And I also believe Buddha was on to something where the hopelessness of all earthly endeavors is concerned, because I feel hopeless; I stole from the grocery store, gave Åge B. the time, buried a time capsule, baked rolls, turned up the hot plate, tried to plan my own funeral, tried to become a tree, and then the most difficult thing of all – I used the telephone, which was really too much for me – and yet I’m still sitting here in my apartment and I’m just as afraid of living life as I am of dying.
—Kjersti A. Skomsvold, from The Faster I Walk The Smaller I Am

About

Poets think in lines, prose writers in sentences; the best of both work from sound to sense, with an ear for the music in their compositions. S for Sentence celebrates lyricism in prose, the play and craft at work in the artful sentence. We post a sentence a month along with comments by a guest writer on the craft that shapes it, on what makes it great. In one or two sentences.
—Pearl Abraham, Editor
This narrator is an old woman who talks to her dead husband. Her life has become solitary: All of what she does, she does alone. She experiences the fate we all share – not only the solitude that comes with age, but the fact that we each die alone. She recounts both her spiritual—she “tried to become a tree”—and the physical ambitions—“I used the telephone”— listing not only what she has accomplished, but also what she has failed to do. With its deep yearning for more time, and the stark awareness that she runs out of possibilities, this sentence sums up the narrative arc of the novel. The juxtaposition of impending death with the baking of rolls and the turning up of the hot plate depicts how life is lived. One minute your loved one is putting together a meal, and the next – even if the next lingers for a while – he’s gone.
—Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of What We’ve Lost is Nothing and Fugitive Denim