Bury Our Bones Quotes

Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures. No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.

Bury my bones in the midnight soil, plant them shallow and water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose, soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.

To the ones who hunger— for love, for time, or simply to be free

One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.

Careful. In nature, beauty is a warning. The pretty ones are often poisonous.

You are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil.

Let us lie here forever. Let us be buried as wild things are, by tooth and claw and worm. Let the grasses grow up through the sockets of our eyes. Let them find us in seven years or seventy, and let their brows furrow, because they cannot tell my bones from yours.

Death comes, and sometimes it is kind, and often it is cruel, and very rarely it is welcome. But it comes all the same.

The world will try to make you small. It will tell you to be modest, and meek. But the world is wrong. You should get to feel and love and live as boldly as you want.

Some people keep their heart tucked so deep, they hardly know it’s there. But you, you have always worn it like a second skin. Open to the world. You feel it all. The love and pain. The joy and hope and sorrow. It will make your life harder, but it will also make it beautiful.

What is the point, she thinks, of loving something you are doomed to lose? Of holding on to someone who cannot hold on to you?

But María has known, all her life, that she is not meant for common paths, for humble houses and modest men. If she must walk a woman's road then it will take her somewhere new.

And how is a miracle different from a spell? Who is to say the saint was not a witch?

What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

The hunger lives inside us all. To some it is an empty bucket. To others, a yawning pit. And yet, no matter how shallow or how deep it feels, here is a truth that will either drive you mad, or bring you peace.' He sits forward. 'There is no filling it. You will never be sated. It does not matter whether you drink a carafe or drain a city. The hunger will not ease.

We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across.

and it drives her mad, the idea that the shape of her body determines the shape her life must take. That her beauty is something she is expected to pass on instead of keep.

Stories matter, Alice. When you live long enough, they're all you have.

But you cannot have what you want until you know what you want. And once you do know,” she adds, “it’s only a matter of what you’re willing to do to get it.

Death is a kind of freedom, after all.

From that moment on she insisted she would only read romance, as if love and horror could not go hand-in-hand

And here is the awful thing about belief. It is a current, like compulsion. Hard to forge when it goes against your will, but easy enough when it carries you the way you want to go.

A name is like a dress. It might be by nature pretty or plain, but it is the person wearing it who matters most.

No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.

We keep on burying our dead/ We keep on planting their bones in the ground/ But they won't grow/ The sun doesn't help/ The rain doesn't help.

Never walk alone at night, they tell you, if you're a girl. And it isn't fair. Because the night is when the world is quiet. The night is when the air is clear. The night is wild and welcoming and Alice lets her head fall back, until all she sees is the sky, not black, as it should be, given the time, but a twisting tapestry of blue.

She looked at her life and found it small. Saw the road that lay ahead, and there were no curves, no bends; it ran straight and narrow all the way to its end.

More and more she thinks of cutting it off. Her hair. His hand. Depending on the day.

Is it life,” he counters, “if there is never death to balance it? Or is its brevity what makes it beautiful?” The words spill out in such a practiced way, she’s sure he’s made the point before.

The highest cards have men on them.” María can see that. There are men holding clubs. Men holding swords. Men holding coins. Men holding cups. “Where are the women?” she asks, and Ysabel only laughs, as if it were a joke.

Why does Charlotte stay? That is like asking—why stay inside a house on fire? Easy to say when you are standing on the street, a safe distance from the flames. Harder when you are still inside, convinced you can douse the blaze before it spreads, or rushing room to room, trying to save what you love before it burns.

And there it is, that feeling the men have tried and failed to stir in her, that heady, ground-tipping mix of hope and fear, the hunger to move closer, and to shrink away.

I thought that I’d given up on Mal. I thought the love I’d had for him belonged to the past, to the foolish, lonely girl I never wanted to be again. I’d tried to bury that girl and the love she’d felt, just as I’d tried to bury my power. But I wouldn’t make that mistake again. Whatever burned between us was just as bright, just as undeniable. The moment our lips met, I knew with pure and piercing certainty that I would have waited for him forever.

October Fullness” Little by little, and also in great leaps, life happened to me, and how insignificant this business is. These veins carried my blood, which I scarcely ever saw, I breathed the air of so many places without keeping a sample of any. In the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones. The best thing was learning not to have too much either of sorrow or of joy, to hope for the chance of a last drop, to ask more from honey and from twilight. Perhaps it was my punishment. Perhaps I was condemned to be happy. Let it be known that nobody crossed my path without sharing my being. I plunged up to the neck into adversities that were not mine, into all the sufferings of others. It wasn’t a question of applause or profit. Much less. It was not being able to live or breathe in this shadow, the shadow of others like towers, like bitter trees that bury you, like cobblestones on the knees. Our own wounds heal with weeping, our own wounds heal with singing, but in our own doorway lie bleeding widows, Indians, poor men, fishermen. The miner’s child doesn’t know his father amidst all that suffering. So be it, but my business was the fullness of the spirit: a cry of pleasure choking you, a sigh from an uprooted plant, the sum of all action. It pleased me to grow with the morning, to bathe in the sun, in the great joy of sun, salt, sea-light and wave, and in that unwinding of the foam my heart began to move, growing in that essential spasm, and dying away as it seeped into the sand.

She is tired of keeping up appearances, of pretending this lonely life isn't wearing her from stone to sand

In our memories, there is a graveyard where we bury our dead. They all lie there together, the loved ones and the ones we hated, friends and foes and kin, with no distinction among them. We have to mourn every one of them, because our memories have made them as much a part of us as our bones or our skin. If we don't, we've no right to remember anything at all.

one of those grim reminders that your life is small and the world is big, and even when it feels like it’s falling down, it’s only falling down on you. To everyone else, it’s just going on as usual.

Our ancestors,” he went on after a while, “took this land. They took it and made it and held it. We do not give up what our ancestors gave us. They came across the sea and they fought here, and they built here and they’re buried here. This is our land, mixed with our blood, strengthened with our bone. Ours!” He was angry, but he was often angry. He glowered at me, as if wondering whether I was strong enough to hold this land of Northumbria that our ancestors had won with sword and spear and blood and slaughter.

She swallows. “Isn’t it lonely?” “It doesn’t have to be. After all, loneliness is just like us,” says Ezra. “It has to be invited in.

the strange mix of pleasure and grief that came with finishing a book.

Bury me next to you in that unmarked grave, Joy. We knew that was the only hope we ever had–that we would live to see it through… and pray for our own cessation. Oh, we’ll still hate each other, my dear, we have hated each other too long and too passionately to stop… but my bones will rest easy next to your bones.

María feels no maternal urge, no envy when she sees a babe swept up into a mother’s arms. Everyone insists it is her purpose, and it drives her mad, the idea that the shape of her body determines the shape her life must take.

And as she did, she told her daughter what it meant to be a wife. Gentle. Loving. Obedient. Words that made María tense. And, as if her mother could feel her stiffening, she leaned close and said, “You will learn, it is better to bend than to break.” María stared into the hearth. “Why should I be the one who bends?

No—disappearing would be better, because maybe in the absence of Alice she could become someone else.

she tries to leave, and learns the hard way that, among their kind, promises are binding.

This woman, who is a force of nature. Who bends the world instead of bending for it.

I miss the last cherries of the season. I miss chocolate melting on my tongue. I miss the way sun used to feel against my skin in spring. I don't miss walls and doors.

you look like you are made of stars.

Born restless, her father used to say. Which was fine for a son, but bad for a daughter.

Anger and resentment are the worst. They’re like rocks in your pockets. Too many, and you’ll drown.

Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures. No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.

A name is like a dress. It might be by nature pretty or plain, but it is the person wearing it who matters most.” María considers, looking through a jar of herbs. Studying the face beyond. “If names are dresses, mine simply does not fit.

Sixty minutes to an hour. Twenty-four hours to a day. These are mortal instruments, for mortal lives. But when you live forever, time is something far less constant. When you are happy, a decade rushes by. When you are sad, a minute crawls. When you are lonely and afraid, time seems to lose all meaning. Blink, and a year is gone. Blink, and it has only been a night. Only, it is not a life at all. It is a prison sentence.

She didn’t know it then, but it turns out a soul is what makes the sun feel warm against your skin, what gives food taste, what makes you feel full. “Still, the girl told herself it was worth it. After all, she had the woman’s love, and that was enough. That would always be enough.

Ford. Our cars are built strong. Our cars are built out of bones. Weird metal bones that we found buried in a meteor. Ford: Drive Weird Bones.

But María has known, all her life, that she is not meant for common paths, for humble houses and modest men. If she must walk a woman’s road, then it will take her somewhere new.

She knows these things, but there are no memories to go with them, and the few she has are like teabags used too many times, all the flavor feeding till it's just tinted water.

As if love and horror could not go hand in hand.

