On the Savage Side

by Tiffany McDaniel

“If I do fall,” Sage Nell said as she straddled the lowest branch, “and I don’t get back up again, promise you’ll bury me facedown, so the dirt won’t fall in on my eyes, and I can be the only dead dreamer not half blind.”

A witch is merely a woman who is punished for being wiser than a man.

“Power is not only physical. It’s not some muscleman lifting all the weights. It’s much more than that. It’s being smart. It means you endure.”

We humans have always been in pain. History tells us that in the artifacts civilizations have left behind. Pain is there in the broken vases, the fractured poetry, the overwhelming music we have played for centuries. We belong to grief until the engine goes out. Then we belong to the dirt, our bodies identical to other fallen things.

“The one who broke it must not have known,” I said. “Known what?” Daffy asked. “That a woman with a broken jaw can still speak.”

I thought if you smiled in a photograph, you smiled forever, and anything else that came after that smile didn’t matter because the moment that was captured on film was the moment that mattered for eternity. I guess it was just another myth for the heart to believe.