Older Sister Quotes

grief is a house where the chairs have forgotten how to hold us the mirrors how to reflect us the walls how to contain us grief is a house that disappears each time someone knocks at the door or rings the bell a house that blows into the air at the slightest gust that buries itself deep in the ground while everyone is sleeping grief is a house where no one can protect you where the younger sister will grow older than the older one where the doors no longer let you in or out

So Caymen..." "So, Xander..." "Like the islands." "What?" "Your name. Caymen. Like the Cayman Islands. Is that your mom's favourite place to visit or something?" "No, it's her third favourite place. I have an older brother named Paris and an older sister named Sydney." "Wow." He opens the bag, takes out a muffin, and hands it to me. The top glistens with sprinkled sugar. "Really?" I gently unwrap it. "No.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them… That’s what happens, like it or not. And because that’s what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear… Coach Bob knew it all along: you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows.

How would you feel about life if Death was your older sister?

I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.

Klaus had known for all twelve of his years that his older sister found a hand on her shoulder comforting - as long as the hand was attached to an arm, of course.

That's another thing that doesn't turn me off, sweetheart, knowin' that you come with those kids and you need to know that. You also need to know I want kids of my own, two of them. But I don't care, if this works out between me and you, that the kids we have will have an older brother and sister that don't have my blood, just my heart.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge, to get there-and then bolt across the chasm between you, before your bridge collapses.

Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. “Unworthy boys make a lot of noise,” Ma had said. She read a consolation for females. Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone.

As his older sister, it was my job to lie to him in the name of easing his troubled mind.

First job:Be older sister Second job:Cope with first job Third job:Get annoyed with jobs.

I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in and ask for a buttered biscuit or something and my mother, impatiently, would tell them no. But I would cry out and make a fuss until I got what I wanted. I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn't be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

I hate it too,” Violet said, and Klaus looked at his older sister with relief. Sometimes, just saying that you hate something, and having someone agree with you, can make you feel better about a terrible situation.

Just yesterday I was twenty and meeting some of these people⏤people that I'd spend my life with, that'd become my home. Just yesterday I was twenty⏤still deeply and desperately in love with my best friend. I grew older. We all grow older. In a blink of an eye, our children will grow old too. And I'll think: just yesterday they were twenty. Headed for college. Falling in love. Memories will flood behind us, the lake house no longer filled to the brim. As quiet as the moment we first walked in⏤and we'll sit on this hill. Feeling the stillness that exists. And then we end⏤we end where we started. Just us. All six of us.

I stand there for a while, then sit cross-legged before it and bow my head. "Hi, Metias," I say in a soft voice. "Today's my birthday. Do you know how old I am now?" I close me eyes, and through the silence surrounding me I think I can sense a ghostly hand on my shoulder, my brother's gentle presence that I'm able to feel every now and then, in these quiet moments. I imagine him smiling down at me, his expression relaxed and free. "I'm twenty-seven today," I continue in a whisper. My voice catches for a moment. "We're the same age now." For the first tine in my life, I am no longer his little sister. Next year I will step across the line and he will still be in the same place. From now on, I will be older than he ever was. I try to move on to other thoughts, so I tell my brother's ghost about my year, my struggles and successes in commanding my own patrols, my hectic workweeks. I tell him, as I always do, that I miss him. And as always, I can hear the whisper of his ghost against my ear, his gentle reply that he misses me too. That he's looking out for me, from wherever he is.

And what renders him so unmarriageable?” Eloise asked. Francesca leveled a serious stare at her older sister. Eloise was mad if she thought she should set her cap for Michael. “Well?” Eloise prodded. “He could never remain faithful to one woman,” Francesca said, “and I doubt you’d be willing to put up with infidelities.” “No,” Eloise murmured, “not unless he’d be willing to put up with severe bodily injury.

Even though I grew up two hours south, I had rarely ventured to Los Angeles. I soon learned that my dad wasn't totally off base when he said, "Los Angeles is like San Diego's older, uglier sister that has herpes." . . . "Remember. Family," he said. "Also, how do I get back to I-5? I hate this fucking city.

He was often ridiculed by the other children at his school and had shown up more than once with wide red welts on his arms which Lillian Jean, his older sister, had revealed with satisfaction were the result of his associating with us. Still, Jeremy continued to meet us. When

Ouch," he said. "Move your foot." "No." "Go away." "Glad to see you, too." "What are you doing here?" I asked. "You missed the bus," he said. "I'm sick." "Need chicken soup?" "Actually, it's my period," I lied. "Killer cramps." "Chocolate and a heating pad?" "How do you know that?" "I have an older sister and my mom is a kick-ass feminist," he said. "I'm probably the only guy in school who can buy tampons without having a seizure. Look, at that, I can even say the word. 'Tampon, tampon, tampon.' If you say it enough, it stops sounding like a word, know what I mean?

I know what you mean. I usually take it out on my older sister. You can lease her for a weekend or something if you need a psychological punching bag. I'll even give you a discount.

I’m twenty-seven today,” I continue in a whisper. My voice catches for a moment. “We’re the same age now.” For the first time in my life, I am no longer his little sister. Next year I will step across the line and he will still be in the same place. From now on, I will be older than he ever was.

A moment later, Helen had returned; she was walking slowly now, and carefully, her hand on the back of a thin boy with a mop of wavy brown hair. He couldn’t have been older than twelve, and Clary recognized him immediately. Helen, her hand firmly clamped around the wrist of a younger boy whose hands were covered with blue wax. He must have been playing with the tapers in the huge candelabras that decorated the sides of the nave. He looked about twelve, with an impish grin and the same wavy, bitter-chocolate hair as his sister. Jules, Helen had called him. Her little brother. The impish grin was gone now. He looked tired and dirty and frightened. Skinny wrists stuck out of the cuffs of a white mourning jacket whose sleeves were too long for him. In his arms he was carrying a little boy, probably not more than two years old, with the same wavy brown hair that he had; it seemed to be a family trait. The rest of his family wore the same borrowed mourning clothes: following Julian was a brunette girl about ten, her hand firmly clasped in the hold of a boy the same age: the boy had a sheet of tangled black hair that nearly obscured his face. Fraternal twins, Clary guessed. After them came a girl who might have been eight or nine, her face round and very pale between brown braids. The misery on their faces cut at Clary’s heart. She thought of her power with runes, wishing that she could create one that would soften the blow of loss. Mourning runes existed, but only to honor the dead, in the same way that love runes existed, like wedding rings, to symbolize the bond of love. You couldn’t make someone love you with a rune, and you couldn’t assuage grief with it, either. So much magic, Clary thought, and nothing to mend a broken heart. “Julian Blackthorn,” said Jia Penhallow, and her voice was gentle. “Step forward, please.” Julian swallowed and handed the little boy he was holding over to his sister. He stepped forward, his eyes darting around the room. He was clearly scouring the crowd for someone. His shoulders had just begun to slump when another figure darted out onto the stage. A girl, also about twelve, with a tangle of blond hair that hung down around her shoulders: she wore jeans and a t-shirt that didn’t quite fit, and her head was down, as if she couldn’t bear so many people looking at her. It was clear that she didn’t want to be there — on the stage or perhaps even in Idris — but the moment he saw her, Julian seemed to relax. The terrified look vanished from his expression as she moved to stand next to him, her face ducked down and away from the crowd. “Julian,” said Jia, in the same gentle voice, “would you do something for us? Would you take up the Mortal Sword?

