Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

by Neil Gaiman

As I write this now, it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill. Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas—abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken—and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.

I like things to be story-shaped.

Reality, however, is not story-shaped, and the eruptions of the odd into our lives are not story-shaped either.

“we can tell anyone we want. It’s making them believe us that’s problematic.

they glowed like old dreams high above us,

All your tomorrows start here.

you never stop loving someone. There’s always a piece of them in your heart.

You have the conviction of all two-year-olds. I wish I had such certitude.

Innocence, as if it were a commodity.

“I would dower you with experience, without experience,”

there was originally no distinct branch of fiction that was only intended for children, until the Victorian notions of the purity and sanctity of childhood demanded that fiction for children be made… “Well, pure,” says the professor. “And sanctified?” asks Greta, with a smile. “And sanctimonious,” corrects the old woman.

bowdlerized

dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always; hearts can be well-hidden, and you betray them with your tongue.

know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one’s lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.

Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

My chest no longer hurts. I feel nothing at all. I feel just fine.

My dreams are vanishing as I wake, overexposed by the glare of the morning sun through my bedroom window, and are being replaced, slowly, by memories; and now, with only a purple flower and the scent of her still on the pillow, my memories are all of Becky, and fifteen years drifts away like confetti or falling blossom through my hands.

It was love, I knew, and it tasted like champagne in my mind.

and I loved her, and I loved to love what she loved. I had never heard music before; never understood the black-and-white grace of a silent clown before; never touched or smelled or properly looked at a flower, before I met her.

“No, I don’t hate you anymore. It’s gone away. Floated off into the night, like a balloon.”

deliquesced