Status Updates From Gliff

"There is no way she is back, or anywhere near here.
There would have been no stopping her if she were.
No. Tell it like this:
whatever’s stopping her, there will be no stopping her."

"If I don’t find somewhere to shelter I’ll let the weather have me. Whatever."

"Now that I don’t exist I finally exist again."

"But fuck that, and them, because my briar self is back, prickly and twined and opening in me like a bush covered in wild opening blossom."

"Unbelievable believable hope, I say. Impossible, possible."

"Unbelievable believable hope. She told us the story of the mother, the person called Ayesha Falcon says, a mother so outraged by what’s happened to her child that this mother makes the mountains pick themselves up and move. And the story of the person who was really a swan and the swan who was really a person. And the traveller who, wherever they go, is accompanied by a flower that never dies."

"He’s mad. He’s a tyrant. He thinks he’s all-powerful.
But look at what real power is.
The person he turned into a mound of nothing but rubble, nothing but smoke and ash, is the opposite of destroyed.
His opponent is everywhere. His opponent is everything."

"His opponent is the water.
His opponent is the air.
His opponent isn’t just this world.
His opponent is the universe."

"Now he doesn’t want to eat.
He can’t eat anything.
He’s scared to drink.
He finds it hard to breathe.
He closes his eyes to the sky.
His opponent is the sky.
His opponent isn’t just inside the walls of whatever room he’s in.
His opponent is the walls.
His opponent is lapping at the side of his boat, at the side of his dock."

"He goes out for a walk with his dogs and his bodyguards. He worries that the ash might be in the air he’s breathing.
A maid pours him a glass of water at lunchtime. He worries about the ash in the water system."

"But now the tyrant is worrying that when he was shaking the rubble of the person out of the container into the toilet bowl he ingested some of the ash.
That would mean some of the person who was his opponent is now inside him."

"But the person doesn’t seem broken by any of it.
The person still seems light as anything, and when anybody catches a glimpse of the person, like a guard, or another prisoner, amazingly the person is warm, witty, even funny, while still pointing out, in all their warmth and lightness and funniness, that the tyrant is a tyrant.
So the tyrant has the person killed."

"We can’t see her but we can hear her voice. She says she’s going to tell us this story. She says it’s called The Tyrant and the Ash.
If I could explain to you what it did for us just then to hear something so complete, a whole story, one with a beginning and an end.
I can’t tell it anything like as well as she did but I’ll do my best."

"If that were my dream, she says. I’d get myself ready for the next time I have it. I’d instruct myself: next time I see that wall in the dream I will make a note of each foothold, I will see exactly where to put each foot. And each hand. And then I’ll be over that wall too and I’ll run after them and catch up with them."

"Then I see it’s hard for her to sit down because of her missing hand. But she does it.
I don’t offer to help.
I feel bad.
Feeling bad feels quite strange. I realize this is the first time I’ve felt bad, or maybe anything, for a while."

"The night shift is working now. The night shift has the worst time. We tend to assign the most damaged people the night shift.
The night shift isn’t my responsibility."

"That something in me didn’t go through that door too?
Or that something in me is still there, even if just in a dream, still sitting by it? The knowledge that I’m still doing what I said I’d do, I’m waiting, I’m keeping my word?
Yes.
That at least in my dreams I still have a word I can keep."

"Every time I wake up with that cold at my core– even though what I’ve seen of her is her disappearing– I’m full of wild happiness at having seen her and walked a road with her again.
I surface each time out of this dream into relief. But relief at what?"

"The turn-away. The threatening look. The actual threat. The stony silence. The artistry and the discipline it takes to humiliate. The laughing at someone, to their face then behind their back as they walk away. The swelling pleasure of seeing someone know to shrink away from you.
The girl on that bus, for instance, the first whose head I’d made turn away. Ghost of a sister."

"These were the days when I found out what power can do.
It thickens like muscles. It’s red- blooded and it tastes like blood."

"The void is simultaneously the place where, for me, words first ceased to mean and where, for words, I first ceased to mean too.
Over the past few years, most often at the start when I was still apparently fresh enough, I was repeatedly brought to various voids by men and women more powerful than me.
That’s as much of that story as I care to tell. One line about it is more than enough."

"The voids are where you learn what power does and what the word void can mean."

"and down below on the cellar floor of the building:
the voids.
It’s a given that a void is never monitored. On any official building blueprint the voids look like stairwells, or nothing,so nobody knows they exist unless they’re in the know, and the reason they do exist is that the people who use them need to avoid a record of anything that happens in them, usually to do with money or violence or sex, or all three."

"and every time he hit the too-dry earth with a hoof a pure water spring would appear under that hoofprint, I mean the one called Pegasus, the horse whose name became synonymous with mass spyware, the legendary one, with the wings."

"faster than horses in a dream, than sound, than lightning, and light, fast as all the uncatchable famous fictional horses, the one with eight legs, the one with twelve legs, the one whose tail catches on fire he’s going so fast and the one so swift and gifted that he was named after lightning and the gods used him to carry thunder"

"In my head through all of it a wide open landscape and a horse crossing it through the rain, faster than the rain, leaving the rain behind fast like speeded-up film footage from wars in history and my sister so steadfast on that horse’s back that they’d melded into one single form moving at the kind of gallop that horses, horses in legends I mean, the ones that are immortal, can move at, faster than rain and wind,"

"Then I realized that it smells great, being up on a horse.
I don’t know how else to describe it. It smells like something should smell.
It’s also unexpectedly rhythmic, like an extra heartbeat."

"Why are you such a walking question mark? she said to me. You even walk like a question mark would walk if it was a person. I know because our mother told me and I listened. Where were you when we were meant to be listening?"

"Yeah, and then you’re going to invent a technology that means you can stop surveillance following people who are travelling from one place to another, because that surveillance isn’t anything to do with the real journeys people have to make in the world. And we’re going to call that technology Campervan."