I had to be the next family Alchemist. My sister... well, she's older, and usually it's the oldest kid who has to do the job. But, she's kind of... worthless. -Sydney to Rose

Christ. No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel’s sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches, God of the Mystery.

Sophia looked down her long nose at the girl. “Who are you?” “I’m Abigail, ma’am,” she said, curtsying. “This is my brother, Jamie. I apologize for him.” Sophia arched an eyebrow. “I’ll wager you do that quite a lot.” Abigail sighed, sounding world-weary. “Yes, I do.” “Good girl.” Sophia almost smiled. “Younger brothers can be a chore sometimes, but one must persevere.” “Yes, ma’am,” Abigail said solemnly. “Come on, Jamie,” Alistair said. “Let’s go into dinner before they form a Society for Bossy Older Sisters.

I once tried to give him a friendly little "drugs chat". He politely corrected me on every single fact, then said he'd noticed I drank above the recommended guidelines of Red Bull and did I think I might have an addiction? That was the last time I tried to act like the older sister.

Older sisters are much alike the world over: half a cup of love and half one of contempt.

Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. “Unworthy boys make a lot of noise,” Ma had said.

So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.

She was like a little sister I never wanted, and then as she grew older, as we grew older, she became something entirely different to me.

Beside the watch was a pearl bracelet she always wore. She never took it off. Will had given it to her when they had been married thirty years, smiling as fastened it on. He had had gray in his hair them, she knew, though she had never really seen it. As if her love had given him his own shape-shifting ability, no matter how much time had passed, when she looked at him, she always saw the wild, black-haired boy she had fallen in love with. It still seemed incredible to her sometimes that they had managed to grow old together, herself and Will Herondale, whom Gabriel Lightwood had once said would not live to be older than nineteen. They had been good friends with the Lightwoods too, through all those years. Of course Will could hardly not be friends with the man who was married to his sister. Both Cecily and Gabriel had seen Will on the day he dies, as had Sophie, though Gideon had himself passed away several years before.

Ours is a joint family. We live in the same house - my wife and I, my parents, my uncle and Malati. Malati is my older sister, back home now after having left her husband. It is natural to wonder, I suppose, why the six of us should want to live together. What can I say - it is one of the strengths of families to pretend that they desire what is unavoidable.

This wasn’t a way of getting over a passing crush on your older sister’s swain. This was the moon of Jupiter and the sun of Venus aligning in the sky over her head.

As anybody with two older sisters can tell you, a closed door is like a red rag to a bull. It cannot go unchallenged.

Tatiana knew that she belonged irrevocably to Alexander. She thought she could extricate herself from him, that she could go on with her life somehow, that he could go on with is. It was all a sham. This wasn't a way of getting over a passing crush on your older sister's swain. This was the moon of Jupiter and the sun of Venus aligning in the sky over her head.

Blake looked around and gulped. He'd forgotten about the mess on the floor. Chamber pot shards, his shaving kit, a towel or two... "I... ah..." It seemed to him that it was far easier to lie for the sake of national security than it was to his older sister. "Is that a bar of soap stuck to the wall?" Penelope asked. "Um... yes, it appears to be.

There were once two sisters who shared the same room, the same clothes, the same thoughts at the same moment. These two sisters did not have a mother but they had each other. The older sister walked ahead of the younger so the younger one always knew where to go. The older one took the younger to the river where they floated on their backs like dead men. The older girl would say: Dunk your head under a few inches, then open your eyes and look up at the sun The younger girl: I'll get water up my nose The older: C'mon, do it and so the younger girl did it and her whole world filled with light.

As if he were reading her thoughts, Klaus put a hand on Violet's shoulder, and she smiled at him. Klaus had known for all his twelve years that his older sister found a hand on her shoulder comforting- as long as the hand was attached to an arm, of course.

Sometimes I couldn't help thinking that the unluckiest thing about being the thirteenth child was having all those older brothers and sisters telling me what to do.

Los Angeles is like San Diego’s older, uglier sister that has herpes.

The two of them were like oil and water. Her older sister was forever stuck in surrogate mommy role. But Viviana had never needed, nor wanted a replacement mother. Fate had seen fit to remove her biological mother, so she figured that was the way it was supposed to be.

Silas continued, in his voice like velvet, "You had parents. An older sister. They were killed. I believe that you were to have been killed as well, and that you were not was due to chance, and the intervention of the Owenses." "And you," said Bod, who had had that night described to him over the years by many people, some of whom had even been there. It had been a big night in the graveyard. Silas said, "Out there, the man who killed your family is, I believe, still looking for you, still intends to kill you." Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.

Family… that was my older sister Tiffany as well. My emotional spectrum for her covered everything from “my dearest sister, foundation of my heart and soul” up to “you fucking bitch, go and get run over by a train, please”. We had quite a normal sibling relationship, I assume.

And do you want to hear something that was breaking my heart, day after day? I forgot the faces of my granddaughters in all that hatred. Hatred smothers all beauty. Beloved Isaboe has little resemblance to her older sisters, but your Phaedra — she made me remember those precious, precious girls, and I wasn’t angry anymore. I just missed them, and it’s the beauty in here,” she said, pointing to her chest, “that made me remember them. Her beauty.

My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sigh and make the best of it. I feel I’m older than they are, much older. I feel ancient.

Daemon is just .. you know, a bit overprotective when it comes to you.” His sister laughed. “A bit?” “Okay. A lot. It’s not against Archer. He’s actually a really good guy. He helped me – helped us – while we were with Daedalus, but he’s older, he’s different, and he –“ “Has a penis?” Dee supplied. “Because I think that’s Daemon’s main problem.

