The Book Eaters

by Sunyi Dean

They were now her Great Enemy. In fact, they always had been. However loving her childhood, her flesh was still theirs, her goods for the selling. Like pigs or chickens raised for the slaughter, she had developed affection for her keepers, and they for her. But that did not stop her from being consumed; pig farmers still chewed their bacon with enjoyment. Affection only made cruelty rueful.

Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the heart to keep you warm. Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn; love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive.

There is love in me the likes of which you’ve never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied in the one, I will indulge the other. —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“But I do know we can only live by the light we’re given, and some of us are given no light at all. What else can we do except learn to see in the dark?”

I call death onto those who don’t know a child when they see a child. Men who think they made the world out of clay and turned it into their safe place, men who think a woman wouldn’t flip the universe over and flatten them beneath it. I have enough bullets for all of them. —Maria Dahvana Headley, The Mere Wife

“That’s what fairy tales do to us,” Devon said, rueful. “If we grow up thinking that we’re princesses and someone else will rescue us, then we spend our lives waiting for that rescue and never trying to escape ourselves.”

Hester’s laugh was tortured in every sense. “Does anyone have family that grows up functional? At all, anywhere?” “In books, sometimes. A few rare cases.”

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. —C. S. Lewis, note to his goddaughter