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.

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.

I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me.

Start a stone rolling, so in three centuries you’ll have an avalanche.