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January 6 - January 15, 2021
This girl was her own cuckoo, laying stories in her own head, and the heads of those around her, until even she couldn’t remember which ones were true, or if there was anything left of her.”
Even his own story had spun out to describe him in relation to his sibling.
He was his brother’s giant shadow. He was a forward echo, a void. Nothing was his. All he could do was watch the world try to catch up with him, but he was always looking backward at it.
Once there was a girl who got lost and when she found her way home she realized she’d arrived back without herself, and her parents didn’t even notice the difference.
To break her story, she’d have to walk back down the hill and reconstruct herself the right way round.
It is the score of the dreams of the city, half-heard in the high branches of boulevards at midnight, felt as a rumble under the fall of rain, seen as a tremor in the light through the pane.
But none of this is what the Night Soil Salvagers do. Not as they would have it. What the Night Soil Salvagers do is lessen the burden of the city on the Earth. On a good night—and what night is not good to the Night Soil Salvagers?—one will greet another with, “The city is light tonight.” And the other will reply, “Let it be so light that under the moon it rises up.”
“The women who can’t help seeking, and bring destruction when they do.
“I don’t care how far back you go, Henri. There have never been only two genders.”
Every revolution has its cost, and to defeat death—that is the biggest revolution of all.
For all her efforts, she could never envision a Heaven bigger than a house.
She thought of Heaven, and Hell, and the space between. And then she flung open the door.
Heaving, retching, drenched in sweat, barely able to stay on their feet, but they were okay. Just peachy. They knew because they told one another this, and several times.
I try to imagine it, like a kaleidoscope or something, but a better way to think of it is probably that it’s all noise.
For her, a sandwich is a nightmare of crisp lettuce and melted cheese and soft bread, green and spongy and the smell of something toasted.
“She has no boundaries,” he said. “She doesn’t know where she ends and the world begins.
“Cause our reality is assembled in our brains,” Wanda explained. “Not our eyes.
The legends surrounding the Atoka were so thick, and their symbolism so important, that the truth was elusive—even, in a sense, irrelevant.
“It’s not worth her suffering. Pride can’t justify that.”
We are so tired of being told who to be.
“A replica would not have a ghost. It would be soulless.”
it. We value it in a different way than you—not as a piece of property but as a living ancestor whose desires must be respected. We want to honor her wishes.”
“Yes, it has a ghost. The ghost speaks to all of us, not in words but in our instinct toward beauty and goodness. We are better for having seen it. If it burns, something pure will pass from the world. Do you really want that?”
She wanted to be present at the end, however tragic that end might be.
“They have known nothing but pain for so long. Generations. You can see all that pain pouring off of them, washing away.”
“Even Glancing will live in our songs,” he said. “She will still be radiant in our memories. But she will be free. And so will we.”
We don’t want to drag our past behind us. It’s too heavy for us to bear.”
What good is the past? The past is everything lost. The past is never again. The past doesn’t feed anyone. Only the future does that.
and her urge to protect him is so strong that it does not occur to her to wonder if someone someday will need protecting from him.
How can you make a choice like that? Decide that you are the solitary individual among hundreds of thousands who deserves to live? Or not even deserves: simply gets to. Wasn’t it such choices that got us into this mess in the first place?
I used to think that there was just a simple either/or: either sell your soul or wait to wither away and die. But I have come to realize there is a third possibility: to become the devil himself. Do that, and all sold souls shall belong to you.
The free hours stretch on forever when you don’t have someone else to worry over, and you wonder what you could possibly fill them with. What are your interests, your hobbies? You hardly know yourself.
My new home needed caring for. Every old and rare thing does, no matter how well made.
Could dead things die? I hoped not.
My house of dead things might have been a home if not for her.
There comes a time when you have to confess what haunts you. You have to peel back the plaster and show your bare bones to someone — your copper piping and weight-bearing walls, the stains in your floorboards and the dead birds in your chimney — and you have to trust that they won’t scream.
Quiet moments impress themselves upon a house as well as hideous ones.
And then, I felt God’s hand on mine. I tried to pull away. Didn’t He know we were done?
We had found love in poison. We had found life in death.
But this is the way the world is: all the storms have moved inside. A cloud hasn’t touched the sky for over two years.
“You start to think: Is this really divinity? Or the epitome of what it means to be human?”
But what do you do with that? What do you do when what is best and what you need do not match?
There is no use in remaining, nothing on offer but the threat of extinction.
She is convinced that at any moment it will fall in on itself, will erase its own small emptiness. The spray of glass and plaster, the shedding of shingles like dead skin. But it stays standing, and soon disappears from view.
“There were no walls in the old world, and there will be no walls in the new. We exist in a temporary hell of barriers.”
We can’t stay in one timeline, people like us. People with trauma. All the bad things tunnel through. They tunnel through to each other. Do you know what I mean?
Time travel to the future is easy. All you have to do is wait.
He knew how the paradox would taste as it roared into the universe.
They tell you many things, but they don’t tell you absence makes the heart grow older. Ghostly. As if one of your what-might-have-been lives just evaporated.
“I am the Queen of Red Midnight,” says she, “and I pound at the rotten core of the world.”
