The Water Cure Quotes
"Once we have a father, but our father dies without us noticing."
"It is possible we drove him away, that the energy escaped our bodies despite our attempts to stifle it."
"The father shape he leaves behind quickly becomes a hollow that we can put our grief into, which is an improvement in a way."
"Your body was not completely all right. Of course I would see that where she would not."
"'Are you dying?' I asked you. 'No,' you said. 'In many ways, I have never been better.'"
"Mother comes out on the terrace and puts a stop to it by raising her hand, a swift motion against the sky."
"We ask her about them and she tells us a revised version. 'Love only your sisters!'"
"It feels good to wish my sisters only well."
"The first time we gather to pray in Mother’s room after your death, I broach the idea of drawing the irons again."
"It’s important, the nature of the game means that they do not always fall: they are caught more often than not."
"We gather lengths of muslin and our knives and we move down to the shore while the men are still weak."
"There are still days when Mother doesn’t get out of bed, though they are further apart now."
"‘Draw pictures of what the men have done to you,’ Mother told the damaged women."
"‘This is a bullet. Look.’ She opens the gun, puts the bullet in, closes it again."
"I worry at a scab on the back of my right hand, a wound I don’t remember."
"Trauma is a toxin that hooks into our hair and organs and blood and becomes part of us."
"‘You remember this,’ she tells us. ‘Well, now is the time for you to learn how to use it.’"
"‘Can you not be grateful for that? Can you not thank me for that?’ she asks us from the bed."
"The desperation in her voice is unbearable."
"I realize that if I have to stand up in front of him I will fall and give myself away."
"‘If you fire that at somebody, they will die instantly,’ Mother explains calmly. ‘It’s the most effective way to kill a person.’"
"‘Men,’ we whisper to each other, our heads almost touching. ‘Men men men.’"
"I am surprised and happy at the idea that blood ties them together; it feels like some kind of familiarity."
"‘What are men beyond the border like?’ we asked him."
"‘You mean you had a dream,’ Grace says."
"‘Do you miss the women?’ Mother asked us once. To her we answered, ‘No.’"
"‘I know what it’s like to be a young woman,’ she tells us. ‘I know all about what can destroy you.’"
"‘Stop it, Grace,’ Mother tells her. She squeezes our hands tighter."
"I try to follow him out of the room, but Mother grabs my wrist as I walk past her."
"Mother has us all try out the pistol, even Sky, who cries when it knocks her on to the wooden boards of the jetty."
"I have never learned it because I am clumsy and uninterested, because the sound of the notes puts my teeth on edge."
"‘It’s you,’ he says. ‘The one who gave us the water.’"
"‘If you touch the girls, I’ll have to kill you,’ Mother says."
"‘Well, now that’s sorted, let’s get on with the day. Girls, I need you. Come with me.’"
"‘My girls,’ Mother says. Her face is speckled from the season, from the heat, her eyes like two pale chips of glass against the skin, her lips cracked."
"‘We always love some people more,’ Mother explained when we first drew them."
"I feel the tears gather at the back of my throat."
"‘We just want water,’ the dark-haired man says."
"‘Stay there,’ she tells us without looking around. ‘Don’t move.’"
"‘You think you know pain,’ Mother used to say. ‘You don’t know anything, you have no idea.’"
"‘We need time,’ she tells them. ‘Until then, you stay here. Where we can see you.’"
"‘This isn’t a threat from us, understand. But a lot of things are happening out there.’"
"‘I will probably do anything,’ I tentatively promise the sea, the sky, the dirt."
"‘I have never been better,’ you say, but I can tell it’s a lie."
"‘Nobody comes here any more,’ she reads from her notebook. ‘It’s not like it was before.’"
"‘Do you need to rest?’ she asks me without interrupting her own bending, her body a shivery, wasted thing."
"Think how angry Mother would have been to see that."
"I move the word’s contours over and over in my mind, the sheer fabric moving out with my breath."
"We had shorter hair once. You probably don’t remember that."
"You look pretty. The men will get ideas. Don’t let them take liberties."
"But you’re old enough to be your own person. It’s not healthy to be so dependent on your sisters, at your age."
"I used to hate my brother. I wanted to kill him sometimes."
"You’re still young, Grace. Thirty isn’t too old to start all over again, not by any means."
"The world is not what you have been told."
"You don’t know what kind of man King is."
"We will not go. You don’t know what kind of man King is."
"King considers your life here a failure."
"You still have so many years of your life ahead of you."
"I thought about getting your mother to do it. But in the end, I decided it wasn’t appropriate."
"It doesn’t matter, anyway. Not now. Let the whole world melt, for all the difference it will make."
"We reacted each time, slapping each other hard around the face or pulling out whole locks of hair or gripping each other tight until our nails burst small red moons against the skin."
"The world is very terrible, but you have been told a number of things that are untrue."
"I didn’t ask for any of this. I have never fucking asked for this."
"Love was a rising water coming up around me."
"‘There has never been anyone like you in the world,’ you continued. Your voice was grand."
"‘You will inherit all of this,’ you told me on another evening on the terrace. ‘This is where you belong.’"
"We sat together with our sewing, facing each other across the dining table. Occasionally we duelled with hard words, hers worse than mine."
"I did not want her to be a fellow woman. Sometimes she was my enemy and sometimes she was just my mother, an enemy in a different way."
"Through it all, she told us she loved us so often that it became its own violence, something it was impossible to turn down."
"You blamed my early exposure to the outside world for why I never grew tall like the other sisters, remained small like Mother."
"‘Can you tell me why you don’t love me?’ Lia asks him, very quietly."
"But do not follow us. Do not look for us. Do not dredge the undergrowth and the shallows, send the birds and the snakes rising from their homes with the rhythm of your feet."
"It used to bother me that we would leave little trace, but now I have never been more glad about anything."
"‘Goodbye to all of this,’ we say out loud as we move from room to room. Our home has not kept us safe, in the end. But it has taught us love."
"It is possible there are no safe places left. It is possible that we can create a new one with our rage and our love, that other women are already out there, doing the work."