Don't Sleep with the Dead

by Nghi Vo

for unreliable narrators and the stories we tell

Dead men weren’t free, but I wasn’t dead. Instead, I was made of paper, and I walked out into the winter day.

The problem of course was that anyone who tells other people stories first must tell themselves stories. I had been telling myself stories for a long while about Gatsby, and now I no longer trusted them, either his voice in my head or who I knew him to be.

The rivers of the world have long memories, and some of the things that live in the Loire and the Seine had been dead for a long time, staring up through the water with their children cradled in their arms.

“Which of us did you think had the better of it?” he asked earnestly. “A heart of paper or a heart made from hungry gears. Would you trade?”

“Be a little kind to yourself, please. If you can be whoever you want, wouldn’t it be nice to be someone you liked?”