Kellynn Wee

“It was past noon and the alley was deserted, overbright and shadow-less. She had just woken up from a nap. Long was at work. The dog was in a rectangular cage, its snout muzzled. It had been deposited on the curb in front of the restaurant, destined to be eaten in one of the seven ways advertised on the sign. It was a small, skeletal thing, with jutting hip bones Winnie could make out all the way from the balcony, but it was so filthy that she couldn't tell what color it was supposed to be.
And as she watched, the animal lifted its head and locked eyes with Winnie, and Winnie had to hold on to the railing to steady herself because there was such raw anger in those eyes that her whole body shuddered in response. In that moment Winnie felt something strangely akin to envy. There was something wild and unquenchable even in a cage, in the last hours before it became someone's dinner that the dog possessed, which Winnie had never figured out how to cultivate correctly inside herself. She did not pity the dog; she pitied herself, and this was why she knew she had to free it.”
― Violet Kupersmith, Build Your House Around My Body

“On the night Sam went missing, it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game could be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn't chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into this other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that led to Wonderland. But it wouldn't be strange like Wonderland, not at all. Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way. You would feel relief, because you had always wondered what that other life would have looked like. And there you were.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Winnie felt better in the sunlight. She let her hand rest on the tree's ropy trunk. The bark was smooth beneath her fingers. These were the breed of strangling ficus that spent two hundred years braiding their bodies around a host tree, killing it while gradually assuming its form. Parasite, doppelgänger, sarcophagus. Winnie admired it. What she wished, she reflected dreamily, her whole back now leaning against the tree, was for the same thing to happen to her. For the new self she'd hoped she would become in Saigon a better self, a banyan self, resilient and impenetrable to encase Old Winnie completely in its cage-like lattice of roots and then let her wither away inside. She wanted there to be no trace left of that thirteen-year-old girl that Dr. Sang had remembered.”
― Violet Kupersmith, Build Your House Around My Body

“What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow