Dear Hanna

by Zoje Stage

Really, it’s so unfair how much all the animals suffer because of humans. It makes me very sad sometimes. And very mad that people are so cruel and indifferent.

Sometimes she thought of herself as a constellation—an arrangement of stars that didn’t actually look like anything until someone looked skyward and connected the dots. In spite of her ambivalence about the human race, she needed to be around people.

What Hanna really wished was that Joelle would dump Boyd. Why did she like him so much? A dull lump of boy flesh.

She really didn’t consider, or care about, the dishonesty of the script she’d written. Didn’t everyone play a role when it suited them?

I like to think that makes you inherently better than these dickheads from the near and distant past. They had small ideas about other people’s intrinsic worth. But really, to be so dismissive of others is to make yourself smaller, don’t you think? What sort of person needs to act that way—someone who’s cowardly and insecure, right?

No one is who they say they are. Words lie.

Raccoons are such divas, even more dramatic than squirrels, affronted by everything, strident in their outrage.

She imagined their gorgeous countertops dripping with blood. In her head it looked beautiful, not gory.

It’s easy to think now, when everything’s fine, that you’ll be together forever, that it’ll all turn out exactly how you want. But you know life throws a few more curveballs than that. You both have good intentions, you want to do the best you can—but there are no guarantees.

She felt something inside her that she struggled to name, a sensation that was part emptiness and part jagged teeth. If she’d had a pencil and paper on hand, she could’ve drawn it, a crevasse-like thing that divided the easy territory she and Jacob had once shared. She wondered if she’d accidentally dug the abyss herself—a side effect of weighing if she should leave him,

Hanna wished she had some sort of superpower, one that allowed her to Taser people by blinking at them.

I needed to acknowledge her and I knew lunging for her throat wasn’t appropriate.

You make me feel less alone in the world—and that is enough.

I wear my darkness like a sweater; it keeps me warm.

For going on fifteen years, she’d played the game well enough to blend in, keeping at arm’s length the demons with the most unhelpful suggestions. But they were back, and she’d lost the willpower to stop listening to their stories.

She’d become a wine stain on everyone’s white tablecloth, unsure how to remove herself.

She prayed to the void that it would engulf her. Let me disappear.

Needles weren’t worthy of anyone’s fear, given the daily horrors that came with being sentient, constant witnesses to human cruelty.

Hanna had been cast to the fringes, far away from the epicenter of the family. She felt herself bobbing there, wondering if she’d be tossed a lifeline, or if he’d leave her there to drown.