What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

Giacomo was not a person who knew what a lie was or why anybody would tell one; his mind worked at a different speed than usual. Not slower, exactly, but it did take him a long time to learn some things, especially practicalities regarding people.

yet he couldn’t be persuaded to perform on demand; no, he would give looks that asked Arkady to perceive the distinction between artist and mere entertainer.

who did not choose to be known by her true name—or perhaps was yet to discover it—and went by the nickname Lokum.

I remember a dawn when my heart / got tied in a lock of your hair.

The river Danube ran through her new city of residence, and her mother had often said that if she could drown in any river in the world she wished for it to be the Danube, a liquid road that would take her body to the Carpathians and onward until it met the Iskar as it crossed the Balkan mountains, washing her and washing her until she lost all scent of the life she’d lived. Then let the Iskar take her to lie on beds of tiny white flowers in old, old glades, high up on the slopes. Or if she stayed with the Danube, let it draw her along miles and miles of canals to collect pine needles in the Black Forest. As many as her lap could hold

Do you think that maybe we’re able to love someone best when that person doesn’t know how we feel?

a badge that said HELL, which she tapped whenever anyone asked her where she was “originally from,”

an implosion of memory. And as the subjects drift through the subsequent debris, they calmly develop a conviction that they do not do so alone. These presences aren’t reported as ghostly, but living ones

familiar exchange, the kind we’re always having with friends and family, repeating ourselves and repeating ourselves, going over what we know about each other to prove that we still know these things and will not, cannot, forget them.

Rain fell through sunlight. This was what Sabine Akkerman called fox rain. In her mind’s eye Jill’s mother shook iridescent raindrops off her umbrella and said: “Wolves are hosting wedding feasts and witches are brushing their hair today.”

Presence certainly met its objective but perhaps the objective itself was flawed and warranted adjustment.

hmm, strangely insecure of intelligent people to spend time patting each other on the backs for having social skills and getting pretty girls to have dinner with them.

bigarurre up and found that it meant both “a medley of sundry colors running together” and “a discourse running oddly and fantastically, from one matter to another.”

She thought it might be connected to anxiety and the need to be absolutely certain that it was shared. And she really didn’t feel like punching anybody that night.

Not the way you tense up when you’re about to run away, but the way you tense up when you’re not about to have any nonsense.

When she surveyed the entire scene it seemed to be one that the stained-glass figures were dreaming. And she was there too, living what was dreamed.

whenever Thalia heard this she said, “Care,” to indicate that she didn’t.

yet somehow still not permitted the brains to perceive that the man you see or work with every day is exactly the same person as the superhero who saves your life at night. “Seems like someone behind the scenes clinging to the idea that the woman whose attention you can’t get just can’t see ‘the real you,’ no?”

he liked the connections he could see her making in her mind, and the way that she tried to tend them so that they thrived. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her before. Usually it was “Aren’t you overthinking things, Day?” But a gardener growing thoughts—she liked that.

“It’s great, isn’t it? It sort of rocks you . . . reading it is sort of like reading from a cradle hung up in the trees, and the trees rock you with such sorrow, and as the volume turns up you realize that the trees are rocking you whilst deciding whether to let you live or die, and they’re sorry because they’ve decided to smash you to pieces . . .” “But then you’re put back together again, in a wholly different order . . .” “And it hurts so much you don’t know if the new order will work.” “It’ll heal. It has to hurt before it heals, don’t you think?”

With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there—not always, but more often than not. With girls, Why her? came up so quickly.

She’d gone up the mountain to look at a statue of a hypothetical pagan god; she’d taken a really long look at him and for her he remained hypothetical.

cities are fueled by the listless agony of workers providing services to other workers who barely acknowledge those services.

Another thing the law didn’t like: He’d broken into the clock towers, and left them open to people seeking shelter, attracting all sorts of new elements into moneyed neighborhoods and driving established elements out into shabbier neighborhoods so that it was no longer clear what kind of person you were going to find in any part of the city.

There are three telephone booths in the lobby. Their numbers are automatically withheld and they’re mainly used for lies.

cleared, but he gripped the knife and his grip held firm. He looked honored, extraordinarily honored, seeming to care more for that which tore his flesh than he did for the flesh itself, embracing the blade as if it were some combination of marvel and disaster, the kind that usually either confers divinity or is a proof of it. To the boy gawping through the glass it seemed that this man strove to be a worthy vessel, to live on and on at knifepoint, its brilliance enmeshed with his guts.

Lust, the warden’s daughter; a little feckless, perhaps, but not one to cause injury until the day her telescope shows her that troops are marching on the walled city. When darkness falls she slips through the sleeping streets, meets the foe at the city gates, and throws those gates wide open: Take and use everything you want and burn the rest to the ground

Every time someone comes out of the lift in the building where you work you wish lift doors were made of glass. That way you’d be able to see who’s arriving a little before they actually arrive and there’d be just enough time to prepare the correct facial expression.

is it eloquence that makes you people believe things? You are all morons.

“I grew up in a city where people fell out of windows a lot,” you say. “So I used to practice falling out of them myself. But after a few broken bones I decided it’s better just to not stand too close to windows.”

while you were looking for pen and paper the diary has been unfolding. Not growing, exactly, but it’s sitting upright on your tabletop and seems to fill or absorb the air around it so that the air turns this way and that, like pages. In fact the book is like a hand and you, your living room, and everything in it are pages being turned this way and that.