All the Names They Used for God

by Anjali Sachdeva

“I used to be a wild thing, you know, before I met you. I’ve drunk toasts in places that would make your stomach turn. I can take care of myself.” “I can take care of you, too,” she said.

They are just so many stories patched together, so many forgotten days encased in bone and meat. 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.

Forgetting is a concept the angel knows only through observation. Every moment of her long existence echoes through her like the unfading peal of a bell, things she would rather forget every bit as loud as those she would remember.

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

A boy who cares more for the freedom to direct his own gaze than for the master’s anger is a rare creature indeed.

There was even a time, decades ago now, when he began to write the poem, but it withered in his hands like a plucked flower. And so he learned to leave it alone, to let it grow in silence, until the silence consumed it, until the words fell asleep again beneath his skin. Now he wonders whether he will ever find them.

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.

Robert was, above all else, a sensible and sober man, and he adored Carol as only such a man could, with a love built on a list of reasons and proofs of her goodness.

“You ever meet this slut?” “No. What difference does that make?” “Just sounds like an ugly name to call someone who wanted the same thing you did.”

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

Science will have nothing to do with us anymore, nor we with it. We will be just a void in the cosmos, a dark place in the sky where there was once starlight.