The Everlasting

by Alix E. Harrow

And yet, she was no one at all. She was nothing, daughter of nothing, heir to nothing. Just another of the numberless, featureless small folk of Dominion, whose name would not be forgotten only because no one ever learned it in the first place.

He asked this question two or three times a week, because he was at heart a bastard who reveled in the suffering of others.

WOULD PREFER TO DISOWN YOU IN PERSON SO DONT DIE LOVE DAD. I hadn’t died.

(Drayton was a liberal, which meant he thought boys of every race and class ought to be allowed to die for their country.)

I only knelt for a while in the place where the woods had once been, but were no longer, until I understood what every person understands eventually: that I had left home and could never return to it, and that there would never be a time when I did not miss it.

“A gathering with slogans is called a protest, Dad.”

“Because it was not God’s voice I heard in my dream, boy,” you said, and I felt your breath on the fine hairs at the back of my neck. “It was yours.”

I am not sure which I prefer: To be taken for something I am not, or to fail at being what I am.”

Was that not how you loved someone? By hammering your body into whatever shape they liked best, and handing yourself to them like a hilt? Apparently it was not,

“I have loved you since before I was born, I think. I have studied you, worshipped you, lost you, mourned you. I have wept at your bier and fought beneath your flag. I have killed you, Una, over and over.” Your voice dragged now like a dull blade, whetting itself against me. The tips of your thumbs pressed into my flesh. “This once, please—let me save you.”

that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes,