An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

When you saw the world sideways, you couldn’t always get a proper handle on things.

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

That was the way of things—to live, and then to have their offspring live, and so on, for all time, as it was in the beginning and would be until the end of days. And everything connected, back to the very first thing that ever was, and to the last thing that ever would be.

Memories could not be unmemoried, only shuffled so as not to be in the forefront of things.

What was a person’s self but carefully articulated mimicry?

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