Things in Jars

by Jess Kidd

This is a practical woman, or at least a woman who finds it practical to be able to fit through doorways, climb stairs, and breathe.

“What person, in full possession of their reason, would choose to swagger through eternity half-naked with their boots undone?”

“All the legions of the glorious dead,” she informs him, pointing to a patch of air, “and I’m plagued by that.”

If it swims or paddles or blows bubbles in any way oddly, then he’ll have it killed, stuffed or put in a jar, and brought to his private library.

“So that’s it: your daughter stirs up memories and thoughts, makes you feel angry, and has stony, changeable eyes?”

“You’re no longer a resurrection girl, Bridie,” he said, wiping his face with his sleeve. “From this day forward you’re a gentleman surgeon’s apprentice.”

Stories, particularly the bad ones, are told in their own time. And so, for now, it is enough that she turns her face to him, like a flower to the sun, and that she sleeps.

At best she had viewed poor Lydia as a dress-up doll, at worst an inconvenience, like February or indigestion.

all at once Bridie is filled with the hot rage that comes over any sane woman who rails against her market price, or the damnable fact that there is a market price in the first place.

Edmund’s ancestors would have taken the heads of their foes on the battlefield and, really, what don’t nobs put in aspic?”