The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente

Rubbing a seal’s stomach is the opposite of nihilism.

“If God turned up for supper and brought all the dry land back for dessert, it wouldn’t be half as good as one day on Brighton Pier,”

I didn’t know what to say to him. You can only love and need and miss someone so much for years and years before language just washes its hands of the whole business.

Memory-petrol. Which is all petroleum ever was, when you think about it. A planet’s memories of when it was young, burned up to keep warm and keep going.

I want to have enough left over that it matters to me who has the best smile at the volleyball tournament.

They had bored expressions in their jeweled eyes and those expressions were somehow the most elegant parts of them, like the actual meaning of elegance was the boredom and not the beauty.

Anarchy can be so cozy, if you bring enough pillows.

Maybe Oberon looked at them deep and long and said in that voice of his, What if you never had to feel bad, ever again? And they cried and cried because that’s all everybody ever wants and put a crown on his head which is no price at all to pay, and maybe that’s how all of Fuckwit history started, with an Oberon and a promise and a crown nobody really understood until it was too late.

I think kings happen because some people have an empty place inside them that wants to be full and it will do anything to feel full and the first thing that makes it feel the opposite of empty it will chase forever and ever. And the weirdest thing about this place is that obeying fills it up, but making someone else obey makes it slosh up and splash all over the floor.”

I like asking her little unimportant questions like that. It makes me feel luxurious, to care about small nothings.

“Have you been running a quality assurance test on me all this time, Tetley?” she teases, laughing. But I keep eating snap peas and I don’t say anything back because when you really think about it, it isn’t funny. When humans meet other humans, that’s all they ever do forever.

Being alive is like being a very bad time traveler. One second per second, and yet somehow you still get where you’re going too late, or too early, and the planet isn’t where it should be because you forgot to calculate for that even though it was extremely important and you left notes by the door to remind yourself, and the butterfly you stepped on when you were eight became a hurricane of everything you ever lost in your forties, and whatever wisdom you tried to pack with you has always gotten lost in transit, arriving, covered in festive stickers, a hundred years after you died.

“Eventually. But not soon.” “That’s what the Fuckwits put on their graves, you know.”

“I used to be happy.” “Me, too,” said the machine. “What does that mean to you?” “It means all my functions once operated smoothly, without interruption, and the input I received from my operator matched my predictions over ninety percent of the time.”

“What does that mean to you,” I whisper to heaven, “on the other side of feel?”

Sixty-six percent of me hates her. But she is sorry and small and alone and I have been sorry and small and alone and it appears I am now in the business of collecting small and alone things. I know how to take care of them.

He will be lonely without me. We are all of us lonely without our quality assurance technicians.

What kind of stories would we tell in the new world created by the climate crisis?

Humans are remarkably adaptable, and in some ways we adapt better to the worst-case scenario than to the idea that anything can be better. There is a full cup of fatalism in the recipe for Homo sapiens sapiens, and some of us are very much more comfortable with the world ending than it going on. And of course, if you are born into the worst-case scenario, it just feels like home.

I wanted to write about something I so firmly believe: that in a good world or a horrific one, the thing people will give the most for, crave the deepest, is entertainment, to be transported from their existence into another, distracted, elevated by stories and lights.

She is the part of humanity that will love anything, find meaning in anything, build a new civilization out of anything, because it’s a compulsion with us.

The oceans can erase our cities, but they cannot drown our existential malaise. That shit’s waterproof.