The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

For the first time, when I tell myself how my future will go, it is not the instructions for a hysterectomy. It is not hot blood, yellow fat, the soft edges of internal organs slipping between my fingers. There are no implements jutting out of a wound and no stitches. There is nothing to cut, or clamp, or sew shut. I don’t even have to take out my eyes.

Instead, my future is calm. Once this is done, once this is over, it will be just us.

We deserve to be together on our own. Without death hanging over us like a scalpel. But we’re not, and this is what we face now, so we have to make do with what we have

It would be so easy to not hurt us, and the Speakers can’t even do that. It’s more work to hurt us. It’s more work to be cruel. And yet they continue.

This is not Veil sickness. This is the ones who did not make it reaching out screaming

There’s a difference between horrible things that have gone on forever, because you can almost convince yourself of the inevitability of an age-old cruelty, or almost its necessity. But not a new one. With a new one, the change is too great, the wound too new, and you cannot convince yourself that it is simply the way of the world.

Isabella is leaving us.

It is like watching an animal being led to the slaughter, and there’s something in her eyes that says she’s going to do something about it

You are at once exceedingly logical and horrifically illogical. Can you explain that to me, Miss Bell? Can you help me understand?”

I cannot. Because I do not know the way my mind works either. It is a mind that experiences the world too much. It is a mind that at once experiences everything in its smallest details, but without sensing the deeper meaning the rest of the world seems to inherently understand. It is a mind that sees the patterns and clicking, ticking systems all around us, but crumbles as soon as something falls out of place. It is a mind that operates, it seems, in a mirror version of the world, where the same actions and reactions are experienced so differently it’s like we are not even the same species.

I don’t want to take her apart in the way most men would want to disassemble a woman. Not for any sort of power or hunger. I want to be close, and I don’t know how to be close unless I’m elbow-deep in innards

Would I choose to bear a child if I was allowed to keep my manhood through it? If pregnancy did not mean shedding my masculinity? I don’t actually know how much of my fear and revulsion is linked to the world’s inherent gendering of everything reproductive.

I didn’t know how to explain to her that I didn’t want to be a boy because it was easier than being a girl. I wasn’t pretending.

It was just that my girlhood was—and still is—simply, factually, incorrect