Highlights from May & June: Lines Worth Repeating

June slipped away without me taking care of May. So, it’s time for a little catchup.

Christa Comes Out of Her Shell by Abbi Waxman

If it’s possible to blush all the way down to your DNA, I did it.

It felt very much like home all of a sudden, like a familiar book released in a new edition.

Chasing Empty Caskets by E.N. Crane

“Winnie, seek,” I said, letting her lead me. She was following the boy’s scent back the way he came and I followed her, grudgingly taking the sticky hand. It was small and somehow both wet and freezing. Children were a terrifying medical anomaly, and I suddenly understood why the ladies in mommy groups were nuts.

The Olympian Affair by Jim Butcher

Bayard is a born hero, which is the larval form of a dead hero.

Ransom shook her head. “Some people think that if they’re simply insane and ruthless enough, they can accomplish anything.”

“Terrifying,” Espira said.

“Oh, that’s not the terrifying part,” Calliope said.

“No?”

“The terrifying part,” she murmured, “is that sometimes they’re right.”

Bridget rather forgot how to be conscious for some indistinct length of time.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can’t have one without the other.

You may have noticed that when I do manage to care, I’m a pessimist.

Grave Cold by Shannon Knight

They’d reached her truck. “Nyle, meet the Gremlin, a machine you will love to hate.” The yellow truck looked very much up to the task.

One’s own mortality was a mighty incentive.

Backpacking Through Bedlam by Seanan McGuire

Family is complicated. Peach cobbler, on the other hand, is refreshingly simple.

“The laws of physics aren’t negotiable.”

Darius laughed, and the sound was loud and joyous as he set his hands back on the wheel. “Sure they are. There’s no law that’s not negotiable, if you know how to get your shoulder against it and push.”

Always be polite to she shapeshifting super predator. It’s a simple rule of life, but a good one all the same.

Dark Days by Derek Landy

“Sometimes you’ve got to admit it when you’re wrong.”

“You never admit it when you’re wrong.”

“But I’m rarely wrong, you see. You, on the other hand, are wrong a bizzarly large amount of the time. Statistically, it’s quite amazing.”

The Ink Black Heart by Author

He was starting to feel like a truffle pig doing its job in a room full of incense, dead fish, and strong cheese.

First Frost by Author

I’d taken the frontage road, but I think I might’ve accidentally taken a few other turns, and now here we were in what might be the middle of nowhere—and when a guy from Wyoming refers to a place as the middle of nowhere that truly means the epicenter of nowhere.

I said nothing, which, when there was a stenographer in the room, was always a safe bet.

Paper & Blood by Kevin Hearne

Grief is never easy. But it gets softer around the edges, smoothed over like a river rock given time enough and water. It’s still a rock and it’s heavy and dangerous and capable of hurting you. Just not immediately to the touch, if that makes sense.

When the sky slid from indigo to grey, heralding the dawn, the birds began to wake up and call about their urgent need for Wednesday coffee— or so I imagined. I certainly needed some, as a belligerent caffeine-withdrawal headache had taken up residence in my brain and likely had legal arguments against eviction.

From pulp—utterly lifeless pulp—new life can be born. Add water and pressure and you no longer have mere pulp but a medium for the miraculous. It can carry the words of one lover to another. Express gratitude for gifts and thoughts. Invoice a client. Threaten death. Bear the light touch of poetry or the weighty prose of novels. It can be folded into an airplane, to annoy your teacher, or folded into origami, an artistic appreciation of nature made from wholesome natural ingredients. And on and on. So much can be built from the ruin of plant life.

Which is not to say that humans are noble. We ruin so much else that never gets a new life, and their dissolution—their extinction—is final.

But paper is one thing we got right.

The best we can do sometimes, in absence of actual wisdom, is to simply cease being foolish.

Howl by e rathke

To look back on that day is to sink into a delicate memory. Like a love letter sent to myself, yet left to pulp in the rain.

The Bitter Past by Bruce Borgos

I believe in hunches. I think they’re just the dots in your brain that aren’t fully connected yet.

Erasure by Percival Everett

There are as many hammers as there are saws, the misplaced thumb knows no difference.

A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious.

I was lonely, angrier than I had been in a long time, angrier than when I was an angry youth, but now I was rich and angry. I realized how much easier it was to be angry when one is rich.

What some people would have you believe is that Duchamp demonstrated that art could be made out of anything, that there is nothing special about an object d’art that makes it what it is, that all that matters is that we are willing to allow it to be art. To say, “this is a work of art” is a strange kind of performative utterance as when the king knights a fellow or the judge pronounces a couple man and wife. But if it turns out that the marriage license was incorrectly filled out, then the declaration is undone and we will say, “I guess you’re not husband and wife after all.” But even as it’s thrown out of the museum, what has been called art it is still art. Discarded art. Shunned art. Bad art. Misunderstood art. Oppressed art. Shocked art. Lost art. Dead art. Art before its time. Artless art. But art nonetheless.

Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

“I like land,” I said. “I don’t drown there.”

“Any dietary restrictions?”

“I tried being a vegan for a while, but I couldn’t live without cheese.”

“They have vegan cheese.”

“No, they don’t. They have shredded orange and white sadness that mocks cheese and everything it stands for.”

“That thing looks like H. P. Lovecraft’s panic attack.”

It was stupidly perfect how all my problems were suddenly solved with the strategic application of money.

Detours and Do-overs by Wesley Parker

Since she doesn’t wanna talk, I do what I assume most men do when confronted with crippling silence from their significant other.

I start to rationalize shit.

“How you holding up?” she says.

“Like a Jenga tower in the middle of a bunch of drunks,”

Grammar Sex and Other Stuff by Robert Germaux

Don’t you just love it when a professional athlete ends a long holdout and finally signs that new deal worth multiple millions of dollars, but assures everyone that “it wasn’t about the money”? Bless his little heart. As if any reference to cold hard cash would have somehow sullied the whole salary negotiation process.

(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)