Caim > Recent Status Updates

“Sisters with surnames that spoke to their mother’s heartbreak, her anger.”

This makes me wonder why does me & my sister have different last names, but the same dad. I have my mama’s last name, though I’m the oldest.

Already, I am sensing a contrast between Danielle and Desiree; Desiree, inspired by her mother‘s untimely death at the age of 42, was inspired to pursue a medical career whereas Danielle, in the words of her grandpa, “She still figuring out what she wants to do… Nowadays in America the young folks gotta take their time.”

⚡️🪄 “ Cora wants to believe in him, wants him to whip some magic spell out of his backpack that was soft all their problems. But as she looks at the trinkets and sack of rice slumped over on the ground, she agrees that it all seems like child’s play.”

The “ghostbusters” have really lost their mind…

“This is the difference between Yifei and Cora—Yifei turns her pain into a plan, while Cora scrubs her pain away with Blood Busted. Cora is aware all at once that she should be the one fighting. She’s the one who sister died because of people like the one Harvey calls Batman. All that anger should be hers…Cora cannot fathom her actions mattering beyond her own mind.”

IKTR, Yifei!

OK, I was tempted to DNF this book because I am not going to finish it before book club meets tonight at 7; however, I read somewhere that is A-OK to read the last paragraph to see how the story ends I did that just to tip it and now orange juice is keeping me forging ahead for another 180 pages…

So, the ancestral ghosts are vampires?

“I hope when I die, I won’t have to take the subway to heaven,” Cora says, and father Thomas laughs again.

It’s presumptuous, of course I think she’ll make it to heaven, but as far as father Thomas knows, she’s just a good, God-fearing girl.

—
Interesting, considering Delilah was killed at a subway station!

“…but she doesn’t think she can survive another medical professional telling her that her mind is a web they cannot untangle. None of them can help her because she can’t tell them the truth. Whenever anyone gets a glimpse of what her mind is truly like, they always have one hand hovering above the panic button, ready to send her away, make her someone else’s liability.“ — like her father paying her off?

Wow… as hard as it is for me to keep reading this gory disgusting, disturbing detail of a cleanup crew, I am intrigued to know each of their stories. Harvey has some deep issues that stares his obsession with the nastiness of death and who cleans it up afterwards that I’m pretty sure I can’t read at night if I don’t want to have nightmares myself

This is gory…

“ Cora wishes her body was sealed tight like a snow globe, that nothing could ever penetrate the inside.”

I do not like Auntie Lois… how audacious to proclaim “forgiveness” over something this disgusting!

Wow!!! Disgusting!!

“ around her all of course emotions felt as dirty as her hands, something that didn’t affect people like Delilah. No Delilah would never be angry on Cora‘s behalf. If Cora were the one beheaded by a train, Delilah would probably have scrub and say something like, (it was meant to be).”

“Yuxi He’s single dead eye stares up at her as if saying, ‘Of course nothing adds up, your mind is a labyrinth and you are lost inside.”

“Fear is born in the after, when the whirl peels back at skin shows you it’s raw, causing inner, when it forces you to remember its name. Anyone who has seen the face of your nose you should damn well be afraid.”

“Cora asked once why fear is a sin. Auntie Lois said that it shows distrust in God, that one should not fear man and only fear God. But auntie Lois lives in Staten Island, on a quiet street cars have nothing to do with stop tea from making out in cars, but Cora knows that the face of fear is not an abstract what if.“

“She calls for feelings of love, and Grace like Hollaran anchor to the surface of her mind, but it is far too heavy. all she can feel is that first hot splash of blood, the sharpness of it, the way it burned her eyes, the taste of its salt. If God cannot love, Cora, unless she forgives, then Cora will die without his love.”

“Cora has tried to forgive him because auntie Lois says it will make her feel better, but Cora doesn’t even know where to begin. She tried to imagine him, because you can’t forgive someone who does exist, but he burst into 1,000 white spiders in her mind.”

“ three months ago aunt Lois stood up in church and told the congregation that after much thought and prayer she had finally forgiven the man who killed her niece and she loved him as God loved him or doesn’t even think her aunt loves her that much yet she loves Delilah‘s murderer.”

toxic religiosity (& forgiveness?)

“ God is not listening to her, but she can’t really blame him. It is so so loud inside of her mind.”

“Cora cannot imagine how terrible it would feel if the typhoon is in her mind were visible on the outside.”

“ Violent deaths leave unsettled ghosts… You don’t want her to suffer do you?
“Don’t,” Cora says in English, the word a low warning. She does not want to talk about that. She has never once talked about it.”

“She is completely Fine.” — yes, with a capital F because that makes it more convincing, right?

“ Cora imagine if she herself were someone’s one and only source of American culture, how they would find it, strange that Americans take such long showers and have such smelly jobs and cry so much.”

This isn’t completely false, though…

🪄⚡️This is like Sir Nicholas Deathday party!

“The official reason for Cora's visit today is the first day of Zhongyuan Jie, the hungry ghost festival. Auntie Zeng says it's when all the ghosts take a vacation from hell to visit earth for a month. The living are supposed to feed them and pray for them and make them offerings of things ghosts almost certainly don't need anymore, like clothes and jewelry.”

“Something inside of Cora must be unraveling, and the thought makes her palm sweat, and even though she hates sweating, she cleans to the thought like a liferaft because because the alternative is that someone has been to her apartment. She doesn’t know which possibility is worse.”

“She wonders, not for the first time, if she ripped out too much of her brain when she pulled Delilah out of it. Extricating Delilah Zingg from your mind is probably a lot more difficult than it seems, like pulling out a tumor that’s grown into all of your brains crevices getting rid of. It means ripping out healthy tissue too.“