How hard could husbanding be? Don’t drink, don’t gamble, don’t bring hunting dogs to the table. Don’t be terrified of tooth-drawers. Don’t be stupid about money. Don’t go for a soldier. No hitting girls. He wasn’t drawn to violate any of these prohibitions. Assuming older sisters weren’t classified as girls. Maybe make that, No hitting girls first.

I depended on you....You're older, you're supposed to be my...my archive. That's what sisters do, remember for each other.

We were sisters. We felt each other’s pain. We caused each other’s pain. We knew the smell of each other’s morning breath. We made each other cry. We made each other laugh. We got angry, pinched, kicked, screamed at each other. We kissed, on the forehead, nose on nose, butterfly eyelashes swept against cheeks. We wore each other’s clothes. We stole from each other, treasured objects hidden under pillows. We defended each other. We lied to each other. We pretended to be older people, other people. We played dress up. We spied on each other. We possessed each other like shiny things. We loved each other with potent, fervent fury. Animal fury. Monstrous fury.

The sky looks comfortingly mundane compared to the garish kaleidoscope of the stained glass. It makes Rose yearn to be reliving any one of a thousand ordinary days spent with her ordinary older sister, who has now done this extraordinary thing and died.

Let me tell you a story, Alix. This ship…the Talia? It’s named after my father’s older sister. She killed herself when she was fourteen because she couldn’t stand living the horror of her life for another day. With her death she both condemned and freed my father from his monster of a father. I never knew the pain of her life or his. But I named this ship after her to remind me of all the children out there like her and Omari…the children out there like your sister who are silent in their pain. They have no voice and no hope. But I hear them. Every time I think of my parents. Every time I see Omari, I hear the sobs that are kept inside for fear of it making their lives worse, and I will not stand by and see your sister torn apart by an animal. You help me nail him and I swear to you, I will lay Merjack down at your feet and hold him there while you take your revenge. (Devyn)

Soon I will be older than him, but I'll always chase him anyway, like a little sister, and always he'll be running just along at the edges of things, and always he'll be turning a corner, just ahead.

My grandfather was crying. The kind of quiet that is quiet and a secret. The kind of crying that only I noticed. I thought about him going into my mom's room when she was little and hitting my mom and holding up her report card and saying that her bad grades would never happen again. And I think now that maybe he meant my older brother. Or my sister. Or me. That he would make sure that he was the one to work in a mill. I don't know if that's good or bad. I don't know if it's better to have your kids be happy and not go to college. I don't know if it's better to be close with your daughter or make sure she has a better life than you do. I just don't know.

Under the best of circumstances, middle school is a sixth-circle-of-hell situation, sandwiched somewhere between flaming tombs and flesh-eating harpies. It's the kind of situation that doesn't need gasoline on the fire, especially when said gasoline comes in the form of your older brother murdering the older sister of the third-most popular girl in school.

Don’t go sniffing around the older one. Piper,” Brendan muttered. “And don’t ask me to explain why, either.

I am not my sister. Words from the books curl around each other make little sense until I read them again and again, the story settling into memory. Too slow my teacher says. Read Faster. Too babyish, the teacher says. Read older. But I don't want to read faster or older or any way else that might make the story disappear too quickly from where it's settling inside my brain, slowly becoming a part of me. A story I will remember long after I've read it for the second, third, tenth, hundredth time.

As she grew older, Maddy discovered that she had disappointed almost everyone. An awkward girl with a sullen mouth, a curtain of hair, and a tendency to slouch, she had neither Mae's sweet nature nor sweet face. Her eyes were rather beautiful, but few people ever noticed this, and it was widely believed Maddy was ugly, a troublemaker, too clever for her own good, too stubborn - or too slack - to change. Of course, folk agreed that it was not her fault she was so brown or her sister so pretty, but a smile costs nothing, as the saying goes, and if only the girl had made an effort once in a while, or even showed a little gratitude for all the help and free advice, then maybe she would have settled down.

I’m fifteen and I feel like girl my age are under a lot of pressure that boys are not under. I know I am smart, I know I am kind and funny, and I know that everyone around me keeps telling me that I can be whatever I want to be. I know all this but I just don’t feel that way. I always feel like if I don’t look a certain way, if boys don’t think I’m ‘sexy’ or ‘hot’ then I’ve failed and it doesn’t even matter if I am a doctor or writer, I’ll still feel like nothing. I hate that I feel like that because it makes me seem shallow, but I know all of my friends feel like that, and even my little sister. I feel like successful women are only considered a success if they are successful AND hot, and I worry constantly that I won’t be. What if my boobs don’t grow, what if I don’t have the perfect body, what if my hips don’t widen and give me a little waist, if none of that happens I feel like what’s the point of doing anything because I’ll just be the ‘fat ugly girl’ regardless of whether I do become a doctor or not. I wish people would think about what pressure they are putting on everyone, not just teenage girls, but even older people – I watch my mum tear herself apart every day because her boobs are sagging and her skin is wrinkling, she feels like she is ugly even though she is amazing, but then I feel like I can’t judge because I do the same to myself. I wish the people who had real power and control the images and messages we get fed all day actually thought about what they did for once. I know the girls on page 3 are probably starving themselves. I know the girls in adverts are airbrushed. I know beauty is on the inside. But I still feel like I’m not good enough.

I don’t think you can even begin to understand what your words mean to me. Even if they were addressed to Forest in the beginning. You were a sister writing to her missing older brother. And I felt that pain as a brother who had lost the only sibling he ever had.

My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore. He’d watch a plane gaining altitude after taking off from Sky Harbor and he’d sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people. He was sensitive to the most incidental stimulus and he thought he could feel the object itself yearning to burst. All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. His sister used to tell him, Go ahead, blow it up, let me see you take that plane out of the sky with all two hundred people aboard, and it scared him to hear someone talk this way and it scared her too because she wasn’t completely convinced he could not do it. It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent. But Jeff got older and lost interest and conviction. He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things.

