you want me to bleed to death so that no one can tell what wound it was we shared. Jeanette Winterson, "Gut Symmetries"
pain serves a purpose. without it you are in danger. what you cannot feel you cannot take care of. Rebecca Solnit, "The Faraway Nearby"
you hurt. it's okay. i hurt too. hold my hand. Neil Gaimain, "The Sandman: Endless Nights"
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VALERIE had beena sweet girl for as long as anyone could remember. She changed, of course, in the way that girls often do when they become women too soon, see too much at one time — slowly, and then all of a sudden she is unrecognisable, a stranger in her own skin. Her face is the same, but it is the eyes that have changed. Wild, with something feral behind them. Something dangerous.
She sniffs around where she does not belong, a rabid dog. The police rule it a gas explosion — she knows this is not true. If she continues to put her snout where it does not belong she will be put down by powers that be, this much Val understands. But if there is one thing that Val refuses to understand, to accept, to swallow, it is this: her sister's death was an accident. Val was there.
Accidents don't happen in the part of the city that Val has been raised in — an accident didn't kill her father and now, no matter how much they try to stamp her out of her own story like putting out a cigarette underfoot, an accident did not murder Val's sister. At first she sings it like a hymn to herself, kneeling in the pews and hoping that someone else's God will save her. Then, she gives up this pursuit of Divine Mania. Nobody is coming to help her because there is no such thing as a mistake.
