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Why do boys have to make everything sound weird? It’s not a robot until you put a girl inside.
light comes out of me like dawn.
Big me powers down transparent highly-conductive golden eyeball by transparent highly-conductive golden eyeball.
My body is full of holes where the junkbody metalgirl tinkid used to be inside me inside it and I try to go out for tea and noodles but they only taste like crystallized cobalt-4 and faithlessness.
I can’t understand why no one sees the dinosaur bones of my exo-self dwarfing the ramen-slingers
Maybe I fuck, maybe I get fucked. Nothing is as big inside me as I am when I am inside me.
my feet are mighty, flamecushioned and undeniable.
I salute with my sadgirl/hardgirl/crunchgirl purplebolt tungsten hands the size of cars and Saturn tips a ring.
It hurts to be big but everyone sees me. When I am little when I am just a pretty thing and they think I am bandaged to fit the damagedgirl fashionpop manifesto ins...
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I’ll be able to double over at the waist like I’ve had something cut out of me and fold up
sourshimmer stimulants
The girls and I talk. We say: start a dream journal. take up ikebana. make your own jam.
We say: turn up that sweet vibevox happygirl music tap the communal PA we’ve got a long walk ahead of us today and at the end of it a fire like six perfect flowers arranged in an iron vase.
The trouble is, I ran away when I was fifteen. Everyone knows you run away when you’re sixteen. That’s the proper age.
A sixteen year old runaway walks with an invisible crown—boys want to rescue her and they don’t even know why. Girls want her to rescue them.
She’s got that skittish, panicky beauty that makes circuses spontaneously sprout out of the tomato field outside of town, just to carry her off...
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I’m not actually talent-free.
She’s just a big fist, and you’re just weak and small. In a story, if you have a stepmother, then you’re special. Hell, you’re the protagonist. A stepmother means you’re strong and beautiful and innocent, and you can survive her—just long enough until shit gets real and candy houses and glass coffins start turning up.
The thing I like best about Sacramento is that I don’t live there anymore,
My national resources sat in a green backpack wedged between my knees: an all-in-one Lord of the Rings, the Complete Keats, a thrashed orange and white Edith Hamilton, a black skirt that hardly warranted the title, little more than a piece of fabric and a safety pin, two shirts, also black, $10.16, and a corn muffin. Yes, this represented the sum total of what I believed necessary for survival on Planet Earth. I forgot my toothbrush.
during the day, I slept in libraries.
I flopped in shifts, so as not to arouse suspicion.
old French men usually have the good stuff: R-rated for nudity and adult concepts.
if you don’t give a shit and are a somewhat pretty girl who doesn’t look like trouble, just sleep by the heater and take the fine the man gives you.
even though I was always so hungry it took my breath, I thought that was beautiful, too. Just beautiful.
At sixteen, you can get a work permit. At fifteen, you’re out of luck.
I could sing like I was dying and if you got just close enough you could catch my soul as I fell.
A voice like a hole. People just toppled in.
emphasized her words like she was underlining them in a diary.
She sighed dramatically, enjoying the luxury of being the source of information.
Something pretty to think about when you’re cold and hungry. It’s nice to think someone beautiful is protecting you. It’s nice to think there’s a place you can go if you want it bad enough.
that’s like the job of magical places, to vanish.
I didn’t know where I was going, I just wanted to go somewhere.
it’s more like you flip inside out. Everyone can see your business on the outside—too
Anything I got I just tore through so fast, it didn’t really seem to exist in a cosmic sense. Hungry before, hungry after.
what was so bad you couldn’t dream about magic anymore?
I hoped I wasn’t singing her death, I hoped I was singing something better, for both of us, my broken voice and her broken body. I sang because if she could get that far gone I could, if she wasn’t a good enough soul for Diogenes I never would be, if she could die I would never get to be old.
my body rejected what it saw, what it felt, and I couldn’t think of anything to do or say,
I can’t abide girls crying, I’ll warn you. Shows a fragile disposition, and brings the amorous sort to wipe them away, which would pretty much sort the whole conveyance issue. Sniffle up, before some silver-haired Byron gets your scent.”
The magic wants to go Realmward and the machine wants to go Worldward, and in a mess like that you can’t ask for any straight lines.”
history is always plotting, and it bites very hard. It stalks around the world, fickle and dissatisfied and often angry. It demands to be fed just a little earlier each day, until you find yourself carving meat from the bone as fast as you can, faster than you thought possible, just to satisfy it.
Fairyland has always needed saving.
even her hairpins got up and started living serious-minded lives, writing hairpin-ballads, celebrating hairpin-holidays, and inventing several new schools of philosophy.
really think of herself as a magician yet—more of a freelance wizard or part-time hag—she
Truly, Mallow yearned to know everything. Curiosity was part of her, like her short blond hair and bitten fingernails.
having curiosity satisfied, feeling the warm, sure spread of knowledge through her body.
She had used her magic to make a pleasant life for herself, where she could be alone as she preferred, and where nothing would disturb or hurt her if she did not want to be disturbed or hurt. This was important to her, for she wished to be safe, and she wished to live in a kind world, which on the best of days Fairyland could only manage for an hour or two before getting bored and playing a trick on a maiden or nine.
looking helpful and honest as best they could.
Did she find any of the Fairy youths attractive in a marrying way?
Mallow is wonderful fierce at No Magic. Sometimes that is the last magic you can hold on to, when all the rest has gone.
