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Most of my deaths can be linked directly to my mother.
He liked caring for me afterward, as if the damage were done by someone else.
the couple the papers called saviors abducted her daughter and called it adoption.
Why have I survived? Because I am a creature more devious than all the other mes put together. Because I saw myself bleeding out and instead of checking for a pulse, I began collecting her things. 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.
What they don’t tell you about getting everything you ever wanted is the cold-sweat panic when you think about losing it.
I tell myself it’s just another shallow grave to crawl out of.
He didn’t say I love you. He’d say, I’m proud of you. Or, I’ll keep you. Or, You’re safe. But it was all the same.
I was never one of the women who believed she could change her abusive partner. I was just one who believed she could survive it.
It is possible to love a monster, even if you spend every day reminding yourself that they are a monster.
Adra was wrong. My sister is polite, but polite and angelic are two different things. Everyone makes that mistake. They think hair like snow means angel, and eyes like the sky mean saint. But my sister would ostracize someone to their death if they threatened her church. She could teach me lessons in ruthlessness. It’s what I first liked about her. If she was what people saw when they looked at her, she’d have no more use than a porcelain doll.
Sometimes, focusing on survival is necessary. Sometimes, it is just an excuse for selfishness.
“Careful you aren’t letting your hope lead you into gullibility.”
“Careful you don’t let your pessimism drown your faith.”
I have to be alive, because there is someone who needs me.
Give her a home better than her home and a family better than her family.
“Their indifference has killed you on hundreds of worlds, and here you are, sticking your neck out to let them do it one more time. I want you to know, after this goes bad and you’re facing whatever end you’ve engineered for yourself, that I do admire you.”
I want them to know I did it. That I, an Ashtown child so worthless they’ve let her die hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, have scored perfect on a test made for them.
Murder has a cycle just like water.
“We built your city full of holes. Ins and outs, where only we can find them,”
They say hunting monsters will turn you into one. That isn’t what’s happening now. Sometimes to kill a dragon, you have to remember that you breathe fire too. This isn’t a becoming; it’s a revealing. I’ve been a monster all along.
