Libbie

“It occurred to me then, mouth full of chocolate chip banana mush, that our past is not the truth. It’s warped by time and emotion, inevitably muddied by love and resentment, joy and shame, hope and regret. I couldn’t trust my own memories. Good or bad.”
― Rachel Harrison, Black Sheep

“After all, friendship lasted forever until it didn’t.”
― C.G. Drews, Don't Let the Forest In

“Prayed and prayed. Not to the church-god, exactly. To her own. One that lived closer, up on the mountain, perhaps. For here was a place fit for a god to live, not in any building or book. Here she was understood. She was wicked, sure, but no hypocrite. She had fought every day of her life, same as the beasts of the field. The bloody Christ nailed naked and roaring to the cross—his bones iron-split, his body whip-flayed to the meat—he was hard as they come. Surely he prized grit, a game heart. Same as she did.”
― Taylor Brown, Gods of Howl Mountain

“No one will think anything, Alma. It’s an empty room, remember – you said so yourself.’ I began to sit cross-legged at his feet so as to listen to his operatic flourishes. Soon I was running to meet him when he came home, then crawling up onto his lap so I could see the words on the page. I still didn’t say much, and I was mute with all strangers and continued to hide my face in my grandmother’s skirts. We were sat this way one afternoon when there was a tap at the window that startled us both. We looked, but there was nothing there. It sounded like something had been thrown at it, so my grandfather told me to stay inside while he went out to investigate. When he came back, he was carrying a tiny bird in his hands. ‘It’s a little dunnock, Susannah. He must have got himself confused, or scared, chased by a sparrowhawk maybe, and flown into the glass. He’s only stunned himself. We’ll find him a box and keep him warm, see if he comes to.’ The bird looked dead to me, but my grandfather lined an old box with straw, placed the tiny bird inside and closed the lid. ‘We need to remove him from all the terrors of the world for a while, let his little body recover. You know, it’s a very good thing for an animal to hide if he’s injured or in danger. All the clever animals do it. He crawls into the tiniest space he can find and makes his world very small. It’s a natural thing, when you’re very scared, to make your world very small indeed. The trick is to understand when the danger is gone, to be very brave and let the world be big again, or else there may as well be no world at all.”
― Clare Whitfield, People of Abandoned Character