Thrust

What it amounts to is, I met that young woman, I met that girl, out of order. Stories don’t care how we tell them. Stories take any shape they want. Not all stories happen with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I’ve come to understand maybe they never do. End, that is.

Countless hands were lost. Arms, even faces, mangled. The sunk cost of mechanizing America, creating the fiction of freedom, included the slashing of woman and child bodies. The disconnected pieces fell to the ground, reaching for one another across brutalities and absence, until the wet gutters carried them away.

I don't know how to talk about what it means to be haunted by other bodies, by family stories, by ancestral sorrow. By other experiences from the past. Maybe all of us carry the voices and bodies of everyone who has come before since the dawn of time. Maybe some of us carry them differently.

Sometimes all a father can do is smile for his daughter and give her the story she desires. Perhaps in fairy tale form children can live with what really happened.

Laisvė recited her understanding of the word history, in triplets: “Explosion, cosmos, chaos. Water, land, cells. Plants, fish, animals. Indigenous humans, habitats, stories. Dreams, desire, death. Invasion, dispossession, colonization. Money, ships, slavery. God, goods and services, slaughter. War, power, genocide. Civilization, progress, destruction. Science, transportation, cities. Skyscrapers, bridges, poison. “Nations, power, brutality. Terror, insurrection, incarceration. Collapse, raids, water.

Sometimes the story of who you might become comes before you understand it.

A tender fan of white threads surfaced up through the dirt, speaking in a hundred tiny whispers. 'It's true. My god, your ignorance about the flora and fauna of the Amazon -- staggering. Do you know there are four thousand species of trees alone that none of your scientists have even named, much less analyzed? You have any idea how many fungi? I heard you finally 'found' a few new species of electric eels, that cobalt-blue tarantula, a couple of new river dolphins. I think also a tree that's a hundred feet taller than the tallest tree you thought you knew of. At what point do you rethink your whole idea that these are 'discoveries?' How does that word even have any meaning for you? Something exists just because you finally 'found' it? You 'discovered' it?

Most humans were stupid; the rest of them suffered from a melancholia that was something like an irrational addiction to nostalgia, or so it seemed to him. A decidedly human ailment. They were addicted to dead things.

She felt . . . how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. —Virginia Woolf

Women have been outsmarting their counter-genders since the dawn of time. I do wonder, though, when women will tire of their part in the story and revolt. I imagine the bloodbath.

Memory is proof that imagination is a real place.

We’ve made a wrong place for fathers in the world, so they throw their lives at heroisms and braveries and wars, and winning and owning, and desire poking out of their pants in a way that is desperate, and then they die with a want inside them that is larger than a body.

For work,” she finally said, then added, “For a better life.” She hugged herself. The two answers were a story that had formed like a cradle in which immigrants sang themselves to sleep.

I think some people slip time and enter a life wrongly—or, if not wrongly, at least formed differently, mismatched with the material conditions around them. I do not think any god with some odd intention put them where they are. I think that beings emerge and decompose endlessly, like cosmic or oceanic particles, so whoever we are and wherever we were emerges and dissolves endlessly, like all matter and energy.

Miles of information... so that questions might be answered, so that judgements might be made, so that stories would not be lost, so that memory might outlive slaughter. So that crimes against humanity could be witnessed by the humanity that survived them.