The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?

There is a freedom, after all, in being forgotten

Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

“But isn’t it wonderful,” she says, “to be an idea?”

She has prayed, and someone must have heard, for she is still free. Free from courtship, free from marriage, free from everything except Villon. Left alone to grow.

And dream.

Adeline is sixteen now, and everyone speaks of her as if she is a summer bloom, something to be plucked, and propped within a vase, intended only to flower and then to rot. Like Isabelle, who dreams of family instead of freedom, and seems content to briefly blossom and then wither.

The past drawn like a silk sheet over the present.

Don’t you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke?

Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.

The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.

Estele Magritte, 1642–1719

YOU ARE THE ART