Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

“We won’t have to go looking for Sabine,” she says. “She’ll come to us.”

Alice thinks that there’s no way Sabine will find them here, surrounded by so many people, starts to scan the massive crowd, but Lottie’s hand tightens and she pulls Alice hard enough to spin her round, into the circle of her arms.

If they could just stay, pressed in the amber of that moment, maybe everything would be okay.

Alice’s whole world goes black.

When Alice lurches back into her body, she’s standing in an elevator.

It was fast, the man on the phone assures her father, and all Alice can see is Catty sprinting down the road ahead of her. Slow down. Come back.

day they bury Catty, the rain comes raging down. It pummels the earth and plasters the grass, turns the cemetery rows to mud, and beats its fists against Alice’s umbrella as she stands at the foot of the fresh grave that sits beside her mum’s.

One moment Sabine is wrapped around Alice, and the next she is gone.

Three years that become two and then one and then somehow, Alice is seventeen and a half, older than Catty ever was. She spent those three years being exactly the daughter that she’s supposed to be,

Get up, get up, she thinks, counts to ten, then blinks and rises to her feet, skirts Lottie’s ashes as she heads for the elevator door, forcing herself forward step-by-step. Because if she’s learned anything it’s this: There is no going back.

ever think about how mad it is, that we only get one life? (It is a lie, Sabine told Lottie and Lottie told her, that you only get one story.) Maybe that’s what death is, and we just don’t know it. A chance to play again.