Ashley Husemoller > Recent Status Updates

“Alas!” cried Chang, “I am already over thirty, and in fifteen years more I shall be drawing near the wood [coffin]…”
Now, Chang…

Whatever has come within the bounds of their own ocular or auricular experience men regard as proved to be actually existing; and only such things.

END OF SERIAL NO. 7 (September 1852, chapters 20-22)

‘Why, what I may think after dinner,’ returns Mr. Jobling, ‘is one thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another thing.’

Magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn’t want was a haunting.

Maybe you didn’t know who you would be in the world. Maybe you were a different type person everywhere you lived.

Aubrey wondered if they were the only ones who felt they didn’t know their mothers. Maybe mothers were inherently vast and unknowable.

After a secret’s been told, everyone becomes a prophet.

In a way, subtle racism was worse because it made you feel crazy. You were always left wondering, was that actually racist? Had you just imagined it?

It was strange, learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.

Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.

In all that living, we have known men. Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.

END OF SERIAL NO. 6 (August 1852, chapters 17-19)

FIRST LINE: We didn’t believe when we first heard because you know how church folk can gossip.

The immutable decrees of fate can be foreseen, they cannot be evaded.

FIRST LINE: Day had begun to smile and the sun was shining upon the hilltops when a band of armed pirates scaled the mountain which extends to the mouth of the Nile called the Heracleot, where it empties into the sea.

“Up in Illinois, we’ve forgotten what it’s all about. I mean the dead, up in our town, heck, they’re forgotten. Nobody goes to sit and talk to them. That’s really sad. But here — It’s both happy and sad. It’s all firecrackers and skeleton toys down here in the plaza and up in that graveyard now are all the Mexican dead folks with the families visiting and flowers and candles and singing and candy.

“But, stop and think. What does the word ‘witch’ truly mean?”
“Why —“ said Tom, and was stymied.
“Wits,” said Moundshroud. “Intelligence. That’s all it means. Knowledge. So any man, or woman, with half a brain and with inclinations toward learning has his wits about him, eh? And so, anyone too smart, who didn’t watch out, was called —“
“A witch!” said everyone.

Aye, boys, see? Gods following gods. The Romans cut the Druids, their oaks, their God of the Dead, bang! down! And put in their own gods, eh? Now the Christians run and cut the Romans down! New altars, boys, new incense, new names…”

FIRST LINE: It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state.

END OF SERIAL NO. 5 (July 1852, chapters 14-16)

END OF SERIAL NO. 4 (June 1852, chapters 11-13)

FIRST LINE: The note was there, lying beside her plate when she came down to breakfast.

And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of *there* from entering *here*. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,“ said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty.