What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

I’d have liked to admire that but felt I was watching a distressing form of theft, since the puppet could do nothing but suffer being forced open like an oyster.

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.

Those who drove me into this form did what they did and that’s all. I was on my way out and they thought they were helping me; instead they turned motion and intelligible speech into a currency with which personhood is earned.

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

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

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

she was tall and vague . . . exceedingly vague. Her tendency toward the impersonal led to conversations that ended with both parties walking away thinking: “Well, that didn’t go very well.”

Jill was never more aggravating than when she got busy understanding things,

“I just mean . . . if it was healthy, it might be easier to give up.”

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.

He was like a boy in a fairy tale; there was a set of steps he was to follow with no concession whatsoever as to how others viewed his actions.

“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?” —

She felt a bit sick but that was just obstructed emotion,

IT’S A SPECTRAL wisp of a film, film more in the sense of a substance coating your pupils than it is a stream of images that moves before you.

Before assuming ownership of a key you should look at it closely. Not only because you may need to identify it later but because to look at a key is to get an impression of the lock it was made for, and, by extension, the entire establishment surrounding the lock.

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.