And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

by Amber Sparks

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.

The way they would finally say I love you and I love you too and the way alarms would shriek and the way the men in suits would invade in an army of red ties and bulletproof vests. The way the room would shrink and blacken the way the room would dim the way the blood would pool and churn in the bath the way their names their real names would finally echo soft but true in tune like nothing else in this cruel circus called the world when they finally shut off the lights.

Existential Suffering, USA: Here is where I understand our complaints have been vague. I understand it is off-putting to you, to your obsession with a certain certainty.

Fort Wayne, Indiana: Here is where I used to think you had given your whole body to Jesus Christ, all those delicious lusts and longings. I used to admire your purity, so unsullied that you could not even touch a breast or kiss a mouth.

Dead center of my heart: Here is where you lived for a long time, before the kid was born, before you started drinking all day. Here is where you lived while I think we loved each other. At least, I loved you enough to feed us both for a while, enough to paper over the spreading damage. Here is where you kissed me and gave me a ring, and I believed in that diamond like I believed in fairy tales. Even though I was old enough to know neither was real.

The muffled quiet of the womb: Here is where we got our new starts, our very first starts.

Underneath the sky somewhere between Michigan and Indiana and you: Here is the moon, that same shape I’ve been looking at since I was small and thought I might do bigger things. Now I’m the deserted bride howling up against it. It’s bigger and emptier than me. It’s something to hold my sorrows, I suppose. It’s something for you to remember me by.

To be clear, I don’t want a funeral. I want a memorial service, a sort of celebration or party. The term “funeral” is only used as a generic marker, a shared cultural symbol to let others know that: (1) I am dead and (2) hope is the thing with feathers, and I have always been allergic to down.

Related: anyone who reads Ayn Rand, or attempts to read Ayn Rand, will be forcibly ejected from the proceedings.

price one paid to make bargains with the wild. Animals rarely honor such bargains, and humans even less often. He had chosen to open a butcher shop instead. Elephants and bears were introduced to circuses well after the big cats, to significantly more fanfare. They were also more dangerous, their attacks more sensational. Some claimed, of course, that this was the whole point. Revenge as a story, attack as an art form. A wholly new and novel act.

After the husband went to work, 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.