Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

It’s because there’s a moment, pressed beneath the weighted blanket of the storm, when her body stops fighting, when all the voices inside her finally go quiet, and her shoulders loosen and her lungs unclench and her skin goes numb and the line between girl and world gets smudged, and she is washed away. Made new.

and the freedom is dizzying, and it scares the shit out of her as well—but fear and fun could be neighbors, right?

now that it’s happening to her she’s torn between the urge to hold the moment on her tongue, and the urge to spit it out before it can dissolve,

As if there was an unspoken agreement that when they buried Mum, the grave would follow them home, a six-foot hollow in the bed, a hole at the table, a plot of land left fallow for their entire lives, and then Dad broke his word by planting something there.