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“You only love me for my apples,” she told the colt, as he ate it greedily and then pushed his warm nose against her hand, hoping for more. “It’s okay. I’ll take what I can get.”
Theron, perpetually a bit baffled but especially then
“No lovers,” he said. “Not for you. Not ever.” Unexpectedly, she found herself wanting to laugh. “What?” “Women die in childbirth, and in pregnancy, and trying to end pregnancy. Lovers driven mad by jealousy lash out in violent ways. We can’t risk any of that.” Then she actually did laugh. “And where are they,” she said, when she could speak again, “these lovers who’ll be driven mad with jealousy over me? They sound unbalanced. I’d like to think I’d have better taste.”
Theron’s words were words like fix and repair and assemble and he knew the depths those words contained, how they were the stories of things: how you couldn’t fix a thing without understanding what it was for, and how it was meant to work, and the sophistication of the mind that had created it; how repairing was not a task to be checked off a list but an act of devotion, a moment of communion between one human being and the world.
If the human body was a machine, Theron knew his own had been poorly built from half-functional parts.
Moments like that came a dozen times a day, moments when she considered whatever she had to do, thought, I can’t, and then did. Instead of making her feel triumphant it made her exhausted and angry and frustrated.
