Status Updates From The Daylight Gate

“The north of England is untamed. It can be subdued but it cannot be tamed. Lancashire is the wild part of the untamed.”

She wanted to remember the stretch of her body. The feeling of hunger. How it felt to breathe. She was leaving home. Her body was home. She wanted to say goodbye before they evicted her.

The question that followed he liked less: If Alice is a witch, how can I love her? He would love her if she were a wolf that tore out his heart. And he wondered what that said about love.

‘But, Mistress, do not be seen to stray too far from the real that is clear to others, or you may stand accused of the real that is clear to you.’

She thinks about Hell, and is it like this? She thinks that the punishments of the Fiend are made out of human imaginings. Only humans can know what it means to strip a human being of being human. [...] She thinks that godliness is ridiculous because it exists to hide this; this stinking airless doomed cell. Life is a stinking airless doomed cell. Why do we pretend?