Take a photo of a barcode or cover
We had begun so long ago with our poems after Sappho, carefully styled in fragments, our paintings and blushes all done in likeness. Perhaps at last the future of Sappho would be delivered into our hands like a packet of books knotted up with string. For example we might open a seemingly ordinary biography, its chapters neatly partitioned, and find that it was webbed throughout with the most extraordinary filaments of a life. A life after all did not happen by itself, in discrete units. Thus this biography would be bound together with all of our lives, twined through from preface to index: curling, animate, verdant. In the end we might become the readers of our own afterwords.
As a wise woman once said,
"You know the problem with heroes and Saints?
They always end up dead."
In fact, we all end up dead.
But people who steal books
have a truly miserable afterlife.
"You know the problem with heroes and Saints?
They always end up dead."
In fact, we all end up dead.
But people who steal books
have a truly miserable afterlife.
Now in the valley, the people care less for pretty faces. Mothers pat their pregnant bellies and whisper prayers for the future. They pray for rain in the long summer. They pray that their children will be brave and clever and strong, that they will tell the true stories instead of the easy ones. They pray for sons with red eyes and daughters with horns.
In the eerie, muffled silence of the water, he heard his mother's voice, vicious like a whip crack. She was always asking more of him, demanding it, and now she told him to fight. She spoke his true name, the one she only used when they trained, the name tattooed on his heart. A heart that had not stopped beating. A heart that still had life.