The Electric Kingdom

How to be human, it seemed, was an infinite ocean in which Kit had only yet dipped the corner of a toenail.

Even in a world where Fly exterminates Human, this has not changed: that one person might find beauty in another.

It occurred to her that this was true friendship: a person in your life who was willing to walk through strange doors into dark places, so long as they could walk there with you.

He'd done more than give her a story - he'd given her life inside the story.

Morning people, as Kit understood them, belonged to a breed of humans who derived unending joy from the horrors of emerging from one's bed. . . . The only thing "morning people" enjoyed more than morning was telling everyone else about it. It was a badge of honor, apparently, to be a "morning person.

But listening was about more than hearing; it was about when and where you put yourself in the story.

But in a world consumed by Flies, kids were adults and adults were nowhere. How long you’d been alive only meant something when life itself wasn’t a luxury.

Sometimes Kit would look at the veins in his own hands and think, All these little rivers flowing through my body, keeping me alive. Thank you, little rivers. Thank you.

It was beauty and discord at once. Nature unleashing her global psyche.

We sit there, just being together, not speaking or even looking at each other, and it feels quietly tectonic, the kind of moment that might move a mountain if it were let outside.

Sometimes it’s nice to feel small, to know you are far from the first.

Strange, how a person could create something they didn’t understand. But maybe that was what made art great: Who cares where it comes from, so long as it comes from you?

Maybe instead of portals to other worlds, all we needed were portals to other times.

Some people said a lot in quiet voices, some said nothing in loud ones.

I have asked the stars many questions. This is the first time they've answered.

It wasn't that Kit didn't like the old person library. It was the insinuation that a library for old people had more wisdom than a library for children. It only took a few afternoons in the old person library for Kit to debunk this theory. (Debunk being a word he knew that meant "remove the bunk.") The stories were different, yes. Most of the covers were bigger, and some even had print so large, Kit could have read the pages from across the street. There were "books on tape" and "audiobooks," which, so far as Kit could tell, had been nothing more than very long grown-up versions of bedtime stories. But there was no more or less wisdom to be found in the old person library.

In the olden days, there had been a breed of human known as "billionaire." To qualify, you had to have at least a billion cash bucks. One billion! But the real mind-boggler was that billionaires kept on being billionaires even when they knew there were people who had zero cash-bucks. What a zany place this world had been.

After reading a few more entries, something occurred to her. A trend. The more ambitious Lives--the ones that stretched the boundaries of their power--generally ended in trauma, disaster, or grief. Whereas those Lives who understood and respected their power were generally fulfilled.

Whenever Kit got down about being born in a world where Flies ate humans, he reminded himself that even in the world before Flies, things made little sense.

He would never understand how humans could be so entirely smart and so entirely stupid at the same time. Not 50 percent one and 50 percent the other. They were 100 percent smart and stupid.

Outside, the forest was alive with invisible things, nighttime critters and near-winter winds and tree-siblings breathing staccato breaths, reaching out for one another, seeking touch. Nico listened for their words of comfort… We are here. You are not alone. She felt her place among them, felt them calling her home.

In the beginning, there was nothing. Then the world. Then people, but no art. Then people made art. Then people died. Now there is art, but no people. And that’s how it went. That’s how it went. But only for a little while. Years passed. The old died and the young grew. And some became artists. And now there are people again. And art. There are people and art together, the way it’s supposed to be.

Is your mom dead?” he asked, immediately regretting it. “Sorry.” “It’s okay. Yes, she died.” Somewhere a bird chirped, and he thought maybe it was a finch from the sound of it, and he said, “My mom died too,” as he looked at his feet, such weird little feet, and he wished they were wings. “That’s who I was talking about. She called me her Kit and I called her my Dakota because we belonged to each other.” But his feet were just feet, sadly, not the flying kind, and so he tossed his thoughts into the air instead, watched them glide around, blossom into breezes, little I-see-yous floating this way and that, landing like a soft quilt on all the world’s small forgotten things.

Kit understood cinnamon the way he understood sex: he had been told by those he trusted that it worked a certain way, and so he believed it; its qualities, while supposedly miraculously effective, were a complete mystery; its implications were terrifying.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only twelve-year-old in the world.

All around, the trees were thick: every few feet, the base of a trunk exploded from the earth, rose up into the sky where branches reached like arms to hold hands with other branches, tree-sisters and tree-brothers seeking touch, listening for words of comfort in the dark night.

You'll be like me, a pitiful little knot in the floorboard that no one even knows exists. Kit brushed his hand against the grainy wood. I see you, he thought. I know you exist