Charlotte Hastings, on the other hand, was shades of brown. Eyes the color of tea before the milk goes in.

Those grown in the midnight soil are never alone.

Nothing fits, even if it’s fitted, because it’s not really about the size of the body or how it fills the clothes, but how much space it takes up in the world.

She reaches out and runs her fingers through the ash. Knows she should feel horrified. But as she rises to her feet, all she feels is hungry.

Control is knowing yourself well enough to know your limits

It's a lie, you know, that you only get one story.

The fact is, whether death takes you all at once, or steals pieces over time, in the end there is no such thing as immortality. Some of us just die slower than the rest.

The woman took so little and gave so much. She offered the girl friendship, offered her pleasure, offered her everything she ever wanted. And in the end, all she asked for was her soul.

She has four sons,” Nurse Purvis leads me on, “all with a London post code, but they never visit. You’d think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we’re all heading to.” I consider airing my theory that our culture’s coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Sansara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that.

Did you know,” she would say brightly, “that sometimes I think of the cemetery plot where you will lie, beneath all that dirt and stone, and it brings me joy. And if by some unlucky spot I ever get with child, I will take them there, and let them frolic on your bones.

Live long enough, and things begin to rot.” He draws a hand from his pocket, taps a fingertip against his chest. “Compassion, affection, humility, care.” One strike with every word. “They drop away like petals, till all that’s left is stem and thorn. Hunger, and the urge to hunt.

Unfurl your muscles. Slip off your skin. Drop your guts in a heap on the floor.” I felt my airway constrict. Damn, this was profound. I continued. “Nuzzle inside the hollow of my bones. Let our breaths mingle as one. Turn liquid for me. Only for me. Bury your essence inside of my soul.

There are other names for us, of course,” continues Hector. “Night walker. Blood drinker. Abomination. Vampire. But those are words crafted by mortal tongues. They are imperfect, incomplete. They lack the poetry, the brutality, the grace. No,” he says. “We are roses.

Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future

She didn’t know it then, but it turns out a soul is what makes the sun feel warm against your skin, what gives food taste, what makes you feel full.

Death comes, and sometimes it is kind, and often it is cruel, and very rarely it is welcome. But it comes, all the same.

Silence is a kind of wealth, she thinks,

That her beauty is something she is expected to pass on instead of keep.

I want you. I have wanted you in ballrooms and in parlors, in crowds and behind closed doors. I have wanted you since before we ever met.

It is easy, isn’t it, in retrospect? To spot the cracks. To see them spread. But in the moment, there is only the urge to mend each one. To smooth the lines. And keep the surface whole.

People go on and on about boobs and butts and teeny waists, but the clavicle is the true benchmark of female desirability. It is a fetish item. Without visible clavicles you might as well be a meatloaf in the sexual marketplace. And I don't mean Meatloaf the person, who has probably gotten laid lotsa times despite the fact that his clavicle is buried so deep as to be mere urban legend, because our culture does not have a creepy sexual fascination on the bones of meaty men. Only women. Show us your bones, they say. If only you were nothing but bones.

Everyone insists [motherhood] is her purpose, and it drives her mad, the idea that the shape of her body determines the shape her life must take. That her beauty is something she is expected to pass on instead of keep. That anything she makes will thrive while she is left to wither.

Flirting with other girls is a long game, a drawn-out con of longing, and guessing, toeing the edge of a pool before finally, sometimes, in a moment of weakness or exasperation, flinging yourself in. But Catty always said that guys were easier. Just let them think they’re in control.

Never walk alone at night, they tell you, if you're a girl. And it isn't fair. Because the night is when the world is quiet. The night is when the air is clear. The night is wild and welcoming.

lives in the mind. A piece you cannot see or touch. A prize you are told to shield for a time you cannot know. Easy enough to part with something so abstract when the alternative is freedom. When the promise is love.

Autumn comes like a buyer of cloth, her long fingers touching, turning orange, yellow, brown. taking what she wants, stretching the bone taut air. Her skin crackles beneath our feet. I didn't think anyone wanted me, bruises pulled like a sweater around my neck. We talk in the pore tightening air, branches bare, about the girl buried in the chill of prewinter. We show each other our mutilated children in the guise of women as autumn plucks at our lips. Each color, blue, black, ochre popping like kisses on the rib lined flesh, the puberty soft things. And we muse how women keep bruises hidden beneath dead leaves.

The most difficult stories about the Khmer Rouge are the ones over which hover almost and maybe. She almost made it, but dysentery took her at the end. He is maybe buried in the mass grave at Choeung Ek, so we will pay our respects there. He almost walked all the way to Thailand, but the cadres found him in the forest. She maybe saw her infant son one last time before she was taken. Anne Spencer almost made it off those wards. After I read the email, an ancient and exuberant terror blazed through me. It was partly the terror that had grown in me alongside my very bones, knowing as I did that I only existed because my mother had outrun almost; I don’t know at what point you stop feeling the need to run, generation by generation, when you’re born after that. But it was also a wonderful, simple, human terror. The one where death brushes too close to you and you abruptly remember what an insane gift it is to be alive, and how much you’d like to stay alive even when death is laughing at your window, laughing in your mirror.

You should always be found ahead of your corpses, and never in their wake.

the door is open wide, and she can see straight into the little house—but no amount of force will let her through.

One can feel lonely without being alone.

And Lottie ambles on, thinking If I wanted to, I could.

But you can see it in the wedding photos taken after. The emptiness in her eyes, like a house packed up, the tenets already gone.

The story isn’t over yet,” she says. “Get to the part that matters, then,

It is hard to know what one is capable of, until it becomes a matter of necessity. But I hope I’m not forced to find out.

Hope flares in her chest, and she thinks, This, this, this is where her story starts.

Bury my bones in the midnight soil, plant them shallow and water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose, soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.

Time doesn't heal. It just wears you down. Tricks you into thinking, as the present slips into the past, that it will stay there. Safely buried in your wake.

I suspect if we were as familiar with our bones as with our skin, we'd never bury dead but shrine them in their rooms, arranged as we might like to find them on a visit; and our enemies, if we could steal their bodies from the battle sites, would be museumed as they died, the steel still eloquent in their sides, their metal hats askew, the protective toes of their shoes unworn, and friend and enemy would be so wondrously historical that in a hundred years we'd find the jaws still hung for the same speech and all the parts we spent our life with titled as they always were - rib cage, collar, skull - still repetitious, still defiant, angel light, still worthy of memorial and affection. After all, what does it mean to say that when our cat has bitten through the shell and put confusion in the pulp, the life goes out of them? Alas for us, I want to cry, our bones are secret, showing last, so we must love what perishes: the muscles and the waters and the fats.

Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.

The things I need to say can only be written furtively on scraps of smuggled paper, in moments of time stolen from the dead for the sake of their memory. They can only be hidden away in tins and jars, carefully sealed with scraps of cloth and hidden with great fear and greater longing amid fragmented bones—buried in the uncaring ground soaked with our blood. We bury them as we could not bury our loved ones. These things can never be told.

Her hand flies to her neck, thinking she’s been cut. But instead of a blade, or ragged wound, her fingers find soft hair, the widow’s head bent against her throat. And yet, beneath that softness. Something violent, sharp.

thought that I’d given up on Mal. I thought the love I’d had for him belonged to the past, to the foolish, lonely girl I never wanted to be again. I’d tried to bury that girl and the love she’d felt, just as I’d tried to bury my power. But I wouldn’t make that mistake again. Whatever burned between us was just as bright, just as undeniable. The moment our lips met, I knew with pure and piercing certainty that I would have waited for him forever.

Mountains have long been a geography for pilgrimage, place where people have been humbled and strengthened, they are symbols of the sacred center. Many have traveled to them in order to find the concentrated energy of Earth and to realize the strength of unimpeded space. Viewing a mountain at a distance or walking around its body we can see its shape, know its profile, survey its surrounds. The closer you come to the mountain the more it disappears, the mountain begins to lose its shape as you near it, its body begins to spread out over the landscape losing itself to itself. On climbing the mountain the mountain continues to vanish. It vanishes in the detail of each step, its crown is buried in space, its body is buried in the breath. On reaching the mountain summit we can ask, “What has been attained?” - The top of the mountain? Big view? But the mountain has already disappeared. Going down the mountain we can ask, “What has been attained?” Going down the mountain the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain disappears, the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain is realized. Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain.

