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.

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

The sun is gone now, lost behind low clouds, and up close, she smells like candied figs and winter spice.

She looked at her life and found it small. Saw the road that lay ahead, and there were no curves, no bends; it ran straight and narrow all the way to its end.

(Four inches of metal and glass is as good as a shield, since no one notices a phone, and if they do, they just assume you’re looking at yourself instead of them.)

The moment when her whole life starts. Only she’s been here three weeks, and the nows keep piling up, keep passing her by.

You’re having fun, she tells her heart, and her heart thuds back in all its stupid anxious glory no no no no and Alice wants to cut it out, wants to be a different version of herself, one that isn’t so goddamn insecure.

Brown, the most common color in the world, but there is nothing common about them. They’re gold at the edges, like some internal light is trying to peek out, but dark at the center, so dark she’d think the pupils were blown wide if she couldn’t see them too, pinpricks despite the party’s muted light.

No, she smells like wet earth and wrought iron and raw sugar.

She is no longer bound, and yet, here she is, unable to leave.

“The fact is, whether death takes you all at once, or steals pieces over time, in the end there is no such thing as immortality. Some of us just die slower than the rest.”

And yet, as she stands in the train car, facing the windows and the platform sliding away, empty save for Jack, she swears that she can feel Sabine, like a weight at the end of a rope. The cord between them drawing tight enough to snap as the train leaves the station, picking up speed. She waits to feel the moment of relief, when the cord breaks, and she is free. It doesn’t come. But neither does Sabine.

“Isn’t it lonely?” “It doesn’t have to be. After all, loneliness is just like us,” says Ezra. “It has to be invited in.”