Thrust

by Lidia Yuknavitch

What has this majestic androgyne got in its hand? A broken chain? Those poor dimwitted god-addicted souls, still tortured by their loss in the Civil War, will consider this heresy. They’ll protest, riot, try to tear it down. This bawling, sprawling infant of a country will never get over losing its power to enslave and slaughter other humans as if they were objects. We’re built from it.

you’ll get on a boat—any boat—that holds out the possibility of saving them.

The water comes for all of us, I think, like an answer.

“For work,” she finally said, then added, “For a better life.” She hugged herself. The two answers were a story that had formed like a cradle in which immigrants sang themselves to sleep.

we’ve inflicted countless barbarisms and tortures upon our fellow man to prove that some of us have it by god, and others do not, will not, but that’s not really freedom, is it? That is power. Ugly.

This statue must carry something of the heat and thrust of cities.

The grief crosses all times.

They did not perceive living as more important than not living; they were not afraid to die.

Sailors at the time described the whale as a ferocious monster. No one asked the whale. Or any whales around.

We need human history to mean something. We need the things we do with our hands to mean something, not nothing.

His smile is like a new word that has never been said.

Stories don’t care how we tell them. Stories take any shape they want.

there were no more Raids by then. There were no more nations, and so no more borders, and so no more immigrants, and so no more arrests or leaders or prisons.