Ça faisait longtemps que je n’avais pas lu d’aussi bonnes nouvelles

“She faced him, now, watched him with the same intensity she’d been giving the ceiling.
“You’re angry,” she said. “You still love her, and you’re mad at God.”
He shook his head. “I’ve been mad at God a long time. Kate couldn’t change that. She thought she could, but she couldn’t.”
He reached for her hand, but her arm was beneath her. If he wanted a hand now, it would have to be plastic.
“Anyway, I’m done with God.”
Lily smiled. “But what if it’s not God you’re mad at?” she said. “What if the thing you’re mad at is this idea of God, this really bad idea you got from other people. What if God exists? What if God is love? Aren’t you going to feel stupid later?”
“I don’t believe in afterlives,” he said. He wanted to, but getting rid of hell had meant jettisoning heaven. He’d practiced the rhetorical backflips of one without the other, but what was grace without justice? Halos begged firebrands, fangs wings.
Better the ground. Better the great, white blank.
“You believe in heaven?” he said.
Lily turned onto her back, and again her hand was at his waist.
“I have to,” she said.
She slipped her hand down his pants, took hold, let go.
“You have protection?” she said.”

David James Poissant - The Heaven of Animals
Amputee (p.49)

 
“We talk in our sleep, and so do the deaf. Nights I snuck into my father’s room, his hands worked over his chest, signing. It was the language of dreams, incomprehensible, but it was gorgeous. His hands rose and fell like birds with his breathing.
“One.”
Except sometimes, sometimes, meaning crept in. A transmission. My father, who spent his life missing my mom, that sign: index fingers beckoning, then hands pulling air in the direction of the heart.
I close my eyes, and it’s there, the gun muzzle, ice between my eyes.
I want to cry out. I hold my breath.
I wait.
I wait.
You want to know what my father was saying, and I’ll tell you. It’s what I shout once the gunman’s given up, returned his weapon to his jacket pocket. It’s what I call after his heels slapping the sidewalk.
It’s my voice to the gunman and my father’s hands to my mother in the night, calling: “Come back. Come back. Come back.”

 David James Poissant - The Heaven of Animals
100 % Cotton (p.62)

“I blame his parents. Not for the depression—I mean, maybe that’s their fault. Maybe there’s something fucked in their genes that got more fucked up when his dad fucked his mom. I don’t know. I don’t know how DNA works. I only know that his folks bought into the whole Y2K thing, and Aaron’s never been the same since.
Imagine it: You’re eight years old, all of your friends are partying with their families or up late with other friends at New Year’s Eve sleepovers, and, instead of watching the ball drop with your parents, you’re huddled in the basement watching your mom cry. The basement is stocked with two years’ worth of water, batteries, and green beans. Upstairs, a TV’s been left on, and Dick Clark counts down. Downstairs, you shut your eyes and wait for the end of the world.
You could say Aaron’s been waiting ever since.”

 David James Poissant - The Heaven of Animals
The end of Aaron (p.64)