Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

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.

Death is a kind of freedom, after all.

Alice looks down at herself, in her T-shirt and black jeans, her high-top sneakers, wishing she’d picked something more suggestive, even though she knows it doesn’t really matter. That the simple act of having a teenage body, no matter how it’s dressed, has always been enough to justify a man’s attention.

“Is it life,” he counters, “if there is never death to balance it? Or is its brevity what makes it beautiful?”

What is the point, she thinks, of loving something you are doomed to lose? Of holding on to someone who cannot hold on to you?

“It is our nature, isn’t it? To persist. Continue on when others can’t.”

“One thing you learn when you live as long as we do, is that nothing’s permanent. Who you were isn’t who you have to be.”

“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.”