When the World Goes Quiet

by Gian Sardar

There is nothing worse than silence, in a moment after.

Ask a daughter whose mother didn’t make it into the shelter, because of her. Silence screams loudest of all.

Sometimes fault is also like a wind. It slips into cracks and fills spaces.

A bullet kills at the end of the war the same way it does at the start.”

And though the war is almost over and people are grasping at the tattered ends of hope, the dead can only stay dead.

The painting was a promise: Your world doesn’t need to be the one others see.

Be angry, not guilty.”

Always look for the knife behind the back of kindness,

Explain your sympathy to the sheep, her father once said, after she cried when he’d shot a rare lynx that killed their lamb. What he didn’t understand was that she’d cried for both of them, but mostly for all the horrible necessity in life, for the fact that needing to eat for one meant death to the other.

What does it mean, if fear is what brought them together?

Kind. Appreciative. Until he’s not.

Treachery from her heart, something she knows all too well.

“My advice is not to listen to someone who says your only option is to be a wife with children.”

No one wants a woman with big plans,

“Art is a wound turned into light. Georges Braque said that, or so I was told.”

War creates its own weather,

“The things that undo us. They’re never what we think they’ll be, are they?”

“That’s not who I am. It’s what they made me do.

War throws rules out the window.

Do what’s right, her mother used to say, and what’s right will happen. But did it? And what’s right for whom?

In war, every day is a new day to die.

little wrong that prevents a lot of wrong is worth it.

if she sent you here after the storm, maybe the second chance was for you.”

I wish I knew he wouldn’t notice—I wouldn’t have bothered being so good.

she ignored the uniform and saw what she wanted to see.

“All I know is that continuing on with a mistake doesn’t make it right. It only makes it bigger.”

So much over, right as it begins.

all of life is woven with lies necessary to take another step.

Good men don’t always do good things.

“My dear, we may have borrowed you for a little while, but you belong only to yourself.”