Miss Peyton,” Lillian Bowman asked, “what kind of man would be the ideal husband for you?” “Oh,” Annabelle said with irreverent lightness, “any peer will do.” “Any peer?” Lillian asked skeptically. “What about good looks?” Annabelle shrugged. “Welcome, but not necessary.” “What about passion?” Daisy inquired. “Decidedly unwelcome.” “Intelligence?” Evangeline suggested. Annabelle shrugged. “Negotiable.” “Charm?” Lillian asked. “Also negotiable.” “You don’t want much,” Lillian remarked dryly. “As for me, I would have to add a few conditions. My peer would have to be dark-haired and handsome, a wonderful dancer…and he would never ask permission before he kissed me.” “I want to marry a man who has read the entire collected works of Shakespeare,” Daisy said. “Someone quiet and romantic—better yet if he wears spectacles— and he should like poetry and nature, and I shouldn’t like him to be too experienced with women.” Her older sister lifted her eyes heavenward. “We won’t be competing for the same men, apparently.” Annabelle looked at Evangeline Jenner. “What kind of husband would suit you, Miss Jenner?” “Evie,” the girl murmured, her blush deepening until it clashed with her fiery hair. She struggled with her reply, extreme bashfulness warring with a strong instinct for privacy. “I suppose…I would like s-s-someone who was kind and…” Stopping, she shook her head with a self-deprecating smile. “I don’t know. Just someone who would l-love me. Really love me.” The words touched Annabelle, and filled her with sudden melancholy. Love was a luxury she had never allowed herself to hope for—a distinctly superfluous issue when her very survival was so much in question. However, she reached out and touched the girl’s gloved hand with her own. “I hope you find him,” she said sincerely. “Perhaps you won’t have to wait for long.

A son who will never be older than his motherland - neither older nor younger. There shall be two heads – but you will only see one – there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees. Newspaper praises him, two mothers raise him! Bicycles love him – but crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep, cobras will creep… Washing will hide him – voices will guide him! Friends will mutilate him – blood will betray him! Spittoons will brain him – doctors will drain him – jungle will claim him – wizards reclaim him! Soldiers will try him – tyrants will fry him… He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die before he is dead!

EJ cries, "We've been best friends since kindergarten. You can't become a babe slayer and leave me in the dust! I don't have an older sister. I'm disadvantaged. All I got is Emmy, who can only drop preschool wisdom like, 'No pull Barbie's hair!'" "That's probably some early girl wisdom. Nobody likes to get their hair pulled," I say. "Except this one chick in my porno; I think she's into it. I cant really tell, though. I wish they would slow down.

Sometimes a family was a mischievous magical boss, her magical rival turned friend, a magical girl who used to be a babysitter and now was like an older sister, and the person you didn't understand in the beginning but liked so much now. And sometimes it was arguments and sometimes it was hugs and sometimes it was banding together to fight a morally corrupt government body and sometimes it was just existing in the same space together as friends. But whatever this family was right now, whatever it was going to be, and however it would turn out, it was mine. And I knew that I belonged.

My father used to tease me at the table by implying that “cold Claire” had brought in the draft. I had three older sisters, all beautiful, and I was always less affected than them, slow to smile. I remember finding it extremely hard to open presents as a child because the requisite theatricality was too exhausting. My sisters forever humiliated me over a moment in fifth grade when I’d opened a present from my grandmother and declared, straight-faced, “I already have this.

Dear Delphine, When you are older I want you to find Chinua Achebe. I want you to read Things Fall Apart. Don't be hardheaded and try to read this book now. Don't be hardheaded, Delphine. You are the smart one, but you are not ready. You can read all its words. Even the African words. But you will not know what Achebe is saying. It is a bad thing to bite into a hard fruit with little teeth. You will say bad things about the fruit when the problem is your teeth. I want you to read this book. I want you to know Things Fall Apart. Fourteen is a good age to find Chinua Achebe. Nzila. Your Mother. P.S. For now you are eleven. Be eleven.

When I was younger, my brother told me that he had the power to shrink me to the size of an ant. In fact, he said, he used to have another sister, but he shrank her down and stepped on her. He also told me that when you became a grown-up, you were admitted into a private party that was full of monsters and horror movie characters. There was Chucky, drinking a cup of coffee. And the mummy on the cover of the Hardy Boys book that used to freak me out, except he was doing the twist while Jason from 'Friday the 13th' played the alto sax. He told me you stayed at the party as long as you had to, making conversation with these creatures, and that was why adults were never afraid of anything. I used to believe everything my brother told me, because he was older and I figured he knew more about the world. But as it turns out, being a grown-up doesn't mean you're fearless. It just means you fear different things.

I wanted to deny him, but that's the terrible power of a diary: it not only calls forth the person you used to be but rubs your nose in him, reminding you that not all change is evolutionary. More often than not, you didn't learn from your mistakes. You didn't get wiser, but simply older, growing from the twenty-five-year-old who got stoned and accidentally peed on his friend Katherine's kitten to the thirty-five-year-old who got drunk and peed in the sandbox at his old elementary school. "The sandbox!" my sister Amy said at the time. "Don't you realize that children have to pee in there?

From early childhood he had experienced the wish to die, to commit suicide, as they say, but never was totally concentrated. He could never come to terms with being born into a world that basically repulsed him in every detail from the very beginning. He grew older and thought that his wish to die would suddenly no longer be there, but this wish grew more intense from year to year, without ever becoming totally intense and concentrated. My constant curiosity got in the way of my suicide, so he said, I thought. We never forgive our fathers for having sired us, nor our mothers for having brought us into the world, he said, nor our sisters for continuing to be witnesses to our unhappiness. To exist means nothing other than we despair, he said. When I go to bed I have no other wise than to die, never to wake up, but then I wake up again and the awful process repeats itself, finally repeats itself for fifty years, he said. To think that for fifty years we don't wish for anything other than to be dead and are still alive and can't change it because we are thoroughly inconsistent, so he said. Because we are wretched, vile creatures. No musical ability! he cried out, no life ability!

He looked so glorious. Just like the knights I had dreamed about when I was six years old, whacking at brambles iin our garden, imagining I was fighting dragons and giants with a sword that made me invincible and wearing armor that protected me from all the things that frightened me - older kids, dogs, a storm in the knight, or my little sister's questions about when our father would be coming back.

Mrs. Spock: He's in his 80's now His face is showing his age Not quite the trim figure That he had on the old show But I've grown older too, Wider, and more creaky bones And "Bones" has travelled on But, still, "Live long and prosper!" Back when I was little Was always Mrs. Spock when Ever we played "Star Trek" With my sisters, as a child

There were times when she had an inkling of a situation not being fair, but she was accustomed to rationalizing things by telling herself that she was being a generous older sibling and that she shared with her sister because they were both girls. Jiyoung’s mother would praise the girls for taking good care of their brother and not competing for her love. Jiyoung thought it must be the big age gap. The more their mother praised, the more impossible it became for Jiyoung to complain.

She was my first crush. The first woman I ever masturbated about. My first Mrs. Robinson-like, older-woman fantasy. Sister Mary Beatrice Dugan. Yep, you heard me right - she's a nun. But not just any nun, kiddies. Sister Beatrice was a NILF. I don't need to spell that one our for you, do I?

