I’ve come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We’re.

Who would have thought at this time in our lives that we’d still have something like this.

They don’t come to church on Sunday morning to think about new ideas or even the old important ones. They want to hear what they’ve been told before, with only some small variation on what they’ve been hearing all their lives, and then they want to go home and eat pot roast and say it was a good service and feel satisfied. But.

Not like I was. I’ve come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We’re just in this physical body till we go back to spirit.

You are still in love with her. No. But I think I’m in love a little with the memory of her.

I believe there are failures of character, like I said before. That’s a sin.

This ain’t going to be no goddamn Sunday school picnic.

But we didn’t know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we’d grown up with.

And they had folded his brother’s hands across his suited chest, as if he would be preserved in this sanguine pose forever, but only the heavy callouses visible at the sides of his hands seemed real. It was only the callouses that appeared to be familiar and believable.

Alene looked out toward the fading sky. There was only a little light remaining. It would turn nighttime now and soon they would return to the house. I would be too cool to sit outside. It would get dark out. I’m so lonely, she said. I had my chance and I lost it.