Little Fires Everywhere

by Celeste Ng

Literally was one of Lexie’s favorite words, which she deployed even when the situation was anything but literal.

Literally me

it would feel to him that he had always known her name, and that she had always known his, that somehow, he and Pearl had known each other always.

At that moment Moody had a sudden clear understanding of what had already happened that morning: his life had been divided into a before and an after, and he would always be comparing the two.

Perfection: that was the goal, and perhaps the Shakers had lived it so strongly it had seeped into the soil itself, feeding those who grew up there with a propensity to overachieve and a deep intolerance for flaws.

But Lexie was seldom, if ever, offended: subtle implications and subtexts tended to bounce off the fine mesh of her brain.

lol

Something inside Izzy reached out to something in her and caught fire.

To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.

It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.

You could figure out anything about a person if you just tried hard enough.

A lifetime of practical and comfortable considerations settled atop the spark inside her like a thick, heavy blanket.

All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles. Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never—could never—set anything ablaze. Carefully controlled. Domesticated. Happy in captivity. The key, she thought, was to avoid conflagration.

Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn’t, you might burn the world to the ground.

They had their own words for things, a jargon of obscure origin: for reasons even they had forgotten, they referred to butter as cheese; they called the grackles that perched in the treetops icklebirds. It was a circle they drew around the two of them like a canopy.

me & dustin fr

“Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.”

But the problem with rules, he reflected, was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time there were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure which side of the line you stood on.

Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.