Ribs Quotes

He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.

They say that the first woman was born of man, Altha,” she said to me once when I was a child, for this was what we had heard the rector say in church that Sunday. “That she came from his rib. But you must remember, my girl, that this is a lie.

The police always arrived too late, long after the echoes of screams had faded away and the blood had run dry, leaving dark stains across the floor. They would find no clues at all, no broken doors or windows, no fingerprints or stray hairs, as if the monster had never even existed. The only pattern between the deaths was the state of the bodies: rib cages opened up like books, organs spilled across the floor, and hearts mysteriously absent. So the humans prayed to gods who couldn’t intervene even if they’d wanted to, made shrines to benevolent Yōkai, and lit one thousand lights to banish the shadows. But none of it made any difference, because it wasn’t a Yōkai at all. It was me.