What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

it was the certainty of this devotion that saw her through times at school and times down in the city when people looked at her strangely or said insulting things; the words and looks sometimes made her lower her head for a few steps along the street, but never for long.

she felt instinctively and of course heretically that the Virgin herself was only a symbol of a yet greater sister-mother who was carefree and sorrowful all at once, a goddess who didn’t guide you or shield you but only went with you from place to place and added her tangible presence to your own when required.

the white stone of this particular house rippled as if reacting to a hand that had found its most pleasurable point of contact.

SEÑORA LUCY was a painter with eyes like daybreak.

the Señora sometimes grew short of breath though she’d hardly stirred. A consequence of snatching images out of the air—the air took something back.

enough canvas to make compelling errors on.

as they came to understand each other they learned that what they’d been afraid of was running out of self. On the contrary the more they loved the more there was to love.

Insofar as a purely transient construction of flesh and blood can remember (or foretell) what it is to be stone, Lucy understood the mountain’s wish to listen at the window of a den of gamblers and be warmed by all that free-floating hope and desolation.

After a little while Safiye spoke, her voice so perfectly unchanged it was closer to memory than it was to real time.

an uneasy search because somehow in these pictures seeing her never meant the same thing as having found her.

Some words that made me happy because they were said by exactly the right person at exactly the right time,

your mother’s brilliant smile, always slightly anxious, as if even in the moment of delighting you she wonders how she dares to be so very delightful.

I wished for a million books. I think I wished this because at that time I was having to force my smiles, and I wanted to stop that and to really be happier.

in some way we had always known about each other and that he would be at my side forever.

one night I told him that he wouldn’t die, but that he would become roses.

Boudicca doesn’t care how big or pretty her fellow fish are; if they come to her manor she will obliterate them,

So now Boudicca lives alone, which is exactly what she wanted all along.

In this world there are voices without form; they sing and sing, as they have from the beginning and will continue until the end.

what a ridiculous place we were born into, that fatherlessness was a reason why people would flick a boy’s forehead and say insulting things to him,

bloodthirsty gazelles.

Like a stray, but a dangerous stray; you could take him home if you wanted to but he’d tear the walls down.

He said that “they” were three women and yet “they” were one, and that one of them took his pain away so that the others could return it to him and so it went on.

I’ve got something that other lovers would give a great deal to possess: a perfect memory of the very first time I saw you.

Don’t you ever think that one day you might miss something really important, Arjun, she’d say. Something that someone can only say one time?

with everyone else he’d just fall silent and then insert a generic comment into the space left for him to speak in.

you’re going to suddenly find yourself having a conversation that turns you into a grown-up, a conversation that stops you being able to see things and people that are actually there.

To have seen your lips and not ever kissed them would have been the ruin of me

a hatred of make-believe, which did not heal, but was only useful to the people who didn’t need it.

the puppet could do nothing but suffer being forced open like an oyster.

the bright words flew through my mind like comets.

The ghost even advised me not to bother turning up. Naturally I disregarded her advice.

I think the soul must be heavy and smooth,

Tyche Shaw.

this tiny queen’s question was large;

a person doesn’t easily recover from the sadness of finding that it’s not always affinity that draws us together (not always, not only), that you can be called to undo the deeds of another.

little by little she was falling for an invisible man, she was confounded and kept me awake until dawn asking who on earth it could possibly be

this Rowan who is everything but mostly tree.

failed. A shattering so absolute that no word can be picked up again—that’s my success.

All I knew how to do with puppets, all I used to want to do, was play unsettling tricks. That’s not enough anymore. I want to put on stubborn little shows, find places here and there where we get to see what we’d be like if we were actually in control of anything. Cruel fantasies, maybe, but they can’t hurt any more than glimpsing a galaxy does.

She said whatever she had to say and did whatever she had to do to circumvent unnecessary physical contact, but her situation was further complicated by the effect that her touch had on others. She was walking pain relief.

the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.

loved to watch her father with his puppets—he showed her the influence it was possible to have from a slight distance—so

She was carved of rowan wood, and she retained the opinions of trees: one of them being that it was best not to have anything to do with human folk.

when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that they were either forgotten or misremembered.

She’d even seen the traveler in the trees: “Spinning, as a wheel does.”

That went by; so can this.

to whom can someone of good conscience give such an object as a key? Always up to something, stitching paths and gateways together even as it sits quite still;

I don’t know anything about light, from where it comes, nor where it goes I only want the light to light up

a suspicion that many whose work is play can never be free of: that you can only flaunt your triviality for so long before punishment is due. A date has been selected, and on that day there will be a great culling

when her tears met the water they told their own meaning as they flowed from eye socket to eye socket.