You needn’t tell a bird it’s a bird. Or remind a fish of its purpose. It’s only us who lose our way. We have names because we must. – from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter.
She was staying awake. She was staying awake long enough to become great.
The raven was Glendower’s bird. The Raven King, he was called, from a long line of kings associated with the bird. Legend had it that Glendower could speak to ravens, and vice versa. It was only one of the reasons why Gansey was here in Henrietta, a town known for its ravens.
My head was stuffed full of dreams: wolves and humans and blood smeared on lips.
Wake up the ley line?” Hennessy sneered. “I’m afraid we’re fresh out of your order. We can’t wake the ley line. Can we give you a substitution? Fries, a baked potato, side salad, eternity in hell?
He no longer looked torn between. He was both at once; there was no dissonance.
She pitied him. The feeling came so much more easily for Declan Lynch, who crushed all outward appearance of suffering, than Hennessy, who detonated unhappiness in every room she entered. She couldn’t understand Hennessy, but she knew what it was like to be the sibling keeping it together.
The dust exhausted him. How quickly everything returned to grime and disarray when Declan wasn’t attending to it. All he needed, he thought, was just a day or two where things didn’t run to ruin without him. An hour or two. A minute or two.
He lived in guilt, he wallowed in guilt, he was nothing but guilt.
His heart bust with gladness. Gladness and relief. Thank goodness, he thought in the dream, that this was what the world was actually like. Some part of him had thought it must be. It could not be just mundanity and humans, because that felt wrong, like he had been made for something different, like he would always be seeking something more but never finding it.
Do Wednesday’s even count as days, really?
For a moment she struggles over the waves, and then she is swimming. Just a wild black horse in a deep blue sea full of the ashes of other dead boys.
It was a laugh like his smile, contained and cunning.
Sometimes you don’t have to see something to know it is there.
The ocean stretched out and stretched out and stretched out, and my heart hurt to see it.
It really was a nice day.
A dark-haired boy who is made of all corners. He is standing next in line by the counter, silent and still in his blue-black jacket, his arms folded across his chest. He looks out of place and wild in here: expression sharp, collar turned up against the back of his neck, hair still windblown from the beach.
He was the night and he was the world and he was as infinite as them both.
Change isn’t about getting taller or changing the roof over your head. Change happens in your heart, in your way of thinking, of moving in the world.
Life’s a game, but only some bother to play.
Okay,” Grace said, “I’ll bite. Where?