Harvest Season

“What do you mean, your mother’s a vampire?” I demanded. “Vampires don’t exist!”

“Neither do zombies, and neither do nameless mystery girls from the woods, but here we are,” said Jude. “For someone who doesn’t know her own name, you’re awfully judgmental about the life choices of others.”

The candle cannot be cut in half because you wish to begin burning it at the middle. All that would do is shorten your candle, and consequentially shorten the life of the light. No. It is better to let the whole thing burn, knowing that you will have to wait for a time, knowing that you cannot hurry the process, because then you will know, when you are back in the darkness, that you have done everything you can.

“Make sense!”

“But that, my dear, is not my job. You’re awake, aware, and best of all, here. That was my job. The rest is up to you.”

Sometimes—not very often, mind you—alive things can look in front of them and behind, see how badly, how really wretchedly, they are about to muck it all up, and just decide not to. They can see how wrong they were, up until this very minute, bloodily determined to put their feet, shake their heads, and say wasn’t that a near miss? Good job we turned out to be so clever and level-headed and the good kind of cowardly or else who knows what would have happened?
Which is just how Idem Arent and Catchpenny sat down in a little clearing in the sugar maples and hazelnut saplings and giant baobabs with all their friends and made a treaty instead of eating each other

“I was just thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of the day,” I said. “And then I remembered that this time yesterday, I didn’t want anything. I’m not sure I even existed. So this is sort of nice. I like wanting things.”