in the room the women come and go

Then the grass by the mouth of the hole stopped waving, and Darzee said: “It’s all over with Rikki-Tikki! We must sing his death song. Valiant Rikki-Tikki is dead! For Nagaina will surely kill him underground.”

So he sang a very mournful song that he made up on the spur of the minute, and just when he got to the most touching part the grass quivered again, and Rikki-Tikki, covered with dirt, dragged himself out of the hole leg by leg, licking his whiskers. Darzee stopped with a little shout. Rikki-Tikki shook some of the dust out of his fur and sneezed. “It’s all over,” he said. “The widow will never come out again.” And the red ants that live between the grass-stems heard him, and began to troop down one after another to see if he had spoken the truth.

Rikki-Tikki curled himself up in the grass and slept where he was-slept and slept till it was late in the afternoon, for he had done a hard day’s work.

“Now,” he said, when he awoke, “I will go back to the house. Tell the Coppersmith, Darzee, and he will tell the garden that Nagaina is dead.”

The Coppersmith is a bird who makes noise exactly like the beating of a little hammer on a copper pot; and the reason he is always making it is because he is the town-crier to every Indian garden, and he tells news to everybody who cares to listen. As Rikki-Tikki went up the path, he heard his “attention” notes like a tiny dinner-gong; and the steady “Ding-dong-tock! Nag is dead- dong! Nagaina is dead! Ding-dong-tock!” That set all the bird in the garden singing, and all the frogs croaking; for Nag and Nagaina used to eat frogs as well as little birds.

Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American Night. Carlo told him of Old Bull Lee, Elmer Hassel on Riker’s Island, Jane wandering on Times Square in a Benzedrine hallucination, with her baby girl in her arms and ending up in Bellevue. And Dean told Carlo of unknown people in the West like Tommy Snark, the clubfooted poolhall rotation shark and cardplayer and queer saint. He told him of Roy Johnson, Big Ed Dunkel, his boyhood buddies, his street buddies, his innumerable girls and sex parties and pornographic pictures, his heroes, heroines, adventures. They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they had danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing my whole life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

This is the story of the Dead.

We took them out to the fields at night. Our mothers and our fathers, our babies, our brothers and sisters, and eventually, we knew, ourselves: once we succumbed to age, to disease, accident, or if we left this life by our own hand, we too would be wrapped in a burlap sheet and taken from our casket by the hands of the strongest men and buried deep within the fields around our town. It all started when the old burying grounds began to grow lush with all manner of things. Flowers, vegetables, herbs. Whatever seed happened to find its way to this soil prospered like nowhere else, and we looked around us at our barren fields that were supposed to support us with their bounty but didn’t, and we had an idea. With the bodies we grew corn, and tobacco, and cotton, but most of all watermelon, the crop that fared best. They say that’s why watermelon meat turns red: it’s colored by blood, which the fine and mossy tendrils wrapping around our bodies would suck out and bring to the surface. And so within each watermelon was a little bit of who we are, or were, and some said back then you could actually taste it, at the end of a long hot summer’s day, slicing through the thick green crust and bringing a slice of it up to your parched mouth and eating, they said sometimes it might remind you of someone you once knew, or loved, or lived with, even, and lost. “Daddy,” you might say. Or “Sweet Sally.” Or, tears streaming down your face, tasting and remembering, “This is my baby, Lee.”

As with many things in our town, what is often known is forgotten, or stored in the part of the brain that resists remembering. How else to explain our actions? Everybody knew we removed the bodies from their caskets, and that the box they buried on the morrow was empty.

We still prayed and cried over the nothing inside.

David Wallace, The Watermelon King

Then, for ten more days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of birds and the uproar of monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed with the suffocating stench of blood.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

The creek had been transformed. Gone were the clear waters where Tally liked to bathe. Gone were cool little rivulets running around rocks and logs. Instead the creek was much wider and filled with muddy water rushing to the St. Francis, half a mile away. We got off the tractor and walked to the bank. "This is where our floods come from" Pappy said. "Not the St. Francis. The ground's lower here, and when the creek runs over, it heads straight for our fields."

The ground was at least ten feet below us, still safely contained in the ravine that had cut through our farm decades earlier. It seemed impossible that the creek could ever rise high enough to escape.

"You think it'll flood, Pappy?" I asked.

He thought long and hard, or maybe he wasn't thinking at all. He watched the creek and finally said, with no conviction at whatsoever, "No. We'll be fine."

There was thunder to the west.

John Grisham, A Painted House

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a life-time ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

-Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried