mia moraru’s Reviews > The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion > Status Update

‘I sang of thieves within, I sang of time that had stolen my things, and my places that had hurt me.’

‘…places disappearing from under my feet once more, or rather crashing in my head.’

‘My aunt became a dream reservoir;’

‘He played a tune about the thieves that nearly killed him and stole his flock, standing atop a mountain that looked like the giant stage of a legendary theatre, an open theatre, whose audience was the people, the plains, the mountains—‘

‘Something else sir, a question I’ve had for a couple of weeks—did you become a mirror?’

‘“In my experience, the jailer fears being bewitched by the prisoner. Not all prisons are the same, not the jailers, not the prisoners. Prisons in this time of occupation are especially complex… It’s not easy to snatch away the cause from a prisoner fighting for their freedom, his refusal to give in wears out the jailer…[the jailer is] afraid of sympathizing with you.”’

‘If you were searching for the occupation, it’s in the background, and I can bring it to the foreground in everything, everything.’

‘I saw graves as stone metaphors, sculptures, a final attempt to delay the eternal absence, like a memory in stone of the absolute emptiness left behind by the disappearance of the body.’

‘I had snuck back into Ramallah; it was one of my seasonal and sudden games with death.’

‘It seems as much. There are places in life that are for one’s dreams only, you feel that they hold the keys to your imagination—such places drug you so you dream, summoning your dreams, enticing them. Or maybe, more precisely, such places allow you to dream these dreams. Compact places, magnetic, something like that.’