var quotes = [ "The faint warble of Philip's music faded from Ellen's awareness as she lost herself in the reel. Work was the only place she felt like herself. [...] At her desk it felt like reality slowed down enough that she could take it in, that its problems could be fixed, its inhabitants understood and predicted. Things were so much simpler in celluloid.
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. 25", "Are you saying something happened to you? You got better. That's all. Dr. Decker fixed you. He opened you up and drained all that pus and stinking sewage water, and it became another woman and went off to do whatever evil things those women do. It left you clean, and whole. And empty.
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. 27", "The second movie. [...] Her seatmate left, sliding past her and tugging down the brim of his cap as on the screen flesh bloomed and twisted, bubbled and ran like mercury. Opening and opening and opening.
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. 33", "He came after her. He was saying something, voice whiny and needling, covering her in little cuts until all her feelings ran out of the flapping, empty purse of her skin and soaked into the carpet.
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. 44", "The thousand little things that made up a film, and which the slightest error could destroy, obscure or mar beyond saving. [...] The film itself disturbed her. Men in women's clothing. [...] Dark splashes of blood across pale skin and wetted stone. Bodies writhing in elaborate tangles. Rubber and leather. Iron and broken teeth.
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. 47", "A duel. A tryst. An orgy. A nun opening her habit and a nearly seamless cut to a centipede's writhing legs. [...] A woman slashed by a Turk's jeweled scimitar and left to bleed out on an altar, her blood falling upwards through the ruined roof.
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. 48", "A woman climbed the stairs, a woman with a sharp, narrow face like a carving knife and hair teased and oiled into spreading horns. She wore a gown of midnight scales and her own skin swung in soft sheets from her arms and in strips from her cheeks. [...] Plucked birds flapping raw and headless. Something wet. The hissing slither of hot meat over cold marble.
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. 54-55", "Ellen swallowed. She didn't like food. It made her uncomfortable, made her think of her Bubbe's bathroom scale, her mother's litle Weight Watchers cards, the ear-splitting shriek of Richard Simmons inspiring fatties on the television. It made her think of Freddie, who at their first meeting in the collage cafeteria had licked salt and grease from her fingers and said the most obscene, erotic thing Ellen had ever heard. I love to eat.
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. 77", "I'm nothing to this woman, Ellen thought. [...] She realized in a dim, half-conscious way that she'd expected Feldman to defer to her, that she'd thought her fatness would translate into social timidity. Instead, Feldman was looking at her like she was something that had crawled out beneath a rock.
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. 80", "If a photograph could slice a little flesh from time, did the rest of the carcass remain? Could she return and suck the lingering taste off of the cracked and splintered bones?
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. 123", "Ghosts didn't exist. They didn't kill people, or haunt film reels, or avenge injustice. If they did, the world would be buried in them.
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. 136", "Her family felt like cardboard cutouts dancing in front of a candle flame, not people but the idea of people, hungry to exist, to be seen, but with nothing worth seeing.
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. 143", "there are more quotes to come
~ Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, p. ", "
~ The Tisted Ones by T. Kingfisher, p. ", "Carcass. Cut in half. Slaughter line. Spray wash. These words appear in his head and strike him. Destroy him. But they're not just words. They're the blood, the dense smell, the automation, the absence of thought.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 11", "[...] he tries to clear the persistent idea that this is what they are: humans bred as animals for consumption. [...] His brain warns him that there are words that cover up the world. There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 11", "He doesn't call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is human but will never be a person, to what is always a product.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 16", "He thinks that Senor Urami needs to reaffirm reality through words, as though words created and maintain the world in which he lives.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 19", "The owner of the tannery is always smiling and he feels that when this man observes him, what he's really doing is calculating how many metres of skin he can remove in one piece if he slaughters him, flays him and removes his flesh on the spot.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 18", "El Gringo tells him they're isolated in incubators from when they're little, and later on in cages. He says their vocal cords are removed so they're easier to control. 'No one wants them to talk, because meat doesn't talk,' he says.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 28", "El Gringo explains to Egmont [...] that the guys are actually about to eat a kid. 'It's the most tender kind of meat [...]. We're celebrating because one of them became a father' he explains. 'Want a sandwich?'
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 33", "The special meatt sold at butcher shops isn't affordable, which is why there's a black market, to sell a cheaper product that doesn't need to be inspected or vaccinated, that's easy meat, with a first and last name.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 41", "'I don't get why a person's smile is considered attractive. When someone smiles, they're showing their skeleton.'
