What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

she was struck by the novelty of its never occurring to him to blame anybody else for his problems.

She cried into her hands because she was lost: She’d carried the key to this place for so long and now that she was there she didn’t know where she was.

A library at night is full of sounds: The unread books can’t stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.

“How will I know when I’ve grown up?” When I started using words I didn’t really know the meaning of, she said.

“Everyone on the plane was freaking out, except the girl beside me,” you said. “She was just reading her book—maybe a little bit faster than usual, but otherwise untroubled. I said to her: ‘Have you noticed that we might be about to crash?’ And she said: ‘Yes I did notice that actually, which makes it even more important for me to know how this ends.’”

Fate is what it was. Yes, fate that the book I had with me was a novel written by my great-grandfather, a text you couldn’t read because my great-grandfather had put a permanent ban on any of his works being translated into English, Russian, or French. He was adamant that these three are languages that break all the bones of any work translated into them. Since people like getting around rules, there are various unofficial translations of my great-grandfather’s books floating around online, but all of them just seem to prove his point.