All the Names They Used for God

by Anjali Sachdeva

Great masses of blue-black cloud gather above the prairie, and lightning cracks sideways at the horizon while the wind sets her hair whipping about her face. Times like these the world feels more alive than any other, like she is only a mosquito resting on the hide of some great beast.

One might unearth almost anything with enough searching. Being a muse is mostly this—a sifting through of memories to find something of merit, hauling it to the surface where it can shine.

Learn to smile in the daytime and write your heresies by candlelight, or you’ll live to regret it.”

I had thoughts like that the whole day, very rational thoughts, like my brain was trying to throw weight on the other side of a scale against all the madness that was happening around me.

When these things have never happened to you, you think, I would rather die. But the truth is that it is not so easy to decide to die. And when, suddenly, you have the option to live again, that is not so easy either.

Well, it’s a hard time getting anything in this life without taking it from someone else.”

We will be just a void in the cosmos, a dark place in the sky where there was once starlight.