This plague... This curse... I have an idea where it came from. I don't think it's from any spell or virus or nuclear rays. I think it's from a deeper place. I think we brought it here. I think we crushed ourselves down over the centuries. Buried ourselves under greed and hate and whatever other sins we could find until our souls finally hit the rock bottom of the universe. And then they scraped a hole through it, into some... dark place. We released it. We poked through the seabed and the oil erupted, painted us black, pulled our inner sickness out for everyone to see. Now here we are in this dry corpse of a world, rotting on our feet till there's nothing left but bones and the buzz of flies.

we were taking his bones to be buried in his tomb in Segovia, his home town.’1 ‘And who killed him?’ asked Don Quixote. ‘God did, with a pestilential fever,’ replied the bachelor of arts. ‘That means,’ said Don Quixote, ‘that Our Lord has relieved me of the task I would have had of avenging his death, if anybody else had killed him; but seeing who it was that killed him, all one can do is shrug one’s shoulders and be silent, for that is what I should do if he had killed me.

Only later did her mother say that not all sins were boulders, that most in fact were more like pebbles. An unkind thought. A hungry heart. Small weights like greed and envy and want (things that didn’t seem to her like sins at all, but apparently they added up).

These are some good questions to ask till one decides on the song, one’s true song: What has happened to my soul-voice? What are the buried bones of my life? In what condition is my relationship to the instinctual Self? When was the last time I ran free? How do I make life come alive again? Where has La Loba gone to? The old woman sings over the bones, and as she sings, the bones flesh out. We too “become” as we pour soul over the bones we have found. As we pour our yearning and our heartbreaks over the bones of what we used to be when we were young, of what we used to know in the centuries past, and over the quickening we sense in the future, we stand on all fours, four-square. As we pour soul, we are revivified. We are no longer a thin solution, a dissolving frail thing. No, we are in the “becoming” stage of transformation.

even though she saw it coming, a kind of automatic flinch, because it’s one of those sounds that means trouble. It’s a rock pitched through a kitchen window, a pint knocked off a counter, a pair of glasses crunched under a clumsy foot, a girl taking out her heartbreak with a bat.

When the ship cracks in the typhoon, we cover our heads and tell ourselves that all will resolve back to normal. But we are unbelieving. This time may not be like the other times that with time grew into cheerful anecdotes. The stories we heard, about the ten thousand buried in the quake, were, after all, true. And more irredeemable than any human catastrophe, the dinosaurs trailed across the desert to their end. They left no descendents to embellish their saga, but only the white bones and the marks in the clay for archeologists to make into footnotes. Our hour may be this hour, and our end the dinosaurs’. So perhaps there will be no revolving back at all, and only archives, full of archetypes, like the composite photographs of movie heroines. But with or without us, the Day itself must return, we insist, when the Joke at least sits basking in the sun, decorating her idle body with nameless red, once blood. Philosophy, like lichens, takes centuries to grow and is always ignored in the Book of Instructions. If you can’t Take It, Get Out. I can’t take it, so I lie on the hotel bed dissolving into chemicals whose adventure will pursue time to her extinguishment, without the slightest influence from these few years when I held them together in human passion.

But when you live forever, time is something far less constant. When you are happy, a decade rushes by. When you are sad, a minute crawls. When you are lonely and afraid, time seems to lose all meaning. Blink, and a year is gone. Blink, and it has only been a night. Only, it is not a life at all. It is a prison sentence.

They dream of the happiness of stretching out one's legs and of the relief one feels after going to the toilet. In Orotukan the earth thaws only in the summer and only to the depth of three feet—and only then can they bury the bones of those who died during the winter. And you have the right to arrange your own life under the blue sky and the hot sun, to get a drink of water, to stretch, to travel wherever you like without a convoy [escort]. So what's this about unwiped feet? And what's this about a mother-in-law? What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusory—property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life—don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart—and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!

words, i think are such unpredictable creatures, no gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. swords may cut and kill but words will stab and stay burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh

heading to.’ I consider airing my theory that our culture’s coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and samsara; that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our wilful myopia about death is exactly that.

A man comes toward her down the block. Shoulders hunched, eyes hanging on her body. Her curls are drying wild, her minidress still damp and clinging to her hips, and she knows exactly what he’s thinking. A girl like you, alone at night. Dressed like that, you’re asking for it. His hands twitch in his pockets, and then he’s close enough to meet her gaze, close enough for her to feel the menace rolling off him, the If I wanted to, I could, but she doesn’t shy back, doesn’t make herself small. She looks right into his eyes, and smiles, and whatever he sees, it’s enough to make him flinch and shuffle sideways off the curb, just to get away. And Lottie ambles on, thinking If I wanted to, I could.

Time is a funny thing,” she said. “It goes racing by right under our noses. I close my eyes and you are eight and climbing trees to get the highest fruit, perching up among the birds to eat your prize. And then I blink, and here you are, all grown, and I don’t know how.” Her brown eyes—the same shade as Charlotte’s—shimmered with feeling. “We’ve kept you at Clement Hall too long.

She doesn’t yet know that her own heart has ceased to beat. That what she feels now is nothing but an echo of a stolen pulse, a rhythm borrowed for the time it takes to drink. That as quickly as it ends, she will be raked by thirst again, not only for the taste of blood itself, but for the drum it beats inside her. She doesn’t know. All she knows is that, at last, she feels alive.

He raps his knuckles against his chest. “We are hollowed, bit by bit, as all that made us human dies. Our kindness. Our empathy. Our capacity for fear, and love. One by one, they slough away, until all that’s left is the desire to hunt, to hurt, to feed, to kill. That is how we die. Made reckless by our hunger. Convinced we are unkillable until someone or something proves us wrong.

What do we mean by the lived truth of creation? We have to mean the world as it appears to men in a condition of relative unrepression; that is, as it would appear to creatures who assessed their true puniness in the face of the overwhelmingness and majesty of the universe, of the unspeakable miracle of even the single created object; as it probably appeared to the earliest men on the planet and to those extrasensitive types who have filled the roles of shaman, prophet, saint, poet, and artist. What is unique about their perception of reality is that it is alive to the panic inherent in creation: Sylvia Plath somewhere named God "King Panic." And Panic is fittingly King of the Grotesque. What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types-biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killerbees attacking with a fury and demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out-not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in "natural" accidents of all types: the earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, automobiles make a pyramid heap of over 50 thousand a year in the U.S. alone, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness. "Questo sol m'arde, e questo m'innamore," as Michelangelo put it.

I thought I'd given up on Mal. I thought the love I'd had for him belonged to the past, to the foolish, lonely girl I never wanted to be again. I'd tried to bury that girl and the love she'd felt, just as I'd tried to bury my power. But I wouldn't make that mistake again. Whatever burned between us was just as bright, just as undeniable. The moment our lips met, I knew with pure and piercing certainty that I would have waited for him forever.

Masking is a common coping mechanism for a Black queer boy. We bury the things that have happened to us, hoping that they don’t present themselves later in our adult life. Some of us never realize that subconsciously, these buried bones are what dictate our every navigation and interaction throughout life. Oddly enough, many of us connect with each other through trauma and pain: broken people finding other broken people in the hopes of fixing one another.

And what can be the worth of that solicitude which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate? What the value of those literary charms which are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment? When we have once learnt what was that picture before which was hung Mrs. Ratcliffe’s solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil. They are to us merely a receptacle for old bones, an inappropriate coffin, which we would wish to have decently buried out of our sight.

In a city it's impossible to forget we live in places raised and built over time itself. The past is underneath our feet. Every day when I leave the house , I may walk over a place where a king killed a wolf in the Royal Forest of Stocket, one of the medieval hunting forests ,where alder and birch , oak and hazel,willow, cherry and aspen grew. The living trees were cut down , their wood used to fuel the city's growth , it's trade, it's life.The ancient wood ,preserved in peat, was found underneath the city(The site of the killing is fairly well buried -the wolf and the king had their encounter some time around the early years of the eleventh century)It's the same as in any other city, built up and over and round , ancient woodlands cut down , bogs drained , watercourses altered, a landscape rendered almost untraceable, vanished.Here, there's a history of 8,000 years of habitation , the evidence in excavated fish hooks and fish bone reliquaries, in Bronze Age grave-goods of arrowheads and beakers, what's still under the surface, in revenants and ghosts of gardens , of doo'cots and orchards, of middens and piggeries, plague remains and witch-hunts, of Franciscans and Carmelites, their friaries buried , over-taken by time and stone .This is a stonemasons' city , a city of weavers and gardeners and shipwrights and where I walk , there was once a Maison Dieu, a leper house; there was song schools and sewing schools, correction houses and tollboths, hidden under layers of time, still there

You’re all bloody,” Caldris said, reaching up to touch my chin. He paused, staring down at the mottled, still healing flesh as his skin knitted itself back together and slowly pushed the iron from his body. “Sorry, I don’t see a bath anywhere. Do you?” I asked, scoffing as I looked at him. The male was covered in gore from head to toe, but Gods forbid I be, too. “Did I say I wanted you to wash it off?” he asked, tilting his head to the side as he studied me. “Because that was not my intent, I assure you. I want to fuck you while you’re covered in the blood and death of our enemies who thought they could take you from me.” I swallowed, the intensity of his dark stare making my throat ache with sudden dryness. “That’s not—” “Normal? You are my mate. I could spend an eternity buried inside of you and still want more, Little One. There will never come a day when I do not enjoy watching you bring men to their knees and cut their throats when they underestimate you. You would do well to remember that,

Death and the Turtle" I watched the turtle dwindle day by day, Get more remote, lie limp upon my hand; When offered food he turned his head away; The emerald shell grew soft. Quite near the end Those withdrawn paws stretched out to grasp His long head in a poignant dying gesture. It was so strangely like a human clasp, My heart cracked for the brother creature. I buried him, wrapped in a lettuce leaf, The vivid eye sunk inward, a dull stone. So this was it, the universal grief: Each bears his own end knit up in the bone. Where are the dead? we ask, as we hurtle Toward the dark, part of this strange creation, One with each limpet, leaf, and smallest turtle--- Cry out for life, cry out in desperation! Who will remember you when I have gone, My darling ones, or who remember me? Only in our wild hearts the dead live on. Yet these frail engines bound to mystery Break the harsh turn of all creation's wheel, for we remember China, Greece, and Rome, Our mothers and our fathers, and we steal From death itself its rich store, and bring it home.

