Sisyphus

“The pain was unbearable. She wanted to cry or scream, but the crawling hollow ache had plugged and sandpapered away all her expressions of self. Those indulgences had been banished forever. Suicide had always been a fiction. A thought that had only ever been a quote in her head. Something for the underclasses, those weak in mind or purpose. Poor people and cowards. Now it sat on her heart like a warm toad. Cherishing the place as a natural habitat.”
― Brian Catling, The Erstwhile

“After they departed the river, the beach, and the raised lip of land, it all readjusted under the towering awareness of the trees. The pebbles lost the stain of human warmth. The water shook off its taste of sweat and the flattened grasses slowly clicked back into their vertical semblance of the rest of the forest. The breeze cleared the air and the birds changed their tune of alarm and disgust into a softer conversation about being here, there, and now. The ants and the clustering insects stopped waiting for the bodies to be still and foraged elsewhere, and the omnipresent mosquitoes reassessed their menu. In one hour all traces of the intrusion were lost and decent time settled back, oblivious to the rubbed-out moment of blight.”
― B. Catling

“He had killed the Bowman Peter Williams, and years later had been tricked into eating his shrivelled head, which seated its longing deep in his marrow and its waking in the empty ventricles of the monster’s leather soul. Now it was waking up.”
― Brian Catling, The Cloven

“It's like we're all going up a flight of stairs together and at a certain point I say 'this is as far as I go'. And on that step, higher up, they're all happy and I watch them from below. Had he always been like that? It wasn't shyness or reserve or adolescence, as other people thought. He wasn't going to get over it. He could dance when he was alone, he could get emotional in his room with a book, but when the party started he disconnected, the others turned into a movie that he could watch but not participate in. So he acted like he was invisible, which wasn't hard when everyone was drunk. And he withdrew into his room, where he felt the purest kind of relief.”
― Mariana Enríquez, Nuestra parte de noche