The Book of Flora (The Road to Nowhere, #3)

by Meg Elison

The Midwife didn’t build Nowhere; it waited for her

She was the one who waited through the years for a child to be born, never letting her tools go rusty.

I cannot begin at the beginning; I wasn’t there. I cannot even begin at one particular moment in time; I do not remember how this got started. Neither does anybody else. We only know the story we are given, unless someone writes the truth of it down. And even then, it isn’t the whole truth. Only theirs. As this is mine.

Now I see that if I do not carry my past with me, it will wrap itself around my ankles and drag me down.

There is no living without it. There is no pretending I am not the sum of all these things.

luxury does not exist without slavery.

Neither Etta nor Eddy welcomed questions about this aspect of themselves.

Nobody has used my body as though I weren’t in it, or

Spake: Alma uses this all the time when she just means “said.” It’s used all over their scripture book, I think she just phrases things that way to add weight to her words.

Haha

People talk long and loud about the natural way of things, or what we lost when the world changed. But I can no longer believe that such a world ever existed. We have always been too strange for things to work out so neatly.

I think about the lost ones who are still out there, each thinking that they are the only one of their kind. Somewhere, there is someone like me or Connie, being run out of town or left to starve because we’re not the ones they think will save mankind.

In the end, almost none of them saw the value. They’re all so concerned with survival that the spirit in Nowhere that guarded their history is extinct.

Is this what it is to adopt a culture other than your own?

What we want for our children and what they want for themselves are so different, I don’t know how two such animals live together. They chafe against one another like a fox in a dark henhouse. Feathers fly. Everyone bleeds. And in the end, one of them is lost forever.

“There’s no way they can get those old war machines moving,” she said, shaking her head. Her white hair is so thin now I can see her scalp.

I want to be like his when im old and not be too concerned about my hair

Her feet were dissolving into water, trickling like rain down the side of a house. Her calves were water, running like the rivulets into a puddle. Her

water, clear in a bowl like collected rain. Her chest was water, deep as a lake, her heart a fish. Her arms were water, icicles melting into the floe that made way for the spring. Her neck and head

“It’s good to leave behind your understanding. Other people can learn from it.”

It’s not safe where it’s not understood,

when someone disagrees with reality and cannot accept it. Nothing good comes of that. “It’s not a gift

It is never just one death.

She’s not mine. She never belonged to anyone but herself.”

“Stop. Stop trying to give and take names. Stop trying to connect things so that life makes sense. Stop trying to tie everything together where it doesn’t fit. If the child doesn’t come out of you, you’re not naming it.”

Your body is corrupt. Haunted.”

He laid the wooden belly against his dead mother’s body.

refused to be someone I’m not. I’m sorry I never told my

And people make sacrifices so that children will be born.

All those women living somewhere that they were so close to free.

“I don’t know. I wanted something else. I thought we were on our way toward something.” Alice licked her lips. “We are,” Flora said. “We just don’t know what it is.”

I cannot say that I was made wrong or raised wrong, she thought, trying to weave the threads of past and present. Only that I was made. So

But I do wonder what it is like to live with that possibility.

They must be after something that doesn’t exist. That’s the only explanation for the scale of destruction they’re bringing into the world. What do you do with a desire that can never be satisfied?

I am no different from them.

Can a thought do so much? It must. Thoughts do everything, in the end.

I think about how many places I never felt that I could belong, because I would not be sorted correctly when the time came to

Nothing soothes a breaking heart like anger, so I found mine. “Alice