He placed a pinch of snow on his tongue and thought of making snow ice cream with Frank and their mother when they were small boys - 'First you stir in the vanilla' - Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.
Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
birth, bullet, conflagration, designer, dictator, frank-chaudhary, functional, jeevan-chaudhary, libya, paraplegic, patterns, pieces, reuters, snow, snow-cream, spinal-cord, the-fullness-of-time, tongue, vanilla, wondrous