Madi’s Reviews > Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow > Status Update

Since she’d started teaching and become a mother, she’d felt old, but that night, she realized she wasn’t old at all. You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.

The work had been hers, yes, but it had equally been his. It had been theirs, and it wouldn’t have existed without the both of them. This was a tautology that had only taken her the better part of two decades to understand.

Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.

No matter how good an MMORPG was, gamers eventually did leave. They moved on to other games, other worlds, sometimes even the real one.

“A headstone for Emily was placed in Friendship Cemetery. The inscription read:

EMILY MARKS DAEDALUS
1875–1909
SHE HATH DIED OF DYSENTERY.”

As a wedding gift to Ms. Marks, Dr. Daedalus created a topiary hedge maze in the garden by her house. When asked why she had decided to make such a gift, the doctor replied cryptically, “To make a game is to imagine the person playing it.”

“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”

“If nothing has an effect, then why bother smoking and drinking?” Emily asked.
“Aren’t you a prickly one? My seventh wife was like that. A rogue and peasant slave to reality,” Alabaster said. “I suppose we drink and we smoke for the same reasons it is done elsewhere. We must fill our infinite days with something.”

Bong Cha narrowed her eyes at Sam, deciding if her grandson was trying to trick her into appearing foolish. “Yes, in my mind, she did. I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother and my childhood best friend, Euna, who drowned in the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.”

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Sam thought she was finished entertaining the subject when she added, “Sometimes, I spoke to Anna anyway, and this helped a little.”
“Do you mean like a ghost?” His grandmother was the least likely person in the world to see ghosts.
“Sam, don’t be ridiculous. There are no ghosts.”
“Okay, so you spoke to her. She was definitely not a ghost. Did she ever reply?”


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