We need not quarrel, Master Axl. Here are the skulls of men, I won't deny it. There an arm, there a leg, but just bones now. An old burial ground. And so it may be. I dare say, sir, our whole country is this way. A fine green valley. A pleasant copse in the springtime. Dig its soil, and not far beneath the daisies and buttercups come the dead. And I don't talk, sir, only of those who received Christian burial. Beneath our soil lie the remains of old slaughter. Horace and I, we've grown weary of it. Weary and we no longer young" (171)

He calls me into the kitchen an hour later, with the fake enthusiasm of a father who has screwed up big-time. Bones are heaped on the cutting board. A pot of glue boils on the stove. Bit of gray, green, and yellow roll in the burping white paste. Dad: "It's supposed to be soup." Me: Dad: "It tasted a bit watery, so I kept adding thickener. I put in some corn and peas." Me: Dad: [pulling wallet out of his back pocket] "Call for pizza. I'll get rid of this." I order double cheese, double mushroom. Dad buries the soup in the back year next to our dead beagle, Ariel.

The victim was beaten to death in her own home by her husband, after reporting him twenty times. Twenty. Reporting abuse is your best defense. Killed in your own home. Women killed for walking the streets at night. Women killed for being whores. In your own home. Nowhere is safe. Nowhere. Being a woman means living in a state of emergency. He murdered his wife in front of their five-year-old daughter. Woman killed in a hit-and-run. Shot to death in her room. There is no room of one’s own when men think our bodies belong to them. Buried under her bathroom floor. There is no room of one’s own. Every two hours and twenty-five minutes, a woman in Mexico is strangled, raped, dismembered, burned alive, mutilated, beaten to a pulp, and left with bruises and broken bones. A woman’s body, another woman. Some woman, a nameless woman. A lifeless body was found.

How can you say such things?!' demanded Kon Fiji. 'Our lives may have changed, but death has not. Respect for the elderly and honor given for a life well lived connect us to the accumulated wisdom of the past. When you die, do you wish to be buried as a common peasant instead of as a great scholar worthy of admiration?' 'In a hundred years, Master Kon Fiji, you and I will both be dust, and even the worms and birds who feast on our flesh will also have traveled through multiple revolutions of the wheel of life. Our lives are finite, but the universe is infinite. We are but flashes of lightning bugs on a summer night against the eternal stars. When I die, I wish to be laid out in the open so that the Big Island will act as my coffin, and the River of Heavenly Pearls my shroud; the cicadas will play my funeral possession, and the blooming flowers will be my incense burners; my flesh will feed ten thousand lives, and my bones will enrich the soil. I will return to the great Flow of the universe. Such honor can never be matched by mortal rites enacted by those obeying dead words copied out of a book.

They are many indeed that lie there, though until now we have not thought of it so. Hitherto we have just all remained there together, they in the graves, we in the trenches, divided only by a few handfuls of earth. They were but a little before us; daily we became less and they more, and often we have not known whether we already belonged to them or not. And sometimes too the shells would bring them back among us again, crumbling bones tossed up; scraps of uniform; wet, decayed heads, already earthy, to the noise of the drumfire issuing once more from their buried dugouts and returning to the battle. It did not seem to us terrible; we were too near to them. But now we are going back into life and they must stay there. Ludwig, whose cousin was killed in this sector, blows his nose through his fingers and turns about. Slowly we follow. But we halt yet a few times and look about us. And again we stand still, and suddenly we know that all that yonder, that hell of terrors, that desolate corner of shell-hole land, has usurped our hearts;—yes, damn it, that it should sound such slush! —it seems almost as if it had become endeared to us, a dreadful homeland, full of torment, and we simply belonged in it.

When I’m old and dying, wheezing my guts out, my organs failing, I want to walk out the front door of some old farmhouse on my own land, maybe forty, fifty hectares of it. I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. I want a death rattle, a final breath, a body intact that can then be torn apart by scavengers, riddled with worms, my limbs dragged off to feed some family of little foxes, my guts teeming with maggots, until I am nothing but a gooey collection of juices that feeds the fungi and the oak seedlings and the wild grasses. I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came. I could give back something to this world instead of taking, taking, taking. That’s the death I want. The death that means the most to me. That is the good death, the best death, and that is the death I wish not only for myself, but for you, too. Our lives are finite. Our bodies imperfect. We shouldn’t spend it feeding somebody else’s cause.

On the deck was a skeleton. Some of the bugs seemed to be fighting for the last scraps of flesh but pretty much everything but bone and some scraps of skin and hair were gone. Bugs were even crawling in and out of the eye sockets, cleaning out the brains. “Holy crap,” Woodman said, “I don’t want those getting on me!” “I just figured out what they are,” Gardner said, stepping through the hatch after a flash around with her light. Every step caused a crunch. “And they won’t bite.” “They stripped that guy to the bone!” Woodman said. “That’s what they do,” Gardner said, bending down and picking up one of the beetles. It skittered along her arm and she shook it off. “They’re carrion beetles.” “Carrion?” Woodman said. “So they eat people?” “They eat dead flesh,” Gardner said. “I’d heard Wolf say he’d ‘seeded’ the boat. I didn’t know it was with these.” “Wolf did this?” Woodman said angrily. “To our people?” “Six of us came off, Woodie,” Gardner said softly. “Ninety-four and twenty-six refugees didn’t. You’ve carried bodies. You know how heavy they are. Now . . . they’re not.” “That’s horrible,” Woodman said. “No,” Gardner said, flashing her light around. “It’s efficient, simple and brutal. It’s Wolf all over if you think about it. These things only eat dead flesh. They may get into some of the electronics but those are mostly thrashed by the infecteds, anyway. It cleans the boat out of the main issue, the dead meat on the dead people. If we ever get around to clearing this out, all we’ll have to do is bag the bones.” “We won’t know who’s who,” Woodman said. “Does it matter?” Gardner said. “There’s a big thing, it’s called an ossuary, in France. All the guys who died in a certain battle in World War One. They buried them, waited for bugs like this to do their work, then dug them back up. All of certain bones are on the left, all the others are on the right and the skulls are in the middle.” She picked up the skull of the former Coast Guard crewman and looked at it as beetles poured out. “I don’t know who you were but you were my brother,” Gardner said. “This way, I know I can give you a decent burial. And I will remember you. Now, we’ve got a mission to complete, Woodman, and people waiting on us. Live people. Let the dead bury the dead.

Kennewick Man is a skeleton discovered in Washington State in 1996, carbon-dated to older than 9,000 years. Anthropologists were intrigued by anatomical suggestions that he might be unrelated to typical Native Americans, and therefore might represent a separate early migration across what is now the Bering Strait, or even from Iceland. They were preparing to do all-important DNA tests when the legal authorities seized the skeleton, intending to hand it over to representatives of local Indian tribes, who proposed to bury it and forbid all further study. Naturally there was widespread opposition from the scientific and archaeological community. Even if Kennewick Man is an American Indian of some kind, it is highly unlikely that his affinities lie with whichever particular tribe happens to live in the same area 9,000 years later. Native Americans have impressive legal muscle, and ‘The Ancient One’ might have been handed over to the tribes, but for a bizarre twist. The Asatru Folk Assembly, a group of worshippers of the Norse gods Thor and Odin, filed an independent legal claim that Kennewick Man was actually a Viking. This Nordic sect, whose views you may follow in the Summer 1997 issue of The Runestone, were actually allowed to hold a religious service over the bones. This upset the Yakama Indian community, whose spokesman feared that the Viking ceremony could be ‘keeping Kennewick Man’s spirit from finding his body’. The dispute between Indians and Norsemen could well be settled by DNA comparison, and the Norsemen are quite keen to be put to this test. Scientific study of the remains would certainly cast fascinating light on the question of when humans first arrived in America. But Indian leaders resent the very idea of studying this question, because they believe their ancestors have been in America since the creation. As Armand Minthorn, religious leader of the Umatilla tribe, put it: ‘From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time. We do not believe our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do.’ Perhaps the best policy for the archaeologists would be to declare themselves a religion, with DNA fingerprints their sacramental totem. Facetious but, such is the climate in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, it is possibly the only recourse that would work.

