Talatuti

“Yes, for there I was, outside of society, destitute, torn between transformations, between beast and god. What other paths could I have taken? No, it was worth corrupting myself slightly, if corruption it truly was, for any filth on my soul would be washed out and countered tenfold—all corruptions sanctified in the purity of the ideal at hand.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“Madame Hugo had become insufferable. She had started with the peeking in at breakfast, and then moved on to skipping romps of faux-concern down the hallway at mid-day, speaking with trumpets in her throat and stumbling by my door with the grace of an elephant. In case it was not already clear, let me pronounce it: I loathed her. The violence I conjured up for her in that dark sanctum of mine was infinite, and the subject of her various fatalities and tortures came to almost—almost, but not quite—rival those intrusions which such thoughts of Sophia continued to make.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“Where they had acquired these objects in their happy captivity, she could not tell. Though their expressions were, for the most part, still mute, she could yet discern a difference in their fixed stares, most obvious in the children. It was a subtle crease under the eyes, the mouths only slightly hanging agape. One of the children, whose gaze flickered more attentively than the others, was even holding a palm-sized, blackened rectangle of stiff paper, which retained a faded red mark at its corner and jagged gold at its top. Sielle could not restrain a smile from spreading across her face, for in each of those talismans over which they loomed, mystified, there remained the forms of metamorphosis and history and decay, and perhaps man was therefore an inescapably metaphysical animal yet.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“But, of course, I had no proof for any of these enticing thoughts. Cursed proof! Cursed proof. Proof: flimsy, false, ethereal fugitive, hiding at the end of a regress that runs out the world itself. No need for proof.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay