And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

by Amber Sparks

It’s easy to shrink yourself down when anger burns through you, hot-fierce, like a grass fire. It sucks the oxygen out; it eats up all but the most essential parts. Heart, lungs, brain, blood. Everything else diminishes, shadows itself, clears out disease. To shrink after anger is such a relief. To run toward oblivion a slaking of dark thirst.

She knew what it is to carry the weight of so much rage. And so she pulled us into her arms, up with the soil and grass, and she scattered us through the skies as stars, shimmering and immortal in the night skies. And for thousands of years, when men looked at the skies—our husbands, our sons, our grandsons, and so on for many generations—they saw us, and were filled with remorse and remembered what it meant to be a woman at the mercy of men.

Fairy godmothers aren’t all lacewings and dew, as everyone supposes. They are quite substantial, sturdy as stout trees and deep as rich dark earth, and their love is as good for you as vitamins and vegetables.)

Would that be true love? The relief of loneliness, replayed forever and ever?

she told him she’d given up on love. I’m done with that for good. And you so young, he laughed. It won’t be forever. Someone will snap you up. But they mustn’t, she thought, and she was so alarmed at the thought that she couldn’t shake it, all through her midnight walk.

But on moonless nights, in deep woods miles outside the city, some souls say they’ve glimpsed—just briefly—someone draped in what looked like an animal skin, huge head and furry ears fallen back over an elegant neck and throat. The shape always flees before it can be clearly seen.

Other people just possess you, she’d told her friend, the butcher. Is that so bad? he’d asked. To be possessed? It’s the worst fate of all, she’d say.

The donkey skin, she thought, was everything else in the world; it was solitude: anonymous, b...

It’s just that I don’t want my life to be amusing. I don’t want my life to be small and funny and disposable.

The ghost girl holds my hand, electric fist in mine, and I can hear her thinking It’s okay now, but of course it isn’t. What kind of tragedy is this? It’s not grand and operatic at all; it’s just awful, just like all the other awful hurts that happen to people like us.

She was up there on the roof, green blanket spread over beige shingles, conversing with the bear like she did many mornings. Sometimes she told him stories. Sometimes she prayed, though she didn’t exactly believe in a benevolent god. Hers was an angry god, furious and disapproving, and she prayed mostly for revenges and disappointments. She prayed to be martyred in briefly agonizing ways.

She pushed her hands and eyes up heavenward. She’s praying, said FB, but I shook my head. She was flying away, dissolving into wing and cloud and air and light. She was becoming her own miracle.

I told him that was because there was no god. Only wronged saints like Wendy.

The men. The last to go: the men, the collective men, and she will finally do the leaving for once. She’s held to them too long, given them too much place of importance in her own long life history. No more.

But now, in this moment, she puts down her wine. She lowers her huge, tired frame to the floor and smiles, puts her hand on her belly and imagines the strange small vessel inside. She tells herself: Remember this. Remember it all.

I really can’t see the point, he said. Of what, asked the wife. Of wings, said the husband.

she took off her shirt and stared. The wings were cream-colored, shot through with lilac and soft brown. She marveled at their loveliness, and how easily they moved with her, how gracefully they spanned her shoulder blades. She flexed them, tested them, felt the wind move through them powerful as engines. And then, she flew away.

But I still have you, Emmaline. I still love you, I still summon you, I call you up, the vision of the way you were. The way the summer sun could make a story of your copper skin and hair. The way your freckles faded in the winter and your eyes looked tired and kinder. The way you laughed, more generous than you really were, and far too loud. Do you still laugh, Emmaline? Do you ever miss the sun?

Our work, of course, does not exist; rather, it is a nagging suggestion, a vapor trail, a troubled miasma that surrounds us and sticks with a strange insistence. It worries us always.

Oh, Emmaline, Emmaline, I would have jumped off a mountain for you, back on Earth. I would have drowned myself, shot myself, baked myself in a pie for you. I would have kept myself to myself if you’d loved me. I wouldn’t have texted you, not after ten.

Why, the robots ask, must you remake your old worlds, cling so tightly to your old same sadness? Even in our sky ships, you dream of things we don’t understand: castles, passion, love. Dragons?

It’s all for you, of course. I have not given up my passion for you. I bind you, like the knights of old, my honor in a silk scarf I stole from your desk. It is tied to my sleeve. It is made of scent and stars. It has grown, it’s true, a little bit musty. Like most things.

O, how we did not understand, then, how we would lose ourselves so quickly, even in all these floating images and films. How could we perceive a life without connectedness? But now we barely remember connection at all.

I have been so lonely, O gods. I have been like the stars, white-hot with endless longing. Where is my companion? Wishing, now, I could fall to Earth.

Someone once said—a poet?—that all light is starlight. Does that mean it’s all dead on arrival, more echo than embrace? Is light just another way to be alone?

O Emmaline, I know I lost my heart to you, and this is not a metaphor. I know I lost my blood, my bones, my skin cells, my DNA—everything has peeled away from me and stuck to some spectral outline of you, some constellation lost to history long ago.

Long ago, I decided I would live (many didn’t), and that I would live for love. But living so long has begun to cloud that intention. The furniture falls apart in these rooms. The shabbiness shows through. If I don’t act soon, the walls will shift and sink, the dreams will dissolve, and I will be left with nothing but stray pixels and this cold hard ship, empty, I suspect, of everyone but me and them.

Sometimes I think we already died, years or eons ago. Sometimes I think we are living on only in dreams, as brains in a jar, or maybe just ones and zeros. I don’t like to think past this thought.