indie’s Reviews > Carrying > Status Update

"But for Enid, her mother is only a wound, scabbing over, but never healing completely."

"Her heart fills with roiling black terror. Her whole life depends on being unclockable. And this man, this random man she only just met, has the nuclear codes to her entire existence, one button away from denotating the whole thing to oblivion. She should deny it, slap him across the face, walk out and never look back, pay any price for his silence, or kill him with her bares hands."

"It could be some sort of passing virus that we didn’t test for.”

"A baby, a beautiful new life, will cast away the last cobwebs of grief and maybe he can return to the man he used to be. He can be normal again."

"She also knows that without another child, they are still stuck in a pale imitation of his original family—a mom, a dad, and a daughter, with Martha slotted in where his first wife once was. A baby would mark a totally new family arrangement, one unblemished by death."

"She does not want to live life on the margins, forever marked by some cruel joke at birth. By passing, she undoes her own monstrosity. Nobody looks at her differently, as less than, as a perverted freak, as something to spread scary stories about."

"His voice stern, she realizes he really might not help her this time, her precious son ready to wash his hands of her and throw her back into the wilderness for the wolves to devour, tearing the meat off her bones with their canines. Sure, maybe she’s a wooden doll of a wife, but it’s better than what came before."

"He loves a cardboard cutout of you."