Cecilia Bartels

“This is what thinking does for you, he thought. It gets you into trouble. Even when you know other people can think for themselves, you start thinking for them too.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents

“Upon the unwrapping of each package, she vows to write a thank-you letter to Aunt Tammy—a letter of the handwritten, thick-papered, thesaurus-consulted variety—but every day following, Joan “forgets.” She “forgets” for so many consecutive days that the idea of a thank-you letter begins to gain weight in her mind, becoming too heavy to lift. By the end of the first week, a mass of gratitude and shame has accumulated inside her body and grown so dense that adequately transcribing it, surely, would take a lifetime. It would bruise both writer and reader. To send a thank-you letter now, she believes by week two, would be like mailing a handwritten account of my indolence, my boorishness. I can’t. I can’t. And once Joan has decided that the opportunity to demonstrate her appreciation has expired, the gifts begin to sicken her. Even when they’re hidden, their presence fills her apartment like an odor that is also an itch. Like some toxin. Joan hides the gifts in drawers, tucks them beneath sweaters too expensive to donate but not comfortable enough to wear, twists them in plastic bags, which she then shoves in paper sacks, which she then stows in the coat closet, behind the vacuum. But it doesn’t help. She can’t eat or sleep or read or pray or watch her shows or even recite the nation’s capitals. She tears her cuticles. Her asthma worsens. At any given moment, she feels like she might cry—not because she wants to, to bespeak her sensitivity, but because she needs to, in order to proceed with her day. By the end of the month, her guilt crescendos, the odor of the unthanked gifts too foul and itchy to endure any longer, and Joan surrenders. She gathers the gifts in”
― Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch

“You will have worked out that there is a race in this world which steals and kills and spreads disease and despoils what it cannot use.

Yes, that's easy. It's called Humanity.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

“Joan apologized three more times, then returned to her seat, feeling evil. As usual, when she confronted the world about one of its problems, the world suggested that the problem was Joan.”
― Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch