Ariel Lawhon

Sometimes rage is hot and explosive. But other times it is cool and sharp and vicious

She is a small woman, grown weak with age, but her anger pushes her forward, one indignant step at a time.

Baby lays his head on the hard knob of Anna’s knee. This is a thing he has done since he was a puppy. Whenever he finds her sitting for more than ten seconds at a time, he plops down on his haunches, drops his chin to her knee, and sighs like an arthritic old man.

Beauty is power and power is all she knows.

He has the look of a man who was recently handsome but doesn’t know what to do with himself now that’s he’s turned the corner of bald and portly.

She has always found that teachers are the least teachable of all people.

“A historian who burns his archives,” she says, bending over the bench and getting as close to the withered old tutor as possible, “is like a corpse that stinks.”

Money cannot buy happiness.”

“Perhaps not. But it makes a nice down payment.”

And, after all, what is a lie? ’Tis but the truth in masquerade.
—LORD BYRON, DON JUAN

Anna has found her drug of choice, and it comes corked, in a bottle, with a thousand tiny bubbles that tickle her nose. Champagne.