“Look, an angel,�� someone yells from the ground. Stupid Terrans. They are still amazed by the sights of such ordinary things. Silly creatures they are, no better than baby making machines.

I almost feel sorry for her, whoever she will be. Maybe her sense of purpose will come when she mothers my child. No one has told me that I need to sire more than one. My duty will conclude once she becomes pregnant.

"I’ll give you the world,�� he said against my mouth. “The moon. The fucking stars. Anything you ask, it’s yours. I’m yours.��

"I would have waited five hundred more years for you. A thousand years. And if this was all the time we were allowed to have... The wait was worth it."

Each snowflake was a sigh heard by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. All the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women suffer.

“A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.��

"Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always."

"I love you,�� he said, his lips grazing against hers. “And I will love you, no matter what the future brings. No matter how hard I need to fight. I will always love you.��

"You were the sun, and I was crashing into you. I’d wake up every morning and think, ‘This will end in flames.’��

And when I felt myself slipping too far, I held on to the one thing I’m always sure of��

Blue eyes. Bronze curls. The fact that Simon Snow is the most powerful magician alive. That nothing can hurt him, not even me.

That Simon Snow is alive.

And I’m hopelessly in love with him.

Kell wore a very peculiar coat.

“I love you, Shayda,�� he says. “I miss you everywhere I go. I want to see you turn your nose up at chapulines in Mexico. I want to walk Temple Street Market with you when I’m in Hong Kong. I want to share every sunrise and every sunset and every second in between with you. I want your laughter and your breath and your blood and your bones. You’re the one thing that centres my soul. I may circle the whole world, but you’ll always be home, Beetroot.��

I was not a pet, not a doll, not an animal. I was a survivor, and I was strong. I would not be weak, or helpless again. I would not, could not be broken. Tamed.

I never needed this race or a hashtag or a king to become queen. I was born royalty. All I had to do was pick up my crown.

Last week, Freddy Brinkley tripped over his own shoelaces (rookie mistake, you always double-knot before you start the trek into the battle zone) on his way to his seat and face-planted into a plate of spasagna, Campbell County’s lasagna-spaghetti hybrid dish.
At least thirty people captured it on Campbell Confidential, and it’s been remixed, remastered, and retooled so many times and in so many ways that I don’t think poor Freddy is ever going to get past #SpasagnaGate.
Freddy got cocky, thought he could make The Walk without the proper precautions, and he paid the ultimate price: a public meme-ification. You hate to see it.

Ove is fifty-nine. He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his forefinger a policeman’s flashlight.

People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.

Ove didn’t really care who was parked in the guest parking area, of course. But it was a question of principle. If it said twenty-four hours on the sign, that’s how long you were allowed to stay. What would it be like if everyone just parked wherever they liked? It would be chaos. There’d be cars bloody everywhere.

As Ove approached the shopping center from his little side road, he could just make out that there were only two parking spaces left. What all these people were doing at the shopping center on a normal weekday was beyond his comprehension. Obviously people no longer had jobs to go to.

He had his job to take care of. How would it look if people stopped coming to work all over the place because they’d killed themselves? Ove’s wife died on a Friday, was buried on Sunday, and then Ove went to work on Monday. Because that’s how one handles things.

Ove’s wife decided on principle that she’d let Ove repaint one of the rooms in their house every six months. Or, to be more exact, she decided she wanted a different color in one of the rooms once every six months. And when she said as much to Ove he told her that she might as well forget it. And then she called a decorator for an estimate. And then she told Ove how much she was going to pay the decorator. And then Ove went to fetch his painting stool.

You miss the strangest things when you lose someone. Little things. Smiles. The way she turned over in her sleep. Even repainting a room for her.

He never understood why she chose him. She loved only abstract things like music and books and strange words. Ove was a man entirely filled with tangible things. He liked screwdrivers and oil filters. He went through life with his hands firmly shoved into his pockets. She danced.

But if anyone had asked, he would have told them that he never lived before he met her. And not after either.