The Maidens

by Alex Michaelides

There was so much of it, and it was so messy: leaking, spilling, tumbling out of her, like stuffing falling out of an old rag doll that was coming apart at the seams.

He was all she had, and she longed to be worthy of his love.

she believed in the circle, and its power to heal. In her more fanciful moments, Mariana could be quite mystical about the power of circles: the circle in the sun, the moon, or the earth; the planets spinning through the heavens; the circle in a wheel; the dome of a church—or a wedding ring. Plato said the soul was a circle—which made sense to Mariana. Life was a circle too, wasn’t it?—from birth to death.

She felt an impulse to lock it, which she resisted.

After all, everyone’s entitled to be the hero of their own story. So I must be permitted to be the hero of mine. Even though I’m not. I’m the villain.

“It was written” is the Greek expression.

I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; ’Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all …

It didn’t explain how—or why—a person might end up like this: as a merciless monster, using other human beings as if they were broken toys to be smashed to bits.

The liminal is between two worlds—on the very edge of what it means to be human—where everything is stripped away from you; where you transcend this life, and experience something beyond it.

if you’re not awake to the glorious mystery of life and death that you’re lucky enough to be part of—if that doesn’t fill you with joy and strike you with awe … you might as well not be alive.

This time, the rage she was feeling wasn’t his. It was hers. All hers.

She was looking into the eyes of a murderer.

The childhood shows the man, As morning shows the day. —JOHN MILTON, Paradise Regained

Funny, that—he seemed to have vanished.

“Protect them? From what?” “From you, Mariana,” he said. “From you.”

The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. The least little turn of the wrist will do the job. —JEAN ANOUILH, Antigone

I had a premonition—from the very first second I saw you, I knew.

It was Fred.

“Sebastian, of course.”

WHAAAAT