I want to be the girls in these books. Tragic and tortured and caught up in a desperate struggle.
On the cover the girl is always in the arms of a man while buildings burn around her, or flood waters creep towards her throat. They all have the same look in their eyes—they are all broken, they have all been betrayed. They have all given up. But then their knight comes through at the last moment, and they remember that they are girls. They remember that they have hearts.
The fire is put out.
The flood recedes.
These are old books, though. They were written back when there was time to live in pages, when all the books on shelves weren't about How to Save Us, and What Exactly Went Wrong. Every second of every day is a reminder that we're going to die.
My sister wives aren't much for pretending. One is an escape artist, and the other lulls herself to sleep studying ultrasound photos, trying to understand the things that are happening inside of her.
I wish we could just be girls. I wish we weren't born with the promise of blood on our lips in twenty years. I wish we could be like the girls in these very old pages. We could worry about fires and floods. We could fall in love only to have our hearts broken, and then we could pick up and start anew in a different town.
I've reached the last page, and the heroine has ridden off into the sunset. My sister wives are sleeping. I can hear the clocks on their nightstands ticking off their breaths that are tangled up in the seconds. I love them the way I love the sentence before the last of a good book—with terror and happiness and pain. I love them knowing there is an end in sight.
We are brave. I like to think that. Locked up in our tower, we have fierce hearts and the kind of power that starts wars. But we're too late. There are no men to come and set us free, or to love us. All the damage has been done. There's nothing left of the world to save; it was over before we'd even arrived.