Brooke Butler’s Reviews > This Is How You Lose the Time War > Status Update

“Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you.”

“I love you, Blue. Have I always? Haven’t I? When did it happen? Or has it always happened?”

“I am writing in pieces—parcelling out the words I wish you to have, though you’ll of course read them all at once. Or perhaps you won’t? Perhaps you’ll want to save these seeds to absorb at your leisure, perhaps even at the pace of my writing them. But why waste so much time?”

“Memory is tipped and decanted into Garden, life to life to life, always deepening, thickening, growing new roots and efficiencies— but Red’s letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers’ tips, between the lines of her palms.”

“Winning tastes sweet, but sweeter still to triumph and tease.”

“A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist, or worse a poet. Or her child does, or a smuggler she trades jackets with in some distant spaceport. And all this blood for nothing.”