And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges

Maybe then he would have understood her better, understood how suffering steals the aptitude for happiness from you. Maybe he would have been okay with her melancholy then.

Lavoisier's wife's, let us repeat, translated a s***load of science books into another language just so her husband, audience of one, could understand what they said.

he shriveled, and he husked without her. It is this the robots cannot understand. That human love is mostly failure. That failure may be very sad, but it is yours, and you hold on to it if you can.

Mrs. Peters in the seventh grade accused me of being a goth and my dear parents (Dear Mother and Dearest Stepfather, I’ll probably have forgiven you by the time I’m dead, perhaps) sent me to the Catholic girls’ school in Kent to retrain me, and really, is there anything more inclined to train someone to think exclusively of death—manner and method of, and What Lies Beyond—than a Catholic school education?

You’ll do it? you asked, You’ll make the crown for me? and I understood then: this sex was never about love, never about your own body’s need. It was about mine, and how you knew it would undo me in the end. It always has, this great need to melt the world in the flames of passion, to burn everything down behind me, even in the savage dream of these sorry times we inhabit.

Is the Future a nice place for girls, the queen asked, and the fit woman snorted. Not exactly, she said. But - and she eyed the queen's cloak and shoes and hair - better than where you come from.

And what is history, anyway, but the chance to dig up our skeletons and give them new stories ?

She almost wishes for another love affair, sometimes, just to be able to end it. Just to feel that door close once more. Would that be true love ? The relief of loneliness, replayed forever and ever ?

APOPHENIA. The human tendency to seek patterns in random nature, where there are no patterns to be found. See also: ghosts, gambling, and the passions of religious mania and prophecy. See also: what happens when your lover’s brain breaks down while the world is burning. I was born the day they found a face on Mars. It was a lie, of course; it was a geographical anomaly, a trick of the terrain. We want so badly to make sense of the cosmos, to see it in ourselves. We turn shadows into sockets, bright smears into mouths and eyes. We turn the universe into our mirror. #narcissus, naturally.

Someone once said—a poet?—that all light is starlight. Does that mean it's all dead on arrival, more echo than embrace? Is light just another way to be alone?

They married because the wife thought she could open him up, pull out wild Irish weather. But when she tried she found a map to Cleveland instead.

Lavoisier's wife surely could have used a barf emoji, had she ever looked up the origin of 'helpmeet' and shared it with Charlotte Corday. Lavoisier's wife's text: Can you even f**king believe this s**t? (Barf emoji here) Lavoisier's wife's text back from bff Corday: OMG OF COURSE GENESIS, WTF

I would have kept myself to myself if you’d loved me. I wouldn’t have texted you, not after ten.

She had become an ascetic of the suburban sort; she still poured a little whiskey into her tea and wore pastel capri pants and chain-smoked, but she also thought a lot—an overwhelming lot, she told me—about hell.

Hollis Barcus was handsome, young, and literally climbing a building to rescue my mother. She thought he was an idiot, also, because he didn’t use the ladder propped up against the siding.

Sometimes she prayed, though she didn’t exactly believe in a benevolent god. Hers was an angry god, furious and disapproving, and she prayed mostly for revenges and disappointments.

It’s always raining now, or always dry now. And all our days are like this now, here at the end of the world. Everything feels like a memory already. Everything feels like it’s happening for the last time.

I thought to ask your ex-wife, but she wasn’t online, wasn’t anywhere at all where I could find her. I thought that was strange once, but no longer; no doubt you made a hungry hole in her life. No doubt you swallowed her up.

She’s read basically every book in the world and looks like a movie star, but she only dates women. I think that’s pretty brilliant,

When she prints stuff, the neighbors bang on the walls and the dust comes up all around you, like a filthy snow globe.

The girl herself, in the way of most humans: unready for unhappiness.

She loved to create small strange worlds on paper and had set up a gallery in several rooms of her home for her art: the royal version of the family refrigerator.

I wrote it for you, and for all the daughters, and for all the mothers of daughters, and for all the mothers of mothers of daughters, thank you for carrying the world.

That human love is mostly failure. That failure may be very sad, but it is yours, and you hold on to it if you can.

Now I'm the deserted bride howling against it.

She'll push and push through until those long-ago rooms are hers again ; until she finds a new set of stages for a new set of lives.

This one's for the ladies.

Other people just possess you, she'd told her friend, the butcher. Is that so bad ? he'd asked. To be possessed ? It's the worst fate of all, she'd say. The donkey skin, she thought, was everything else in the world; it was solitude : anonymous, bloody, and happy ever after.

The donkey skin - burn it. But not until you find true love. You'll lose your chance at love forever if you shed you skin too soon.