Mira, Mirror

by Mette Ivie Harrison

But love is born in life, and death cannot end it.

The Princess and the Hound

by Mette Ivie Harrison

"Perhaps I was born different. Or made different by the parents who raised me," said George honestly. Did anyone ever know why he was the person that he was, animal magic or no?

"Perhaps I also made myself different, because I wished to be," George added after a moment.

The Sea, The Sea

by Iris Murdoch

As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling
up the whole sky. And far far away in the ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among those billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after
curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeon of my youth. And I saw into
the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing.

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There was a complete and yet somehow conscious silence, as if the travelling planet were noiselessly breathing.

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That no doubt is how the story ought to end, with the seals and the stars, explanation, resignation, reconciliation, everything picked up into some radiant bland ambiguous higher significance, in calm of mind, all passion spent. However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossiblity of living happily or virtuously ever after...

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

An American Childhood

by Annie Dillard

Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in media res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.

Fairytale, a True Story

by Monica Kullig

"I think I know how it is to be grown up," said Frances, thoughtfully. "It's when you can feel... how someone else feels... who isn't you."

My Beautiful Child

by Lisa Desmini & Matt Mahurin

I want to show you everything, my beautiful child. I want to show you how big the sky is and how green the grass is. I want to show you what was here before you were born, and how many ways there are to say hello.

My beautiful child, how strong your cry is! And how bright your smile can be. I want you to smell a spring day, and crush an autumn leaf in your hand. I want to show you everything...

Tales of Protection

by Erik Fosnes Hansen

She noticed that she was about to lose her balance again, forced herself to stay erect. And suddenly it semed to her that this was just a repetition of something, that she had undergone this before; she thought about what she had done as a child, when she had wanted to escape the bad thing, then she had just closed her eyes and said kare kare kare, ma ma ma, without a sound; she had floated away and let everything happen to her, and she had survived, because she had a golden place far behind her eyelids that no one knew about, behind kare kare kare, ma ma ma, where she was alone and nothing could reach her.

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"And in the Gospel of John: 'Whosoever hateth his brother, is a murderer.'"

"What does that mean?"

"It means," Aid says slowly in his grating voice, "that we're all brothers."