The Summer War

by Naomi Novik

I didn’t see anything I could do to stop being wrong, because I hadn’t done anything to start.

“Nothing has ever frightened me since. Everyone calls me brave, but it’s only that nothing else comes close enough to that fear.

I didn’t want to die, I was afraid of dying, but I thought it would be better to be dead.

I hope you meet a hundred beautiful summerling boys and none of them love you. I hope no one else is ever stupid enough to love you again!”

She was badly off herself, too, but she hadn’t made a stupid mistake, at least. She’d made a horrible one, but that wasn’t the same thing at all.

“Because caring about people who don’t care back is stupid, and you’re not,”

Because if you’d care—then I’d care, too. Then we’d have each other, at least.

Father did finally recognize that something was wrong, but he’d spent too much time with his brain shut up inside a dark room, and he couldn’t take it out and use it again right away.

“They don’t change. Time is a river; it carries us along. But they’re only on the banks, watching it go by. They can be changed, if we throw a rock and hit them, but they don’t change on their own.”

Those people didn’t have stories that lived after them. They were just ordinary people: farmers and bakers and weavers, shepherds and millers. They lived and died unseen by the world, forgotten without ever being known by anyone. Anyone except the people who cared for them, the people they cared for.

“It’s all right, Celie,” he said. “Don’t worry,” and she understood at last what he was telling her. This was his own way around the curse: a way to die for love, instead of glory. Something that was worth dying for, to him.

I should have known that he who bargains with liars and cheats can gain nothing but shame and misery thereby.”