The Space Between Worlds (The Space Between Worlds #1)

by Micaiah Johnson

When the multiverse was confirmed, the spiritual and scientific communities both counted it as evidence of their validity.

Because that’s what a sister is: a piece of yourself you can finally love, because it’s in someone else.

He knows growing up under the threat of starvation and homelessness means nothing will ever quite feel like pressure again. He knows even better than I do.

I survive the desert like a coyote survives, like all tricksters do.

I doubt they would have built the wall so high and sure if they’d known which side of it they’d be on.

If I figured anything out in these last six years, it is this: human beings are unknowable. You can never know a single person fully, not even yourself. Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don’t know yourself in the dirt. Even if you hustle and make it in the rough, you have no idea if you would thrive or die in the light of real riches, if your cleverness would outlive your desperation.

A rotating black hole does not collapse to a dot. That’s the old-fashioned thinking. It collapses to a ring, a ring of neutrons. And if you fall through the ring of neutrons vertically, you wind up in Wonderland. You wind up on the other side of forever. —Michio Kaku

“ ‘Reasons I have lived: I don’t know, but there are eight.’ ”

It holds no secrets grander than my own fears.

“Listen well, Yerjanik: I’ve always known you, and there is no evil you could not commit.”

I have the heart of a coyote but he has the eyes of a mountain lion, a creature who doesn’t need tricks because his teeth are real.

He said his grandfather’s people came from a place across the ocean. A small country, but resourceful. Once, a larger country came in and massacred nearly everyone. But that, that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that afterward, swords and sickles still drenched in innocent blood, they turned and said they’d done nothing. If the massacre was mentioned, they denied it, and no one was brave enough to argue. Nik Senior said that was true power. Not to kill a man, but to kill a man in front of his family and force them to agree you did not.

I don’t realize how many years I’ve been alone until I warm under a gift as simple as someone’s undivided attention.

I wonder how long it will be before I am less to him than a ghost.

The universe erases me, but it also remakes me again and again,

If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once. —Ocean Vuong

Dear brother from another time, today some stars gave in to the black around them & i knew it was you. —Danez Smith

As I leave Exlee reminds me to say Jean’s name each morning and each night until the burial, because our dead are only weights on our backs when we won’t let them walk beside us, when we try to pretend they are not ours or they are not dead.

“I do not know which way to go, but my eyes are turned toward you.”

I am a creature that destroys…and Adam Bosch has strayed too close.

Murder has a cycle just like water. In the same way water becomes a cloud, then becomes water again, when blood calls for vengeance the blood from that vengeance calls too. If you plan to give death, it will always return to you.