If Found, Return to Hell

by Em X. Liu

It’s hard to have insight, when you’re within something. Harder still to know what you’d even do differently, if you could.

Never take a deal from something supernatural. When you feel you have something to gain, that’s when you really have everything to lose.

“Why are human bodies so shitty? How do you live like this?” “With great difficulty,” you say dryly.

and maybe life is just a toss-up between the agonies of routine and the agonies of happenstance.

You see this? This is alchemy. The confessional of a quiet meal, spun into spellwork.

The living and the dead are all plagued by the same thing these days. Bureaucracy, and the banality of stupid men.

That’s the thing about having been stuck in place for so long. You stop being able to see the possibilities you can carve out for yourself.

Perhaps Death deals in absolutes, but there is no bargaining for life. There is no handshake to make it go down easy, nothing you can offer up to guarantee your happiness. Maybe that’s not so bad, with the right sort of company.