An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

“If you’re trying to rile me, which I suspect that you are, you’ll have to do better than accusing me of something as banal as self-stimulation.”

Running had become her favorite mode of transport. She lived for that brief snap of true flight, both feet in the air at once.

the guards who patrolled the corridors embraced lawlessness—one of those words that didn’t mean what it meant. Lawlessness suggested the laws forbade such violations. They did not.

obsessed with what was right and what was wrong, what he should do. It was no way to live, constantly on the edge of existential crisis, prostrating himself at the throne of ideological purity.