Amelia and Poppy both glanced at their younger sister quizzically. “Do you know what we’re talking about, Bea?” Amelia asked. “Yes, of course. Merripen’s in love with her. I knew it a long time ago, from the way he washed her window.” “Washed her window?” both older sisters asked at the same time. “Yes, when we lived in the cottage at Primrose Place. Win’s room had a casement window that looked out onto the big maple tree— do you remember? After the scarlet fever, when Win couldn’t get out of bed for the longest time and she was too weak to hold a book, she would just lie there and watch a birds’ nest on one of the tree limbs. She saw the baby swallows hatch and learn to fly. One day she complained that the window was so dirty, she could barely see through it, and it made the sky look grayish. So from then on Merripen always kept the glass spotless. Sometimes he climbed a ladder to wash the outside, and you know how afraid of heights he is. You never saw him do that?” “No,” Amelia said with difficulty, her eyes stinging. “I didn’t know he did that.” “Merripen said the sky should always be blue for her,” Beatrix said. “And that was when I knew he … are you crying, Poppy?” Poppy used a napkin to dab at the corners of her eyes. “No. I just inh-haled some pepper.” “So did I,” Amelia said, blowing her nose.

He raises his brows at me, trying not to laugh. “You’ve eaten a h—fuck it. I can’t say it.” Ryke Meadows can’t say the word hoe. “My older brother, ladies and gentleman,” Lo says loudly, “the most decent fucking guy you’ll ever meet.” There’s nothing but sincerity in his eyes. Ryke flips him off.

That night, when SanJuanna had cleared the main course and brought dessert in, my mother called for quiet and said, "Boys, I have an announcement to make. Your sister made the apple pies tonight. I'm sure we will all enjoy them very much." "Can I learn how, ma'am?" said Jim Bowie. "No, J.B. Boys don't bake pies," Mother said. "Why not?" he said. "They have wives who make pies for them." "But I don't have a wife." "Darling, I'm sure you will have a very nice one someday when you're older, and she'll make you many pies. Calpurnia, would you care to serve?" Was there any way I could have a wife, too? I wondered as I cut through the browned C and promptly shattered the entire crust.

Half of my heart says it would be so simple to share what we've got here with the Charynites in the valley. But the other half of me says I don't want to share it with the enemy, and then I have to work out who the enemy is. I mean, look at what we have," he said, pointing outside at the lushness of their mountain, even in the winter haze. "And look how little they have down there. And why don't I care?" Yata laughed. "Well, from where I'm sitting, it looks as if you do care, Lucian," she said. "Too much in one place, not enough in another, and wouldn't it be simpler if we all shared? Yes, it would be so simple to share. But there's no place for being simple when blood has been shed and the people we love have been torn from us. But forgiveness has to start somewhere. It started with Phaedra. The Monts learned not to hate all Charynites because of her. I learned. Because you may not have seen it, my darling boy, but I hated with a fierceness I can't describe. And do you want to hear something that was breaking my heart, day after day? I forgot the faces of my granddaughters in all that hatred. Hatred smothers all beauty. Beloved Isaboe has little resemblance to her older sisters, but your Phaedra - she made me remember those precious, precious girls, and I wasn't angry anymore. I just missed them, and it's the beauty in here," she said, pointing to her chest, "that made me remember them. Her beauty.

Fate has always been the realm of the gods, though even the gods are subject to it. In ancient Greek mythology, the Three Sisters of Fate spin out a person's destiny within three nights of their birth. Imagine your newborn child in his nursery. It's dark and soft and warm, somewhere between two and four a.m., one of those hours that belong exclusively to the newly born or the dying. The first sister - Clotho - appears next to you. She's a maiden, young and smooth. In her hands she holds a spindle, and on it she spins the thrads of your child's life. Next to her is Lachesis, older and more matronly than her sister. In her hands, she holds the rod used to mesure the thread of life. The length and destiny of your child's life is in her hands. Finally we have Atropos - old, haggardly. Inevitable. In her hands she holds the terrible shears she'll use to cut the thread of your child's life. She determines the time and manner of his or her death. Imagine the awesome and awful sight of these three sisters pressed together, presiding over his crib, dermining his future. In modern times, the sisters have largely disappeared from the collective consiousness, but the idea of Fate hasn't. Why do we still believe? Does itmake tragedy more bearable to believe that we ourselves had no hand in it, that we couldn't have prevented it? It was always ever thus. Things happen for a reason, says Natasha's mother. What she means is Fate has a Reason and, though you may not know it, there's a certain comfort in knowing that there's a Plan.

Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

Hi, Metias,” I say in a soft voice. “Today’s my birthday. Do you know how old I am now?” I close my eyes, and through the silence surrounding me I think I can sense a ghostly hand on my shoulder, my brother’s gentle presence that I'm able to feel every now and then, in these quiet moments. I imagine him smiling down at me, his expression relaxed and free. “I'm twenty-seven today,” I continue in a whisper. My voice catches for a moment. “We’re the same age now.” For the first time in my life, I am no longer his little sister. Next year I will step across the line and he will still be in the same place. From now on, I will be older than he ever was.

Boys are found everywhere- on top of, underneath, inside of, climbing on, swinging from, running around or jumping to. Mothers love them, little girls hate them, older sisters and brothers tolerated them, adults ignore them and Heaven protects them. A boy is Truth with dirt on its face, Beauty with a cut on its finger, Wisdom with bubble gum in its hair and the Hope of the future with a frog in its pocket. A boy is a magical creature- you can lock out of your workshop, but you can't lock him out of your heart. You can get him out of your study, but you can't get him out of your mind. Might as well give up- he is your captor, your jailor, your boss and your master- a freckled-faced, pint-sized, cat-chasing bundle of noise. But when you come home at night with only the shattered pieces of your hopes and dreams, he can mend them like new with two magic words- 'Hi, Dad!

Attention, God the Judge, God the Father, who Art in Heaven, give me one miracle, please. If You exist as I know You do, even if no one else in the world believes in You, please give me a brain tumor. Please tear my limbs from their sockets and let the backseat and my older sister be totally covered with blood. Please make me dumb and blind and deaf, please make me a martyr, please, dear heavenly Father. Tear my heart right from my chest. Drive spikes into my eyes and let hot lava shoot out of my mouth. Make me silent and thoroughly dead, but please hurry. Before we get home, before we reach the next stoplight, let the only sound be no sound, the silence of my death burning in the empty sky. If You are a mighty and true God, if You are not just a dream I have made up, please, before another hour, another minute passes, let the wire in my bra poke through my heart. Dear Lord, please, please, give me this one miracle. I have begged You every day, every evening, so please, let Your will be done, let Your will be done. Give me a gruesome death as fast as You possibly can. Thank you, God. Amen.

