All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

Someone who doesn’t care if they get Tater Tots or turnip slurry is a person who has given up on life.

“Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don’t get it. You can’t believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you’re just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.” Everybody else had gone inside. They were ringing the second bell. “I guess if you’re a Satanist, you believe that God is the bad guy, and He rewrote history to make Himself look good.” “But if that’s true,” Patricia said, “then you’re just worshiping a guy who needs to get a better PR team.”

Not for the first time, Laurence thought this was one of the annoyingly incommunicative features in the English language. Much like the inability to distinguish between “x-or” and “and/or,” the lack of delineation between “x-we” and “in-we” was a conspiracy of obfuscation, designed to create awkwardness and exacerbate peer pressure—because people tried to include you in their “we” without your consent, or you thought you were included and then the rug got pulled out from under you. Laurence dwelled on this linguistic injustice as he watched his parents walk back to their car, across the crunchy parking lot, without him.

“You never learned the secret,” said Roberta. “How to be a crazy motherfucker and get away with it. Everybody else does it. What, you didn’t think they were all sane, did you? Not a one of them. They’re all crazier than you and me put together. They just know how to fake it. You could too, but you’ve chosen to torture all of us instead. That’s the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can’t stand it when someone else lets their crazy show. It’s like bugs under the skin. We have to destroy you. It’s nothing personal.”

“The secret to a successful webcomic is to trick people into believing they will only get all the jokes if they read regularly. By the time they realize there are no jokes for them to get, they’ve invested too much time to quit, and they can’t admit they’ve been duped,”

“You know … no matter what you do, people are going to expect you to be someone you’re not. But if you’re clever and lucky and work your butt off, then you get to be surrounded by people who expect you to be the person you wish you were.”

Laurence had a conviction, in his loins, that he deserved to be dumped. Because he took Serafina for granted, while he was working fourteen-hour days on the Project, or because she was too excellent for him. But the whole point of being a grown-up and an uber-hacker is that you don’t get what you deserve. You get what you can get.

Do you ever feel like you’re just throwing away the people in your life? Like, being so self-centered that people just fall away?” Roberta laughed. “I have the opposite problem: I have a hard time disposing of the bodies.

Booze really was medicinal, after a near-death experience. Holding a drink in both hands and letting it corrode the topmost layer of his mouth and throat, Laurence felt a spiritual relationship with Bushmills.

“Who did this?” Patricia said. “We need to find them. We need to turn them into ash and then blow them into space. We need to make them fucking pay. Tell me who did this.” “Nobody,” Ernesto said. “Nobody and everybody. We all did this.”

“When the whole world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos,”

“You’ve turned your guilt into resentment, because that seemed easier to face. You won’t move on until you turn it back into guilt, and then into forgiveness for yourself.”

He found some dignity in the back pocket of his newly acquired pants and walked up into the main apartment, only tripping once. Or twice.