Tamsyn Muir

“Anything for the job, Amy?” said Lucille. She sounded faintly mocking. “I’m not Amy.” “You are what you eat,” said Lucille. “Oh, cute,” she said. “Very cute.”

“‘Lucy and Lesley,’” she quoted. “‘Love endures.’” “Or so I thought—at the time,” said the Widower. “Oh, something endures, but love doesn’t.”

To which a voice on the opposite side of the shore was raised, exceeding wroth, and Alecto heard it shout in a very great shout: Get in line, thou big slut.

what’s like except a love that hasn’t been invited indoors?

She found Camilla’s wrist—a wrist she had loved so keenly, attached to hands that had bathed her and flipped the pages of magazines to read to her and spooned out food she didn’t want to eat. She looked up into the face of the woman who was gone, which had been shared by a man who was also gone, a face taken by someone new.

we were children—playing with the reflections of stars in a pool of water … thinking it was space.

They left you, they left you. They saw you suffering on dollar-shop life-support, and they didn’t look back. They didn’t give a fuck about trying to save you. They left. She said, “I don’t remember.” He said, “I can’t forget.”

“It was good,” said Camilla, and her eyes closed. “It was good. We were happy."

“Camilla, we did it right, didn’t we?” Palamedes said, and now Nona knew he wasn’t speaking to anyone else in the universe. “We had something very nearly perfect … the perfect friendship, the perfect love. I cannot imagine reaching the end of this life and having any regrets, so long as I had been allowed to experience being your adept.”

You remember how the fuck-off great-aunts always used to say, Suffer and learn?
If they were right, Nonagesimus, how much more can we take until you and me achieve omniscience?

EN L’AN MYRIADE DE NOTRE SEIGNEUR, la dix millième année du Roi Immortel, le bienveillant Prince de la Mort, Gideon Nav prit son épée, ses bottes et ses magazines pornos et s’évada de la Neuvième Maison.