No One Can Know

by Kate Alice Marshall

But people needed stories to make sense of things, and she had learned to give them what they needed.

He wanted to be liked—or rather, he was desperate not to be disliked. So much that he whittled down every edge that he had, in case someone should find them distasteful.

Juliette’s mother isn’t beautiful. She’s the kind of person you call beautiful because she is thin and has good teeth and an expensive haircut.

Worry when it looks perfect, because that means you’ve caught up with your own ambition and judgment. Dissatisfaction is the engine of creativity.

Talk about a thing too much, you’re obsessed. Talk about it too little, you’re hiding something. And no such thing as a middle ground. She could never get it right. That perfect balancing act of the right way to speak, to be, to look, to feel, so your innocence could be confirmed. Once you were tainted you could never get clean.

I don’t know. You lose a dream and it starts to hurt to even remember you ever had it.”

When had she decided that it was better to be miserable than to be alone, she wondered. Or had that always been the price she was paying?

If you are quiet enough, small enough, people begin to forget that you still have eyes and ears, that you can hear their murmured conversations and see their furtive errands.

Here, in the dark, they can say all the dangerous true things they keep locked away from the light.

“I don’t think that every child needs one father and one mother to come out right, but they do need love.