In her essay "Venus in Two Acts,” on the dearth of contemporaneous African accounts of slavery, Saidiya Hartman talks about the "violence of the archive.’’This concept---also called “archival silence”---illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.

Sometimes I wonder if the bars make the monsters and not the other way around.

I do not even struggle to speak. The spark of words dies so deep in my chest, there is not even space to mount them on an exhale.

When you think about it, stories havethis way of running together like raindrops in a pond. Each is bornefrom the clouds separate, but once they have come together, there isno way to tell them apart.

Why do we teach girls that their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?" I would yell. I want to reclaim these words- after all, melodrama comes from melos, which means "music," "honey"; a drama queen is, nonetheless, a queen- but they are still hot to the touch. This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?

The past never leaves us; there's always atmosphere to consider; you can wound air as cleanly as you can wound flesh. In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened.

Being a woman is inherently uncanny. Your humanity is liminal; your body is forfeit; your mind is doubted as a matter of course. You exist in the periphery, and I think many women writers can’t help but respond to that state.

A reader might think that this is, obviously, a kind of misplaced parental anxiety and love. And they might be right. But I felt like I was losing my mind. There was no trust, no affection, no listening, just ignorant micromanagement. It felt like I was existing in a parallel universe where everything I'd just done with my life, everything I was doing with my life, hadn't made any difference at all. I was a kid again, useless. Nothing was mine—not my time, not my schedule, not my choices.

No, Novikovs time traveler is the tragic dupe who realizes too late her |trip to the past is what sealed the very fate she’d meant to prevent. Maybe you mistook your future voice shouting through the walls for something else: a heartbeat pacing and then rapid with want, a purr.

And as the ground gets farther and farther away you swear to yourself that you're going to tell someone how bad it is, you're gonna stop pretending like none of these things are happening, but by the time the ground is coming toward you again you are already polishing your story.