Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

Born restless, her father used to say. Which was fine for a son, but bad for a daughter.

María feels no maternal urge, no envy when she sees a babe swept up into a mother’s arms. Everyone insists it is her purpose, and it drives her mad, the idea that the shape of her body determines the shape her life must take.

“He sees me.” As if he’s the only one, or even the first. As if Alice didn’t come into this world with both eyes focused on her sister.

“The world will try to make you small. It will tell you to be modest, and meek. But the world is wrong. You should get to feel and love and live as boldly as you want.”

She decides early on that she will only take the lives of men.

“But what good is a soul, really?” she muses, as if it’s the first time she’s stopped to wonder. As if it’s not the question that plagued her that first night, that still plagues her after all these years. “It lives in the mind. A piece you cannot see or touch. A prize you are told to shield for a time you cannot know. Easy enough to part with something so abstract when the alternative is freedom. When the promise is love.”

Time doesn’t heal. It just wears you down. Tricks you into thinking, as the present slips into the past, that it will stay there.