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Apparently, people do strange things when they’re scared of dying, and one of them is hoarding toilet paper.
When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t ask them where they’re taking you.
It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness.
And at the end of the world, Cora thinks, there are worse things than being too clean.
“Violent deaths leave unsettled ghosts,”
Maybe she wants someone to teach her how to be a human the correct way, the way she never learned. Someone to wake her up and tell her what to eat, what to dream about, what to cry about, who to pray to. Because Cora somehow feels that every choice she’s made has been wrong, that every choice she will ever make will lead her deeper and deeper into a life that feels like a dark, airless box, and when she peers through the slats in the wood she’ll see the pale light of who she might have been, so bright that it blinds her.
On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, a door opens. The starving dead crawl out, mouths full of dust, and reach for a home that has already forgotten them. Their stomachs scream for food, but their tongues are heavy and dry, their necks as thin as needles. They lick the tears of the living from the dirt, and sometimes, it is enough to sate them. But sometimes, the hunger only yawns wider.
Cora cannot imagine how terrible it would feel if the typhoons in her mind were visible on the outside.
“No matter how the people of Israel disobeyed, God’s patience and forgiveness for them was infinite, for His love has no bounds. No matter your failures, your betrayals, you need only open your heart to God and He will forgive you, for you are His beloved child.”
She tries to imagine him, because you can’t forgive someone who doesn’t exist, but he bursts into a thousand white spiders in her mind, crawls into her mouth and ears.
