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288 pages, Hardcover
First published September 7, 2021
“I spent two hundred years running around, shooting people for a piece of shit who wanted to [SPOILER] What the fuck? What the fuck?”
How Ayane’s name alone is sufficient to extirpate the haunting from her eyes.
Around them, the concert hall colors elegiacally: phthalocyanine blue shadows, viridian luster, an oil painting drowned in the bathyal deep.
This is love too: sacrament, unconditional surrender of the selfish ego […] Love’s work, reminds that memory of Reyha. And sometimes, it is hard work. The work of a funeral. The work of fielding condolences, writing thank-you notes, keeping a son alive, keeping yourself alive, keeping sane when you wake up in bed alone for the first time in more than twenty years. It is the work of saying *yes to the ghost of your dead first love, yes, I accept you’re not coming back, that you choose the grave over me, that it is okay, that I’m here, that we’ll do this together one last time, that I love you, always, always.*
Verdigris kisses her then. She tastes of cool water, salt-sweetened and sunlight-warmed. Of being young, of a youth that Maya knows she never fucking experienced yet there it is, a florescent memory of staggering through early life’s myriad tragedies: first loves and their fumbling sweetness, disintegrating faiths, the dregs of childhood sublimated into the construction of the adult pneuma. All those things, those hominid rights, evoked without advance notice and with searing clarity.
All the small kindnesses she was owed.
All the sweet joys she could have.
She thinks of Reyha in the house she and Rochelle built, haunted and hopeful, hallowed and held by love.