Standback

“Two of our opossums are missing.”
― James Tiptree Jr., The Women Men Don't See

“I don’t have any control over what memories I get, when I get them. Except every single one of them is something I would have rather forgotten.
-- "Erase, Erase, Erase”
― Elizabeth Bear

“He had mistaken his place in this story. The realization filled him with both terror and a little relief, the relief faint but present. He hoped the feeling would someday give him a measure of peace.”
― Cadwell Turnbull, The Lesson

“I did not see the hanging. They hanged him in front of the jail in Toronto, and You should have been there Grace, say the keepers, it would have been a lesson to you. I've pictured it many times, poor James standing with his hands tied and his neck bare, while they put the hood over his head like a kitten to be drowned. At least he had a priest with him, he was not all alone. If it had not been for Grace Marks, he told them, none of it would have happened.

It was raining, and a huge crowd standing in the mud, some of them come from miles away. If my own death sentence had not been commuted at the last minute, they would have watched me hang with the same greedy pleasure. There were many women and ladies there; everyone wanted to stare, they wanted to breathe death in like fine perfume, and when I read of it I thought, If this is a lesson to me, what is it I am supposed to be learning?”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace