Free The Curiosities (Carolrhoda Ya) by Brenna Yovanoff Tessa Gratton Maggie Stiefvater Page B

person ever know the true, honest heart of another?
    This is what I’m thinking as we stomp and thrash our way through the canebrake with blackflies and no-see-ums whining around our heads. This is what makes the goose pimples come out on my arms and the shudders run through me. Not the chill of my wet clothes, not anticipation of the crisp, authoritative splash when I break the surface. But this, this certainty that Asher is too far from me now to ever know me again, and yet he wants an antidote, expects me to cure him of his pain. At the bottom of the lake there are the gloomy shipwrecks of memory, but no answers.
    Fools like to talk about the little town church. They say it wasn’t dismantled, but only left behind. They claim the steeple stands even to this day, dark and ghostly, just visible when the water gets low. That’s nothing but a tale. I’ve been down a hundred times and never seen it.

    This is not a story about God.
    . . .
    Asher wades out first. Just stumbles forward and plunges in. If it were me, I’d have walked farther down the shore, to where the bank slopes off and the ground is all bare gravel and fine sand.
    He goes deeper, water churning up around him, and I’m struck by how badly I want to comfort him, fix it all if I could. I raised him half his life, but that was years ago, and it’s taken me this long just to uncover the mysteries of the place I grew up. I don’t know him any more than he knows himself.
    From the bank, I watch him flail away from me, toward a world he can’t survive and can never understand. The world on the bottom is mine alone, not because I conspire to keep it, but because no one else in the history of our incurious little town has taken the time to explore it.
    “Asher,” I call and then start after him. “Asher, wait. Why are you doing this?”
    “Because you’re the only other person who knows what it’s like,” he says, looking back over his shoulder. “Because you know how it is to wish and wish for something you can’t ever have back.”
    “It was never like that.” And now I’m splashing after him, shaking my head. I say it unashamedly and right out loud. “I never loved our town until they sunk it.”

    He stops.
    He nods but won’t look at me, standing hip-deep in the artificial lake, run through on the realization that I’m not broken. That he is wholly alone in his sadness, when all this time he’s been so desperately sure it was the two of us.
    His eyes are a pure, moody ice-grey, like swimming out to the center. Like going under.
    This is not a love story.

THE WIND TAKES OUR CRIES
by Maggie Stiefvater
    There are two things going on with this story. No, three. First of all, it is about Arthur, and I love Arthur . I just do. I like him in pretty much all of his forms, although I think Lancelot is a douche and I don’t know why Arthur hangs out with him. I think I prefer the older Arthurs, before they came up with the concept of courtly love and sketchy Sir Lancelot. So, there’s that. And then the second thing is that I am trying to be Tessa in this story. She does historical voice so well that I of course had to try my hand at it (I won’t tell you how much longer it took for me to be Tessa than if Tessa had been Tessa). And then, the final thing that’s going on here is I was trying to write a sort of narrator that I’d never attempted before: a sort of person I have often met but never been. —Maggie
    I love the smell of intestines in the morning. Why have I never ended a story with a dinnertime evisceration?—Tessa

    M y Eoin was sixteen years when they rode through. Eoin, I loved him; he was my seventh, and the others nearly killed me coming out, but not him. He slid out like a fish through a fisherman’s hands, and like a fish, he never did cry, just twisted in the good-wife’s arms. Later, when he was older, my husband and master did his part to beat a tear from Eoin’s blue eyes, but he wouldn’t cry for him either. I did the