#cryptcites

[martyrbat]

the final strife – saara el-arifi

[TEXT: Love may give you strength, but retribution gives you purpose.]

[martyrbat]

Familiarity bleeds into strangeness, certainty becomes impossible. Only the violence is vivid enough to stick.

the vegetarian – han kang

[martyrbat]

monstrilio – gerardo sámano córdova

[TEXT: Our son died before the dogwood pushed out its first flower, a bloom so simple with four white petals and a burst of yellow-green in the center—a beginner’s flower. I believed that flower was my son reincarnated. One believes the stupidest things in grief. I spoke to the flower and called it my son. And then I laughed because how ridiculous—how cruel, really—it would have been if my son was reincarnated as something so ephemeral, frail, and beautiful. I killed that first bloom with one swoop of my hand. Dead again, my son could become something else: the shell of a tortoise, strong and ancient, or a hideous fanged creature deep in the sea where he’d see wonders even he could’ve never imagined.]

[martyrbat]

We didn’t so much exist as much as we haunted, and with no one else to haunt, we haunted each other.

monstrilio – gerardo sámano córdova

[martyrbat]

However, it’s a sadness hidden somewhere deep inside him I cannot help but recognize.

the trees grew because i bled there – eric larocca

[martyrbat]

monstrilio – gerardo sámano córdova

[TEXT: Her son was alive and now he isn’t. No thunder, no angels weeping, no cloaked Death, no grace; just his silent body, unbreathing, and the blunt realization that this is it.]

[martyrbat]

downward to the earth – robert silverberg

[TEXT: He felt a stab of nostalgia so powerful that he winced.]

[martyrbat]

human acts – han kang

[TEXT:

You believe in a divine being, and in this thing we call humanity. You never did manage to win me over.

I could never believe in the existence of a being who watches over us with consummate love. I couldn’t even make it through the Lord’s Prayer without the words drying up in my throat. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. I forgive no one, and no one forgives me.]

[martyrbat]

the trees grew because i bled there – eric larocca

[TEXT: They laugh. I don’t. Instead, my eyes perform a makeshift surgery on my husband—from the broadness of his shoulders to the narrowness of his tapered waist. I split him open in my mind and watch his organs spill out like rotten pieces of fruit. Rummaging through the jewel box of carnage I’ve arranged in the center of his fileted chest, I search him for the moment it happened—the moment his love for me became an obligation. The horrible moment it no longer was a necessity and instead became a responsibility. Whether it resides in the marrow of his bones as yellow as amber or whether it’s woven into the latticework of his motorway of arteries, the moment exists deep somewhere inside him. Sadly, it’s something my hands cannot locate no matter how assiduously my fingers comb through the shining sculpture puzzle of his internal anatomy.]

[martyrbat]

They think because I’m deaf, I’m stupid. They think they love me because they don’t make fun of my deafness. They don’t see that this is not enough to be called love. Doing nothing can never be called love.

the gilda stories – jewelle gomez

[martyrbat]

Each thing we love takes a little piece of us whether we give it willingly or not. By the time we find the person we were meant to be with, we’re a honeycombed shell of what we once were.

the trees grew because i bled there – eric larocca

[martyrbat]

the vegetarian – han kang

[TEXT: to a choice that he himself had made. He was becoming divided against himself. Was he a normal human being? More than that, a moral human being? A strong human being, able to control his own impulses? In the end, he found himself unable to claim with any certainty that he knew the answers to these questions, though he’d been so sure before.]

[martyrbat]

He didn’t even protest when I told him I was bored. That I wanted to see it. Rest my hand on his heart stripped of ribs, of cages, have it in my hand beating until it stopped, feel the desperate valves open and shut in the fresh air. He only said that he was tired too.

the dangers of smoking in bed – mariana enríquez

[martyrbat]

being heumann: an unrepentant memoir of a disability rights activist – judith heumann

[TEXT: I think what people miss sometimes, when they’re thinking about disabled people, is our vulnerability. The boy whom the grandmother wanted to kill was a baby and so of course completely dependent on his mother and father for survival. But that vulnerability doesn’t end with infancy or childhood. Our continued need for help as disabled adults makes us vulnerable. Over eighty percent of women with disabilities will be sexually abused in our lifetimes, which is about four times the rate among nondisabled women. What is even worse is that people don’t believe us when it happens—they use our inability to speak or our developmental disabilities as reasons not to believe us.

Despite this reality, however, our issues weren’t on the agenda of human rights activism at that time. There was an international movement, which I was a part of, and the United Nations was making an effort to call attention to our situation. But any mention of disability was virtually absent in the major international treaties, funding was limited, and data across the world documenting numbers and disability issues was scarce to nonexistent. We were off the radar for any major foundation, and most graduate programs on international human rights didn’t even cover people with disabilities. We were some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, some of the poorest of the poor, and we were still invisible. Even to activists.]

[martyrbat]

the trees grew because i bled there – eric larocca

[TEXT: He draws in sharply, considering his every word. “Sometimes you have to do things on your own.” For the first time in thirteen years, I’m honest with him. “I’m scared,” I say. “I’ll be right here watching you.” But I’m too stubborn for my own good. “You can’t come with me?”

“I can’t be with you all the time,” he says, deflating as if he knows full well how much he’s hurting me. “We’ve already talked about this.” The thought arrives in my mind like an unwelcome guest—an unannounced visitor barreling through the front door and setting fire to the living room rug. “What if they ask me to go with them?” “Follow them,” he says. “You’re allowed.” “Wherever they go?” “Of course.”

I know just how to hurt him—how to curl an invisible hand inside him like radiation’s fingers. “You just want me gone,” I say. I instantly regret it. He doesn’t deserve to be hurt. Besides, I’ve already done enough harm to him. “You know that’s not true,” he tells me.]

[martyrbat]

the dangers of smoking in bed – mariana enríquez

[TEXT: All my willpower had evaporated that summer, and I couldn’t manage to meet goals as simple as sleeping at night and eating at least twice a day. Since I lived alone, there was no one around to point out my depression or try to cheer me up. I hadn’t had such a good time in years.]