Thistlefoot

What happens when the walls we raise outlive the dangers they were built to keep out? At what point does a fort become a cage?

How do you ruin a people? Is it with fire? Is it with bullets? You can drag a man through the street tied to the back of a horse. You can incinerate a village. Can line families up in rows against a brick wall and fell them, one by one, like a forest. But all it takes is one survivor, and the story lives on. One survivor to carry the poems and the songs, the prayers, the sorrows. It isn’t just taking a life that destroys a people. It’s taking their history.

The most dangerous and violent men are the ones who believe they have nothing to be afraid of.

Generation by generation, we forget. Only the body remembers. The body, and the ghosts.

When people believe in something, believe in it so much that it informs their life and death, it may as well exist because it's changing the physical world. At that point, it doesn't matter whether God is real or not. The belief, and the action that follows belief, makes the story true and alters the world to match.

Lies? Of course, lies. But what is a lie if not a story? And ah, what power a story has when whispered into the ear of a man with a gun.

what is a memory if not a ghost?

If a story does its job, it doesn't ever end. Not really. But it can change. This is the nature of folktales. They shift to fit each teller. Take whatever form suits the bearer best. What begins as a story of sorrow can be acknowledged, held like a sweetheart to the chest, rocked and sung to. And then it can be set down to sleep. It can become an offering. A lantern. An ember to lead you through the dark.

Malka's flame burns for one hour, then one day, one year. It has not stopped burning since. And I have not stopped running. You were warned. The story as it is, it's not the story as we wish it were, but then again, it is not a story at all. It is our world. A dead child is a dead child. A massacre is a massacre. Memories must be told. Hens beget hens. Mothers beget children who beget daughters of their own. Generations pass and suddenly we forget. Our descendants are born yearning and they do not know why, for they have forgotten. Their hands are full of fire, their legs are trembling to flee. A body remembers. The soured air remembers. We cannot forget. I cannot forget. And if I am to remember, so too, I vow, will you.

[A] folktale can never be forgotten because it wriggles and rearranges until it sits neatly on the heart. It is fluid and changing, able to adapt to whatever setting it finds itself in. It shifts in the mouth of every teller and adapts to the shape of each listener's ear. The facts can change (place names, the color of a character's woolen coat, the particular flowers in a small, circular garden), but the core remains the same. So the folktale survives. Assimilates. And with it--so survives the memory.

What is a house but a container for a life? What is a life but a container for a story? When a container is broken, it does not destroy the contents. It sets them free.

A mob has no ears to call to, only a single mouth, yelling. A mob has no hands to hold, only a single finger, pointing. A mob has no head, only a single body, guideless, acting as it will.

She put out her hand. “Kill the lantern,” she said. There was no more hesitation in her voice. Isaac smiled. He took her hand in his and shook. “Raise the ghost.

The people dreamt, and as they dreamt, they believed, and their belief grew into oceans, into sails, into a good, strong wind to carry them toward that land called America. When they arrived, they found more of the same. New hungers. New tyrants. New suffering. Old brutalities. The soil, already dark with blood. But for one brief, suspended moment, there in the liminal breaths between here and there, there was hope.

It is impossible to take a step without walking through a ghost. Every memory creates one. Every version of ourselves leaves a shadow self behind. Every regret and every promise and every touch of skin against skin.

If a story does its job, it doesn’t ever end. Not really. But it can change. This is the nature of folktales. They shift to fit each teller. Take whatever form suits the bearer best. What begins as a story of sorrow can be acknowledged, held like a sweetheart to the chest, rocked and sung to. And then, it can be set down to sleep. It can become an offering. A lantern. An ember to lead you through the dark.

Truth traveled through her like a bullet. What kind of beast cultivates mobs out of common citizens, using fear as bait? In the real world, these weren’t the traits of monsters. They were the traits of men seeking power. Traits of war. . . .[the] weapon wasn’t a gun. . .it was a charming invitation, a toast to a better tomorrow. It was fear at your back. . .this dybbuk and his wraiths, he wasn’t a who, or an it - he’d told her this outright. He was a when. An event made manifest.

There are moments for sorrow and there are moments for rage. Both, born from grief. Sorrow is long-lasting. It can become a companion if you let it. A stray cat who refuses to leave for side. There will be a time for sorrow, as sorrow, like a cat, has many lives. Rage is brief. It ravages the body like house fire, consuming and powerful. This-this-is the time for rage.

Tell me, how many stories are interrupted by soldiers? Hundreds? Thousands?

People in our family, we’re born with thistles in our feet. It’s why we’re always traveling. Because if we stood still, the thistles would prick us.

They say pain can be passed in the blood. A sorrow great enough can alter an ancestral line, can make itself visible in the body even generations later, even once the name of the sorrow is forgotten. How long does it take for the body to realize it is safe? Does it ever?

Who gets remembered in the great American experiment? Who is forgotten? What becomes of those whose names are dust? Tell me this country ain’t haunted.

There are a finite number of facts in the universe with which to tell a story. Lies, on the other hand, are limitless.

That’s how Bellatine felt inside the legged house. Like she was living her present and her future and her past, all at once. Like her own story was being told back to her, floorboard by floorboard

What of the part where memory and loss and yearning are stored? Surely, they were still out there somewhere - gone to wherever the forsaken are banished. Wandering the burnt-out Alabama plantations, the fields rancid with enslaved sorrow. Across tracks built by Chinese rail workers, shot en masse come payday to save a dime. Into full-plotted cemeteries behind Indian boarding schools and beneath the shadows of burning crosses, white hoods peaked like snowcapped mountains. Over the grounds of Manzanar and potter's fields glutted with migrant peach pickers. Who gets remembered in the great American experiment? Who is forgotten? What becomes of those whose names are dust? Tell me this country ain't haunted.

It's wild, isn't it," Rummy said, "how there are all these stories that played out before we even existed. And their residue is all around us, all the time, but we don't even know it. Sometimes I wonder how much of me is my own, you know?

There is no such thing as a ghost of the dead. Yet suffering has a way of begging to be remembered. Sometimes, as a story. Sometimes, as a wraith.

One of the drawbacks of the artist’s gift: sometimes you’re so busy seeing the world as it could be, you forget to keep track of the one you’re in.

we must always make use of our rights, lest they vanish from neglect.

Soon the tumbleweed had become one of the Wild West’s most iconic characters. A grand joke, no? This paragon of Americana—secretly an immigrant, after all. The Russian thistle disguised itself well.