The Death of Jane Lawrence

Whoever has made him has made something wondrous and terrible, but they have made a man, and to unmake him would be to kill him. He lacks certain finer points of existence, but he is a living thing. To unmake him would be horrible.

No, she cannot unmake him.

The world fell away, and she fell away with it. Had this been here all this time, this gentle succor, this sweet emptiness? Her lungs expanded and contracted as normal, and she knew that she was getting air, but it felt distant. It felt immaterial. Ecstasy danced across her nerves, a sweet delight, perfect in its tenor, blotting out all else.

It is almost enough.

Jane leaves the mirror. Renton is gone. She stands among the statues ringing the operating table, and she looks at the redness of her blood, the orderly disorder of her viscera. It does not look as painful as it felt. It looks, in the candlelight, like ink in water. Like a painting. Like something delicate and rageful. It looks like she felt, all those days alone in Lindridge Hall. It looks like the forming of the chick within the egg.

Both are true, here in death. She wishes that could be true elsewhere. But in life, time is linear. One thing happens, and then the other. There is no changing that.

Time is only onionskins marked with similar drawings of place and actor, arranged in different scenes.

“I will fight,” Jane spat.

Simple. It was so simple. These were not the ghosts of the dead, but hungry things that wore their forms, extracted from memory, bound to cause the maximum amount of pain because they drew only the details that hurt from their victim’s minds.

Did it matter that ghosts were not real and this was not her mother? Or was it only the beating of her own heart that mattered, the longing there, the loneliness?

Stopping did not help, either. The longer she was still, the harder it would be to move again.

“Cruelty has a way of cutting through to the heart of things,” Mr.