This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

What do you want from this, Red? What are you doing here? Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.

Briefly she wonders if the hardness in her throat is poison, her inability to swallow around it anaphylactic. This does not frighten her. She closes her eyes against the alternative, which does.

I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me.

Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.