Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

her mother is the one who makes her go to bed each week with clay in her hair, hoping it will mute the glaring strands. As far as María can tell, it isn’t working. If anything, the hair looks even brighter. She would not mind so much, María’s mother, if the hair were honey-colored, or earthy, even auburn, but such an angry shade of red, she says, is a bad omen. Not a warm color, but the hot orange of an open flame. One she cannot seem to douse.

Great. Already dunking on the poor Carrot-Top Gingers. Haha

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

It's me. Hi. I'm the problem it's me.

not all sins were boulders, that most in fact were more like pebbles. An unkind thought. A hungry heart. Small weights like greed and envy and want (things that didn’t seem to her like sins at all, but apparently they added up). More disappointing still was when María discovered that some who walk the pilgrims’ road are not guilty of a sin at all. That they make the trip not to atone for their past, but to secure their future. To ask for miracles, or intercessions, or simply pave the way into God’s grace.

Welp. Thoroughly Catholic. I'm here for it

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

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.

Oohhh yeeesssss

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.

the cluttered head and anxious heart,

The maid shifts her hair out of the way, to reach a button there, and when the girl’s fingers graze the skin at the nape of her neck, María shivers.

GAY

Silence is a kind of wealth,

“This is a sacred act,” he says. “Your pleasure is of no consequence.”

Fuck you.

Ysabel steadies her as she steps into her slippers, studies her from every angle and declares that she looks beautiful in a breathy tone that makes María flush. And yet, when her husband meets her on the stairs, and says the same, the words stir nothing in her.

You'll figure it ou baby lesbean

There is a serving fork balanced on a nearby tray. She wonders how much force it would take to drive the tines into his head.

Girl. Same.

María thinks, briefly, of letting go, perhaps giving the hag a push, but it is a short flight, only eight steps. Hardly enough to break a neck.

I'm truly waiting for a murder.

“Two kinds of women have leave to wander through this world alone and unmolested. Nuns, and widows. And I am not close enough with God to be a nun.”

“How did he die?” she asks. The widow’s smile widens. “Slowly.”

I love this so much.

“A name is like a dress. It might be by nature pretty or plain, but it is the person wearing it who matters most.”

“Knowledge is power, María. Never turn it down.

close as cloth, draped together in the dark.

“One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.”

she’s nothing but an empty vessel

Great episode of Friends