audrey’s Reviews > Annihilation > Status Update

“I lay there for a long time. Apparently, I was recognizable to the Crawler now. Apparently, I was words it could understand, unlike the anthropologist. I wondered if my cells would long be able to hide their transformation from me. I wondered if this was the beginning of the end. But mostly I felt the utter relief of having passed a gauntlet, if barely. The brightness deep within was curdled up, traumatized.”

“But the longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became. The more it became something alien to me, the more I had a sense that I knew nothing at all…”

“But the fact is, even though I didn’t deserve it—did I deserve it?”

“I had gotten sidetracked, like I always did, because I melted into my surroundings, could not remain separate from, apart from, objectivity a foreign land to me.”

“It bound him to me in a more intimate way than we had ever seemed to have while together.”

“My husband had had an inner life that went beyond his gregarious exterior, and if I had known enough to let him inside my guard, I might have understood this fact…He created his share of our problems—by pushing me too hard, by wanting too much, by trying to see something in me that didn’t exist. But I could have met him partway and retained my sovereignty. And now it was too late.”

“…the brightness washed over me in unending waves, and connected me to the earth, the water, the trees, the air, as I opened up and kept on opening.”

“There were thousands of “dead” spaces like the lot I had observed, thousands of transitional environments that no one saw, that have been rendered invisible because they were not “of use.” Anything could inhabit them for a time without anybody noticing.”

“I didn’t tell my husband my walk had a destination because I wanted to keep the lot for myself. There are so many things couples do from habit and because they’re expected to, and I didn’t mind those rituals. Sometimes I even enjoyed them. But I needed to be selfish about that patch of urban wilderness.”