Sunday Sentence

Every weekend I participate in David Abrams’s “#SundaySentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

You leave the bike behind the trash cans at the side of the house and hop the wooden fence into the back yard and, if the door to the garage is open, you slip in, and if it’s not, which it isn’t, you’ve got to take a chance on the screen door in the back yard, but, lo and behold, your father is ankle deep in the dirt, hunched over, yanking at weeds with his bare hands the way he used to as a farmer in Logar, before war and famine forced him to flee to the western coast of the American empire, where he labored for many years until it broke his body for good, and even though his doctor has forbidden him to work in the yard, owing to the torn nerves in his neck and spine—which, you know from your mother, were first damaged when he was tortured by Russians shortly after the murder of his younger brother, Watak, during the Soviet War—he is out here clawing at the earth and its spoils, as if he were digging for treasure or his own grave.

Source: Jamil Jan Kochai, “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” (The New Yorker)