What January Remembers (Jolvix Episodes, #3)

by Faith Gardner

Do robots consider appliances friends?

what if there was an app that could tell you how much estimated lifetime you had left, based on your choices? Like I eat a baby carrot—my lifetime goes up. I eat a burger, it goes down?”

But wishing had never been anything but an exercise in futility, so I put a cork in my secret bottle of wishes.

“Wow,” he says, with the sheer awe held only by children or the truly stoned.

memory is really just a story you tell yourself. And it makes my heart skip a beat to wonder if I can trust myself and what I remember.

How come all the memories worth keeping seem to fade the fastest, and the ones I wish would leave me alone and stop haunting me seem to stay as vivid as ever?

But life has a way of surprising me, often in the worst ways. What’s scariest of all are the horrible things that could happen that I haven’t even dreamed of yet.

Oh hell. It’s exhausting being the only person who worries about anything in this family.

“When you’re dealing with volatile humans, there is often no such thing as motivation.”

The poison of her disappointment and the blinding spotlight of her adoration were both too much for anyone.

“They are metaphors. It is a literary device when you compare two unlike things.” “But why would you do that?” I ask. “There are times when the truth is ineffable, so human beings speak by using comparative imagery that transcends literal meaning.”

I dreaded the unwrapping of gifts on Christmas morning because it was always so anticlimactic. So hectic and hopeful for a snap of the fingers, then you’re just sitting in a pile of torn-up paper and the holiday’s over.

The best part of Christmas is the spirit of the season. The pretty lights. The decorated trees in windows. Holly and holiday meals and crackling fireplaces.

Justice is human beings’ best attempt at making sense of the senseless.