I did not want to die. More than that, I did not want to die as Ursula Monkton had died, beneath the rending talons and beaks of things that may not even have had legs or faces.
I did not want to die at all. Understand that. But I could not let everything be destroyed, when I had it in my power to stop the destruction.
You can’t drink the water from the sea, can you? Too salty. Like drinking life’s blood.
The room was freezing. It smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives...
You’re weird,” she said. “You don’t have any friends.” “I didn’t come here for friends,” said Bod truthfully. “I came here to learn.
I quite like lessons,” said Bod. “If you paid more attention to yours, you wouldn’t have to blackmail younger kids for pocket money.
It is a tragedy, is it not? The little faces on the milk-cartons – although I can’t remember the last time I saw a kid on a milk-carton – and on the walls of freeway rest areas. Have you seen me? they ask. A deeply existential question at the best of times. Have you seen me?
He will sweep it up – everything you left behind when you woke. And then he will burn it, to leave the stage fresh for your dreams tomorrow.
Political movements, personal movements, all begin with people imagining another way of existing.
She intoxicated him: he was breathing her, sensing her through the pores of his skin.
The islanders know how to find it. But they are too wise to come here, to take its gold. They say that the cave makes you evil: that each time you visit it, each time you enter to take gold, it eats the good in your soul, so they do not enter.
In my family ‘adventure’ tends to be used to mean ‘any minor disaster we survived’ or even ‘any break from routine’. Except by my mother, who still uses it to mean ‘what she did that morning’. Going to the wrong part of a supermarket car park and, while looking for her car, getting into a conversation with someone whose sister, it turns out, she knew in the 1970s would qualify, for my mother, as a full-blown adventure.
I knew enough about adults to know that if I did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed.
The best advice I can give on this is, once it’s done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you’re ready, pick it up and read it, as if you’ve never read it before. If there are things you aren’t satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that’s revision.
And I remembered. I would not be the person I am without the authors who made me what I am- the special ones, the wise ones, sometimes just the ones who got there first. It’s not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It’s the most important thing there is.
Proper bread was white, and pre-sliced, and tasted like almost nothing: that was the point.
Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me. Had you told me that I was seven again, I might have half believed you, for a moment.
If you have nothing left to want, then you just wait. Until there’s nothing left to wait for.
Look... it’s not that easy. Let me tell you what you get. You get life, and breath, a world to walk and a path through the world – and the free will to wander the world as you choose.
It won’t last forever,” said Wednesday. “Nothing does.