The Altals Complex by Olivie Blake

 Even where there's nothing to live for, there's always the next meal.

Amen, sister. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Musings on Lost Mothers

 My mother died March 24, 2024.  I'm having a hard time processing that, I guess.  It is only starting to hurt.  When I was little ("like a number approaching infinity, say, 6") and not so little, but younger (30), I could not imagine a world without my mother.  To consider such a place and time was unbearably painful.  Yet, here I am.  And, often, it saddens and confuses me to say, I don't feel anything.  More, when the loss was new, I am ashamed that I felt relief.  I was her caretaker.  I wasn't all that great at it.  She told me so regularly.  She told me I was a disappointment.  She told me I lacked compassion.  She was sad and lonely and she wanted me to split my soul open and share everything with her.  She wanted me to satify her needs for connection and give her the opportunity to mother me in my distress.  "Ann.  Why are you so unhappy?"  I think I tried at least a few couple times, but i...
Read more

Alone with You in the Ether by Olivie Blake

 ...art is tragedy.  Art is loss. It's the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes.  It's the peeled lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It's him lying next to you, legs tangled with yours, only to know he'll be specter in your thoughts by next month, next week, ten minutes from now.  This is what makes it art, Charlotte, and you've always understood that.  You've always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain. Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else.  It seems like it's the right shape but it's slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are tranasformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don't even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones. What an appropriate passage t...
Read more

Books, 2024

All Systems Red by Martha Wells Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs When Fairies go Bad by Ursula Vernon (Z) The Map of Days by Ransom Riggs Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult Swimming with Bridgeport Girls by Anthony Tambakis The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly The Last by Hanna Jameson Epic Zero (2):  (Z) Geronimo Stiltson: Curse of the Cheese Pyramid by  (Z) The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman Thornhedge by T, Kingfisher (pen name of Ursula Vernon of Dragonbreath fame!) The Story Hour by Thrity Umrigar St. Lucy's School for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell Shrek by William Steig (Z) Danny Dragonbreath in The Frozen Menace by Ursula Vernon (Z) The Mauraders by Tom Cooper Hamster Princess: Of  Mice and Magic by Ursula Vernon (Z) Harriot Hamsterbone by Ursula Vernon (Z) Starter Villain by John Scalzi Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood The Masked City by Genevieve Cogman The Burning Page by Genevieve Cogman Fiction Land by RR Haywood Sleep Donation: A Novella by Karen ...
Read more