Aňa’s Reviews > Januaries: Stories of Love, Magic & Betrayal > Status Update

You will notice that despite my hinting at my flaws I have never claimed to be talentless. I am actually quite talented, though not in a way that fits with contemporary capitalism. I would have made an excellent court joker and, I suspect, a decent bard. My worth is inconveniently misplaced.

I don't like crying in front of people, anyway. (…) Everyone always wants you to feel better, don't they? They can't sit comfortably in a room with your misery, it's like pins and needles for them. To be properly sad you either have to be alone or a little selfish. You have to not care whether your gloom dampens someone else's bright.

Some people have such verbosity of sadness, periods that lead to beautiful metamorphoses. That or they have a destructive form of sadness, little inner cyclones of it. Meanwhile I become something of a brick wall, or a used car. Less valuable each time I am injured.

I felt this, too, was a strange remark but I, unlike most people, am not opposed to strangeness. I am generally regarded as strange myself.

I suppose it was largely because she was a woman that I didn’t question whether or not she was a serial killer. That, or I was tired.

I generally find hunting stupid, given that it is a silly game played mostly by men who cannot find a clitoris, but on occasion I will concede it can be quite stimulating.

Time moves so differently when every day is part of a cycle.

I’m not sure what changed, exactly, just that Carl is losing patience with me and seems somehow more and less interested in what I'm up to, in that he wants to keep an eye on me but doesn't require insight as to why I do anything I do.

(…) I would never do what she does, fucking him with toys and such as if she is the man. Not because I dislike such things (I like to do the fucking on occasion because power suits me) but because afterward I would never be able to look at him without laughing. If I ever allowed myself to leave him keening desperately beneath me I would never be able to stop seeing him that way, and then how would I do any of this?

He knows where I’ve been within the walls of his castle, and he knows what I’ve touched. He doesn’t know what I’ve seen, though, and for all that he thinks he knows me, he doesn’t know who I am.