"Starling House" by Alix E. Harrow
suicide is a folded hand
hard eyes and a liar's smile
the dark throat of the drive
like a poorly kept secret
He was a liar, but the best liars are the ones that stick closest to the truth, so I believe it.
looked at her like she was ice water in July
She fought like an apocalypse, like a great and inevitable ending.
the tap water tastes like blood to him
Hardly anybody in Eden bothers with the area code because it's 270 all the way to the Mississippi
Spring in Kentucky isn't so much a season as a warning
When you want what you can't have, so you bury it like a knife between your ribs.
There's a tension to the shape of it against the sky, as if it has to work hard to remember to be a house and not anything else.
It's as if someone had given a child a piece of white chalk and told her to draw a wolf, but the only thing she knew about wolves was that they frightened her.
Every culture seemed to have its own defenses against them: silver bullets, crosses, holy words, hamsas, circles of salt, cold iron, blessed water, wards and runes and rituals, a hundred different ways of driving back the dark.
She was feckless and foolish and beautiful, she drank and she lied and she had a laugh like the Fourth of July and I needed her.
I cross the crisp white lines of the football field, sweating, fighting the dizzy time-warp sensation of visiting your old school: a glutinous sucking at the soles of your feet, as of quicksand, and the nagging suspicion that you never really left and never will.
She was an appetite on two legs, always running from one scheme to the next.
I smile at him, and from the way he flinches I think it must be my real smile, mean and crooked.
I don't know what kind of deal he made, but I know a devil when I see one.
Maybe there's no difference between wanting and needing except in degree; maybe if you desire something badly enough, for long enough, it becomes a demand.
not lucky so much as too quick for the bad luck to catch up with us
Apparently the maps you make in childhood never fade, but are merely folded away until you need them again.
Surely the precise shape of the wounds doesn't matter as much as how much they hurt, and whose hands dealt them.
the ordinary sin of sex, and the far greater sin of refusing to be sorry about it
It feels like the very end of June or the beginning of July, when you've lost track of time and it doesn't matter because you have nowhere in particular to be, when summer stretches so luxuriantly on either side of. you that you begin to doubt the existence of other seasons.
like fox fire on a dark night