Someday you will murder your father and be with your mother, he said.” Once I’ve spoken this, put this thought into concrete words, a hollow feeling grabs hold of me. And inside that hollow, my heart pounds out a vacant, metallic rhythm. Expression unchanged, Oshima gazes at me for a long time. “So he said that someday you would kill your father with your own hands, that you would sleep with your mother.” I nod a few more times. “The same prophecy made about Oedipus. Though of course you knew that.” I nod. “But that’s not all. There’s an extra ingredient he threw into the mix. I have a sister six years older than me, and my father said I would sleep with her, too.” “Your father actually said this to you?” “Yeah. I was still in elementary school then, and didn’t know what he meant by ‘be with.’ It was only a few years later that I caught on.” Oshima doesn’t say anything. “My father told me there was nothing I could do to escape this fate. That prophecy is like a timing device buried inside my genes, and nothing can ever change it. I will kill my father and be with my mother and sister.

I don't know for sure what ever became of Hatsumomo. A few years after the war, I heard she was making a living as a prostitute in the Miyagawa-cho district. She couldn't have been there long, because on the night I heard it, a man at the same party swore that if Hatsumomo was a prostitute, he would find her and give her some business of his own. He did go looking for her, but she was nowhere to be found. Over the years, she probably succeeded in drinking herself to death. She certainly wouldn't have been the first geisha to do it. In just the way that a man can grow accustomed to a bad leg, we'd all grown accustomed to having Hatsumomo in our okiya. I don't think we quite understood all the ways her presence had afflicted us until long after she'd left, when things that we hadn't realized were ailing slowly began to heal. Even when Hatsumomo had been doing nothing more than sleeping in her room, the maids had known she was there, and that during the course of the day she would abuse them. They'd lived with the kind of tension you feel if you walk across a frozen pond whose ice might break at any moment. And as for Pumpkin, I think she'd grown to be dependent on her older sister and felt strangely lost without her. I'd already become the okiya's principal asset, but even I took some time to weed out all the peculiar habits that had taken root because of Hatsumomo. Every time a man looked at me strangely, I found myself wondering if he'd heard something unkind about me from her, even long after she was gone. Whenever I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the okiya, I still kept my eyes lowered for fear that Hatsumomo would be waiting there on the landing, eager for someone to abuse. I can't tell you how many times I reached that last step and looked up suddenly with the realization that there was no Hatsumomo, and there never would be again. I knew she was gone, and yet the very emptiness of the hall seemed to suggest something of her presence. Even now, as an older woman, I sometimes lift the brocade cover on the mirror of my makeup stand, and have the briefest flicker of a thought that I may find her there in the glass, smirking at me.

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up "by hand". Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand. She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand.

We were sisters. We felt each other's pain. We caused each other's pain. We knew the smell of each other's morning breath. We made each other cry. We made each other laugh. We got angry, pinched, kicked, screamed at each other. We kissed, on the forehead, nose on nose, butterfly eyelashes swept against cheeks. We wore each other's clothes. We stole from each other, treasured objects hidden under pillows. We defended each other. We lied to each other. We pretended to be older people, other people. We played dress up. We spied on each other. We possessed each other like shiny things. We loved each other with potent, fervent fury. Animal fury. Monstrous fury. My sisters. My blood. My skin. What a gruesome bond we shared.

I take the comb from a pocket of my new dress and then hesitate. If I begin to untangle my nimbus of snarls, he will see how badly my hair is matted and be reminded of where he found me. He stands. Good. He will leave, and then I will be able to wrangle my hair alone. But instead he steps behind me and takes the comb from my hands. 'Let me do that,' he says, taking strands of my hair in his fingers. 'It's the colour of primroses.' My shoulders tense. I am unused to people touching me. 'You don't need to-' I start. 'It's no trouble,' he says. 'I had three older sisters brushing and braiding mine, no matter how I howled. I had to learn to do theirs, in self-defence. And my mother...' His fingers are clever. He holds each lock at the base, slowly teasing out the knots at the very end and then working backward to the scalp. Under his hands, it becomes smooth ribbons. If I had done this, I would have yanked half of it out in frustration. 'Your mother...,' I echo, prompting him to continue in a voice that shakes only a little. He begins to braid, sweeping my hair up so that thick plaits become something like his circlet, wrapping around my head. 'When we were in the mortal world, away from her servants, she needed help arranging it.' His voice is soft. This, along with the slightly painful pull against my scalp, the brush of his fingertips against my neck as he separates a section, the slight frown of concentration on his face, is overwhelming. I am not accustomed to someone being this close. When I look up, his smile is all invitation. We are no longer children, playing games and hiding beneath his bed, but I feel as though this is a different kind of game, one where I do not understand the rules. With a shiver, I take up the mirror from the dresser. In this hair, and with this dress, I look pretty. The kind of pretty that allows monsters to deceive people into forests, into dances where they will find their doom.

What finally turned me back toward the older traditions of my own [Chickasaw] and other Native peoples was the inhumanity of the Western world, the places--both inside and out--where the culture's knowledge and language don't go, and the despair, even desperation, it has spawned. We live, I see now, by different stories, the Western mind and the indigenous. In the older, more mature cultures where people still live within the kinship circles of animals and human beings there is a connection with animals, not only as food, but as 'powers,' a word which can be taken to mean states of being, gifts, or capabilities. I've found, too, that the ancient intellectual traditions are not merely about belief, as some would say. Belief is not a strong enough word. They are more than that: They are part of lived experience, the on-going experience of people rooted in centuries-old knowledge that is held deep and strong, knowledge about the natural laws of Earth, from the beginning of creation, and the magnificent terrestrial intelligence still at work, an intelligence now newly called ecology by the Western science that tells us what our oldest tribal stories maintain--the human animal is a relatively new creation here; animal and plant presences were here before us; and we are truly the younger sisters and brothers of the other animal species, not quite as well developed as we thought we were. It is through our relationships with animals and plants that we maintain a way of living, a cultural ethics shaped from an ancient understanding of the world, and this is remembered in stories that are the deepest reflections of our shared lives on Earth. That we held, and still hold, treaties with the animals and plant species is a known part of tribal culture. The relationship between human people and animals is still alive and resonant in the world, the ancient tellings carried on by a constellation of stories, songs, and ceremonies, all shaped by lived knowledge of the world and its many interwoven, unending relationships. These stories and ceremonies keep open the bridge between one kind of intelligence and another, one species and another. (from her essay "First People")