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 44-45", "'That's why I smoke and drink, so I taste bitter and no gets any pleasure out of my death. [...] Today I'm the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle.'
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 45", "His father barely speaks now. He emits sounds. Complaints. The words are there, encapsulated. They're rotting behind the madness.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 57", "The words are a black hole, a hole that absorbs every sound, every particle, every breath. She doesn't answer.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 86", "He wishes he could blame someone for the death of his son. But who can you blame for a sudden death? He tried to hate God but he doesn't believe in God. He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral but he couldn't keep it up because hating everyone is the same as hating no one. He also wishes he could break like Ency, but his collapse never comes.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 83", "She's gorgeous, he thinks, but her beauty is useless. She won't taste any better because she's beautiful.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 94", "His sister's words are like boxes filled with blank paper.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 100", "It looks like a Venetian mask. Beside it, in large black letters, the person has written: 'The mask of apparent calm, of mundane tranquillity, of the joy, at once small and bright, of not knowing when this thing I call skin will be ripped off, when this thing I call mouth will lose the flesh that surrounds it, when these things I call eyes will come upon the black silence of a knife.' It's not signed.
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 118", "'After all, since the world began, we've been eating each other. If not symbolically, then we've been literally gorging on each other. The Transition has enabled us to be less hypocritical.' Urlet gets up slowly and says, 'Follow me, cavaler. Let us take pleasure in the atrocity.'
~ Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, p. 153", "There was nothing before the moment of my eyes opening in the room. An instant held at arm's length from the conveyor belt of instants, suspended in its own little world, in a self-sufficient pod: a now without the before. Piercing the atmosphere of that moment's world was i direct plunge into the now; suddenly and without warning came the shock of the unending present, a raw and jagged edge. Therem within the suddenness of the unending present, I was born—there I became I.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 1", "Everything in the room, everything that I saw in the moment I opened my eyes, was nothing but a stage for the insects to enact their drama: creeping and crawling, fighting and gorging, fucking and dying on the stage of the room. I didn't want to be the audience to their drama, that wasn't the part I wanted to play; I clenched my eyes tight to refuse it, but the drama still weaved itself through me, I could feel it pressing on me like the ominous gaze of a stranger on the back of your head.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 4", "And I could do it: I became myself, so I could become something else. So i could become the room, become the man, become the shadows and damp air, adopt the whole drama as my own. I could orient my desires, shape them into what I needed them to be. I reached inside myself, through the flesh and bone, and somewhere in there was the black pocket of my heart, and deep inside, so deep I really had to look for it, was an ability to want.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 9-10", "A desire that could be trained and commanded like a good pet, palling up whatever's in the open hand before it (whether it's milk or cyanide it still hits the tongue sweet).
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 10", "A death should glimmer like a star billions of miles away, dazzling and inexplicable and mysterious, and here my death was just a quotidian knife that had lain practical and unassuming on a tool bench for years.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 14", "My whole self rushed to the place where the balde hat hit me, tilll I wasn't anything other than the point where the sharpness met my body. I wasn't anything other than the wound, wasn't anything other than a place where a knife could plunge into, a place where a knife slips in.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 15", "The room was set up to make you believe there was a den there, every piece of furniture arranged as a please to the visitor, who should be convinced that they were standing in a place that existed in a way that mattered.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 22", "I looked up, and instead of the door I saw myself sitting there losing blood and life, but on my face there wasn't pain or suffering or spite, only bliss and a fullness of love, the love of a saint starving to death of hunger, alone with her passions in the middle of the desert, transcendant and euphoric. But as I stared at my dying body toed to the chair something in those life-losing eyes shifted, and they were no longer filled with love bt with snarling hate, saliva dripping from the mouth, eyes two black holes that would swallow, that would consume.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 26", "Shimmering against the environment, flickering like a glitch in the visual field of the room: dilating and contracting, growing thinner and then wider, shifting as though it didn't have any edges, any real boundaries that seperated it from everything around it.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 35", "Under the low light of the bar I couldn't see anyone fishing into my eyes, but I know there would be someone there, sitting in one of the darkkened corners, peering at me, throwing lassoes or knives from across the room, grabbing me and placing me into their story. In any room I walked into there would be someone taking me and placing me into their little playpen, gating me in, burying me alive as I sat there reading from scripts they presented to me.