Madeline’s Reviews > Surfacing > Status Update
Madeline
is on page 133 of 199
“It wasn't the city that was wrong, the inquisitors in the schoolyard, we weren't better than they were; we just had different victims. To become like a little child again, a barbarian, a vandal: it was in us too, it was innate. A thing closed in my head, hand, synapse, cutting off my escape: that was the wrong way, the entrance, redemption was elsewhere, I must have overlooked it.”
— 21 hours, 44 min ago
Like flag
Madeline’s Previous Updates
Madeline
is on page 131 of 199
“I felt a sickening complicity, sticky as glue, blood on my hands, as though I had been there and watched without saying No or doing anything to stop it: one of the silent guarded faces in the crowd. The trouble some people have being Ger-man, I thought, I have being human.”
— 21 hours, 54 min ago
Madeline
is on page 130 of 199
“All possible horrors were measured against him. But Hitler was gone and the thing remained; whatever it was, even then, moving away from them as they smirked and waved goodbye, I was asking Are the Americans worse than Hitler. It was like cutting up a tapeworm, the pieces grew.”
— 21 hours, 57 min ago
Madeline
is on page 130 of 199
2/2 - Like the Late Show sci-fi movies, creatures from outer space, body snatchers injecting themselves into you, dispossessing your brain, their eyes blank eggshells behind the dark glasses.”
— 21 hours, 59 min ago
Madeline
is on page 130 of 199
1/2 “It doesn't matter what country they're from, my head said, they're still Americans, they're what's in store for us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can't tell the difference. -
— 22 hours, 0 min ago
Madeline
is on page 129 of 199
“It would have been different in those countries where an animal is the soul of an ancestor or the child of a God, at least they would have felt guilt.”
— Jan 12, 2026 10:30AM
Madeline
is on page 129 of 199
“The innocents get slaughtered because they exist, I thought, there’s nothing inside the happy killers to restrain them, no conscience or piety; for them, the only things worthy of life were human, their own kind of human, framed in the proper clothes and gimmicks, laminated.”
— Jan 12, 2026 10:29AM
Madeline
is on page 125 of 199
“I sat in the dark, the stroking sound of the night lake surrounding me. In the distance the Americans' campfire glowed, a dull red cyclops eye: the enemy lines. I wished evil toward them: Let them suffer, I prayed, tip their canoe, burn them, rip them open. Owl: answer, no answer.”
— Jan 12, 2026 10:21AM
Madeline
is on page 124 of 199
Scene moving from American fishers senselessly killing loons for entertainment, fishing to their limit = gluttony, violence, greed
to Anna talking about how David mistreats her, demands she wears makeup, uses sex to hurt or punish her, etc. = eco feminism, domination over all bodies
“Sometimes I think he’d like me to die,” Anna said, “I have dreams about it.”
— Jan 12, 2026 10:19AM
to Anna talking about how David mistreats her, demands she wears makeup, uses sex to hurt or punish her, etc. = eco feminism, domination over all bodies
“Sometimes I think he’d like me to die,” Anna said, “I have dreams about it.”
Madeline
is on page 121 of 199
“Thud of metal on fishbone, skull, neckless headbody, the fish is whole, I couldn't anymore, I had no right to. We didn't need it, our proper food was tin cans. We were committing this act, violation, for sport or amusement or pleasure, recreation they called it, these were no longer the right reasons. That's an explanation but no excuse my father used to say, a favorite maxim.”
— Jan 12, 2026 10:10AM
Madeline
is on page 114 of 199
“The lake didn’t matter to them, only the system: it would be a reservoir.”
— Jan 11, 2026 09:40AM