When The Matrix debuted in 1999, it was a huge box-office success. It was also well received by critics, most of whom focused on one of two qualities—the technological (it mainstreamed the digital technique of three-dimensional “bullet time,” where the on-screen action would freeze while the camera continued to revolve around the participants) or the philosophical (it served as a trippy entry point for the notion that we already live in a simulated world, directly quoting philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 reality-rejecting book Simulacra and Simulation). If you talk about The Matrix right now, these are still the two things you likely discuss. But what will still be interesting about this film once the technology becomes ancient and the philosophy becomes standard? I suspect it might be this: The Matrix was written and directed by “the Wachowski siblings.” In 1999, this designation meant two brothers; as I write today, it means two sisters. In the years following the release of The Matrix, the older Wachowski (Larry, now Lana) completed her transition from male to female. The younger Wachowski (Andy, now Lilly) publicly announced her transition in the spring of 2016. These events occurred during a period when the social view of transgender issues radically evolved, more rapidly than any other component of modern society. In 1999, it was almost impossible to find any example of a trans person within any realm of popular culture; by 2014, a TV series devoted exclusively to the notion won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series. In the fifteen-year window from 1999 to 2014, no aspect of interpersonal civilization changed more, to the point where Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner attracted more Twitter followers than the president (and the importance of this shift will amplify as the decades pass—soon, the notion of a transgender US president will not seem remotely implausible). So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning. The idea of a character choosing between swallowing a blue pill that allows him to remain a false placeholder and a red pill that forces him to confront who he truly is becomes a much different metaphor. Considered from this speculative vantage point, The Matrix may seem like a breakthrough of a far different kind. It would feel more reflective than entertaining, which is precisely why certain things get remembered while certain others get lost.

The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after the possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down -- and plummeted is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother's nose and doesn't need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother's bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, would be buried an arm's length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother's prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother's portrait made, he should have had his made, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother's nose, he hadn't been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he'd believed that plummet was as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arms' reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents' house his portrait hangs within arm's reach of his older brother's, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.

Jill was born into an inner-city home. Her father began having sex with Jill and her sister during their preschool years. Her mother was institutionalized twice because of what used to be termed “nervous breakdowns.” When Jill was 7 years old, her agitated dad called a family meeting in the living room. In front of the whole clan, he put a handgun to his head, said, “You drove me to this,” and then blew his brains out. The mother’s mental condition continued to deteriorate, and she revolved in and out of mental hospitals for years. When Mom was home, she would beat Jill. Beginning in her early teens, Jill was forced to work outside the home to help make ends meet. As Jill got older, we would have expected to see deep psychiatric scars, severe emotional damage, drugs, maybe even a pregnancy or two. Instead, Jill developed into a charming and quite popular young woman at school. She became a talented singer, an honor student, and president of her high-school class. By every measure, she was emotionally well-adjusted and seemingly unscathed by the awful circumstances of her childhood. Her story, published in a leading psychiatric journal, illustrates the unevenness of the human response to stress. Psychiatrists long have observed that some people are more tolerant of stress than others.

The white woman across the aisle from me says 'Look, look at all the history, that house on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ' as she points out the window past me into what she has been taught. I have learned little more about American history during my few days back East than what I expected and far less of what we should all know of the tribal stories whose architecture is 15,000 years older than the corners of the house that sits museumed on the hill. 'Walden Pond, ' the woman on the train asks, 'Did you see Walden Pond? ' and I don't have a cruel enough heart to break her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds on my little reservation out West and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane, the city I pretended to call my home. 'Listen, ' I could have told her. 'I don't give a shit about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories around that pond before Walden's grandparents were born and before his grandparents' grandparents were born. I'm tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too, because that's redundant. If Don Henley's brothers and sisters and mothers and father hadn't come here in the first place then nothing would need to be saved.' But I didn't say a word to the woman about Walden Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted that I thought to bring her an orange juice back from the food car. I respect elders of every color. All I really did was eat my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out another little piece of her country's history while I, as all Indians have done since this war began, made plans for what I would do and say the next time somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea-cosy. I can't say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring - I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn't a very good poem. I have decided my best poetry is so bad that I mustn't write any more of it. Drips from the roof are plopping into the water-butt by the back door. The view through the windows above the sink is excessively drear. Beyond the dank garden in the courtyard are the ruined walls on the edge of the moat. Beyond the moat, the boggy ploughed fields stretch to the leaden sky. I tell myself that all the rain we have had lately is good for nature, and that at any moment spring will surge on us. I try to see leaves on the trees and the courtyard filled with sunlight. Unfortunately, the more my mind's eye sees green and gold, the more drained of all colour does the twilight seem. It is comforting to look away from the windows and towards the kitchen fire, near which my sister Rose is ironing - though she obviously can't see properly, and it will be a pity if she scorches her only nightgown. (I have two, but one is minus its behind.) Rose looks particularly fetching by firelight because she is a pinkish person; her skin has a pink glow and her hair is pinkish gold, very light and feathery. Although I am rather used to her I know she is a beauty. She is nearly twenty-one and very bitter with life. I am seventeen, look younger, feel older. I am no beauty but I have a neatish face. I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic - two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud. I must admit that our home is an unreasonable place to live in. Yet I love it. The house itself was built in the time of Charles II, but it was grafted on to a fourteenth-century castle that had been damaged by Cromwell. The whole of our east wall was part of the castle; there are two round towers in it. The gatehouse is intact and a stretch of the old walls at their full height joins it to the house. And Belmotte Tower, all that remains of an even older castle, still stands on its mound close by. But I won't attempt to describe our peculiar home fully until I can see more time ahead of me than I do now. I am writing this journal partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel - I intend to capture all our characters and put in conversations. It ought to be good for my style to dash along without much thought, as up to now my stories have been very stiff and self-conscious. The only time father obliged me by reading one of them, he said I combined stateliness with a desperate effort to be funny. He told me to relax and let the words flow out of me.

But Little Grandmother did not keep in touch with her namesake, my mother, Margaret Morris. News about Will Morris's younger daughter reached the "white" side through Mamie. They knew where she was, what she was doing, and who she was doing it with. Most important, they knew she had chosen to stay negro. It is still a matter of speculation as to why my mother's father or one of her much older brothers or her sister did not keep in touch with her and her younger brother. Over the years, Aunt Mamie and my mother's various guardians supplied different explanations. The times were hard. They were bad for mulattoes and worse for "real" Negroes. There was little money around. Her father drank, drifted and could not keep jobs. Her teenage siblings could barely keep jobs ...... She was too dark, revealing both the Negro and swarthy Italian strains of her ancestry. Her color would give them away in their new white settings. All of these reasons were plausible. None of them sufficed. None could take away the pain, the anger, the isolation, the questions.

