This Is How You Lose the Time War

They bring daughters of earth back down to the land of death—but death does not claim them.

“Further,” Blue adds, stepping lightly towards the box, making to lift it into the heavy bag next to it, “Ontario sucks. As the prophets say.”

fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

The tears have anger in them at first, but anger burns out fast. Tears stay.

I love you. But stop. Don’t read this. Each word is murder.

Red wrote too much too fast. Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself.

Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

If the planet lasted long enough, the vines that sprout from the corpses’ mouths would grow berries.

I touched their faces, and they were mine; I touched the bed I was on, smelled apples stewing somewhere outside. It was as if, in my own small way, I’d become Garden—so me in my wholeness, me in my fingers, in my hair, in my skin, whole the way Garden is whole, but apart.

Myth and legend give way to history, which gives way again to myth, like curtains parting and meeting again on either side of a performance.