Indexing (Indexing, #1)

by Seanan McGuire

“Once upon a fuck, you people,”

Wildflowers had sprouted from the hallway carpet again, this time in a clashing assortment of blues and oranges.

Really, if all that went weird today was a few dead birds and some out-of-place flowers, I was doing pretty well.

Fairy tales want to have happy endings, and that’s fine—for fairy tales—but they do a lot of damage to the people around them in the process, the ones whose only crime was standing in the path of an onrushing story.

In a very real sense, I owe them my life, or at least my lack of singing woodland creatures.

The more visible she was, the less she felt at risk of sinking back into her own story.

Centuries of helpless girls, half of them rotting away years before their Prince could come.

Whoever came up with “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood” and thought people would find it attractive really wasn’t thinking things through.

There’s one thing the Brothers Grimm got very, very wrong: There’s no such thing as “ever after.” That would require that the story ever end.

Show them what? How to play “Hot Cross Buns” one-handed? A flute wasn’t a good blunt instrument, and it was an even worse lock pick.

there’s a whole team of admins whose only job is ink and quills, every day, until retirement comes to save them.

Jeff could no more refuse to clean up a mess than Sloane could be trusted with apples and arsenic.

if something could be classed as vermin, she could control it. Given the most classic story attributed to her tale type, that said something unpleasant about how children were viewed in Europe during the Dark Ages.

fairy tales are apparently better for property values than aerosolized Ebola.

I always felt like I was leaving a hard-boiled crime drama and stepping into something with starships and empires when I had to visit the dispatchers in their home territory.

“I can put my eyeliner on in the car. Let’s go fuck up a fairy tale.”

The radio wasn’t an option: no matter what station we tuned into, it fluxed back and forth between thrash metal covers of nursery rhymes and syrupy sweet acoustic versions of murder ballads.

Because ‘don’t be smart, kids, that’s what gets you fucked over’ is a wonderful moral.”

that’s not what you’re really smelling. That’s just how your story tells you to filter it.”

“Because in your story, blood is the smell of getting away, and death smells like apples,” she said,

“I hate my job,” Demi muttered, and ran into the dark, chasing the distant and receding sound of laughter.

The narrative is an old, dark force that keeps trying to worm its way back out into the light, and sometimes the only thing that keeps it locked away is knowledge.

this was the truth at the heart of the story: the girl, and the apple, and the broken glass around her.

My story might have started with a spoiled little princess who was scared of her own shadow, but it wasn’t going to end that way.

“What, you think I have all those packages shipped to the office for my health? It’s always ‘Sloane, go into the sewer after the gremlin,’ or ‘Sloane, wade into the abattoir to save the baby.’ I throw out six pairs of tights a month.”

Everyone thinks of them in terms of poisoned apples and glass coffins, and forgets that they represent girls who walked into dark forests and remade them into their own reflections.

Most Princes are like skeleton keys: they can open many doors. Left to roam, a fully active Prince could do more damage than any single furious fairy-tale princess could have dreamed.

I was starting to wonder whether there were any Snow White variants that included killing the Wicked Queen for being too annoying to be allowed to live.

Not because it would change the way I felt about my brother, but because I liked Jeff, and it would be a shame to have to find a place to hide his body.

“The monomyth is the story that’s managed to win.

Sloane slipped into the room the way a knife slips into a wound: silently, and with the potential to do a lot of damage to anything that happened to get in her way.

no one expects a thorn hedge to have a chewy princess center anymore.

If anyone was going to kill Sloane’s team, it was going to be Sloane.

I wanted to listen, deep down, in the place where I was more fiction than flesh. And still I ran.

Now rest my dear, and be at ease; there’s a fire in the hearth and a wind in the eaves, and the night is so dark, and the dark is so deep, and it’s time that all good little stars were asleep.