Her courage was a guise. She wondered if courage always was, or if there were those who truly felt no fear.
There are guerrilla armies that make little boys kill their own families. Such acts rip out the soul and make space for beasts to grow inside. Armies need beasts, don’t they? Pet beasts, to do their terrible work!
The truth, she found, felt smooth, like a skipping stone in the palm of your hand.
Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned petting, that needed no one. Why couldn’t she be that cat?
It seemed she was in a cathedral – if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone.
It was as if she had emitted a pulse of radiation that reached him even where he stood, and it bathed him and it burned him.
If it’s not chocolate, it’s not breakfast.
We dreamed together of the world remade.
And I’ve found that since you can’t electrify yourself like a fence, the next best thing is to have murderer’s eyes.
Long life is a burden, when it’s spent in misery.
How could you tell if your instincts were just hope in disguise, and if your hope was really desperation parading as possibility?
What are we fighting for? What are we killing for? What do you see when you look into the future?
It was Kizzy’s first kiss and maybe it was her last and it was delicious.
And there’s no better way to thaw a face, as it turns out, than with another face.
Around Mik, my powers desert me. I lose basic motor function, like my brain focuses all neural activity on my lips and shifts into kiss preparedness mode way too early, to the detriment of things like speech, and walking.
As long as you’re alive, there’s always a chance things will get better.
Thank you, but we respectfully decline your overture, being more enjoyably occupied at present.
A thousand things might have stopped me from being here right now, but instead, a thousand things brought me here.
What a lovely display of personhood. He’s like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I’m fun but smart. You won’t be able to put me down.
The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls. Like Kizzy.