[PSL] in this sense the open jaws of wild beasts will appear no less pleasing than their prototypes

[katabasis]

The bread that is over-baked so that it cracks and bursts asunder hath not the form desired by the baker; yet none the less it hath a beauty of its own, and is most tempting to the palate. Figs bursting in their ripeness, olives near even unto decay, have yet in their broken ripeness a distinctive beauty.

Comments

[katabasis]

Sturdy shoes, a hat, a coat. They aren't the only good things had out of Marshall, but they're certainly the last. They likely count for more than anything the man might have had to say; should it be disturbing how easy James finds it to leave him behind in favor of anything else, everything else, or does it just go without saying that Marshall should understand himself as owning some strange, complicated form of his gratitude. It would've been easy to kill the man, James doesn't think. That should be enough for anyone. He isn't going to say Be well or Thank you to anyone who helped pin Thomas thrashing to the ground. To anyone who had any part in making Thomas so angry, so disparate, so hacked open. He doesn't have the capacity to even think of it.

Bes uses a kitchen knife to cut three strips from a dark shirt. She uses one to tie around the knife's handle and secure it to her apron string, tucking the blade neatly into her pocket. The others she gives to James; he knits them together for a belt, tucking Andies' pistol against his hip. From a distance, he knows the lot of then might almost be mistaken for people. It seems like a strange conclusion to draw, though. Even after they've cut across the firelit landscape and climbed over the fence, passing into the underbrush where the stench of smoke and burning doesn't hang so heavily in the air, it doesn't feel as if anything has shifted like it has.

It's the same night here as it was in the yard. The glow of fire burns through the trees and they are not radically different people from the ones they were forty meters ago. Again and again and again.

Then they plunge North into the deeper wood, Thomas's hand in his in the midst of women and a young man who can hardly grow his beard, and they see that place for the last time.