Starling House

I know exactly why Icarus flew so high: when you’ve spent too long in the dark, you’ll melt your own wings just to feel the sun on your skin.

It occurs to me that this lonely, beastly, bleeding boy is the only person who has ever fought for me, ever stood between me and the dark and told me to save myself.

They averted their eyes from evil, and in doing so, became complicit in it.

I figure dreams are like stray cats, which go away if I quit feeding them.

It occurs to me that I’ve been mourning two people all these years—the mother I had, and the mother I wish I had—and that neither of them was the one who kept a roof over my head.

How in the hell in anybody supposed to help you if you won't ask?" Because asking is dangerous, I could tell her. Because to ask is to hope that someone answers, and it hurts so bad when nobody does.

Starling House was no longer just a house. What had begun as stone and mortar had become something more, with ribs for rafters and stone for skin. It has no heart, but it feels; it has no brain, but it dreams.

I have no home, no porch light. But I have what I need, and it's enough, It's just that sometimes, God help me, I want more.

Once you’ve established a reputation for dishonesty, it becomes possible to lie simply by stating the flat truth.

He is a ghost, a rumor, a story whispered after the children have gone to bed, and she was cold and hurt, all alone in the rising dark - and yet she hadn't run from him until he told her to. The house has always had a taste for the brave ones.

Her hands are fisted in the collar of his shirt and she is so vital, so furiously alive that Arthur understands for the first time why Hades stole Persephone, why a man who has spent his life in winter might do anything at all for a taste of spring.

Because asking is dangerous, I could tell her. Because to ask is to hope that someone answers, and it hurts so bad when nobody does. I stiffen my spine instead.

It makes me think of an apple seed spit carelessly by the side of the road, sprouting despite the bad soil; and the fumes, clinging hard to the only patch of earth it was ever given.

But sometimes it feels like I’m pulling up the carpeting in an old house, and finding everything underneath has gone to rot.

Except I won't le him, because I need him. And I might be a liar and a thief and a cheat, but I'll walk barefoot through hell for what I need.

I love him, and love wipes every ledger clean.

Arthur went down, and I know him too well to imagine he's coming back up unless I drag him behind me, a sullen Eurydice. I know the hard set of his jaw and the soft slide of his lips, I know the terrible guilt that drives him and the scars it left behind. I know he is the thing I have been chasing and craving, searching and waiting and hoping for my entire life: home.

Survival is a hard habit to break.

He doesn't look like a dancer. He looks like a boy who wanted to grow flowers but was handed a sword instead.

I've gone hungry too many times not to recognize a starving man when he kneels in the dirt before me.

Starling House makes me think of an underfed pet or a broken doll, a thing unloved by the person who promised to love it best.

I wonder if the feeling will fade. If the memory of a single season will be buried beneath the weight of ordinary years, until it is just a story, just another little lie. If I will learn to be content with enough, and forget that I was ever foolish enough to want more.

I dream sometimes about a house I’ve never seen.

Dreams aren't for people like me. People like me have to make two lists: what they need and what they want. You keep the first list short, if you're smart, and you burn the second one.

Then he closes his eyes very deliberately, and I recognize this, too; this is what it looks like when you swallow all your hunger. When you want what you can't have, so you bury it like a knife between your ribs.

I know that part of the story must be made up, because there's no such thing as curses or cracks in the world, but maybe that's all a good ghost story is: a way of handing out consequences to the people who never got them in real life.

Because I dreamed of Starling House long before I ever saw it. Because sometimes when the light slants soft through the west windows and turns the dust mots into tiny golden fireflies I like to pretend the house belongs to me, or that I belong to it.

It’s easier to fall apart when no one is watching you.

Home is just where you get stuck.

It occurs to me, looking at those eyes, chips of cold limestone, that the Starlings probably had it right. That the only name worth having is the one you choose.