Tender Is the Flesh

His brain warns him that there are words that cover up the world. There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.

No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food.

“I don’t get why a person’s smile is considered attractive. When someone smiles, they’re showing their skeleton.”

Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything.

Ever since animals were eliminated, there’s been a silence that nobody hears, and yet it’s there, always, resounding throughout the city. It’s a shrill silence that can be seen on people’s faces, in their gestures, in the way they look at one another. It’s as if everyone’s lives have been detained, as if they were waiting for the nightmare to end.

Naming children after their parents is stripping them of an identity, reminding them who they belong to.

“The mask of apparent calm, of mundane tranquillity, of the joy, at once small and bright, of not knowing when this thing I call skin will be ripped off, when this thing I call mouth will lose the flesh that surrounds it, when these things I call eyes will come upon the black silence of a knife.”

“The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus.”

It’s been a long time since he felt that this house was his home. It was a space in which to sleep and eat. A place of broken words and silences encapsulated between walls, of accumulated sadnesses that splintered the air, scraped away at it, split open the particles of oxygen. A house where madness was brewing, where it lurked, imminent.

The human being is complex and I find the vile acts, contradictions and sublimities characteristic of our condition astonishing. Our existence would be an exasperating shade of grey if we were all flawless.”

It doesn’t matter if you fall, if you were a bird for even just a few seconds.”