Damsel

She was too much and not enough, both in the same instant. Too big and too small; too bright and too dull; too affectionate and not affectionate enough.

I made you beautiful,” Emory said again, again. “You keep saying that,” Ama answered. “But I did not ask for your beauty. I made beauty all on my own. I did not need you then.

And that is the way it has always been," the queen mother said again. "And if something is the way it has always been, who are we to wish it otherwise? Who are we to want anything at all? Who are we to desire?" "I desire," Ama said.

Without you," Ama said, "I would be free.

Dusk was the most colorful hour, with the horizon set on fire by the breath of the yawning sun.

At last Emory turned to leave, well pleased, and then a thought flashed through Ama’s mind, a realization that chilled her even more deeply than the rain – This is how he likes me best… when I am in need of rescue.

You see, Ama, it is for men to create. It is for men to decide. It is for men to speak. It is your place to listen, and follow, and gestate. And those are no small things! For without women to listen, how would the men’s words be heard? Without your fertile womb, how could my son hope to grow? You are important, Ama. Desperately important. But do not overreach.

She was of the sun and from the sun. She was not a plaything of this little man.

Perhaps the key to being content, even without a past, is to keep your eyes firmly on the present moment, and looking no further than what was most probably around just the very next bend—tonight, a fire—and not anticipating beyond that, or allowing oneself to cast backward, into the great black void of before.

Secrets, like memories, do not disappear just because they are buried by snow or time or distance.

A brain will lie to the body, even when the body is the brain’s only hope.

One should not make a pet out of a wild beast,” Ama said. She mounted Emory, knelt over him, and, ignoring his batting, bloodied hands, she reached into his chest, pulled open his mortal wound, and extracted his still-beating heart. It pulsed in her palm, and Ama bit into it like a ripe plum.

No one knew how the castle had come to be, and Emory did not care. He did not care why a sun hung in the sky; it did, and that was enough for him. As long as it warmed his back each day and disappeared each night, Emory had no desire to waste his time examining the whys and wherefores behind it’s existence, and that was how he felt about the castle and the cliffs, the sea and the sky. The world was made. That was all.

Ama lost connection to the places where her body intersected with the world: where her feet touched the ground, where her head existed in relation to the rest of the room.

Time was lost to her and distance. With each turn they took, each step they paced, Ama felt her own heart constrict, as if the iron and the stone of the castle seized and squeezed it tight.