Deathless

by Catherynne M. Valente

“There is no need for you to speak tonight, Marya Morevna. That time will come, and I will hang on your words like a condemned man.

And morality is more dependent on the state of one’s stomach than of one’s nation.”

“That’s how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”

You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.

and with a sullen kind of savagery he wrapped Marya up in his body, and kissed all of the skin she had, and cursed her for not having more.

A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.

A ration card says, This much life we have allotted you. It says, This much death we can keep from your door. But no more. It says, In Leningrad there is only so much life to go around. It says, The only thing not rationed in Leningrad is death.

No one is now what they were before the war.

After love, no one is what they were before.