The temple was in a field of graves suddenly a pitiful-looking skeleton appeared and said: A melancholy autumn wind Blows through the world; the pampas grass waves As we drift to the moor, Drift to the sea. What can be done With the mind of a man That should be clear But though he is dressed up in a monk's robe, Just lets life pass him by? Such deep musings Made me uneasy, I could not sleep. Towards dawn I dozed off... I found myself surrounded by a group of skeletons, acting as they had when they were still alive. One skeleton came over to me and said: Memories Flee and Are no more. All are empty dreams Devoid of meaning. Violate the reality of things And babble about 'God' and 'the Buddha' And you will never find the true Way. Still breathing, You feel animated, So a corpse in a field Seems to be something Apart from you. If chunks of rock Can serve as a memento To the dead A better headstone Would be a simple tea-mortar. Humans are indeed frightful things. A single moon Bright and clear In an unclouded sky; Yet we still stumble In the world's darkness. This world Is but A fleeting dream So why be alarmed At its evanescence? The vagaries of life, Though painful, Teach us Not to cling To this floating world. Why do people Lavish decoration On this set of bones, Destined to disappear Without a trace? The original body Must return to Its original place. Do not search For what cannot be found. No one really knows The nature of birth Nor the true dwelling place. We return to the source And turn to dust. Many paths lead from The foot of the mountain, But at the peak We all gaze at the Single bright moon. If at the end of our journey There is no final Resting place, Then we need not fear Losing our Way. No beginning. No end. Our mind Is born and dies; The emptiness of emptiness! Relax, And the mind Runs wild; Control the world And you can cast it aside. Rain, hail, snow, and ice: All are different But when they fall They become to same water As the valley stream. The ways of proclaiming The Mind all vary, But the same heavenly truth Can be seen In each and every one. Cover your path With fallen pine needles So no one will be able To locate your True dwelling place. How vain, The endless funderals at the Cremation grounds of Mount Toribe! Don't the mourner realize That they will be next? 'Life is fleeeting!' We think at the sight Of smoke drifting from Mount Toribe, But when will we realize That we are in the same boat? All is in vain! This morning, A healthy friend; This evening, A wisp of cremation smoke. What a pity! Evening smoke from Mount Toribe Blown violently To and fro By the wind. When burned We become ashes, and earth when buried. Is it only our sins That remain behind? All the sins Committed In the Three Worlds Will fade away Together with me.

The history of the land is a history of blood. In this history, someone wins and someone loses. There are patriots and enemies. Folk heroes who save the day. Vanquished foes who had it coming. It’s all in the telling. The conquered have no voice. Ask the thirty-eight Santee Sioux singing the death song with the nooses around their necks, the treaty signed fair and square, then nullified with a snap of the rope. Ask the slave women forced to bear their masters’ children, to raise and love them and see them sold. Ask the miners slaughtered by the militia in Ludlow. Names are erased. The conqueror tells the story. The colonizer writes the history, winning twice: A theft of land. A theft of witness. Oh, but let’s not speak of such things! Look: Here is an eagle whipping above the vast grasslands where the buffalo once thundered bold as gods. (The buffalo are here among the dead. So many buffalo.) There is the Declaration in sepia. (Signed by slave owners. Shhh, hush up about that, now!) See how the sun shines down upon the homesteaders’ wagons racing toward a precious claim in the nation’s future, the pursuit of happiness pursued without rest, destiny made manifest? (Never mind about those same homesteaders eating the flesh of neighbors. Winters are harsh in this country. Pack a snack.) The history is a hungry history. Its mouth opens wide to consume. It must be fed. Bring me what you would forget, it cries, and I will swallow it whole and pull out the bones bleached of truth upon which you will hang the myths of yourselves. Feed me your pain and I will give you dreams and denial, a balm in Gilead. The land remembers everything, though. It knows the steps of this nation’s ballet of violence and forgetting. The land receives our dead, and the dead sing softly the song of us: blood. Blood on the plains. In the rivers. On the trees where the ropes swing. Blood on the leaves. Blood under the flowers of Gettysburg, of Antioch. Blood on the auction blocks. Blood of the Lenape, the Cherokee, the Cheyenne. Blood of the Alamo. Blood of the Chinese railroad workers. Blood of the midwives hung for witchcraft, for the crime of being women who bleed. Blood of the immigrants fleeing the hopeless, running toward the open arms of the nation’s seductive hope, its greatest export. Blood of the first removed to make way for the cities, the factories, the people and their unbridled dreams: The chugging of the railways. The tapping of the telegram. The humming of industry. Sound burbling along telephone wires. Printing presses whirring with the day’s news. And the next day’s. And the day after that’s. Endless cycles of information. Cities brimming with ambitions used and discarded. The dead hold what the people throw away. The stories sink the tendrils of their hope and sorrow down into the graves and coil around the dead buried there, deep in its womb. All passes away, the dead whisper. Except for us. We, the eternal. Always here. Always listening. Always seeing. One nation, under the earth. E Pluribus unum mortuis. Oh, how we wish we could reach you! You dreamers and schemers! Oh, you children of optimism! You pioneers! You stars and stripes, forever! Sometimes, the dreamers wake as if they have heard. They take to the streets. They pick up the plow, the pen, the banner, the promise. They reach out to neighbors. They reach out to strangers. Backs stooped from a hard day’s labor, two men, one black, one white, share water from a well. They are thirsty and, in this one moment, thirst and work make them brothers. They drink of shared trust, that all men are created equal. They wipe their brows and smile up at a faithful sun.

Briar Patch women would face, lives were at risk, and the pursuit of justice would have to come first. She finished her drink and glanced at the clock. ‘God! Is that the time? I must get home. Thanks for the drink, and thanks for helping me, Spooks. I appreciate it. Now I have to go. Don’t forget to put your candle back in the window.’ CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE With a showman’s flourish, Rory burst into the office and deposited a pile of folders and reports on Nikki’s desk. ‘Results, Nikki! Incontrovertible. Listen to this. Millicent Cartwright’s dental records match those of Ellen McDonald from Dunedin, South Island. Same woman. And your nice new detective, Ben, is it, has a fairly recent photograph of her, sent by the New Zealand police. Same face as the cadaver in my mortuary.’ Rory took the coffee Joseph handed him. ‘Now, how she died.’ He paused. ‘In exactly the same manner as Louise Lawson. There’s a head injury, not enough to kill her, but enough to knock her out, and she had almost identical lacerations on her arms, wrists, neck and thighs. There is no doubt that she died from a massive loss of blood.’ ‘And as Millicent Cartwright is connected to the Hammond case and Louise to the Prospero case, we have our connection!’ Nikki felt a surge of elation. It was a single killer. ‘Ah, now hold on, dear Detective Inspector, the good professor has yet to finish.’ Nikki looked at Rory. ‘Go on, and don’t make it bad news, please.’ ‘Far from it. Listen to this. I was having a brief discussion with one of my colleagues who conducted the PM on your suicide case, George Ackroyd. We were just admiring the excellent job he did on crushing the hyoid bone in his throat, when I noticed something.’ He took a slow sip of coffee. ‘It’s fortuitous that I have such a good eye for colour because there it was, Midnight Orchid! On his left cheek! Just the tiniest dab, but I got a match!’ Nikki stared at him. ‘So Louise’s last visitor also kissed George?’ ‘Well, that brand of lipstick is not exactly rare. But it would seem so.’ ‘Then did he actually kill himself? Or was it made to look that way?’ ‘It was suicide, without a doubt. Everything about the crime scene indicates that he was alone when he died, and my findings discount any outside interference. It’s what, or who, drove him to it that you need to prove.’ ‘Avril Hammond.

If we spent our whole lives here we would have little to offer the world and know little enough of the world to have context for our prayer …’ Seeing Nona’s frown she spoke more simply. ‘We wouldn’t understand what we’re praying for. Without knowing the chaos and confusion that washes all around this plateau, our Rock of Faith, we could not appreciate the serenity we seek.’ Abbess Glass paused and fixed Nona with dark eyes. It seemed important to her that Nona understand … that Nona believe. ‘I wasn’t always a nun. I had a son and I breathed for him. When we buried him my sorrow consumed me. Was my grief holy? Was it unique? All our hurts and follies are repeated time and again. Generation after generation live the same mistakes. But we’re not like the fire, or the river, or the wind – we’re not a single tune, its variations played out forever, a game of numbers until the world dies. There’s a story written in us. Your parents – your father and his ice tunnels, your mother and her Church of Hope, both of them, whether they loved you or left you, are in you bone-deep, remembered in your blood.

Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures. No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.

Was it some impulse buried deep within me? Was there in my blood and bones some selective device that chose me and a few others like me to venture? To go on? To penetrate the strange and the new? Were we something chosen by nature for this purpose? Had we control over our actions, or were we mere tools of the way of things that must ceaselessly go forward?

In my fantasy, I always strangled them as they slept. I don’t know why, but it seemed the most humane way. I knew from my earliest sexual awakenings that I was gay. I was always attracted to men and never really questioned why. I just accepted the fact that I liked men and not women. I was raised Lutheran, and I knew the faith frowned on gays. I saw that openly gay people could have a tough time of it, so I decided to keep this my little secret. This wasn’t hard, since I kept most thoughts to myself. “I don’t know why, but my fantasies always included cutting into the dead bodies of my lovers. I sliced their torso from chin to crotch and pulled out their inner viscera, laying it on their chest. The thought of the warm inner cavity excited me tremendously, and I masturbated thinking about it. The orgasm was always pleasurable and intense. I’m not sure, but I think this was an extension of something I got involved in as a kid. When I was lonely or when my mom and dad fought, I walked the country roads by my house in Bath. I noticed that occasionally there were dead animals along the roadside, hit by cars. I was interested in what they looked like on the inside. At first, I brought them home and cut them up, examining their insides, not telling anyone. But the more interested I became, the less pleasure I got from just cutting into them. “The inner workings of these creatures fascinated me and I wanted to preserve their bones. I remember that I talked to Dad about my interest. I told him that I would like to preserve the bones in some way for future study. Dad was a chemist and knew all about chemicals that could clean off the dead skin. I wanted to sterilize the bones so they could be handled safely. I actually think he was proud of my interest. He helped me by providing various solutions, and even helped me build a little cemetery along the side of our garage to bury my experiments after I was finished studying them. This phase of finding dead animals along the road lasted until I was about fourteen. I actually had the complete set of bones from a large dog I found dead along the side of the road. It was a beagle, and I severed all the flesh from its body, cleaned and polished the bones with various solutions, and reassembled the animal on a large piece of wood. It was just like something in a museum.

Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to becomes corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.

This is real," he whispered, sitting up. "Yes," I said. "You're real. I thought-- I started to think--" He was shaking now. Shame burned through my body, but I pulled him into my arms, and still holding on we rolled back down to lie on the grass. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm so sorry." For an answer, he only buried his face in the crook of my neck, and we lay still together for a long time, until at last he whispered in my ear, "At least you're not as shy as when we met." I was about to say, Do I need to remind you how much I am used to you?-- and then I bolted upright, skin burning. Because I remembered everything we had done together, remembered being this woman at ease in his embrace, yet I knew bone-deep that I had never even held hands with a man, let alone kissed one. Memories tangled in my throat and I couldn't breathe. Then I realized I had thrown him to the ground. "I'm sorry," I blurted, hoping I had not hurt him. But he was sitting up now too, leaned back with his hands behind him, his head tilted to one side. It was exactly the sort of posture that Ignifex might have sat in. "You saved me," he said quietly. The cadences of his voice were uncanny: entirely familiar, but not exactly like either Ignifex or Shade. "You saved me, and I think that covers almost half your sins." I snorted. "I was more than a little late." "Better than never," he said. "Besides, I did deserve it. I wronged you. Both of me." His mouth tightened, and then he said, whisper-soft, "I'm sorry too. Please forgive me." Neither one of them would ever have apologized so desperately. It was a new person staring back at me with blue eyes-- but I was a new person too. And if he, so long divided, could gather himself together and remember how to love me, then I could do the same for him. "Well, you were at least both handsome, too." I took his hand again; our thumbs rubbed together, and then suddenly we were kissing.

People go on and on about boobs and butts and teeny waists, but the clavicle is the true benchmark of female desirability. It is a fetish item. Without visible clavicles you might as well be a meatloaf in the sexual marketplace. And I don’t mean Meatloaf the person, who has probably gotten laid lotsa times despite the fact that his clavicle is buried so deep as to be mere urban legend, because our culture does not have a creepy sexual fixation on the bones of meaty men. Only women. Show us your bones, they say. If only you were nothing but bones. America’s monomaniacal fixation on female thinness isn’t a distant abstraction, something to be pulled apart by academics in women’s studies classrooms or leveraged for traffic in shallow “body-positive” listicles (“Check Out These Eleven Fat Chicks Who You Somehow Still Kind of Want to Bang—Number Seven Is Almost Like a Regular Woman!”)—it is a constant, pervasive taint that warps every single woman’s life. And, by extension, it is in the amniotic fluid of every major cultural shift.

Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures. No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip there skeletons from our flesh.

Anyway, ultimately, we are all the same, aren’t we? Skin and bones. Truth and lies. We all have our stories to tell. Regret we bury. Hope we try to tether lest we begin to think we can be something we’re not.

Tipped, their legs have fallen shut, and the more I look at them the less I believe my eyes. Corruption, in these bugs, is splendid. I've a collection now I keep in typewriter-ribbon tins, and though, in time, their bodies dry and the interior flesh decays, their features hold, as I suppose they held in life, an Egyptian determination, for their protective plates are strong and death must break bones to get in. Now that the heavy soul is gone, the case is light. I suspect if we were as familiar with our bones as with our skin, we'd never bury dead but shrine them in their rooms, arranged as we might like to find them on a visit; and our enemies, if we could steal their bodies from the battle sites, would be museumed as they died, the steel still eloquent in their sides, their metal hats askew, the protective toes of their shoes unworn, and friend and enemy would be so wondrously historical that in a hundred years we'd find the jaws still hung for the same speech and all the parts we spent our life with tilted as they always were—rib cage collar skull—still repetitious, still defiant, angel light, still worthy of memorial and affection. After all, what does it mean to say that when our cat has bitten through the shell and put confusion in the pulp, the life goes out of them? Alas for us, I want to cry, our bones are secret, so we must love what perishes: the muscles and the waters and the fats.

Father Romain always made much of our being from the same place, just as Sebatstien did. Most people here did. It was a way of being joined to your old life through the presence of another person. At times you could sit for a whole evening with such individuals, just listening to their existence unfold, from the house where they were born to the hill where they wanted to be buried. It was their way of returning home, with you as a witness or as someone to bring them back to the present...

But we will not bury our mother. We have no interest in putting her bones in soft ground, no desire for memorials and platitudes, no feelings attached to the organic detritus of her terminated existence.

The back of the church was raised up from the ground. Tossed in among its supports were what looked like moldering bones. My heart ached so much for these poor souls, neglected even after death, I turned away to head back, but managed only a few burdened steps. I drew up abruptly and froze. An old, worn marker, standing off by itself, grabbed at my heart. It was Edgar Alan Poe. He fit in so perfectly there. Maybe I did, too. His sorrow and pain ate through me as I stood, head lowered. Can’t even death let us step away from our darkness? It was like he was scratching a warning into the dirt with his finger, and meant it specifically for me. Don’t wait around for sermons to wash you clean, he seemed to say, for death or drugs to close your eyes. God won’t come roaring in with fresh troops to drive away the darkness we’ve walled our own souls up in. He didn’t put us there; we’ll have to dig ourselves out. I looked at my own life as I stood there, feeling buried alive, like some of his characters. But unlike his characters I had caught a flash of hope.

Our past lives in our bones. It has value and commands respect. We come from a human lineage rife with mistakes, loss, tragedy, and pain. This cannot be avoided because life is temporary, and loss is an inevitable part of it. We can, however, transform our pain into power. We can take these experiences and weave a new chapter—one that allows us to move freely forward, learn from the mistakes, and find the gifts they brought to live a more conscious, empowered, fulfilling way today. In all of this, please don’t ever deny or minimize your personal history. It is rich with gifts and blessings, even if buried under a rubble of tremendous pain and heartache. Don’t allow your past to keep you small. It is not what we encounter, but rather what we do with what we experience that truly matters. Keep from the past what serves you, grieve what needs to be grieved, heal what needs to be healed, love what needs to be loved, and learn what needs to be learned. Let go of the rest.

This was a back that had carried the pain of others until it had become impossible for her bones to unbend themselves, like certain saplings will become permanently twisted under the force of windstorms. I thought of Hawa, whether it was this slow bending she had tried to escape with her linen wings, and whether there was any mercy in the world for those who decline to carry the burdens they are assigned to carry. My mother's back and mine were made from the same mold. Our spines were fashioned for bearing and bending and bowing and burying. Our backs had been honed over generations for the thankless labor of woman. They had never been made for wings.

