Miranda Mellis > Quotes

“As a child, my own mother told me the human heart spun on an axis smaller than a dime. Like her father, she sold "life for love" insurance. For the price of ten years off your life, you could purchase insurance on a ten-year love affair. Plans were also available in increments of twenty-five and fifty. If your love affair failed before your insurance expired, they'd provide you with a clone of the loved one for the duration of the term. Sometimes the clone worked out even better than the original.”
― Miranda Mellis

“For three weeks straight I had been observing the ocean. On the twenty-first day, I saw a man running along the shoreline. I could hear his feet hitting the sand. It was the first time I was able to discern with utter precision every nuance, every gearshift, every soft click of another person's mind.

He remembered that he was there to run, and he even remembered a time there was a reason for it. He did not remember the reason, nor did he want to. He feared he might be running for the old reasons, and didn't want to imitate himself. That would be running in place. Not too far down below the top shelves of memory he knew he was there to run for a reason, but still he decided to invent a different reason. He was reinvigorated by this decision to find a new reason, and ran even faster. He’d run seventeen miles when he realized in dismay that he'd forgotten to do it. He’d been running off the memory of an idea.

He was exhausted and his lungs burned. He pushed his head into the sand and his legs ran in a circle around his head that he was screwing into the sand. He pushed down and screw-drove himself until only his toes stuck out. His toes were twined around each other. I could no longer hear his thoughts. Was he dead? His heart was still beating.”
― Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist

“The seeing-eye dog was giving a lecture called A Corpse Ate Death. There was an avant-garde orchestra accompanying ihs lecture. Dogs barked along, and small children played answering machines, recorders, trombones, triangles, and ukuleles.”
― Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist

“Buildings were curdling.”
― Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist

“The curator came to see me. He held my arm and talked and talked. His tongue got loose and launched out of his mouth becoming an attack dog. Then it became a fish flapping and thrashing around the room. I ducked to avoid his engorged, bulking tongue. His body was a kite being pulled by the tongue. His form was lashed and twirled around as the tongue whipped the curator’s helpless body. At one point it thumped him against the wall, knocking him unconscious. The tongue also slumped, then flattened, and grew still.”
― Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist

“A frigate bird spoke. She described the world as fabric. The idea that nothing would ever be lost, the melancholy frigate bird said, still gripped the collective imagination, even as the fabric of the world wore away.”
― Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist

“In the outskirts of the city, I saw a man lying on the floor of a dirty small room. There was nothing else in the room but a projecting movie and a chair. The movie showed him sleeping on the dirty floor. He sat in the chair and dissolved.

His daughter came home and found the bones of her father in the chair. She sat on his lap bones, and she turned to bone dust. Her son came in and lay on the floor. There was nothing else left but the movie of his grandfather sleeping on the dirty floor, the chair and the combined bones. He sat in his mother’s lap bones and dissolved. His daughter came in and lay on the floor. There was nothing else left except the movie of her great-grandfather, the chair and the bones. She sat in her father's lap bones and she turned to dust. I averted my eyes.”
― Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist

“At first I didn't mind, since we were now “strangers”, I no longer had to do their dishes, take them to AA meetings, make sure they’d taken their pills, fight them off, go to counselling with them, worry about them, be jealous of them, suspect them of lying, miss them, hold their babies, take them to the hospital, help them move, fantasize about them, comment on their haircuts, see their points, admire their looks, proffer my goodwill, keep their secrets, pacify them, reassure them, seek their approval, recover from their abuses, read their manifestos, find them unreliable, try to see their good qualities, hope they’d vote, impress them, ignore their stupidity, or compete with them for jobs and housing.”
― Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist

“Inherited ambitions distracted people from the surreal encroachment of death. Some suspected they did not know their true desires. They were entrenched in so many contracts it would take the dexterity of a contortionist to escape.”
― Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist

“Nature will always be natural, the tutor had told me. For what is ever not natural? Even lies are just a kind of weather. We are not interested in little truths or perturbations. There are too many of them.”
― Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist

“Downtown I saw people running around in circles. Some people tore their own heads off and ran around in circles with their heads in their arms.”
― Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist

“I slept for a week. I awoke numbed and looked out at the state things. Things moved, had dimension, made sounds, slid right up to the surface, but could not poke through. Nothing was felt anymore, or known through the sense portals, despite the fact that every part of the body was designed for contact. Either the world, usually so flagrant, was camouflaged, or my surfaces were deteriorating. In any case, it was hidden.”
― Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist