The Last Paragraph of Charles Wright's The Messenger

The Last Paragraph of Charles Wright's The Messenger

 

I didn't say anything. Suddenly I didn't care. All I wanted to do was sleep, but I knew I wouldn't sleep just yet. Tomorrow I'll sleep on the bus, but now Shirley and I will climb the stairs together, back to my drunken friends upstairs. The party had turned into a free-for-all; I could hear their voices wild above the music, searching for that crazy kick that would still the fears, confusion, and the pain of being alive on this early August morning.  

"What's wrong?" Shirley asked. "Charles, what's wrong?"

"Nothing," I said. "Absolutley nothing."

We started up the stairs and then I heard Claudia's voice, as clear as day, scream, "C-----!" 

The Last Paragraph of D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rainbow”

The Last Paragraph of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

And the rainbow stood on earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they could cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven. 

The Last Lines of Janet Flanner's The Cubical City

The Last Lines of Janet Flanner's The Cubical City


Slowly Delia closed her eyes, her head sightless, erect, and yellow, holding its distance from the shadows that spread around her in her chair.

The Last Paragraph of Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head

The Last Paragraph of Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head


I gave her back the bright light of the smile, now softening at last out of irony. "So must you, my dear!"