Ammonite

I don’t belong to anyone! I’m not a thing, to be kept or ordered or driven to such despair that I open my own veins. Look at me, Aoife. Look at me! I’m a woman.

They were connected: the world, her body, her face. Perhaps she should not be asking who she was but, rather, of what she was a part.

These people were utterly human. But what was human? Human was not just family dinners, human was also the Inquisitions of Philip, the extermination of the Mayans, the terrible Reconstruction of the Community. Human meant cruelty as well as love, human was protecting one’s own at the expense of others. Human also meant having the capacity to change.

The cavity formed between a planetary body and its ionosphere acts as a natural resonator; most people who lived on Earth were unaware that they lived on a gigantic gong that boomed out exactly sixty-nine times every day.

She watched her lover in silence; words would have been too big, too solid for what they had done together.

Marghe learned of linn cloud, the waterfall cloud in multilayers which brought very heavy rain; of n’gus, queen daggerhorn sky—stately and slow-moving like the beasts of the forest; of pilwe sky, soft, white undulating cloud that could hide the sun for a whole moon.

The web convulsed, splitting the dark patch into hundreds of peach-colored corpuscles that pulsed in different directions down the hollow strands. Digestion. The strands were both the spider and the web.

We are more than half of humanity. We are not imitation people, or chameleons taking on protective male coloration, longing for the day when men go away and we can return to being our true, insectlike selves. We are here, now. We are just like you.

People were there to be watched, not related to. And now her mother was dead and her father estranged, and she had no friends. She had no friends, because whenever she began to get close to someone it felt like unknown territory, and it scared her; she ran away to a new place, to find new people to study, people to whom she did not necessarily have to be a person back. To be a person back. She was not sure she knew how.

There was a story her father had told her once, about the organic chemist who had been searching for the solution to the structure of a certain molecule and had fallen asleep and dreamed up the answer: the benzene ring. Her father had used the story to illustrate several of his annoying sayings, like Where there’s a will there’s a way, and Westerners teach their children how not to think, and Relax, let it come in its own time.

You can see so much of the world through others' memories, places you've never been, faces you've never seen and never will, weather you've never felt and food you've never tasted, that sometimes it's hard not to want to just feel, taste, see those familiar things over and over. Truly new things become alien, other, not to be trusted. There are those who know their village so well, through the eyes and hearts of so many before them, that they can't leave it to go somewhere else, they can't bear to place their feet on a path that they have never trodden, on soil they have never planted with a thousand seeds in some past life as lover or child. Some become unable to leave their lodge or tent, or can't sail past the sight of familiar cliffs.

This hand can birth children. This hand can make music. This hand could kill you.

Whenever we come to a new place, I waylaid strangers and dragged their stories and songs and jokes from them before they ever had a chance to find out my name.

All their memories interlock and look down the same path to the same places. Each memory reflects another, repeats, reinforces until the known becomes the only.

It’s as though all I am is my job. All I am is an empty shell. I look all right from a distance, but up close there’s nothing there, nothing behind the pretty whorls and the brittle exterior. But I don’t have that job anymore. No shell. But if I don’t have that then what do I have?

You musn’t let her treat you as badly as she treats herself.

The world lit up like a silent photograph, flat and grainy, limning the tree stark as a charcoal slash against a parchment sky. Lightning exploded like bluewhite cats-o’-nine-tails until sound rolled and cracked and splintered and Marghe could no longer tell if it was the ground shaking or her muscles; she felt deaf and blind and exposed to her core.

The cloud cover was heavy and multilayered, shades of slate blue and silver, pearl and charcoal, like a sketch washed with watercolour.

Wind swept dark tatters across a sky rippling with luminous cloud from horizon to horizon like a well-muscled torso, bringing with it the smell of dust and grass and a sweetness she could not identify.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea if they agreed now, while they still don’t know who it is, what the punishment would be?” She had seen too many negotiations, on Earth and off, fall to nothing because not enough was agreed at the start.

what was human? Human was not just family dinners, human was also the Inquisitions of Philip, the extermination of the Mayans, the terrible Reconstruction of the Community. Human meant cruelty as well as love, human was protecting one’s own at the expense of others. Human also meant having the capacity to change.

In the Trern Swamplands they make boats from hollow tree trunks and they have many words to describe the kind of sound a log makes when hit. That’s how they test the strength of the wood, by the sound it makes when they tap it. Thenike means something like ‘ring true’ or ‘deep and clear.’” She smiled at Marghe. “It’s how I like to think of myself.

love and responsibility don’t give a person the prerogative to be always right.

I don’t want to be Marghe the anthropologist who examines seashells on the beach and moves on. I don’t think I am her anymore. But I don’t know who I want to be.

Sometimes I think she came to care more for me than she had done for anyone for a long time. But she wouldn’t let me go.

There was nothing noble about dying a slow and painful death, surrounded by nothing but empty silence.

Now there was nothing left. She did not weep: this far north, her tears would turn to ice and cut her cheeks.

The air was humid, so thick with moisture that she felt it like spider-webs across her face and kept wanting to hush it away, wipe it from her skin.

Danner strode out of her offices, the adrenaline of rage surging light and hot through her veins. Rage that soon became a kind of exhilaration. She was going to do her job. At last.