Ann (Inky Labyrinth) > Recent Status Updates

After his son was executed, Mr. Mashallah tattooed Kian's last words on his arm. ‘Dad, they announced our punishment. Mine is the death penalty, but don't tell Mom anything.’

I remember I am alive and I have a body, and that it wants things.

A helpful suggestion can turn suddenly into a bad feeling. And people don't forgive you for giving them bad feelings. Especially about themselves.

Banger observation on page two?! It would have been so useful to know this as a little autistic girl who was always trying to be “helpful”. 🥴

Every time I publish something, it's a paper cut. It's a prick of loss. A confirmation that I can't return [to Iran]. I'm stuck here watching from afar.

Slowly, he whispered, ‘I feel like I'm being given permission to stay alive.’

Not the last story making me big cry. 🥲

They themselves have lent it life; light and life to the dead block of ice, and to the silent time that follows midnight.

Prose, mama!

Unlike the gods they pray to, I can't bring myself to look away from their earthly suffering. Their gods have done nothing for them except create a world no different from Hell and leave them there to rot.

'How can the sun shine so brightly, right in front of someone who just died without knowing why? It's so cruel.'

No but she's right. There's nothing worse than having a truly terrible day and it's sunny outside.

In Iran, the regime doesn't even let you rest in peace.

But such things are indeed allowed, and such people who allow it are everywhere.

Frighteningly topical!

The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences.

So, the book has made me cry, already. This whole fucking paragraph!!!!

…she thought she saw the curse, watching her through the window and waving.

She was no better than a witch. But there would be time for shame later, when she was safely in his arms.

Zooming through this!

I commit myself to colour. I'm trying to paint this grey place red.

Nothing like starting the year off with a lil fucked up novella!

What use would invisibility be to me? Most days there is no one here to see me except the birds. Nor do I have any desire to live forever.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

Listening to the audiobook for this reread, which is read by Chiwetel Ejiofor!! What an incredible choice for the voice of Piranesi.

I made a little shelf for all my 2025 favorites, if you'd like to take a look. ♥

'What it is to be a man' she said, 'and to have days off.'

...because you couldn't run if you didn't know how to go. You could be lost forever, if there wasn't nobody to show you the way.

Gazing up into the sky, or out at the water, is, we now know, as essential to the human condition as a sip of water and the taste of oxygen.

If she means "we" as in humankind, I so disagree. We very much do not know this, and that is the problem.

My body isn't like yours.

Can't stop thinking about this line taking up a whole page.

In the same place that she feels this longing for Earth inside her, I feel a similar longing to be human, as if somehow I used to be, but then lost the ability.

No idea what’s going on, just vibing.

Once it happens, it will always be happening. It will never not have happened.

Yoooo…..

Girl...what?!

No one will be spared when the wolf comes home.

!!

Home is where your dead are buried, even if you are there only by duress.

But God isn't present in cities, I want to tell her. There isn't enough sky or space or time for God in the city. God can only exist in the country, where the sky is so big you can press your face against it, right up into the blue, until the light swallows your vision.

The world is distant and at the same time right on top of me, on top of us, its knife at our throats. We are everywhere all at once all of the time now. We are digital witnesses to each other's tragedies.

Language fails us, so we personify the phenomena. Black holes: eat, ingest, suck, spew, devour, expand, grow. We make them familiar in order to understand them, to reduce our fear of what is beyond this life.

…I should probably face the reality that he is only a man. And men die in the woods.