"It's surprising how little we speak, communicating mostly in gestures and monosyllables, both of us savoring the silent wonder of the place and not wanting to break its spell with the noise of our voices. When we do chat--usually at night by the cooking fire--it is in quiet tones and mostly about our reactions to this place--its openness, its feeling of timelessness, its closeness to the images and memories of the camping trips of our adolescence. England seems distant as the present overwhelms me with a kind of sensual fullness that makes experience and imagination indistinguishable: The Pakaraimas, I hear myself telling Robbie, are perhaps just close enough to earthly perfection to arouse a sense of impending catastrophe."
In the above excerpt from a story titled "Sky" in Mark McWatt's Suspended Sentences, the narrator describes the beauty and sensation-compelling wonder of the Pakaraimas, and he portends a catastrophe.
Later on in the story comes this:
"I wake with a sensation of something amiss and find, when my eyes get accustomed to the faint foreday light, that Robbie is bending over me, on his knees (one on either side of my thighs) his hands by my shoulders. He's naked."
What happens next, my friends, is the stuff that makes this collection of stories so worth reading.
