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.

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.

It’s just that I don’t want my life to be amusing. I don’t want my life to be small and funny and disposable.

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

So far as I could tell, her religion had mostly to do with martyred saints and mystics, with women married to an unseen world.

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

It is this the robots cannot understand. 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.