And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

by Amber Sparks

A curse from the depths of womanhood Is very salt, and bitter, and good. —ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, “A CURSE FOR A NATION

What I want is to sleep away an epoch, wake up as a girl with another kind of heart. —LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO, “EVOLUTION

AFTER THE ATTACK, WE PULLED OURSELVES SHUT LIKE HOSPITAL curtains. Snap.

History likes to lie about women.

when we saw our men at war, we almost went out like candles.

she scattered us through the skies as stars,

ONCE UPON A TIME, IN ANOTHER PART OF NOW,

She loved to create small strange worlds on paper

magic in this part of the world was stronger than it is in ours, and it lived out in the open and fed on the fat ripe sun and the clotted cream of moonlight.

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.

who, by the way, decided fairies were dainty? Spenser, perhaps? It takes a sizable constitution to carry all that magic around,

Like most fairies, she respects organized religion, but finds it too tame for her purposes.

suffering steals the aptitude for happiness from you.

She put her hands down on the cool countertop, felt the warmth of loss flood her fingertips.

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.

I guess people can get to depend on each other, even if they don’t really belong with each other.

he’s an entrepreneur, which means he doesn’t do anything for free.

I’ve always loved all the stories and novels and poems and plays where it seems like the author just took everything that’s ever been true about life and people, and stuffed it into the pages and let it grow out like some strange, bloody, chaotic plant.

ghosts are real goddamn needy, you know? Even the good ones.

There are ghosts in every town, she says, and shakes her head. But I wouldn’t go hunting for them.

the ghost girl pulls my voice out like yarn into a thick, tight scream,

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

chemistry once held hands with charlatanism.

a century where modernity and superstition were two ends of a long, tattered rope bridge.

Interesting, as polite society said.

when someone’s husband gets decapitated in a revolution, you make allowances for them.

History does not record any extraordinary level of sassiness on her part.

the practical problems of being broad-minded women when women were basically just broads.

a woman who’s never had a name, down all the corridors of history, doomed to smudged margins and funny little footnotes.

what is history, anyway, but the chance to dig up our skeletons and give them new stories?

You had always been good with the infrastructure of language; you excelled at making roads and bridges out of speech.

We memorize the sonnet of that strawberry hair.

There are boxes better locked.

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.

in petty times like these, we must do what we can to keep our hurts at bay. We must take our tiny revenges.

THE QUEEN WOKE UP ONE MORNING TO THE FURIOUS SOUND of the Future invading. It had that rumbling, insistent sound all uprisings carry with them.

She was a young woman with the heart of an old widow.

Life blossoming out of the long dark stain of winter.

she was fair and pretty and hazed through the world like soft smoke.

Then silence. Serious silence, the eye of the nightmare.

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

I don’t fear the banality of endless earthly hauntings, stalking you all through the emotional landscapes of Whole Foods and holidays. No, no, it’s the celestial idea of the afterlife I fear, living in the stars or clouds or rain or something

hope is the thing with feathers, and I have always been allergic to down.

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.

The more the merrier. The more the more memorial.

I wish that Kissinger hadn’t wasted “I shall not look upon his like again” on Nixon.

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

Revenge as a story, attack as an art form.

They married because the wife thought she could open him up, pull out wild Irish weather. But when she tried she found a map of Cleveland instead.