The Mere Wife

Listen,' someone whispers into my ear. 'Listen to me.' Am I dead? 'Listen,' the voice whispers. 'In some countries, you kill a monster when it's born. Other places, you kill it only when it kills someone else. Other places, you let it go, out into the forest or the sea, and it lives there forever, calling for others of its kind. Listen to me, it cries. Maybe it's just alone.

People never think, until it happens to their place, that all construction is destruction. The whole planet is paved in the dead, who are ignored so the living can dig their foundations.

There's a long tradition that says women gossip, when in fact women are the memory of the world. We keep the family trees and the baby books. We manage the milk teeth. We keep the census of diseases, the records of divorces, battles and medals. We witness the wills. We wash the weddings our of the bedsheets. We know everything there is to know, and we keep it rolled into the newel posts, stuffed into the mattresses, smuggled inside our vaginas if it comes to that. Women's clothing is made without pockets, but we come into the world equipped

The world isn't large enough for heroes and monsters at once. There's too much danger of confusion between the two categories.

No one needs to see us for us to exist. No one needs to love us for us to exist. The sky is filled with light. The world is full of wonders.

I call death onto those who don't know a child when they see a child. Men who think they made the world out of clay and turned it into their safe place, men who think a woman wouldn't flip the universe over and flatten them beneath it. I have enough bullets for all of them.

But who's ever safe? Down below us are the kind of people who walk armed into churches and movie theaters and through libraries, blast fevers into federal buildings, and build bombs out of things they bought cheap at a hardware store. What kind of myth is it, that people like them are keeping the rest of us safe?

Do you think sixty-five-year-old women don’t go to war? We are always at war. Our husbands spent their lives in comfortable chairs. Have we ever sat in comfortable chairs? No. Yoga balls, haunches tensed.

Maybe every monster is a miracle meant to change the world.

Every life starts with the same beginning and ends with the same end. The rest is the story, even if you don't understand it, even if you aren't sure which parts are true and which parts are your brain trying to make sense out of smoke.

Wonders have been born before. Sometimes they've been worshipped. There've been new things over and over, and some creatures have fallen groaning to the ground and others have learned to fly.

The world is full of worse than anyone has yet imagined, and there's only so much room.

Dogs can tell how many times a person's heart beats, how many breaths they've taken, whether they're sick, whether they're dying. Dogs can find the secrets their people don't know, tip them over, spill them onto the ground, roll in them

She looks up at the mountain and wonders which god answered her prayers, wonders if she prayed them.

Once upon a time, he was the child of some other mother, and his beloved was a wonder of the world.

You don't really own anything. Nothing is yours forever, not your body, not your youth, not even your mind.

There’s a long tradition that says women gossip, when in fact women are the memory of the world. We keep the family trees and the baby books. We manage the milk teeth. We keep the census of diseases, the records of divorces, battles, and medals. We witness the wills. We wash the weddings out of the bedsheets. We know everything there is to know, and we keep it rolled into the newel posts, stuffed into the mattresses, smuggled inside our vaginas if it comes to that. Women’s clothing is made without pockets, but we come into the world equipped.

It's water from beneath the mountain, and its full of of the taste of bones and rocks. She's bought five cases of bottled to keep from having to serve this, even in ice-cube format. There's something awful about it. It feels full of ghosts

Is this what love is? That you can see each other, even in the dark?

Inside the mountain, inside the train, one boy kisses the other, and the other kisses him back, and there is nothing but history between them, and history is enough to make a future.

Cash register. Army surplus, my son wrapped up in my coat. He was just a baby then. I thought I might be up here on this mountain for no reason. Maybe everything I thought was wrong in the world wasn't wrong at all, Maybe he'd be safe here. Maybe I wasn't just every mother ever, panicked, looking at her child and seeing all the ways he might get hurt. He was mine, and I wanted someone to tell me my son was beautiful, to tell me he'd grow into a man. I didn't wan't to be alone forever, with no one to help me, and no one but me to help him.

Willa maintains a vigil. Certain tasks are relegated to women. Mourning, staring into the wastes, waiting for no one to surface. It's a white man who's missing. Usually, that would be enough to keep it in the news, but eight days in, the police release their grief in an official report. The art of blame-casting is a lesser sorcery. History is written in sand, and a broom changes everything. Every woman knows the art of covering up a mess: a carpet, a dustpan, bleach on the boards. What do you do with the cleaning supplies of the world? Use them to wash the blood away, and grind the bones into bread. Swallow the confessions whispered in bed. If events don't make sense, a story grows to cover up the confusion. Motives and mistakes.

The famous ones kept going, video, photos, headlines, and here they still are, running countries, pressing buttons, standing in offices insisting that all the money in the world belongs to them, pushing secrets through votes, starving the bottom so the top can feast

Why is she here at Herot Hall, where at any second something bad could come down the mountain, or tunnel up from below? Monsters. There's a whole world filled with monsters. They everywhere

We're commuter wives. These are our commuter lives. We're capable of carrying alcoholic husbands from the kitchen to the bathroom in a fireman's grip. Between trains, we train to fight with enemies we haven't met yet, battling against punching bags, leaping like the world is made of stone walls and we're storming them. There's another version of commuting of course, as in to commute a sentence. This is our sentence, these suburbs, the train that does not stretch to meet them

Half of the dead are killed by their friends. Maybe that's the history of everything.

I’ve been invisible for a long time, and he’s been walking the world with all the privilege of being a man.

Here's the truth of the world, here it is. You're never everything anyone else wants. In the end it's going to be you, all alone, on a mountain, or you, all alone, in a hospital room. Love isn't enough and you do it anyway. Love isn't enough and it's still this thing that everyone wants.

Let him grow up, I was thinking the whole time. That’s an old prayer. It comes in every language.

Champagne mixes with salt. Rain mixes with sea. Am I dead myself? How long have I been here and gone at once? I feel something inside my heart, something that reminds me of someone I used to know, long ago, in a city no one remembers but me. I feel old things running around this place, like we’re in the center of the smoke of a burning book of wonders, as though all the pages have gotten stuck together and now it’s a world of everything at once, a pitcher of water in my hands, a stand of trees somewhere in the middle of a desert, a bed of white linen sheets, above me the moon crescented, stars I don’t know, wine in a cup, smooth wet sand around me packed down, a cave, a tomb, a room, a rock rolling across the entrance, a stick made of old wood. And here, a country of claws, a mob of monsters. Look at them as we fly and look at us, all of us, the desperate desiring humans of this place, no longer. The story is shifting, things are changing. All is well and will be well.