An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

“Rifle,” Aster whispered, her lips splitting at the corners where the cold had pasted them shut. As a child, she’d called them ripples for the way they had of changing everything in a story.

Aster knew where this was going, one of those Sovereignty speeches about redemption and justice. How beatings were good. How each strike undid one sin. If Aster’s eyes weren’t forced shut, she’d be rolling them. Why guards quoted this nonsense to justify themselves was beyond her. The whole point of occupying a position of power was that you got to do what you wanted with impunity. It seemed a waste of time to bother with rationalizations.

“I don’t like to watch you hurt yourself. It’s your right to do it, but please, not in front of me.”

“None of them are harmless, Theo. They are animals, and if it weren’t for us bending them into some kind of shape, they’d live in complete chaos and sin.”

Slavery

Our social order depends on our ethical order, and our ethical order depends on acknowledging and rectifying moral wrongs. So yes, an apology would be appreciated, but not for my benefit, but the benefit of the society in which we all live.” Aster had not met an upperdeck woman quite so showy before, and she seemed to be playing a part.

Nothing is more sad than a person who believes in something that’s so clearly not true.

You keep thinking there’s a reason for everything, ’cause you can figure some out. There ain’t. All the bad that’s happened to you, it was never about you. It was about them. You can’t blame yourself. It’s sad, so very sad, and maybe if I were a different woman I’d weep like a little baby.

That was all one could do with the past—be satisfied with half-answers, take the rest on faith.

Dear Theo, she wrote on a pad of paper once ready to leave, I am off to the Shuttle Bay. Deciding the note not suitably warm, she added: You are not unpleasant to look at when you sleep. Love, Aster.

Autistic

What a small thing she had asked for, to be left alone, to be allowed the solace of her own atoms. The only cocks she wanted inside her were the ones she requested, the only hands on her body the ones she begged to have touching her, the only knife in her gut the one she lodged there herself.