Oct
13

The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt.  In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce.
—Tobias Wolff, from Bullet in the Brain

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
Tobias Wolff's approach to death, and the way he holds it off by trying to charm or outrun it, and even describe the already dead skull as troubled, opens a remarkable space for a lifetime of memories of love and talent and even hope. Between the moment that the bullet enters the skull and finally hits the brain tissue, with the stretch of “dragging its comet's tail,” Wolff renders the victim's life at the speed of a shot, and finally leaves the reader to experience cynical death on the marble floor of a bank building.
—Judith Mok, author of The Executioner, Gael, Gods of Babel