I’m airborne, weightless. Then.
As we walk I can hear the barrel of his gun, slapping against his thigh.
Maybe when you die time folds in on you, and you bounce around inside this little bubble forever. Like the after-death equivalent of the movie Groundhog Day.
There are arms reaching for me through the metal scaffolding: spider arms, huge and hairy. One of the guards grabs my wrist. I reach out and wrap a hand around the back of his.
Heather looked away again. “How do I know I can trust you?” she said finally. “That’s the thing about trust.” He crunched an ice cube between his teeth. “You don’t know.
Lena,” he says at last. “I think your mother is alive.
Even in a world turned upside down, a world of war and insanity, people hang their clothing; they fold their pants; they make their beds. It is the only way.
I’ve been in the Wilds for a month and a half now, and in that time I’ve almost forgotten about the fences. It’s amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.
At our heart, at our base, we are no better than animals.
I can’t stop thinking about what Caroline said to Minna about death. It isn’t an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we’ve nested in the walls like bacteria. We’ve taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing – we’ve made it our own. Or maybe it’s life that’s the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleaning, a cure.
This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.
Maybe for you there’s one thousand tomorrow’s, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around in it, let it slide like coins through your fingers.
Stop your idiocy, Sandra, please. For once in your death.
I pull The Book of Shhh onto my lap and flip through the pages. Even though the psalms and prayers are still familiar, the words look strange and their meanings are indecipherable: It’s like returning somewhere you haven’t been since you were a child, and finding everything smaller and disappointing.
Out of the ash, she knew, flowers would grow.
The bravery was in moving forward, no matter what.
It wasn’t easy.” The second one is a woman. I think her voice sounds familiar. As soon as they pass out of view, Coral.
Fred’s work, probably. I think about his fingers tightening around my throat. You will still learn to sit when I tell you.
He poisoned cats when he was little. He liked to watch them die.
The trees begin to thin, and we pass old, graffiti-covered benches and half-shell underpasses, speckled with mold; a roof, intact, sitting on a field of grass, as though the rest of the house has been simply suctioned underground; stretches of road that, leading nowhere, are now part of a nonsense-grammar. This is the language of the world before – a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair – before the blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.