I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.
She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.
I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.
Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.
It’s always too late for sorries, but I appreciate the sentiment.
Words save our lives, sometimes.
But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept.
I would read. I would explore.
I was not scared of anything, when I read my book...
This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.
You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.
Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easily. They want such simple things.
I couldn’t get you to the ocean, but there was nothing stopping me bringing the ocean to you.
She took my hands in her, then, and squeezed them. ‘But you stayed where you were meant to be, and you didn’t listen to them. Well done. That’s quality, that is,’ and she sounded proud. In that moment I forgot my hunger and I forgot my fear.
I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know. That if I look inward I would see only infinite mirrors staring into myself for eternity.
The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and coming down the lane with me, then.
Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it.
I do not permit affection, or lack thereof, to influence my actions. There is good, and there is evil. The good must be protected; the evil eradicated. I have shown you the triumph of evil, as a caution.
Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams.
On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing. Anything that stops you writing is a bad thing.