The Ministry of Time

by Kaliane Bradley

People say this to me a lot, and what they mean is: you look like one of the late-entering forms of white—Spanish maybe—and also like you’re not dragging a genocide around, which is good because that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.

We were told we were bringing the expats to safety. We refused to see the blood and hair on the floor of the madhouse.

Now we were here, in a room where the electricity was audible in the light bulbs, about to make history.

He had a presence as mild as salad and the beautiful crow’s-feet of someone who could afford to age attractively.

Adela talked to us as if we were pissing lavishly all over her time.

“Evening, Forty-seven,” I heard Reginald-Smyth say. “That smells nice.” “Kind of you to say so. I’m afraid I’m going to have to get you both very drunk. I’m not much of a cook.”

I bristled—not visibly, not readably, but inside me I felt the spikes slide out. I should have ended the conversation there. Spikes under the skin, that angry internal prickle—I hated to have the lower hand, and I’ve never been good at managing it graciously.

I rarely hustled, was indifferent to grind. But I kept careful tabs and a great many secrets.

Life is a series of slamming doors. We make irrevocable decisions every day.

You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up.

Loyalty and obedience are fostered by stories.

I became ecstatic on spite. This firstly manifested as sitting at the kitchen table, eating an entire jar of pickled onions with a pair of chopsticks. I needed vinegar. After I’d given myself stomach cramps, I threw up and went for a post-puke run. When I came back, I showered aggressively, painting the bathroom with soapy water. I wanted to bite a train, or maybe fuck one. I wanted to beat myself bloody in the burial chamber of the pyramid of Giza. As this sort of thing was prohibited by the laws of man and the Ministry, I decided to do the next best thing, which was go to the pub.

When I found myself considering a gin martini, in an establishment where the house wine was called Table and came in cardboard boxes, I knew it was time to leave.

I had always thought of joy as a shouting, flamboyant thing, that tossed breath into the sky like a ball. Instead it robbed me of my speech and my air. I was pinned in place by joy and I didn’t know what to do.

He told me moss is a sign that God has a sense of humor, and fungi that he has a sense of awe.

“The world is at war. We are running out of everything, and everyone thinks they’re owed what’s left.

The trouble with private, singular power is that it narrows the world to an arrowhead. Your heart beats at the tip, an encased and uncommunicative sole reference point. Falter for a moment from a forward trajectory, consider for a second the myriad pressure of outside forces, and the arrow will slow, wobble, begin to fall. Your heart will wind up nailed to the dust. If you wield power for yourself, the only way is outward and onward, away from the ground-bound world of shared concerns.

a form of implosion-explosion, a rip in the air as if the whole room was scenery and a knife had been plunged into it. If a black hole could sneeze, it might have looked like this.

I cannot describe how long a day feels when you think you might have to sit with it indefinitely.

Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.