Little Fires Everywhere

by Celeste Ng

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.

Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, she had thought.

Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less.

It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.

as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she’d carried alongside her.