little daily matches

[littledailymatches]

Time was either not passing at all or it was passing in one huge lump like a lifetime.

Duplex, Kathryn Davis

[littledailymatches]

Words are capable of flying. They dart through windows, over fences, between bar stools, and across courtyards. They travel rapidly from mouth to ear, from ear to mouth. And as they go, they pick up speed and weight and substance and gravity. Until they land with a scud, take seed, and grow as fast as the unruliest of beanstalks.

Himself, Jess Kidd

[littledailymatches]

Mrs. Cauley looks away, out over the forest, into another cloudless day of bleached skies and pounding swelter. For a moment she yearns for the storm that she knows is coming. For when it does she'll be right there, watching the bright cords rip open the sky, with her old bones thrilling to the sound of hot air.

Himself, Jess Kidd

[littledailymatches]

For the dead are always close by... The dead are drawn to the confused and the unwritten, the damaged and the fractured, to those with big cracks and gaps in their tales, which the dead just yearn to fill. For the dead have secondhand stories to share with you, if only you'd let them get a foot in the door.

Himself, Jess Kidd

[littledailymatches]

If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for ... California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

"Notes from a Native Daughter," Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion

[littledailymatches]

...what would drive such a woman to sit on a street called Bella Vista and look out her new picture window into the empty California sun and calculate how to burn her husband alive in a Volkswagen.

"Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion

[littledailymatches]

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

"Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion

[littledailymatches]

She lay on the bed. Drifting. The sky waxed to a blue-black filling her window. Way out and beyond, stars coursed the night's channels like an overlay of light and motion both there and not, laws inscrutable, anarchic.

Blue Field, Elise Levine

[littledailymatches]

When she quit diving Marilyn ceased to dream her parents alive at a kiosk on the platform of a subway station or in a hospital room engulfed in radiant white. No more second chances.

Blue Field, Elise Levine

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It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death's approach as the swell of a wave—a towering wall of blue. You will drown, the world tells me, has always told me. You will descend  into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Krishna blue, the blue faces of the ones you love. They all drowned, too. To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you?

Bluets, Maggie Nelson

[littledailymatches]

Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.

Bluets, Maggie Nelson

[littledailymatches]

'We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object'—this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love.

Bluets, Maggie Nelson

[littledailymatches]

Fifteen days after we are born, we begin to discriminate between colors. For the rest of our lives, barring blunted or blinded sight, we find ourselves face-to-face with all these phenomena at once, and we call the whole shimmering mess 'color.' You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we 'get around' in the world. Some might also call it the source of our suffering.

Bluets, Maggie Nelson

[littledailymatches]

When I talk about color and hope, or color and despair, I am not talking about the red of a stoplight, a periwinkle line on the white felt oval of a pregnancy test, or a black sail strung from a ship's mast. I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.

Bluets, Maggie Nelson

[littledailymatches]

There are those, however, who like to look. And we have not yet heard enough, if anything, about the female gaze. About the scorch of it, with the eyes staying in the head.

Bluets, Maggie Nelson

[littledailymatches]

The song of the redstart begins as a melody and ends in dissonance, as though the song itself comes undone in the process of singing it, finishing up with all the right notes presented in completely the wrong order. James had no paper down by the river. He made no notes. He carried the memory of the song back up the hill to his small wooden desk in the bunkhouse, but when he sat down to write what he had heard, the words unravelled like the song of the bird, and he was left with nothing.

The Evening Chorus, Helen Humphreys

[littledailymatches]

Whenever I hear the word danger, I see Marlena and me staring into the mouth of that U-Haul in the winter hour between twilight and dark. Two girls full of plans, fifteen and seventeen years old in the middle of nowhere. Stop, I want to tell us. Stay right where you are, together. Don't move. But we will. We always do. The clock's already running.

Marlena, Julie Buntin