If we spent our whole lives here we would have little to offer the world and know little enough of the world to have context for our prayer'' Seeing Nona's frown she spoke more simply.'We wouldn't understand what we're praying for. Without knowing the chaos and confusion that washes all around this plateau, our Rock of Faith, we could not appreciate the serenity we seek.' Abbess Glass paused and fixed Nona with dark eyes. It seemed important to her that Nona understand' that Nona believe.'I wasn't always a nun. I had a son and I breathed for him. When we buried him my sorrow consumed me. Was my grief holy' Was it unique' All our hurts and follies are repeated time and again. Generation after generation live the same mistakes. But we're not like the fire, or the river, or the wind' we're not a single tune, its variations played out forever, a game of numbers until the world dies. There's a story written in us. Your parents' your father and his ice tunnels, your mother and her Church of Hope, both of them, whether they loved you or left you, are in you bone-deep, remembered in your blood.

The idea of roots setting a person free is counterintuitive, but deracination from the past, from land, from family, from mothers, makes for an unstable present. We must have, or we will always search for, a place to bury our bones.

Whoa, whoa, Nakano,” someone says, hoisting me up. In an instant, I recognize the “All-American” patch on the sleeve—Frankie. “Are you okay?” Covered in mud, with tears running down my face, I know I’ve never looked worse, but at this moment, I couldn’t care less. I fling myself into Frankie’s arms as he sets me on my feet. “No, I’m not.” He pats my shoulder. “That Tanaka boy break your heart?” With a wail, I bury my face in Frankie’s shoulder. He sighs, and through the haze of my anguish, I feel his arms go around me. “Want me to hit him for you?” he asks. I let out a sound that’s supposed to be a laugh, but it comes out more like a hiccup. “Oh, Frankie.” Leaning back, I smack him lightly in the chest. “That wouldn’t do any good.” He smirks. “But thanks for offering.” As we stand in the ice and mud, the last notes of “Harbor Lights” drift over the empty street. My eyes well up again. “C’mon, Nakano, don’t cry.” Gently, Frankie takes my hand, swaying with me as the next song begins. “What happened?” “He was kissing Gail Johnson.” I hiccup again. “During our song!” “That keto girl?” He has the audacity to laugh—a big, bellowing laugh that would sound harsh if it didn’t have such warmth to it. “Shit, Nakano, you’re twice the girl she is. Dumb boy doesn’t know what he’s missing.” I sniff. In his arms, I feel the chill beginning to ease from my bones. “You really think so?

Pale lights illuminate The Seven’s inner chamber. Once bright, the lamps are overgrown, dimmed by a sheet of stone. The room is octagonal, one side for the supplicant, unadorned. Six others each house a figure, statue-like, covered from head to toe in a thick layer of rock. All appear human shaped, with discernible wings, their postures neutral, dead. The seventh alcove lies empty. The Vagrant holds the sword up, letting it hum, calling, calling. As if returning from a dream, The Seven respond, slowly, sonorously. Splitting the shells that cover them, yawning into life. One by one, they catch the call and return it, till the harmony swells, reverberating from the walls and leaping up, vanishing into the fathomless, ceilingless dark above. Beautiful sounds mature, becoming words, musical, passed from one to the other, filling the chamber and the Vagrant’s ears. ‘Mourning has become morning, and we rejoice …’ ‘We rejoice in the proximity of your flame once more …’ ‘Once more we are Seven …’ ‘Are Seven together, come …’ ‘Come and join with us …’ ‘Join with us your light, diminished but still bright.’ Six arms drift out, gesturing to the last alcove, inviting. Neither Vagrant nor sword move. An eye studies the chamber, pausing at each alcove, noting the blades housed there, buried beneath layers of stone, useless. Rage simmers between sword and Vagrant. He takes a lock of hair from an inner pocket, throws it down on the floor between them. The sword lowers to point at it, then sweeps across the figures, then makes a hard stab towards the doors. Six faces freeze as the joyous echoes of song die out. The Vagrant swallows in a throat suddenly dry. Vesper dares a quick peek from behind the Vagrant’s coat. Alpha, of The Seven, sings out. The note begins wondrous but imperfect, the others soon match him. ‘We see now your pain, most furious …’ ‘Most furious you are and desperate to fight …’ ‘To fight once more, your desire …’ ‘Your desire we grant, go forth, take a second flame to our enemies …’ Voices come together, their force rocking the Vagrant backwards until he is pinned to the wall. Vesper holds his hand tightly, little feet rising from the floor. ‘Do not stop …’ ‘Stop when the cancer …’ ‘Cancer is cut …’ ‘Cut from the bones …’ ‘Bones and flesh …’ ‘Flesh of the land …’ ‘Land is clean!’ The Vagrant closes his eyes, squeezes them tight. He braces himself against the sound, pulling Vesper behind him raising the sword in front. Silvered wings unfurl protectively, shielding his face. An eye widens, blazing with indignation. ‘Then …’ ‘Then, then and only then …’ ‘Only then will you be free …’ ‘Be free to return to us …’ ‘Return to us and rejoice …’ ‘Rejoice for true, complete again. Immaculate.’ Six go quiet, demands echoing after. Vesper’s feet touch floor again and she wraps herself around a comforting leg. In the Vagrant’s hand, the sword trembles, humming dangerously. He takes a deep breath. From the depths of his stomach something is forged, travelling inevitably, gaining force as it goes, following tubes behind ribs, up through the chest, into the throat, teeth parting, allowing it outside. The Vagrant opens his eyes, they are full of weariness, disgust, conviction. ‘No.

A Song for Many Movements - 1934-1991 Nobody wants to die on the way caught between ghosts of whiteness and the real water none of us wanted to leave our bones on the way to salvation three planets to the left a century of light years ago our spices are separate and particular but our skins sing in complimentary keys at a quarter to eight mean time we were telling the same stories over and over and over. Broken down gods survive in the crevasses and mudpots of every beleaguered city where it is obvious there are too many bodies to cart to the ovens or gallows and our uses have become more important than our silence after the fall too many empty cases of blood to bury or burn and there will be no body left to listen and our labor has become more important than our silence Our labor has become more important than our silence.

Un Drallag.” I spell the name in Elikesh, though I never imagined him being a young man. “The sorcerer who created the God Knife,” I add. Alexus’s eyes light up. “Yes. You know this part?” I shrug. “Father told me a little. That Un Drallag fashioned the knife from the bone of a long-dead god. Thamaos?” “Yes, but Thamaos was very much alive when the knife was made. He cut himself open and tore out his own rib, offering it to Un Drallag for the creation of a weapon, so that he might defeat Urdin when the time came. But he failed. A battle ensued along the Jade River, close to Fia Drumera’s gates. Thamaos took Urdin from behind and drove the God Knife into his chest. But before Urdin died, he shoved the blade through his own body, driving it out his back and into Thamaos’s heart. The last two gods of Tiressia died that day. Summerlanders came, and the final deities of our lands were buried at the Grove of the Gods.” A gasp leaves me. “The Grove truly exists? I thought it was a myth. We all did.” Alexus runs a hand over his beard. “It’s a very real place. Ancient as Loria. Gods of other lands are even buried there. The Prince of the East knows this, as have other eastern rulers before him, but Fia Drumera has managed to keep the Eastlanders at bay. Now, however, they’ve learned that the queen’s greatest weakness might just be the isolated King of Winterhold, who will turn to nothing more than desert sand if they bring him across the Jade River. This is why I’m so selective about who I collect from the valley, and it’s why they don’t return home. They have a choice, but they know it’s best for all of Tiressia if they stay and learn and protect. After they’re told the importance of guarding Colden, they understand why we cannot tell the whole vale. Some secrets can change the world, and those we love most can be terribly tempting.

We were born in the mist of time on this land together with the oaks and fir trees. We are bound to it not only by the bread and existence it furnishes us as we toil on it, but also by all the bones of our ancestors who sleep in its ground. All our parents are here. All our memories, all our war-like glory, all our history here, in this land lies buried. . . . By what right do the Jews wish to take this land from us? On what historical argument do they base their pretensions and particularly the audacity with which they defy us Romanians, here in our own land? We are bound to this land by millions of tombs and millions of unseen threads that only our soul feels, and woe to those who shall try to snatch us from it.

That night, as the maid tugs the pins from her hair and frees her from her dress, Charlotte turns her own name over on her tongue, guessing at the taste.

