She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.
Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat and the thrill, and it was as bright within her as a swallowed star.
Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.
She knocked and waited, because when the door was opened from within, it had the potential to lead someplace quite different.
It’s all a quilt of fairy tales with a patch here and there of truth.
Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic.
I am one of billions. I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form. I will be ungathered. The stardust will go on to be other things someday and I will be free.
I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books.
Like a magpie, I am a scavenger of shiny things: fairy tales, dead languages, weird folk beliefs, fascinating religions, and more.
Music. Close your eyes and it’s a rosebush blooming in time lapse so that it shoots and blossoms flow outward in a swift choreography of growth and collapse, twine and coil, release and fade. Close your eyes and music paints light vines and calligraphy on the darkness within you.
She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox’s tongue. She tastes like hope.
She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust.
It’s like losing gravity and falling into space – the moment of pitching headlong when the endlessness of space asserts itself and there is no more down, only an eternity of up, and you realize you can fall forever and never run out of stars.
Bitter, bitter, this desolation of angels.
I know it’s not easy for you, living this life, but try to remember, always try to remember, you’re not the only one with troubles.
Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.
A thousand things might have stopped me from being here right now, but instead, a thousand things brought me here.
It’s not stalking if you don’t follow them home, right?
Hazael rose from his knees. It had to take extraordinary effort, yet somehow he managed a version of his lazy smile when he said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to be a bath attendant. You should take me instead. I’m nicer than my sister.” Jael returned the lazy smile. “You’re not my type.” “Well, you’re not anybody’s type,” said Hazael. “No, wait. I take it back. My sword says she’d like to know you better.” “I’m afraid I must deny her the pleasure. I’ve been kissed by swords before, you see.” “I may have noticed.
The two of them were stoic and stone-faced and ten feet apart, currently not even looking at each other, but Zuzana had the impression of a pair of magnets pretending not to be magnets. Which, you know, only works until it doesn’t.
It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such. The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry ‘Monster!’ and looked behind him.
I don’t know many rules to live by,’ he’d said. ‘But here’s one. It’s simple. Don’t put anything unnecessary into yourself. No poisons or chemicals, no fumes or smoke or alcohol, no sharp objects, no inessential needles–drug or tattoo–and…no inessential penises either.’ ‘Inessential penises?’ Karou had repeated, delighted with the phrase in spite of her grief. ‘Is there any such thing as an essential one?’ ‘When an essential one comes along, you’ll know,’ he’d replied.
But he is pretty. God, I hope he’s not an asshole. Do you think there’s any chance he’s both non-orifice and single? I mean, seriously. What are the chances?
…something was starting to take shape, out of magic and will. Smoke and bone.
The audacity to love. Do you know what a gift that is?