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 40", "It's impossible to walk into a room without someone blaming you for something, either happily or grudgingly; impossible to be yourself under the gaze of others, the gaze creating you as whatever antagonist or lover the looker needs, momulding you into that perfect porcelain object of affection, pity, resentment. Even a mirrror is a room like this; whem I'm in a mirror I fall under the watchful stranger's gaze of my own eyes, as I shape myself into whatever porcelain object I need to struggle or rest against. Even alone, there's no place away from the stranger's gaze.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 40-41", "It stayed facing me, mouth open, not lunging toward me, just wanting me to see, willing me to understand. It wanted me to sleep cradled in its razor mouth, with the rubbery, humid meat of its body wrapped all around me, with the teeth pushing up against me but not breaking my skin.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 64", "How could anything at all take place, under the weight of sheer improbability that distributed its crushing pressure over everything? How could I be permitted to exist, to breathe, to move throughout the world, with the chances of anything so unfathomably low? The world should have been a void, a non-place where nothing ever happened, which gave shape to nothing.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 69-70", "It started to move, bubbled and then began to drip down carefully, its form changing; abandoning itself in favor of what it would become.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 75-76", "The street was dark and quiet, no passing cars or people, the whole scene submerged deeply in those liminal hours before dawn breaks. Those terrible long hours nestled in between night and morning when the foundation of things crumbles, when the rawskin of the world is exposed.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 93", "I allowed myself to doze just behind my dull eyes, receding back into my head, curled up behind the occipital bone like a passanger in a smoothly cruising plane whose pilot was skilful and kind enough to avoid turbulence or sudden movements.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 116", "[...] if I somehow managed to reach out and touch him, the touch wouldn't resonate below his skin, wouldn't pass through to the nerves beneath. He would feel nothing [...]. I couldn't recognize him either; as he stood there gazing blankly at me I couldn't tell what he was supposed to signify, what he was meant to stand for.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 124", "The child wasn't afraid, it was holding its breath in excitement, fluttering quickly within me like a tender-winged insect, crackng new creases into its understanding like the folds in the cerebrum that increase its surface area, that allow it to contain more and more data within it, more and more until you would think it was filled to bursting but it doesn't burst, never bursts, just sits there underneath its crown of bone.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 127", "They surveyed me absolutely and directly, and it was a beautiful relief to realize that I was being watched, because it took away the pressure to find something to want. I became not a self that had to want something, but an object to be regarded; I was removed from my obligations and scooped up instead into another's gaze.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 145-146", "I was hidden there in the filth, in te dirt, so low and sequestered that the sky couldn't even see me if it tried; when I looked up the sky appeared through the ripples in the reeds all broken up, shattered and shifting like I was instead looking down into the depths of the sea, though the algae and excrement and shadows of fish, and suddenly I didn't know which wayI was facing or where I was supposed to go from here.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 166", "I could imagine the vehicle'ss happiness—the simple joy of a machine subsumed in activity, the simple joy of a thing synonymous with its movements, a thing for whom every moment exists as a pure exploration of its purpose, of its reason for being. For a machine, existence is an unadultarated form of playful curiosity, and I needed that too; that was what I had been promised.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 171", "It's time, they said simply, and the words tore open my flesh and began to feast on my organs, the words rabidly clawed my insides out of my body with the fiendish desire of making me empty inside, completely empty.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 174", "And then I truly fell backward, fell backward into the space that exists in between everything, into the dream of the will that upholds the boundaries of all things, the dream which articulates the seperateness of all things.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 185", "The veins of that place criss-crossed through all things, hidden like a mining shaft beneath the surface of the world, beneath the surface of our minds and bodies, behind the curtain that sits next to the world's stage. Peel back the veneer and it's right there, as obvious as anything else—more obvious than anything else, more real than the dirt or the soil or the plastic, than the gases diffusing over our heads, than the enormous ball of light hovering in the sky and diligently burning itself alive.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 187-188", "I was stabbed by the acute sense that I didn't belong there, that I was an intruder, that everything about me clashed grotesquely with the air: the contours of my clothes and flesh, my hair and my arms and legs, the way I breathed. I was a hideous accent against the serene atmosphere of the room, a drop of oil in a glass of wter.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 196", "There was a feral ache in my heaad that stretched down into my neck and shoulders, a pulsing beat like a logger rhythmically sending his axe into a tree. A river of pain flowing through my body; no, it was that my body was detritus floating through an ocean of pain, the water lapping at me, pulling me into it as I slowly fell apart and became part of the ocean, little pieces of me swallowed by schools of fish, little pieces of me eroding into nothingingness in the salty water. There was nothing that differentiated my body from what happened to it; there was nothing that differentiated me from what happened to me.
~ Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul, p. 218", "more quotes to come" ];