The Alchemy of Stone

We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.

The spirits, he said, the souls. They are not angry at the living, they just want to help. Helping others is the only way we can prove we still matter.

Your people are losing your jobs to your machines. You put mechanizing everything and making it efficient above your people's happiness, and you wonder why they aren't happy?

Of course I am!” Mattie stomped her foot, and the entire house shook. “Everyone should be afraid of change—people die in such times.

If she were to get her key back, she thought, no one but her would ever touch it. She would wind herself well in advance so that she would never need to rely on another to keep herself alive.

They, the women, were like the gargoyles, Mattie thought. Respected in words, but hidden from view of those who ran the city and managing to live in the darkness, in the secret interstices of life.

Be careful there, dear love—history leads to politics more often than you could imagine.