And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

by Amber Sparks

We suspect they sometimes step inside our skins; that sometimes, unbodied, they open our lives like envelopes, peer inside, fold in new dreams.

What language do the stars speak?

memories are just runoff, washed away in the end like everything else.

Why, the robots ask, must you remake your old worlds, cling so tightly to your old same sadness?

And I love you still, in a way the beige days can’t change.

I have been like the stars, white-hot with endless longing.

building a place in my head where a human could actually live.

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?

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

everything has peeled away from me and stuck to some spectral outline of you, some constellation lost to history long ago.

the cycle long but eventual. Everything returns in the beginning and the end.

I will dig the stars from the sky; I will bury them like seeds and we will grow a new and living home.

He only has enough kindness for one person.

He hangs up the phone and feels his good bits breaking off, bitterness growing in like brittle new limbs.

how small and dreadful sounds can be, drowned in an empty city without bodies to absorb them.

the kind of green that grows over graves, that thrives in the stillness of a finished story.

strong light is a bath these cities can no longer stand. They would crumble to dust in daylight, like old manuscripts and maps.