Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

by GennaRose Nethercott

Somewhere a mile off, a crow landed on a length of thread, and a single sweet note rose from the plucking. It traveled up the thread until it reached the Thread Boy, and as if summoned by the sound, a nearby cloud split open into a tumult of hail. Hailstones fell, fat as grapes. They bounced off the tightened threads, plink, plink, until the Thread Boy was wrapped in the most beautiful music, and he wept, and dropped the shears, unused. And he would not lift them again—not for anything.

If you were to ask a fox if he loved you, he would probably eat you, but not for the reasons you might hope.

War cannot be imagined, for those who have not witnessed it cannot truly fathom it, and for those who have borne witness—it is no longer an imagining. It is a boot print permanently crushed into the heart.

When I was young, I believed this was magic. Now that I am older, I know it must be a science I do not yet understand—which is only another way to say “magic.”

If nobody really knows you, then no one knows if you’re telling the truth. And if no one knows if you’re telling the truth, you can decide what the truth is, and what it isn’t. You have the control. Even when the water is rising.

There is wanting and there is yearning—and then, there is a lung filling with water.

If this document acts as anything, let it be a map of hunger. Let it be flint. Let it be a warning.

When I say I love you, I mean I reach for you. When I say I reach for you, I mean you went out to buy a bottle of gin & didn’t come back. When I say you didn’t come back, I mean I woke last night with you in my bed, but my hands slipped right through you.

Ghost (noun): The suspended sensation of watching a wineglass tilt off a table’s edge—knowing it will shatter, but being powerless to stop it.

Fact: Ghosts do not belong only to the dead. They belong to whatever is absent. A sweetheart. A misplaced key. A hometown you fled in a glinting jet plane while swearing never, never to return.

“It’s not the dark we’re afraid of,” the goat girl continued, “it’s being in darkness with eyes that were built for the light. It’s not a lone ghost we’re afraid of—it’s the ghost appearing in the realm of the living, in the same room as our breathing bodies. We are never afraid of a thing on its own, as it is. We’re afraid of something intruding in a context in which it doesn’t belong. What is a monster? It’s a contradiction. A creature who houses two dissonant aspects. So yes, a girl is not monstrous on her own. Nor is a goat. But a goat is a goat and a girl is a girl, or so it should be. Nestle them side by side, in one body, and that is where the monstrosity is born. Am I a monster? Yes, love, I am. I am a monster because I contain too much.”