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Her father had told her, the year before, that every winter she saw would be one of Earth’s last winters.
Borders had stopped mattering after the asteroid Finis was discovered twenty years ago. Everyone was just an Earthling now.
“Everybody’s family is dead around here, you know.”
Why take a shower when you’re just going to get dirty? Why eat when you’re just going to get hungry? Every flower dies eventually, Sam. But not yet.
she had clutched her hands tight around the rise of fat around her middle when she first put it on, only for her mother to smack them away and tell her not to be silly—it was no crime to have a body.
So maybe he had been apologizing for giving her life in the first place, when he knew it would be full of dread. She wished she could have told him that life was already full of dread, no matter who you were. That there was nothing you could have that you couldn’t one day lose. That autumn always gave way to winter, but it was her favorite time of year—those fleeting bursts of beauty before the branches went bare.
“What is necessary?” he said. “I’m no longer sure. I think that she was necessary, for me.”
“You feel like you’ve been dying all this time, too, then,” Samantha said. “It’s just that your body hasn’t caught on yet.”
it was simply that her entire life had been lived in anticipation of loss, such that neither her mother’s death nor her father’s had surprised her in the least, but had rather seemed like the fulfillment of a promise.
“It’s the story of this planet in reverse,” she said. “We were born out of—coalescing matter, chaos, here, all lava and earthquakes and thunder.” She smiled a little. “It will be like . . . seeing the birth of the world. Can you imagine anything more beautiful, more worth witnessing, than that?”
But now she felt like he had known too well that he was in a piece of weaving that was unraveling, that the world was unmaking itself, and he just didn’t want to witness it.
“There is so much left for you to see.”
