He wants to fold his body flat, make little cuts with scissors and unfold it into a paper–doll chain like a magician. This silver-streaked fritillary beast that is standing in his room covered in shadowed scars that look like barbed wire.
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She had to get out of here. But there was nowhere to go. Only the sea, deep and brown and salty. There was also school, but that was its own kind of imprisonment. So she put away her plate and went back to her room. It was small, but it seemed expansive, because it was the only place that the baby hadn’t yet invaded. Starfished on the bed, Romi envisioned what her life would be like if she could just make it out, out of this little house, out of this tiny space, and out to the city above.
Ah, the Emperor’s most favored cardamom buns. Balls of deep-fried rice flour formed into the hair-like shape of a swollen top-knot, browned to soggy perfection and glistened with coconut oil. Bunty hated the damned things with a passion they seldom held for any other food. And yet, Bunty’s mind⎯or perhaps their stomach⎯continued to crave the buns, drawn to them like a fly to a pile of shit.
While the sun god works, I weave its blanket, a fabric growing larger by the day but never faster than the expansion of the sun god’s domain. There is always something new it hasn’t touched before: mountains formed from magma rising and lifting the earth’s surface, cracks in the ground created by plates shifting, canyons carved by water deeper and deeper until the sun god can no longer reach, though it tries. There is always something new that needs blanketing. I warp the loom, pulling the strings tight. The threads are made from cloud bodies and pollen dusted off flowers with no trees to shield them.