Amy Hempel, "Cloudland", Sing to It

I remember thinking: There will never come a time when I will not be thinking of this. And I was right. And I was wrong

Amy Hempel, Sing to It

At the end, he said, No metaphors! Nothing is like anything else. Except he said to me before he said that, Make your hands a hammock for me. So there was one. He said, Not even the rain—he quoted the poet—not even the rain has such small hands. So there was another. At the end, I wanted to comfort him. But what I said was, Sing to it. The Arab proverb: When danger approaches, sing to it. Except I said to him before I said that, No metaphors! No one is like anyone else. And he said, Please. So—at the end, I made my hands a hammock for him. My arms the trees.

—Amy Hempel, "Sing to It" (from Sing to It: New Stories, Scribner, 2019)

Cloudland from Sing to It by Amy Hempel

has passed .

from ‘Sing to It’ by Amy Hempel, 2019

A tale of Ba Sing Se.

poetry and musical theater get similar accusations leveled at them in terms of not being realistic, i.e. “no one fucking talks like that” or “people don’t randomly burst into song in real life” and sometimes i just want to take people by the shoulders and say. there are forms of art that are not aiming for perfect realism. are you capable of handling that

The world is oftentimes such an ugly place, but sometimes it can be so beautiful.

Like, when two choirs, one from Croatia and the other from Zimbabwe, met on the opposite sides of a Lisbon subway station and both sang to each other.

I unfortunately do not know what the Zimbabwe children choir sang to them (although it was so beautiful), but the Croatian klapa Kastav sang 'Kuća puna naroda' (a house full of people).

And let my reward be a house full of people, my life, give me a voice, so I can embrace you with songs.

Video source: Irena Grdinić

Here’s a video so you can hear the water and the thrushes. I took it for you because you couldn’t be there. <3

Halloween pup

Amy Hempel, "Cloudland", Sing to It

Between them it was always almost over. Especially at the start.

Amy Hempel, Sing to It

me: this is a background character who's in one scene, has two lines, and is completely irrelevant to the rest of the story. i am going to stop obsessing over what to name him and use the random name generator on behindthename.com. i am going to accept the first thing it gives me and move the fuck on.

behindthename.com:

love the Avatar show! yes the animated show from 2005 haha, what else?

(prints)