Implied Nonsense

“If you think in black and white your brain can't be agile."

He said, "I guess you could say... we had beef."

twat-waffle

Misery may love company, but anger thrives on it.

Men making deals on the behalf of women never seems to go very well for the women.

But that is such bull because the bad things you see your parents do they never die. They cling to you like when you walk through a spider’s web in the woods and you can’t pull off the strands. You didn’t get caught by the spider, but stuff sticks to you. And to say everything will just fall away when your parents die is stupid.

Get this through your pea brain,” Jasmine growls back, “I don’t want to be you. You people think you know every damned thing, but you don’t know me. You just see a fat dummy with a hillbilly accent. You don’t even think I’m a person.

Oxeye daisies clinging to gravel lean in the wind as the train clanks by. Alabama is beautiful like that, like flowers clinging to gravel.

Gyre sat there, breathing hard and staring at the tubes and electrodes running from the suit to Jennie’s torn flesh. This was her, beneath the suit. Wired in, plugged in, part of the technology. In some ways, she was just the brain inside of it, the fine-motor control. Her stomach roiled. She wanted out of her own suit, but she could picture her own skin sloughing off, the tubing tugging, rupturing, her body a bag filled with fluid and blood and bile, punctured and leaking out onto the cavern floor. Vomit rose in her throat, and she let go of Jennie, falling back onto her ass and staring at the corpse, which sat upright on its own, braced by the remains of the suit, hunched forward.

What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were. His story. His, not mine. It ends at his grave.

We’re going to survive—our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams—and in their worst nightmares too.

What I came away with was a sense of Helen seizing control of her own story. She was so isolated in that city, so powerless—even at my age, I could see that—and those tapestries were a way of saying: I’m here. Me. A person, not just an object to be looked at and fought over.

At that time, he was probably the most beautiful man alive, as he was certainly the most violent, but that’s the problem. How do you separate a tiger’s beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah’s elegance from the speed of its attack? Achilles was like that—the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.

Viewed from sufficient height, all problems are simple. All knots can be untied with a few deaths, or ten thousand.

I grew up reading those stories of ancient gods and mythologies, and they are a part of me as they are a part of us all, even if we don’t realize it. That’s the true power of story. That it can find the secrets both writer and reader didn’t know they had within themselves.

I’d been kind to Ismene—or I thought I had, but perhaps no kindness was possible between owner and slave, only varying degrees of brutality? I looked across the room at Ismene and thought: Yes, you’re right. My turn now.