Kij Johnson

Adventures are what happens when an event is flawed, a mark of imperfection.

Happiness is the pleasantest of emotions; because of this, it is the most dangerous. Having once felt happiness, one will do anything to maintain it, and losing it, one will grieve.

We ascribe meanings because it is our nature to do so..We can no more see a thing without searching for a meaning than we can see a snag in a robe without pulling on the loose thread.

There was for everything a possibility, an invisible pattern that could be made manifest given work and the right materials.

Does Carthage even have forests? Did Virgil know for sure or was it just convenient for his story? Virgil was a professional liar. This would not be the only place where he pruned the truth until it was as artificial as an espaliered pear tree against a wall, forced into an expedient shape and bearing the demanded fruit.

Aeneas comes to her court a suppliant, impoverished and momentarily timid. He is a good-looking man. If anything, his scars emphasize that. The aura of his divine failure wraps around him like a cloak. Dido feels the tender contempt of the strong for the unlucky, but this is mixed with something else, a hunger that worms through her bones and leaves them hollow, to be filled with fire.

I feel strangely free at such times. To behave properly is to be always courteous, always clever, and subtle and elegant. But now, when I am so alone, I do not have to be any of these things. For this moment, I am wholly myself, unshaped by the needs of others, by their dreams or expectations or sensibilities. But I am also lonely. With no one to shape me, who stands here, watching the moon, or the stars, or the clouds?

I can write about it if I am careful, if I keep it far enough away.

As a young woman, when she had been beautiful and had worn her hair short and her clothes loose to conceal that fact, she had known all the signs of men and read them well enough that she had been successfully robbed only three times and raped once; but none of those had burned from her the hunger for empty spaces, strange cities, new oceans.

I worry about you. You__e good with people, I__e seen it. You like them. But there__ a limit for you._ He opened his mouth to protest but she held up her hand to silence him. __ know. You do care. But inside the framework of a project. Right now it__ your studies. Later it__l be roads and bridges. But people around you__heir lives go on outside the framework. They__e not just tools to your hand, even likable tools. Your life should go on, too. You should have more than roads to live for. Because if something does go wrong, you__l need what you__e feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.

The constant talking didn't bother her, for cats use their voices to say 'here I am, where are you?' and this seemed to be the primary intention of most human conversation.

She hadn't loved Randolph Carter. He had been a man like many, so wrapped and rapt in his own story that there was no room for the world around him except as it served his own tale: the black men of Parg and Kled and Sona Nyl, the gold men of Thorabon and Ophir and Rinar; and all the women invisible everywhere, except when they brought him drinks or sold him food - all walk-on parts in the play that was Randolph Carter, or even wallpaper.

He loved who he was: Randolph Carter, master dreamer, adventurer. To him, she had been landscape, an articulate crag he could ascend, a face to put to his place. When were women ever anything but footnotes to men's tales?

She had never met a woman from the waking world. Once she asked Carter about it."Women don't dream large dreams," he had said, dismissively. "It is all babies and housework. Tiny dreams."Men said stupid things all the time, and it was perhaps no surprise that men of the waking world might do so as well, yes she was disappointed in Carter.

Cats have a sort of game they play when they meet. A player alternates between watching the strange cat and ignoring her, grooming or examining everything around herself - a dead leaf, a cloud - with complete absorption. It is almost accidental how the two cats approach, a sidelong step and then the sitting again. This often ends in a flurry of spitting and slashing claws, too fast to see clearly, and then one or the other (or both) of the cats leap out of range. The game can have one exchange or many - and is not so different from the first meetings of women.

Love is curiosity sometimes. Concentrated wondering about the other one.

The soul often hangs in a balance of some sort. Tonight do I lie down in the high fields with Dirk Tanner or not? At the fair, do I buy ribbons or wine? For the new ferry__ headboard, do I use camphor or pearwood? Small things. A kiss, a ribbon, a grain that coaxes the knife this way or that. They are not, Kit Meinem of Atyar. Our souls wait for our answer because any answer changes us. This is why I wait to decide what I feel about your bridge. I__ waiting until I know how I will be changed._ __ou never know how things will change you,_ Kit said. __f you don__, you have not waited to find out.

If {Death} comes for you?_ he said. __ould you be so sanguine then?_ She laughed and the pensiveness was gone. __o indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.