“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

- William Faulkner*

Welcome to the Darling Cemetery

Here lie passages, painstakingly crafted, lovingly edited, and read and re-read with a pride that borders on masturbatory. These words are truly my darlings, yet for the greater good, I was forced to excise them from their works. Perhaps I’ll find use for them one day.

Or perhaps, this shall be their final resting place.

RIP

——

02/09/2020

The blue halo around the windows had faded. Glass grew dim, and the building’s oaken light was absorbed into the porous red brick of its walls. Shadows spread around the great copper fixtures standing like sentinels along the length of the room. The orange filaments buzzing in transparent bulbs did little to push the darkness back. Eventually, even these were switched off. As night took hold, Jane had closed her eyes. She had slept. And when morning’s glow graced them once again, she opened her eyes. Still, she had not moved a muscle.

——

13/08/2020

His eyes, like beady pebbles, scuttled so quickly about, they appeared to vibrate.

——

03/07/2020

 Cre-ea-ak.

Jane froze. Her throat constricted; her pulse bounded against it. No big deal, she assured herself. Just another squeak. Nothing to arouse suspicion; the house does it all the time. Still, she shifted her weight to a safer spot on the floor and resolved to be more careful with where she stepped.

——

19/05/2020

Squaring to impossibility is implicit in the life of a child. When the future stretches vast before you—infinite in the scope of youth’s callow vision—and the ledge of your past extends no further than could arrest your body in an ill-conceived trust fall, revolution is easier to accept than permanence. Doors of possibility close as experiences pile up in your wake, and memories anchor you to the world you have come to know. Children are not bound by such anchors though; the cords of their memories are too scant, too elastic, to hold them to any one truth.

For Jane—who had virtually no memories at all—acceptance was a matter of course.

——

* While Faulkner’s words are most often quoted in expressing this idea, he’s actually paraphrasing Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch here.