Skinned

Nor did I need anyone's pity, but I would accept it with grace, because I have been well trained. Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the powere to accept anything and move on.

Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the power to accept anything and move on.

There are some moments you'd rather sleep through, pass from point A to point B without awareness of the time passing or the events that carry you from present to future. And it's mostly those moments in which it's smarter-safer- to stay awake.

Nobody likes me,” he concluded at the tail end of a ten-minute pity fest. “Can’t imagine why,” Quinn murmured. I turned my snort of laughter into a fake cough, which was an embarrassingly feeble attempt at subterfuge when you consider the fact that I didn’t have any lungs.

If you can't remember something, did it really happen?

As last days go, mine sucked. The last day I would have chosen — the last day I deserved — would have involved more chocolate.

When I was a kid I used to wonder if, just maybe, the world existed only for me. If rooms ceased to exist when I stepped into the hallway and people disappeared once they left me, the rest of their lives imagined solely for my entertainment.

The doctor’s voice was cold. “There’s nothing to put back. There’s no body to go back to. The body of Lia Kahn is dead. Be grateful you didn’t die with it.

Since I was dead — or worse than dead, buried alive in a body that might as well be a coffin except it denied me the pleasure of suffocation — I figured I should be allowed to grieve.

Sascha looked torn. Should she cram my head full of newfound terror that the world would reject me, or let me wander into the big, scary out-there, like a naive lamb prancing to the slaughter?

I did it all mechanically. Mechanically, as in without thought, as in through force of habit, as in instinctively, automatically, involuntarily. Mechanically, as in like-a-machine.

Like when everything flipped upside down and the scream of metal on metal exploded the silence and the world churned around me, ground over sky over ground over sky, and then, with a thunderous crack and a crunching of glass and steel, a twisted roof crushing me into a gutted floor, ground, I wasn’t surprised.

Just because you can’t take something back, doesn’t mean you don’t want to. Just because you want to, doesn’t mean you try.