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She’d preferred to slip into the tales of Shirley Jackson rather than go out dancing with her friends, and instead of asking for a quinceañera party she’d managed to persuade her mother to buy her a first edition of Tremblay’s The Vanishing and a cache of other horror novels,
Minerva was not sure she could ever imitate the stubborn certainty in Nana Alba’s voice. Perhaps Minerva was made of a softer substance.
Une tasse trembleuse, pour moi?”
we must endure the yoke of yearning, no matter if it be heavy,”
Some traits you can’t acquire, you’re simply born with the ability or not. It’s all in the blood, you see.”
Some moments return to us, intact and incandescent, undimmed by the passage of time.
Time is a treacherous mistress. In our youth it flows slow and deep; the days stretch out endlessly. When we are children, a summer lasts for a century. As we age, the flow of time speeds up. Suddenly, a year vanishes with the snap of one’s fingers. How quickly time eludes us, how easily it tricks us.
Those words were like a blow to the temple. I felt as if I might lose my balance and looked at him in wide-eyed surprise. A sanatorium! Did he mean the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers, that grand old building perched like a vulture upon a hill? Would they place Ginny in a straitjacket? Would they make her take one thousand pills and tinctures and remedies? I pictured him dragging Ginny by the hair up to an attic where she’d be locked away.
Let us return to those first days of December, when my heart is still whole and Edgar’s smile spreads across his face. Let us remain there, one second longer.
Her heart was also crimson and black, wounded so deeply that it could hardly beat inside her chest. Yet beat it she must and live she must and fight she must.
Death hurts, yet the wound heals. But when Ginny went missing, it left a void. No scar tissue could be formed.”
A mystery is the most seductive of poisons; it intoxicates the soul.
