where words come not to die, but to live

Devotion: profound dedication, loyalty, or love for a person, activity, or cause.

by Bethany A. Breitland

I look forward to a long talk with you finally after we’re dead, our ghost legs flopped over a blackened sill. The storm window with its rickety metal ridge no longer cutting into the backs of our thighs, like it did when we were young, perching over the porch roof to see the moon of the young corn. It’ll be cool summer nights forever — Indiana, crickets singing — freight trains fat with silage howling across the flat land. And we shall sit, our spirits willing a heft into our backsides as we inhale. And because we’re ghosts, the tar smell won’t seep into our hands or hair as it did when we were sisters — sure signs we weren’t the good of girls we’d been raised to be.

But we’re dead now, so we don’t have to lie. And we also don’t have to avoid talking about the nuances of love and violence we were born into. How need and want and touch and hate bundled our bones for kindling. It’s easier now to feel safe in my body because I don’t have one. It’s easier now to admit we all were just trying to stub out a nightmare

Robert Eggers, from the original Nosferatsu script (2016)