Quotes from Abby Geni, The Wildlands, 2018

Perhaps this was rock bottom. But then, she had thought that before, and there was always a little farther to fall.

A house was not a home without animals.

That afternoon we reached a small town, an oasis of struggling greenery in the desert... There were saguaros everywhere. I had never seen these cacti in such numbers... Their flesh varied in color from tropical green to gunmetal. The churchyard was full of massive plants standing sentinel. Each cactus had a different number of limbs, ranging from a single erect arm to a crown of fat, prickly oblongs...

When he died, Daddy went to the Wildlands for sure... He rode a tornado to get there.

[B]ut his own vehicle had been a wreck of rust and nostalgia.

She did not feel sad; she did not feel anything. She seemed to have moved into a quiet state beyond human emotion.

I missed Darlene so much that it felt like a fever.

I had a secret... It was on the tip of my tongue, taking up all the room in my brain, cupped in both my empty hands.

It was only a few months after their father's death. His loss had left a wound in Darlene's chest that felt physical, a perpetual ache.

For the past three months, Darlene had waited for the fact of her father's death to reach every corner of her mind. She had been through this process when Mama died; she knew how it would unfold. Right now, each morning was its own little funeral. She would wake up and listen for Daddy's footsteps, sniff the air for his pipe smoke, open her eyes, and remember. Every morning she lost him...

There was nothing to do for that kind of loss — no solution to it, no medicine for it. You just coped as best you could. The ache was dull but profound, like the unanswered call of a lonely coyote.

Tucker seemed too happy to smile, his expression solemn and prayerful.

We had... a pony with a bronze coat and a joyful temperament. Most afternoons the colt could be found cantering in the grass, kicking his legs high and twisting his thin torso into jaunty leaps, as though with a little effort he could undo the binds of gravity and gallop away on the wind.

Humans have forgotten so much... It's so easy for us to live now that our lives have no meaning. So we start looking for something else, something more. Money. A bigger house. A hobby. Church.

There's a tension to being human... People are the only animals that die in childbirth... on a regular basis, I mean. It's really common for our species. Even now, with all our modern medicine... It's because of our brains... It makes you what you are, but it doesn't fit easily through a tiny birth canal.

Jewel-bright grasshoppers buzzed around me, their wings aglitter.

She did not believe in happy endings... not anymore. There were no endings in life except death. There was only the present moment, the passage of breath into breath, action and reaction, word after word, a story that was still being told.

There was a crash of thunder, the sky shattering right above our heads.

I remembered Tucker telling me that luck was no lady; luck was a mean drunk who didn't know when to stop punching.

She smelled Roy before she saw him. She liked to imagine that it was the perfume of his good heart.

The rain dwindled and stopped. The car windows were speckled with moisture, already evaporating in the heat. Soon enough, the sidewalks would be scorched clean, the sky clear, the clouds burned away into wisps.

She could feel the echo of lovemaking in her body in the same way she could feel the rock and shift of waves after a day of swimming, long after she left the water.

I was not exactly sleepy, somewhere between alertness and a kind of delirium.

I had napped... earlier — dropping into a dreamless void as soon as the adrenaline left my system...