Courtney S’s Reviews > Notes on an Execution > Status Update

"They’d have heard Jenny’s voice, rumbling the same words every time she passed them into their mothers’ sticky arms.
Welcome, little one, Jenny would have whispered into each precious
seashell ear. You’ll see. It’s good here."

"At dawn, Grace would have woken to a mouthful of fur, the leopard’s
head resting gigantic on her knee. She would have thought: How gentle,
this world. How tender, this mercy."

"the real Izzy—is invisible beneath the shadow of what happened to her. The tragedy is that she is dead, but the tragedy is also that she belongs to him. The bad man, who did the bad thing. There are millions of other moments Izzy has lived, but he has eaten them up one by one, until she exists in most memories as a summation of that awful second, distilled constantly in her fear, her pain, the brutal fact."

"In another world, this is a regular evening for Izzy,
Angela, Lila, Jenny. But they do not live in that world—and they do not live
in this one."

"You pray. In the next life, you hope you will be reincarnated as something
softer—something that understands the innate sort of longing that makes a
being whole. A graceful creature. Hummingbird. A dove."

"You have lived your years in careful imitation, mimicking the things someone else would say, think, feel, and now you are tired...I promise I’ll be better, you say, your voice booming sorry. Give me one more chance."

"It seems abundantly clear now, the opportunity you’ve wasted. There is good and there is evil, and the contradiction lives in everyone. The good is simply the stuff worth remembering. The good is the point of it all. The slippery thing you have always been chasing."

"You do not feel the same love that everyone else does. Yours is muted, damp, not bursting or breaking. But there is a place for you, in the category of personhood. There has to be. Humanity can discard you, but they cannot deny it."

"Blue looks like a summer evening. Like a dusk spent wading through fields of bluegrass, like gentle hands brushing your hair from your eyes. At the sight of Blue’s freckled nose, you hear your mother’s voice, clearer than ever before."

"You try to memorize the curve of your own jaw, the shape of the self
you have lived with all your life. You do not know whether you hate your
own body or if you will miss it when it’s gone."