What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

She’s powerful. Not just in doing whatever she does to make people listen to her instead of watch her, but . . . I think she heals herself. She wears a wedding ring, so I made reference to her partner, but she held her hand up and said: “Oh, this? I found it.”

He’d been told that the key to a real apology was the identification of one’s real mistake.

it must have been due to her red cape. Our Dornička had decided that once you reach your late

fifties you can wear whatever you want and nobody can say anything to you about it.

In many tales people who’ve died don’t realize it until they try to travel to a place that’s new to them and find themselves prevented from arriving. These ghosts can only return to places where they’ve already been; that’s all that’s left for them. Depending on the person that can still be quite a broad existence.

Your grandmother is vehement on the topic of survival and skeptical of all claims that it’s possible to choose anything else when the chips are down.