And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

by Amber Sparks

everyone should have been a little in love with Feral Boy, he was so beautiful and lost.

confessed her life in full, her parents and her childhood and the martyred lady saints and how she admired them so. Men she had no use for, not the saints or popes or even Jesus himself. She loved Mary like the sun, though, and she always wore the Virgin in a locket around her skinny neck.

He wasn’t funny, Hollis, though you could tell he longed to be. He was just too punctual.

BECAUSE THERE IS NO GOD, my mother decided to play him, and the gods do love to watch the results of their own handiwork.

We made a small kingdom for ourselves.

She will be possessed, by then, of the magic of forgetting. Rabbit by rabbit, the past will go into the hat.

She tells herself: Remember this. Remember it all.

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.

Here is the moon, that same shape I’ve been looking at since I was small and thought I might do bigger things.

DEATH DESERVES ALL CAPS: On Planning for My (Very Far-Off) Funeral

is there anything more inclined to train someone to think exclusively of death—manner and method of, and What Lies Beyond—than a Catholic school education?

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.

what else, really, can we be expected to do with this tiny vial of time on earth?

THE WIFE THOUGHT THE HUSBAND LACKED SPIRIT. HE WOULD hunch silent over his breakfast in the mornings, hands pale and cold as his cereal, his hair the color of cubicles. 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.

But I still have you, Emmaline. I still love you, I still summon you, I call you up, the vision of the way you were. The way the summer sun could make a story of your copper skin and hair.

The robots gave us leisure, at first.

They don’t understand, the robots, how our memories eroded. They don’t understand how memories are just runoff, washed away in the end like everything else.

the robots, like angels, are ineffable

There is pain in memory, after all.

O, how we did not understand, then, how we would lose ourselves so quickly, even in all these floating images and films. How could we perceive a life without connectedness? But now we barely remember connection at all.

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

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?

It is this the robots cannot understand. That human love is mostly failure.

The robots tell us nothing is really lost. All turns, reverses, becomes, dissolves, re-forms, and streams out among the stars. They tell us they have seen it, over and over, the cycle long but eventual. Everything returns in the beginning and the end.

Of course we dream of filing cabinets and paper trails, the vast most of us. Bigger dreams are hard, are messy with feeling. Connection causes pain.

My mother built herself walls of story

Surely, I can’t be the only one dreaming himself out.

Surely someone on this ship wants to feel something more than the smallest feelings. Where, after all, are the humans who built the robots?

Long ago, I decided I would live (many didn’t), and that I would live for love.

But for us, who built Elysian Fields for our dead, who tore down our forests and burnt the sky to please the living, who made the robots to make us whole—we might have made another choice.

THE MAN AND WOMAN ARE CHILDLESS AND WEALTHY AND happy. She loves him, and he loves her, in part because of affection, in part because of muscle memory, in part because of their shared personal possessions.

He only has enough kindness for one person.

He marches home with purpose, ax very much in hand, and of course no one stops him because he is white and middle-aged and wearing an expensive parka.

All is still green in Camelot. But only the kind of green that grows over graves, that thrives in the stillness of a finished story.

Thank you to my family, especially my mom and dad, who probably still think I’m a morbid weirdo but who have been nothing but supportive of my morbid weirdo pursuits.