Sure, what better day for this than May 1?
Head Fake by Scott Gordon
“In moments like this, Shay, we realize how funny life is. We must get the joke. We have to.”
Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett
Freedom, Alabama, wasn’t really the middle of nowhere. We had big fields and the woods, sure, and horses and cows, but if we drove half an hour to Auburn we had a mini-golf course, a mall, and both a Waffle House and a Red Lobster. We had a bowling alley and the water park, even if the water park had been closed last summer, and we had the second-largest zoo in Alabama. It wasn’t like we were Laura Ingalls Wilder or anything.
I’d figured out by now that death never makes sense, no matter how someone dies: murder, accident, old age, cancer, suicide, you’re never ready to lose someone you love. I decided death will always feel unexplained; we will never be ready for it, and you just have to do the best you can with what you have left.
I wondered how many world records had gone unrecorded. How did you really know yours was the world record and not just the only one someone had bothered to write down?
City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky
There was no treasure more precious than a man’s unstretched neck, after all.
Her name was Lemya. She was fresh out of the provinces. She was, Ruslav could tell, one of those who de/ieved in things. She’d already spent a night in the cells because some idiot students had refused to leave some idiot place when the Turncoats had told them to. Not even Occupier patrols, just the locals in their uniforms that were literally a pale imitation of the Pals’. Ruslav knew about that, because he’d been in the cell across the way after being too slow to get out of a punch-up. He heard her and her idiot friends arguing about morals and ethics and other things you couldn’t eat or stab someone with.
In the Pallesand Archipelago, there were no executions. That would imply criminal acts, and everyone knew that the Palleseen were sailing into their Thousand Years of Perfection. Even the persistence of the Temporary Commission of Ends and Means was entirely focused outwards. Of course, plenty of people disappeared across the Archipelago. They just weren’t there, and all reference to them was removed. Their name would only ever be found in one place, a carefully curated list of all the people who didn’t exist and should not he mentioned. The list was necessary when prosecuting anyone gauche enough to mention them, because you had to have something to refer to, to know what it was to which nobody was permitted to refer. But these weren’t executions. This was just the operation of perfection. Outside the Archipelago, however, the officials of the Sway tended to retain the crude local forms of punishment.
Her look suggested she saw through him as though he was no more than the evaporating fog…
He didn’t think of the war anymore. Which wasn’t true. He woke from dreams of it, fighting his blanket. The gas, the wire, the hungry dark that descended at midday. The shrill scream of demon artillery, the bellows of monsters in torment. But he didn’t think about whether it still raged on (doubtless it still raged on) or who was winning (nobody was winning).
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.
If you’re going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance, you should make it a good one.
Falling didn’t bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It’s stopping that’s the problem.
Surely it isn’t illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.
The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst
It wasn’t that she didn’t like people, it was only that she liked books more. They didn’t fuss, or judge, or mock, or reject. They invited you in, fluffed up the pillows on the couch, offered you tea and toast, and shared their hearts with no expectation that you’d do anything more than absorb what they had to give.
She didn’t really know anything about running a shop, or magic, or jam. “But I do know books,” and that meant there was nothing she couldn’t know…eventually. That was a magic in and of itself.
Opening the notebook, she stroked the smooth, crisp, blank page. There was something so very beautiful about a notebook without a single note in it. It felt like touching pure potential.
Return to Sender by Craig Johnson
“Nobody smiles anymore.”
“Excuse me?”
“Have you noticed? Nobody smiles anymore.” Mike adjusted himself in the tiny postal Jeep, setting his back against the passenger-side door as he sat on the floor beside Dog so no one would see him in the September early morning light. “Remember when we were growing up how you were taught that when you walked down the street and you met a stranger, that you smiled or said hello?” He sighed, staring at the plethora of mail and packages in the back as if it were a weight he could no longer bear. “People don’t do that anymore.”
Mike Thurman, my late wife’s cousin, was in a bad mood, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a point.
There’s a part of I-80—or, as the locals call it, the Snow Chi Minh Trail—that’s spoken of as the Highway to Heaven that, when atmospheric conditions are right, gives the appearance as though the Interstate goes straight up into the heavens. But that wasn’t the part that I was on. I was on the soul-leeching part that seems to go on forever; a life-eroding slab of concrete that tears the very hours from your life at an excruciatingly slow pace.
Or maybe that’s just me.
The Highway to Heaven between Evanston and Lyman doesn’t go to heaven but rather to the Bridger Valley, which is pretty nice.
So, maybe it was just me.
(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)
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