Deathless

by Catherynne M. Valente

I don’t do that. I don’t drink the ocean so you can fetch a ring from the bottom of it,

Marya Morevna listened to him with only one of her ears. In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake, and eat only what you can stomach, she said to me later.

“Marya,” she sighed. “No one is now what they were before the war. There’s just no getting any of it back.”