Emily M’s Reviews > Acceptance > Status Update

Ghost Bird re. Biologist
“I’m not her. She’s not me. Do you know what I’d say if I came face to face with her?…I’d tell her, ‘You made a lot of fucking mistakes…and yet I love you. You’re a mess and a revelation, but I can’t be any of that. All I can do is work things out myself.’ And then, knowing her, she’d probably look at me funny and try to take a tissue sample from me.” 😂

“‘How can you be so cheerful?’ [Control]’d asked [Ghost Bird], after she had noted their depleted food, water, in an energetic way, then pointed out a kind of sparrow she said was extinct in the wider world, an almost religious ecstasy animating her voice. ‘Because I’m alive…Because I’m walking through wilderness on a beautiful day.’.. a sideways glance he took to mean that she wondered if he was holding together.”

“Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way…opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes…because they had no choice.”

Saul the lighthouse keeper being so happy with his fisherman boyfriend makes my heart hurt, knowing what happens to him and this stretch of coast 😢. But it is also crazy how much stuff is already mentioned - esp. by “Seance & Science” crew (“terroir”, “necromantic doubling”)- that sounds suspiciously Area X like, even though it isn’t Area X YET.