Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

To the ones who hunger— for love, for time, or simply to be free

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

“And how is a miracle different from a spell? Who is to say the saint was not a witch?”

“Careful. In nature, beauty is a warning. The pretty ones are often poisonous.”

But María has known, all her life, that she is not meant for common paths, for humble houses and modest men. If she must walk a woman’s road, then it will take her somewhere new.

“You will learn, it is better to bend than to break.” María stared into the hearth. “Why should I be the one who bends?”

Nothing fits, even if it’s fitted, because it’s not really about the size of the body or how it fills the clothes, but how much space it takes up in the world.

And as the liquor hits, so does the weed, and warmth finally blooms inside her chest, and her head feels light, and this is the secret, isn’t it, she thinks, this is the easiest way to become someone else.

There are two parts to every answer. The part that’s said, and the part that isn’t.

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.

Sabine heard once that happiness makes time move quick.

A steady current of students fills the hall, headphones on, heads bowed, one of those grim reminders that your life is small and the world is big, and even when it feels like it’s falling down, it’s only falling down on you. To everyone else, it’s just going on as usual.

Never walk alone at night, they tell you, if you’re a girl. And it isn’t fair. Because the night is when the world is quiet.

read the final pages of Udolpho, and felt beset by the strange mix of pleasure and grief that came with finishing a book.

After all, there is no art without life to inspire it.”

In fairy tales, big things happen in threes. Three children. Three beds. Three roads. The third bite is poison, the third gift is great, the third door always leads home.

“Simple? No.” Sabine discards one card and draws another. “But you cannot have what you want until you know what you want. And once you do know,” she adds, “it’s only a matter of what you’re willing to do to get

“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 is not a lily or a rose. Not a flower ready and waiting to be picked. She is still growing wild at the edges of her family garden. She is not ready. She will never be ready. This isn’t what she wants.

And here is the awful thing about belief. It is a current, like compulsion. Hard to forge when it goes against your will, but easy enough when it carries you the way you want to go.

Why does Charlotte stay? That is like asking—why stay inside a house on fire? Easy to say when you are standing on the street, a safe distance from the flames. Harder when you are still inside, convinced you can douse the blaze before it spreads, or rushing room to room, trying to save what you love before it burns.

You learn how heavy some feelings weigh, how much they’ll drag you down. Anger and resentment are the worst. They’re like rocks in your pockets. Too many, and you’ll drown.”

But the world is supposed to be changing. Some years, it seems it does, in leaps and bounds. Others, the progress is so scant it hardly registers.