Lady Oracle

How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.

I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?

and each of his voices left his body in a different colored soul and floated up towards the sun still singing.

I thought, men who changed their names were likely to be con-men, criminals, undercover agents or magicians, whereas women who changed their names were probably just married.

I grew sodden with light; my skin on the inside glowed a dull red.

A man in a cloud, with icicle teeth and eyes of fire.

My life had a tendency to spread, get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance. I wanted my death, by contrast, to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls...

Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I'd buried there growing themselves a body.

Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?

If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

She sits on the iron throne She is one and three The dark lady the redgold lady The blank lady oracle of blood, she who must be obeyed forever Her glass wings are gone She floats down the river singing her last song

Now I wanted to be acknowledged, but I feared it.

His view of the world featured swift disasters set against a background of lurking doom, my cooking did nothing to contradict it.

to fix and make plausible, the nebulous emotions of my costumed heroins, like diamonds on a sea of dough.

Love was merely a tool, smiles were another tool, they were both just tools for accomplishing certain ends. No magic, merely chemicals. I felt I'd never really loved anyone, not Paul, not Chuck the Royal Porcupine, not even Arthur. I'd polished them with my love and expected them to shine, brightly enough to return my own reflection, enhanced and sparkling.

It's no good thinking you're invisible if you aren't

I sang out the words unflinchingly though, as I stomped around the toadstool in clouds of church-basement dust, with a damp Gnome hand clutched in each of mine.

I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living.

Besides, who would think of marrying a mothball? A question my mother put to me often, later, in other forms.

you can't change the past,Aunt Lou used to say.Oh, but I wanted to;that was the one thing I really wanted to do

I always remembered what she looked like, the dried apple face, the silvery gray hair, the snapping blue eyes.

He had been with me, but he wasn't with me now, we had been walking along a street like this one and then the future swept over us and we were separated. He was in the distance now, across the ocean, on a beach, the wind ruffling his hair, I could hardly see his features. He was moving at an ever-increasing speed away from me, into the land of the dead, the dead past, irretrievable.

There was always that shadowy twin, thin when i was fat, fat when i was thin, myself in silvery narrative...

Occasionally when no one was looking I would try on the wigs myself, but it was mostly the gray ones. I wanted to see how I would look when I was older. I would soon be old, I felt, and nothing would happen to me in the meantime because I wasn't interested in anything or anyone. I'd be deserted, I was convinced of it now. I was miserable.

I’ve always wanted to know what it was like to fuck a cult figure,’ the Royal Porcupine said reflectively. He was lying on his mattress, watching me as I scrubbed the dog blood off my belly with a corner of his shirt, dipped in the toilet. He didn’t have a sink. ‘Well,