This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?

Atlantis sinks. Serves it right.

Fortunately, geniuses understand that young men are often fools.

Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself. She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt.

They would make this war, she thinks, if there were not a war already made for them to make.

All good stories travel from the outside in.

I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand.

But when I think of you, I want to be alone together.

Everything starts, and everything fails.

Red screams at the sky. She calls Beings in which she does not believe to account. She wants there to be a God, so she can curse Her.