The Shadow King

What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no "what happened", there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once.

My father was always a stranger to me, he will say. I knew him through his questions, not his answers.

She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones.

She is afraid of crumbling and disappearing, of being taken and being left behind at the same time: a body tumbling between hands while dying inside.

What is lost is gone, my child, what is lost makes room for something else.

Make living your act of defiance. Record it all.

He is doing as she once did, in the naïve belief that what is buried stays that way, that what is hidden will stay unseen, that what is yours will remain always in your possession. He is being foolish.

Here is the truth he wants to ignore: that what is forged into memory tucks itself into bone and muscle. It will always be there and it will follow us to the grave.

The routine dulls the terror.

These aren't the days to pretend you're only a wife or a sister or a mother, she says. We're more than this.

Who remembers what to do? she asks. Who remembers what it means to be more than what this world believes of us?

We all know that war destroys mankind, and in spite of their differences in race, creed, and religion, women all across the world despise war because its fruit is nothing but destruction.

She is mid-sentence, her tongue against her teeth, curving around a word lost forever.