A Council of Dolls

by Mona Susan Power

I want my parents to be in love both ways, not Dad by himself. So I fall in love for them, over and over again.

Maybe English is safer to me because it doesn’t mean anything, because its words are empty to me. No heart. Sometimes when you lose a lot, you have to put your heart away to keep it ticking.”

when a dream comes true you have to feel deserving or else it brings only guilt and shame.

“God gets the last word,” I say aloud, and laugh. Because of course I don’t mean Sister Frances’s god, a being who creates a body only to ask it to stop being one, a deity who would choose the likes of her to be his “bride.” That’s a god I don’t want to believe in because he makes no sense.

Even the wisest person doesn’t know everything. But it’s also important to preserve the ideas that make sense to you, even in the face of resistance—someone telling you that you’re wrong and only they know the truth. Such boasting is evidence of a fool, perhaps a dangerous one.”

I wonder how these people have flourished on the earth; they can be so unkind and perverse.

There is no true healing without remembering,

From my studies I gather wašíčus wish to know everything there is to know. That isn’t our way. We understand that aspects of the world are so wonderfully mysterious we aren’t capable of comprehending the whole of it.