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Only the cicadas were happy, crooning like a funeral choir from the trees.
Still, they say demons are spirits freed from hell by the fifth trumpet, along with cancer and microplastics, which slink into people’s souls and change them into monsters.
They spoke a dead language and worshipped a dead god, a man suspended gruesomely on two sticks. They gave themselves antiquated names (Ashley, Charlemagne, John) and obscure titles (president, chief operating officer, knight). Finch had tsked her tongue: Nothing grows on a grave while you’re standing on it.
grief ages you.
We learned, after the old world died, not to put our faith in wood pulp or motherboards; the only archive that survives is the one we carry with us.
Why do people change, Sir John? Because they are cursed, pursued, poisoned, trapped, under siege. Because they have to.
At six, I’d thought love was a full belly; at sixteen, I’d thought it was wildflowers and gooseberries and Mayapple’s mouth on mine. At seventeen, I knew better: love is whatever you’re willing to kill for.
Nothing grows on a grave while you’re standing on it.
But she’d been willing to kill for me, and so she must have loved me, after all. As I loved May, as Sir John loved his wife, as God loved the world: with blood on our hands.
That’s how a knight proves his love: on a pile of corpses.”
Death, now, was the bride, who could not keep hold of her shape-shifting lover.
A woman’s scream, high and hoarse. No, not a scream—a wild animal keen. A hawk’s cry, a vixen’s wail, a dog’s howl: a menagerie in mourning, from a single mouth.
An outlander doesn’t prove her love by dying young, but by living as long as she can. She eats berries grown in bad earth and licks the poison from her lips; she makes her wedding bed from barbed wire and cinder blocks; she falls in love at the end of the world. And when death comes for her—too soon, too fucking soon—she becomes something else. Something that survives.
So the knight and the demon walked the world, never together, never apart, waiting for the day one of them would cease to be what they were.
They chased and changed above me, knight and demon, husband and wife, shifting like clouds in strong wind, and then wheeled together, toward the horizon.