How many hundreds of times had I driven on the Woodruff Parkway without ever knowing or caring who John Woodruff had been? He’d orchestrated a mass murder, enslaved the survivors, stolen Indian land with bullshit treaties he knew would hold up in white men’s courts. That made him a hero? They parked a statue of him on top of the buried bones of his victims? Named a four-lane road after him? Jesus Christ. In school they taught us that we were the good guys—the descendants of brave freedom seekers who had crossed the Atlantic and established their claim to the “New World.” Land where our fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring. But we weren’t the good guys. That was just propaganda. I recall what Javier said when he checked out this

We bury the things that have happened to us, hoping that they don't present themselves later in our adult life. Some of us never realize that subconsciously, these buried bones are what dictate our every navigation and interaction throughout life. Oddly enough, many of us connect with each other through trauma and pain: broken people finding other broken people in the hopes of fixing one another.

Don’t let them touch you, he said, like it was that fucking easy. I was starting to realize that Asar often gave advice that wasn’t very useful. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find on the path to the underworld. Dead, of course. But I was expecting, perhaps, disembodied souls, mournful ghosts. These were living corpses, still encased in the rotting remnants of their mortality. The stench of decay surrounded us as they descended, all open mouths and outstretched hands. Their hunger buried into my bones—deeper than flesh, like they’d slide inside our skin just to remember what it was like to be alive. I swung my sword clumsily to bat them back, but it occurred to me that perhaps a sharp piece of metal wouldn’t exactly do much to deter opponents who were already dead.

Down the hall from the Neanderthals rests the bones of a nine-thousand-year-old priestess known as the Shamaness of Bad Dürrenberg. Workers excavating a canal in Saxony-Anhalt discovered her grave in 1934. The woman, between thirty and forty years old, was buried sitting upright, with a six-month-old infant resting between her legs. Their grave was also filled with jewelry; red ochre; the bones of deer, turtles, cranes, and beavers; and mussel shells. Given the care—and the hoard—with which she and the infant were interred, the woman was probably important. Analysis of her skeleton showed that she had two malformed vertebrae in her neck, which could have restricted blood flow in her head and caused involuntary eye movements. She might have appeared to experience trances, or other mysterious behaviors that could have seemed

The body clings to life at any cost. It even eats itself. When there’s no food, it turns cannibal and devours its fat, then its muscle then its bones. I’ve seen soldiers, mad with hunger and cold, chop off their own arms and cook them. How long could you go on chopping? Both arms. Both legs. Ears. Slices from the trunk. You could chop yourself down to the very end and leave the heart to beat in its ransacked palace. No. Take the heart first. Then you don’t feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there’s no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It’s the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smoldering village. To survive the zero winter and that war we made a pyre of our hearts and put them aside forever. There’s no pawnshop for the heart. You can’t take it in and leave it awhile in a clean cloth and redeem it in better times. You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive. And if you refuse? If you felt for every man you murdered, every life you broke in two, every slow and painful harvest you destroyed, every child whose future you stole, madness would throw her noose around your neck and lead you into the dark woods where the rivers are polluted, and the birds are silent. When I say I lived with heartless men, I use the word correctly.

She taught me I didn't own things. I really liked the idea of possession. We don't own our mothers. We don't own our bodies or our land - maybe I'm unsure. We become the land when we are buried in it. Our grandmothers have been uprooted and shelved in boxes, place on slabs of plastic, or packed neatly in rooms or turned into artifact- all after proper burials. Indians aren't always allowed to rest in peace. I want to be buried in a bone garden with my ancestors someday. I'd like to belong to that.

Where others rot without, we rot within. Sabine suspects that it is starting: that some small piece of her has died, as Matteo said it would. She thought she would feel frightened, or at least disconcerted by the loss, but there is only a visceral relief, like shedding layers on a too-hot day, the absence like a breeze against bare skin. She exhales, feeling lighter than she has in years.

What are you?" she asks at last, and Sabine's mouth twitches in that old familiar way. "What am I?" she muses, almost to herself. "A widow." She tugs Charlotte forward, turns her in her arms as if they're dancing. "A feral rose." She lets go suddenly, and Charlotte stumbles, catches herself against the bedpost. But in the next breath, Sabine is there again, cool hand cupping her chin. "I am free." Those lantern eyes, the only thing she can make out in the dark. "Free from pain. Free from rules. Free from death. Free to live as I want. Free to take what I want. Free to be who I want. With whomever I want." Her fingers slide through Charlotte's hair, come to rest at the nape of her neck. "Is that what you want, Charlotte?

After the Austrian Socialists were destroyed, Alfred Hayes composed a poem about Otto Bauer, their leader, who was even then hiding from the police: “All honor to them, Bauer! For you/ History prepares a shameful grave/ A nameless spot buried under weed and stone/ Where creeping jackals shall come to howl/ Stirred by ancient kinship with those bones!” To read that poem and to think that its author once gave his mother the pangs of birth is to understand why, if the Old Testament God and all his vengeance did not exist, man would have had to invent them.

Reading as much as Charlotte did, she knew there were words, and words between words, ones that hid in the spaces, the pauses, the breaths. They hung on sentences, weighed them down with all the things that were not being said.

think of all the stories you’ll have to tell when you get back. After all, there is no art without life to inspire it.

Summer days were made for poetry. Daydreaming in verse.

You make it sound so simple." "Simple? No." Sabine discards one card and draws another. "But you cannot have what you want until you know what you want. And once you do know," she adds, "it's only a matter of what you're willing to do to get it.

She calls Ezra from a pay phone outside Union Station, voice shaking as she says, "It's her." "Are you sure?" he asks over the sound of an acoustic guitar. "Cities are big places, Lottie. We're not the only monsters out there. Sometimes bad things happen." She wants Ezra to be right, she really does.

María is not a patient pupil. Her temper is quick to burn, and hard to quench.

Sixty minutes to an hour. Twenty-four hours to a day. These are mortal measurements, for mortal lives. But when you live forever, time is something far less constant. When you are happy, a decade rushes by. When you are sad, a minute crawls. When you are lonely and afraid, time seems to lose all meaning. Blink, and a year is gone. Blink, and it has only been a night. Only, it is not a life at all. It is a prison sentence.

Some people keep their heart tucked so deep, they hardly know it’s there. But you have always worn it like a second skin. It will make your life harder. But it will also make it beautiful.

trades in two things, misery and gossip,

Maybe that’s what death is, and we just don’t know it. A chance to play again.

Never walk alone at night, they tell you, if you’re a girl. And it isn’t fair. Because the night is when the world is quiet.

one-night stands recorded in the blank last pages of a paperback she took from Penny’s place. The Secret History, it’s called. How fitting.

is easy, isn’t it, in retrospect? To spot the cracks. To see them spread. But in the moment, there is only the urge to mend each one. To smooth the lines. And keep the surface whole.

You will be happy there as well,” she said. “Do you know why?” She took something from her pocket, a small bundle of dried flowers, the ones that grew wild at the edges of the yard. “Because you are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil. And who knows, perhaps you will meet a worthy gardener.

face, makes her seem suddenly girlish, young. “One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.

The night is a hand on the back of her neck, heavy, unwelcome,

La piel se abre como un fruto maduro. La vida se le derrama sobre la lengua y le inunda la boca. Y si la sangre de la viuda era pan, esta es vino. Intensa, embriagadora y dulce.

[...] Pero esta vez, cuando sus cuerpos se encuentran, Alice oye que a la otra chica se le entrecorta el aliento, y una punzada de deseo la sonroja, la acalora, la hace anhelar. (Estás más que acostumbrada a desear cosas, pero que te deseen es harina de otro costal).

You will learn, it is better to bend than to break.” María stared into the hearth. “Why should I be the one who bends?

Wearing no scarf, no veil, her hair twisted up into a coil, the threads of copper catching fire every time she nears a lamp. She is a flame in the dark and the night is full of moths.

She knows these things, but there are no memories to go with them, and the few she has are like tea bags used too many times, all the flavor fading till it’s just tinted water.

Everyone insists it is her purpose, and it drives her mad, the idea that the shape of her body determines the shape her life must take.

Some things we do for pleasure, and others for purpose.

Great," mutters Alice. "You guys get pipe smoke and fresh bread, and I get anxiety. Doesn't seem fair

and felt beset by the strange mix of pleasure and grief that came with finishing a book.

Free from pain. Free from rules. Free from death. Free to live as I want. Free to take what I want. Free to be who I want. With whomever I want.

We grow together in this garden.

Like an anchor and buoy all at once

The point is, we find ways to hold on to who we were. In hope it will keep us from becoming someone else

Sabine is full of knowing what she does not want, but even after all these years, she hasn't found the words for what she does.

Because some things we do for pleasure, and others for purpose

She is used to wanting plenty but it is another thing to be wanted

After all, she's seen those girls who can wear anything, and make it look natural, effortless, chic--and then there's Alice, who always feel like she's playing dress-up in someone else's closet, and look that way, too. Nothing fits, even if it's fitted, because it's not really about the size of the body or how it fills the clothes, but how much space it takes up in the world.

Nature gives us what we need,

That her beauty is something she is expected to pass on instead of keep. That anything she makes will thrive while she is left to wither.