Those Beyond the Wall (The Space Between Worlds #2)

by Micaiah Johnson

So if you also sense an undercurrent of rage in this novel, you are not wrong. But it is not bitterness. Bitterness is anger with nowhere to go. Bitterness and resignation are close and tempting cousins. Anger with a target is Rage, and Rage is sister to Hope alone. We rage because we do believe things can be better, by fire if necessary.

I held her together. She insisted on breaking apart. I held her harder. But then I was just breaking her too. Sometimes when you want to fix something too bad, you break it. The way you can shatter metal if you get it too hot, even if all you’re trying to do is mend a crack. This was something I should already have known.

Places where violence isn’t tolerated will never teach you how to deal with it, when it is avoidable, or how to execute it cleanly when you must. You have to accept violence as a part of life to know it, to tame it like a pet, to keep it in your pocket and understand when to let it out. There’s nothing you can tell me about the right way to bruise flesh if your only rule is don’t.

It didn’t matter which version was true. They were all real. Stories should never be believed, but they should always be trusted.

“We have one family. Family is what we choose, not what leaves us behind.”

He takes the quiet thing I am not allowed to say and says it loud.

What must it be like, to know the person you hate most in the world is the one who knows you best?

I told you. Stories are powerful, and none are more powerful than the ones you let others tell you about yourself.

“My little world’s got everything I need. Fuck I need to go reaching for?” “No vision in the gutter,” he says, and this time I know it’s a dismissal. “Vision or no, you’re in the same gutter as me,” I say, more to have the last word than anything.

I think my mother knew. She could tell that I wasn’t a spirit broken into obedience, I was a spring held tight and losing, a monster being born but holding its breath.

I was a violent child who committed the worst crimes; I was a broken child who had no reason to believe she wouldn’t be broken forever, but through the love, care, and modeling of everyone around me I learned how to love and care for others. All because I wasn’t thrown away based on how I behaved on my worst day.

I’m thinking about how I can survive life, how I can survive anything, as long as there are warm people who know what it looks like when someone is cracking, and know how to be the thing that holds us together,

The hard thing to accept is that it wasn’t hate or indifference that ended us. It was love.

They want gender like a border, something fixed, something to be defended from trespass. We like genders like landmasses here, like puddles that congregate, evaporate, and re-form.

’Cause I bet snakes do mourn their skins. I bet they crawl back inside sometimes, wishing they could fit. I bet they rub their old skins all over, trying to cover themselves in the smell of home. That’s all growth is, getting too big to stay somewhere that used to feel good. Just having one less place in the whole world that fits right.

I shake my head. “What could be worse than murder?” He leans back in his chair, and suddenly he looks older and more tired than he ever has. He looks, just a little, like the first man I killed. “Letting some of your own people die to save the rest,” he says.

Maybe that’s all holiness is: the dirt that raised you in the hands of someone who cares.

Our way out was obvious, once I figured it out. Stories. Our salvation, our continuation, our whole existence, has always been sustained by the power of a story to determine reality.

I will not be the same person when this ends as I was when it began. But maybe that was always true.