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“I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll tell you if my tongue gets puffy.” “Keep your lewd allergic reactions to yourself,” she said.
“I know,” Noel said with a sigh. “You can eat tree nuts. Eat one of those brownies for me—let me watch.”
“We all lose,” says an acerbic voice. “We all love and we all lose and we go on loving just the same.”
Papa signals to the elf band, who launch into a rousing rendition of “Last Christmas,” my dad’s favorite Christmas song. The elves all think it’s Elvis’s version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” but I know the truth. Papa loves Wham!
But Marigold was enthralled by the way he said the word unwieldy. A fantasy flashed through her mind in which he dictated an endless list of juicy-sounding words. Innocuous. Sousaphone. Crepuscular.
“That you still don’t realize I’m willing to do anything, anything”—he gestured in a full circle around them—“to stay in your company.
“Gingerbread ladies?” Marigold shrugged. “My mom isn’t really into men right now.”
What if no one else comes, either? What if it’s just us at this party?” “Then we get loaded,” Wren said. “Really, really, really loaded.” I sighed, slumping in a lawn chair. “And eat all those little quiches by ourselves. And cry.”
They had harmonized so beautifully, Sophie had asked her grandmother if those were angels singing. “No, darling,” Luba had replied, “just gentiles.”
“If I spend all my disappointment before breakfast, what will I go on for the rest of the day?” And she smiled at herself for being such a sour thing. She thought of Dame Somnolence at the factory, whose advice to the girls was to “live bitter, so the crows will have no taste for you when you’re dead.”
“I will free you, and I will lift you. I will learn a thousand ways to make you laugh. Your smiles will be the honey in my mead, your enchantment my delight.”
And in her shed by the dying fire, Neve sensed, as she had in the dream, that she was not alone. But it wasn’t a lurking feeling, as a figure in the night. It was the sense that she wasn’t alone in the world, and that was a very different thing.
She was the goddess of … herself.
from this day on, whenever he sought to master a woman, whether by threat or strength or even with a look, the fear would flare and overtake him—so wild and sudden it would drop him to his knees to cower in terror, gibbering for solace from his distant, punishing god.
