And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

by Amber Sparks

They are both mildly unhappy, with moments of joy, in the unexceptional way of most people who live in the city, and they see each other as often as they can these days.

History likes to lie about women.

The girl herself, in the way of most humans: unready for unhappiness. This fairy tale, in the way of most fairy tales: a warning disguised as a wish.

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,

For me, I just like to see all the people and places and emotions and conflicts and struggles all exploding out of the pages of one single amazing book. 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 don’t want my life to be small and funny and disposable.

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.

This is the kind of surprise where your insides quietly eat each other, and your brain goes dark and red and sad.

Lavoisier’s wife, let us repeat, translated a shitload of science books into another language just so her husband, audience of one, could understand what they said.

It’s always raining now, or always dry now. And all our days are like this now, here at the end of the world. Everything feels like a memory already. Everything feels like it’s happening for the last time.

We want so badly to make sense of the cosmos, to see it in ourselves.

Rabbit by rabbit, the past will go into the hat.

But still, who doesn’t think about death, every moment of every day? I simply don’t see how one could exist otherwise, in such earthly limbo, excuse the intentional misuse of the word.

Death deserves all caps. To deny it is like denying that you eat sandwiches.

Shouldn’t death, the great renewal, be a sort of breathless bacchanalia, anyhow?

While we understand that we are all just falling through, like Alice down the rabbit hole, and taking snapshots on the way of all the wrong-sized things and places we may find ourselves, oh funny man-shaped spaces, because what else, really, can we be expected to do with this tiny vial of time on earth?

Revenge as a story, attack as an art form.

There is pain in memory, after all.

That human love is mostly failure. That failure may be very sad, but it is yours, and you hold on to it if you can.

OUR HISTORY IS A HALLWAY. IN THIS VAST SUBTERRANEAN corridor, we keep all the secret places of the world.