N.K.Jemisin

“They quarreled,” he said, “over me.”
* * *

He breathes deeply and becomes a fixture of the earth. They tread upon the filaments of his nerves; their voices stir the fine hairs of his skin; their breaths ripple the air he draws into his lungs.

It is ordinary, as lands go. Mountains and plateaus and canyons and river deltas, the usual. Ordinary, except for its size and its dynamism. It moves a lot, this land. Like an old man lying restlessly abed it heaves and sighs, puckers and farts, yawns and swallows. Naturally this land’s people have named it the Stillness. It is a land of quiet and bitter irony.

Most Yumenescenes prefer polite abstraction over vulgar actuality

arms full of milky, bloody stone

The statement explains how one may estimate the location of an orogene by map,” she says. “It is incorrect—oversimplified—because an orogene’s region of consumption is not circular, it is toroidal. Many people then fail to understand that the zone of effect extends downward or upward as well, and can be deformed in other three-

There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is always important to include the eyes; otherwise, people will know you hate them.

Then she wonders why a part of her is trying to find value in degradation.

One cannot reasonably expect sameness out of so much difference,

“Isn’t it understandable that we might be… uncomfortable?”

“Discomfort is understandable. It’s the rudeness that isn’t.”