She’s more delicate than you’d think,” I say. She’s glass. I’m glass. We’re all glass, busted up, unrecognizable from our original selves. We walk around in fragments. It’s a circus act.
When you’re everyone in the past and when you’re for everyone in the present, you’re no one. Nobody. You don’t exist. I didn’t exist.
How come white folks were always telling Black people to get over slavery because it was 150 or so years ago but they couldn’t get over their Christ who died 1,830 years before that?
She didn’t need much. Didn’t need to be adored and loved and called nice things. All she wished for was perfunctory respect paid to the fact that she was, indeed, alive. Real, breathing, thinking, movable parts and all.
Why guards quoted this nonsense to justify themselves was beyond her. The whole point of occupying a position of power was that you got to do what you wanted with impunity. It seemed a waste of time to bother with rationalizations.
She was a girl made of aches and she flung her body at the world in the hopes that something, anything, might soothe the tendernesses.
I had a sister named Inertia,“said Metusine. “Died. Ill from the day she was born. Mother thought if she named her that it would keep her alive. Keep her in motion.
I’m not maternal but that doesn’t mean I don’t love. I love Aster. I love all the girls and women I look after. It is hard to be in somebody’s presence for so long and not develop something like love.
History wanted to be remembered. Evidence hated having to live in dark, hidden places and devoted itself to resurfacing. Truth was messy. The natural order of an entropic universe was to tend to it.
We wait to be numbed by it, for the grief to become so much that we no longer feel it. That point never arrives. Our numbers reduce, and the rage grows.
People watched others commit atrocities all the time. Seeing didn’t transform into doing.
There were worse things than being a motherless child. Without a past, Aster was boundless. She could metamorphose. She could be a shiny, magnificent version of herself.
That was all remembering was. Prodding them lest they try to move on from things that should not be moved on from. Forgetting was not the same as healing.
I’m not the maternal type. Lullabies bore me. The idea of a child hanging off my breast, using me for sustenance, makes me very angry for some reason. Probably because I am always angry about everything. I am like a gramophone and the volume’s too loud, and you can’t find the off button, and all you can do is cover your ears until the end of the record.
I have done at least one good thing: become a person my father would hate.
I learned from him that sadness is the hardest thing to breed out of a bloodline.
Dear Sirs,” Flick began before loudly inhaling, “On account of there being no heat down here in account of the being no electricity on account of the brand-new energy rations so thoughtfully and nobly and honorably imposed on the steerage decks by Sovereign Nicolaeus on account of the blackouts – Aster fell prey to a brief fit of hypothermia-induced delirium de spoke against you in her maddery. She’s healed up now so you don’t have to worry about it happening again.
There was no talking Ollie and her ilk into believing Vern and her ilk were actually people. They were collateral damage in a useless battle waged to attain more power.
She understood why all the historians before Basha performed the Remembrance to melody, that impulse to salvage a speck of beauty from tragedy with a dirge, but Yetu wanted people to remember how she remembered. With screams.
I am the only one who gets to decide what is in my best interest. Not you, Theo. The fact that you have been given arbitrary power over me does not mean that you should exert that power when it suits you.