Indexing (Indexing, #1)

by Seanan McGuire

“All of this! Fairy tales are not real, I can’t control rats by playing the right song on my flute, and you are not a real government agency! My father would have been complaining for my entire life if there was a branch of government dedicated to stopping things that don’t exist!” “Oh, we’re not a branch of the government, we’re just an agency, and there are at least three agencies dedicated to dealing with things that most people don’t believe exist. It’s a natural result of living in a world with aspirations of rationality.”

“Don’t say ‘moronic,’” said Jeff. “It’s ableist language, and you know I won’t stand for that.” “Fuck you,” replied Sloane genially. “Much less offensive,” said Jeff.

Too many years had been lost in the struggle to evade her story. Those years were never coming back, and if she felt safer in her nest of teenage rebellion and outdated angst, then no one was going to convince her that she should do anything differently.

Let her shrine endure for just a little longer. The cleaners and the estate sales and the realtors would tear it down soon enough. That’s what happens to all our private family churches, eventually. The real world can’t let them stay.

He understood that he’d given up everything about the man he’d been to become a man that someone like Kyle could love, and it hadn’t been enough. Nothing was ever going to be enough.

“What, you thought that one story was somehow more real than all the others, just because it’s the one that has the most people living in it? Shit, if it worked that way, all the narratives would focus on quantity over quality, and we’d be buried under something featuring rabbits. What we think of as reality is just the tale type that took over longest ago. The others keep fighting back.”