Charley looked over at him. "About how much you and Jesse have in common." Jesse said, "Why don't you tell it, Bob; if you remember." Bob inched forward in his chair. "Well, if you'll pardon my saying so, it is interesting, the many ways you and I overlap and whatnot. You begin with my daddy, J.T. Ford. J stands for James! And T is Thomas, meaning 'twin.' Your daddy was a pastor of the New Hope Baptist Church; my daddy was part-time pastor of a church at Excelsior Springs. You're the youngest of the three James boys; I'm the youngest of the five Ford boys. You had twins as sons, I had twins as sisters. Frank is four and a half years older than you, which incidentally is the difference between Charley and me, the two outlaws in the Ford clan. Between us is another brother, Wilbur here (with six letters in his name); between Frank and you was a brother, Robert, also with six letters. Robert died in infancy, as most everyone knows, and he was named after your father, Robert, who was remembered by your brother's first-born, another Robert. Robert, of course, is my Christian name. My uncle, Robert Austin Ford, has a son named Jesse James Ford. You have blue eyes; I have blue eyes. You're five feet eight inches tall; I'm five feet eight inches tall. We're both hot-tempered and impulsive and devil-may-care. Smith and Wesson is our preferred make of revolver. There's the same number of letters and syllables in our names; I mean, Jesse James and Robert Ford. Oh me, I must've had a list as long as your nightshirt when I was twelve, but I lost some curiosities over the years.

One article on reproductive strategies was titled "Sneaky Fuckers." Kya laughed. As is well known, the article began, in nature, usually the males with the most prominent secondary sexual characteristics, such as the biggest antlers, deepest voices, broadest chests, and superior knowledge secure the best territories because they have fended off weaker males. The females choose to mate with these imposing alphas and are thereby inseminated with the best DNA around, which is passed on to the female's offspring- one of the most powerful phenomena in the adaptation and continuance of life. Plus, the females get the best territory for their young. However, some stunted males, not strong, adorned, or smart enough to hold good territories, possess bags of tricks to fool the females. They parade their smaller forms around in pumped-up postures or shout frequently- even if in shrill voices. By relying on pretense and false signals, they manage to grab a copulation here or there. Pint-sized male bullfrogs, the author wrote, hunker down in the grass and hide near an alpha male who is croaking with great gusto to call in mates. When several females are attracted to his strong vocals at the same time, and the alpha is busy copulating with one, the weaker male leaps in and mates one of the others. The imposter males were referred to as "sneaky fuckers." Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. "Unworthy boys make a lot of noise," Ma had said. She read a consolation for females. Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone. Another article delved into the wild rivalries between sperm. Across most life-forms, males compete to inseminate females. Male lions occasionally fight to the death; rival bull elephants lock tusks and demolish the ground beneath their feet as they tear at each other's flesh. Though very ritualized, the conflicts can still end in mutilations. To avoid such injuries, inseminators of some species compete in less violent, more creative methods. Insects, the most imaginative. The penis of the male damselfly is equipped with a small scoop, which removes sperm ejected by a previous opponent before he supplies his own. Kya dropped the journal on her lap, her mind drifting with the clouds. Some female insects eat their mates, overstressed mammal mothers abandon their young, many males design risky or shifty ways to outsperm their competitors. Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick and the tock of life carried on. She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. Surely for humans there was more.

Not a single family finds itself exempt from that one haunted casualty who suffered irreparable damage in the crucible they entered at birth. Where some children can emerge from conditions of soul-killing abuse and manage to make their lives into something of worth and value, others can’t limp away from the hurts and gleanings time decanted for them in flawed beakers of memory. They carry the family cross up the hill toward Calvary and don’t mind letting every other member of their aggrieved tribe in on the source of their suffering. There is one crazy that belongs to each of us: the brother who kills the spirit of any room he enters; the sister who’s a drug addict in her teens and marries a series of psychopaths, always making sure she bears their children, who carry their genes of madness to the grave. There’s the neurotic mother who’s so demanding that the sound of her voice over the phone can cause instant nausea in her daughters. The variations are endless and fascinating. I’ve never attended a family reunion where I was not warned of a Venus flytrap holding court among the older women, or a pitcher plant glistening with drops of sweet poison trying to sell his version of the family maelstrom to his young male cousins. When the stories begin rolling out, as they always do, one learns of feuds that seem unbrokerable, or sexual abuse that darkens each tale with its intimation of ruin. That uncle hates that aunt and that cousin hates your mother and your sister won’t talk to your brother because of something he said to a date she later married and then divorced. In every room I enter I can sniff out unhappiness and rancor like a snake smelling the nest of a wren with its tongue. Without even realizing it, I pick up associations of distemper and aggravation. As far as I can tell, every family produces its solitary misfit, its psychotic mirror image of all the ghosts summoned out of the small or large hells of childhood, the spiller of the apple cart, the jack of spades, the black-hearted knight, the shit stirrer, the sibling with the uncontrollable tongue, the father brutal by habit, the uncle who tried to feel up his nieces, the aunt too neurotic ever to leave home. Talk to me all you want about happy families, but let me loose at a wedding or a funeral and I’ll bring you back the family crazy. They’re that easy to find.

Once there was a little girl who played her music for a little boy in the wood. She was small and dark, he was tall and fair, and the two of them made a fancy pair as they danced together, dancing to the music the little girl heard in her head. Her grandmother had told her to beware the wolves that prowled in the wood, but the little girl knew the little boy was not dangerous, even if he was the king of the goblins. Will you marry me, Elisabeth? the little boy asked, and the little girl did not wonder at how he knew her name. Oh, she replied, but I am too young to marry. Then I will wait, the little boy said. I will wait as long as you remember. And the little girl laughed as she danced with the Goblin King, the little boy who was always just a little older, a little out of reach. As the seasons turned and the years passed, the little girl grew older but the Goblin King remained the same. She washed the dishes, cleaned the floors, brushed her sister’s hair, yet still ran to the forest to meet her old friend in the grove. Their games were different now, truth and forfeit and challenges and dares. Will you marry me, Elisabeth? the little boy asked, and the little girl did not yet understand his question was not part of a game. Oh, she replied, but you have not yet won my hand. Then I will win, the little boy said. I will win until you surrender. And the little girl laughed as she played against the Goblin King, losing every hand and every round. Winter turned to spring, spring to summer, summer into autumn, autumn back into winter, but each turning of the year grew harder and harder as the little girl grew up while the Goblin King remained the same. She washed the dishes, cleaned the floors, brushed her sister’s hair, soothed her brother’s fears, hid her father’s purse, counted the coins, and no longer went into the woods to see her old friend. Will you marry me, Elisabeth? the Goblin King asked. But the little girl did not reply.