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They were angry about the weather and their failing crops and shallow wells, alongside all sorts of ordinary things, like the fact that their wives no longer loved them or that they would someday die.
Happiness was frail and flimsy: a petal, a whisper. Hardship was constant. It was muscular and loud. Only fools forgot this vital fact, her face explained. Only fools failed to let it guide their every waking thought and deed.
Some of them were God-fearing, but their main god, the one at whose temple they worshipped most frequently, was violence.
Anne was loved by all in the burning but inattentive way that children love their mothers.
She thought about what they all went through each day: the great, gruelling trial of being a woman in a world governed by men. How painful it was, and how humiliating. To be forced to hold your dead friend aloft because it was thought that you, in your smallness and stupidity, might not realise that this could be your fate. It made her tense and pale with rage.
little tasks were the foot soldiers in the ongoing battle against despair.
That was what had frightened him the most: they were not mere doltish dogs, they were girls with teeth and claws. Girls had crazy whims and grudges—these ones especially. He didn’t trust them. They made him afraid.
Girls—normal human girls—people could contend with; they were weak and small. And dogs too could be trained. But girls who became dogs, or who let the world believe they were dogs, were either powerful or mad: both monstrous possibilities.
He searched within his soul and saw a terrible truth: that he’d rather they were dogs than damaged girls. Dogs lived ignorantly and happily; they didn’t know the extent of human pain. He wanted to preserve them from all the fears and the threats with which life might present them.
“We went out when we weren’t supposed to, we were too free, and this—all of this—is our punishment. It has nothing to do with the idea of us becoming dogs, and everything to do with the fact of us being girls.”
