The Everlasting

by Alix E. Harrow

“You argued that a nation is not a boundary on a map or a flag on a pole, but only a story we tell about ourselves.”

You moved constantly as you spoke, a ceaseless fidgeting, as if your skin had difficulty containing all the sentences you hadn’t yet said. It was strangely mesmerizing, like the swooping and twittering of a swallow, so that I found it difficult to focus on my work.

I thought, despairingly, that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes, and heroes usually didn’t survive.

Because no throne is held easily, or for long; because a nation is a story we tell about ourselves, and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it.

Instead, I saw a throne teetering atop a stack of bones. An appetite, unslaked. A nation obsessed with a past that had never existed,