When We Were Executioners Quotes

“Do you know anything about hearts, Jona? The Senta know hearts. Hearts are not one organ. Inside a mother's womb, two pulsing bags of blood seek their eternal mate."
Her hand reached out to his. She opened his palm, and traced a finger down his lifeline, then his loveline. She lifted it up to her own face. She placed it on her cheek.
"Lungs are fine apart," she said, "Hands do not need another but to clap. Brains gnarl like roots in the nothing of soul, and guts spin in knots around the nothing of hunger. But hearts are made by two complete parts merging together. Once the two pieces sense each other in the blood flow, they cross every bloody cliff inside of us. The arteries bind the halves close. The veins make love to each other in the life pulse that makes all life from love entwined.”
― J.M. McDermott, When We Were Executioners

“A new girl came to work in the room, and the cat was still in it. The cat hid from the new girl in Jess’ old room behind a crack in the wall and yowled for Jess to come and throw this strange girl out of the cat’s bed. This new girl clapped her hands over her ears, and then pulled powder out from her bag of make-up. She doused a piece of old food in the powder and threw it into the wall for the cat to eat.
Later that night, Rachel had to pull the dead cat from a crack in the wall with a long broom handle.
Rachel threw the dead cat over the wall, where the rain would come to wash the body into the sewers.
With Jess crying somewhere about her lost cat—selling hot corn among the thugs and night bruisers, paying for anything stolen—Rachel figured that the powder had done exactly what it had been made to do. The powder had killed a working girl’s baby.”
― J.M. McDermott, When We Were Executioners

“Well, the only place worth going in the whole city is Sabachthani’s estate. Nothing else is worth the trouble”
― J.M. McDermott, When We Were Executioners