And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

by Amber Sparks

History will tell you we made quick peace with our rapists, bore them children, married them. History will tell you how we launched ourselves into the battle like burning arrows, how we landed between kin and assaulters. History will tell you we united Rome. History likes to lie about women.

It had been suspiciously easy, she sometimes thought.

Except after the endless grinning and the explosion and the joy and the music and the all-night painting sessions and the great, great sex—after all that comes the okay sex and the bad sex, the fights and fallout and the nights spent alone or wishing they were alone.

She remembers the feeling, finally, of that door closing on everyone. The feeling, not bad, of being alone again. She almost wishes for another love affair, sometimes, just to be able to end it. Just to feel that door close once more. Would that be true love? The relief of loneliness, replayed forever and ever?

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, bloody, and happy ever after.

I WASN’T REALLY RUNNING AWAY when I ran away—I was just hiding.

But it’s not as if you choose your friends, any more than you choose your family. With friends, it’s all coincidence and timing and who lives nearby. And

I want to eat up all the lines, all the words, since Hamlet really is the most amazing thing ever written by anyone. I feel the same way every single time I read it—like somebody gave me a very tiny, sustained electric shock and I just can’t stop my brain from quivering.

Because that’s how life really is, right? You don’t get to just sit there and concentrate on one tiny little thing. Life just comes at you from everywhere and you have to deal with it all at once. Human life is a huge, messy, complicated, unbelievable thing.

I hope that will help explain why I stayed, when I never should have. I hope that will explain why I left you when you needed me most, in those red days when we hardly remembered the color blue at all.

We want so badly to make sense of the cosmos, to see it in ourselves. We turn shadows into sockets, bright smears into mouths and eyes. We turn the universe into our mirror.

Was it any wonder I orbited you, was your companion star?

Face notwithstanding, the moon is a source of madness just the same. Or so say the police, hospital staff, and good old Pliny the Elder, who theorized that perhaps humans were so affected by the moon because they—like the tides—were made mostly of water, especially the brain.

But still, who doesn’t think about death, every moment of every day?

WHO DOESN’T LIE AWAKE AT NIGHT AND THINK ABOUT DEATH? I don’t believe it. Death deserves all caps. To deny it is like denying that you eat sandwiches. Everyone eats death.