18 Quotes by Tom Franklin

On the other end of the porch the swing creaked pleasantly on its chains. This was the time of home-night he enjoyed, when his wife was inside asleep and he, at last, was alone. Time of year he enjoyed, too, the kind of peaceable weather you needed sleeves for but not a coat, chill in the air to make your scalp tingle but not set you to shivering.

After work the following Monday Larry sat on his porch not reading but waiting in his usual company of bats and birds and insects, the tinkling of his mother's chime each time the earth breathed its wind. He was disappointed but not surprised when the night stole the far trees and the fence across the road and then the road itself and finally the sky, Larry's truck gone too in the dark and stars beginning to wink in the sky like nail holes in the roof of a barn.

He looked out across the field. He seemed to have forgotten where he was, and for a while Larry rocked, bats fluttering over his view and crickets chirping in the monkey grass along the edge of the porch and his mother's wind chime jingling, delicate notes too tender to be metal, more like soft bone on wire; he'd always thought the chime sounded like a skeleton playing a guitar, and for a time they sat together on the porch and watched the sun scald the sky red and the trees black.

Maybe she'd needed her dream to come true to realize it was the wrong dream.

...how time packs new years over the old ones but how those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from weather. But then a saw screams in and the tree topples and the circles are stricken by the sun and the sap glistens and the stump is laid open for the world to see.

In the divorce my ex got everything. Even kept her composure.

... daylight crept through the trees like an army of crafty boys.

It wasn't Glen's jealousy that surprised him. "You owe Roy money?""Yep. Borrowed it to get my truck painted.""Roy's a loan shark, too?""You ever see JAWS?" Snakebite asked.Glen said he had."How 'bout THE GODFATHER?""Yeah.""Well, if Michael Corleone waded out in the ocean and fucked that shark, then you'd have old Roy."from the Tom Franklin short story "Grit" (page 31) from POACHERS:STORIES

Larry felt a strange forgiveness for him because all monsters were misunderstood.