The Cliffs

by J. Courtney Sullivan

But after her mother died, it was like she could see through people, and she thought it a miracle to consider in, say, a packed movie theater or a traffic jam, the collection of beating hearts all around her, kidneys flushing out toxins, synapses firing just as they were meant to. Everything working in perfect order, for the moment.

Her mother once told her and Holly that if you couldn’t think of something nice to say, you could always just state a fact with enthusiasm, and it would be received as a compliment.

Our cycles are linked to the moon, to the tides. Like them, we change two dozen times over, every month. What do men do? They don’t get to experience much of life. We gestate the babies and bring them into existence while the men try not to faint. It’s why they’re obsessed with extrinsic markers of success. And war! Taking life to feel some speck of the power we get from making life. You have to hand it to men, they’ve managed to convince us that the things that make women powerful are weaknesses. Motherhood is the most radical act in the world, and we’ve turned it into tapioca pudding. What’s more toothless, more invisible in this culture, than a mother?”

Jane was often astonished that there were so many worlds. Ideas and obsessions that meant everything to one person, to which he might devote his entire life, which the next person knew and cared nothing about.

She supposed that for an atheist like her it was easier to imagine an afterlife that had nothing to do with God. Just humans, continuing to be something like themselves.

There were versions of death that existed inside of life, Jane thought. Her drunken blackouts, that time unaccounted for. The state Betty and the other patients here were in, almost the opposite of being ghosts—a body with no awareness, no memory. The shadows of past lives all around in graveyards, in old houses, in Jane’s work as an archivist. In stories.