Anne de Marcken

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over asks how much of yourself can you lose before you are lost…and then what happens? The heroine of this haunting, spare novel is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, our undead narrator notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. She has forgotten even her name, but she remembers with unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known — where she loved and was loved. She heads west and into mind-boggling adventures, carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest. The joint winner of The Novel Prize, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is a sharp and funny tale for our dispossessed times. ‘Astounding, inventive, and utterly original, Anne de Marcken has written a freakish classic with wisdom to spare about life, death, and the eerily vast space between. I was absolute putty in this book’s hands.’ — Alexandra Kleeman ‘Anne de Marcken must write in a charmed ink that first erases the line between the living and the dead, and then — with prose as elegant as it is spooked — tells the story of what lies underneath. I have never read anything like this brilliant debut.’ — Sabrina Orah Mark

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

Rachel Livingston

I continue west. I know you will not be there in the dunes. Except that I will be there. I will be there and through me you will be there. I think, if I am in the place where we were together, then we are together again. 

smile??

I stay in bed all day. If I lie on my right side, I can keep the arm balanced as if it is still part of me. Or I can pretend it is your arm and that you are in bed with me. I think about how we used to take a blanket into the dunes and wrap up together. Wake with sand in our hair and in the corners of our eyes. Sound of the ocean as big as the sky. I miss sleep. I miss you.

We are character actors to ourselves—people we recognize but can't name.

I don't miss my name and I haven't bothered to replace it. I miss your name. I'm sorry, but I have forgotten it, too. I don't look for it on the walls. The thought that I might read it and pass it by, just go on to the next name, is terrible. Like meeting you in another life and failing to recognize you.

If I ever remember your name, how will I know it was really your name?

Perhaps the chief difference between me now and me then is my tolerance for terror. I think this has to be related to the abstraction of pain. Physical pain. Emotional pain. The pain of others. My own. The flinch is still there.

If you were here, you would tell me that you would have fallen in love with me no matter when we met. Even when I was a horse, you would say. Even now, you would say. Even now you would fall in love with me.

I miss the way we retold each other the same stories as if we'd just remembered them. And the way we'd play along, asking questions to get at the details we already knew. I think it was so we would still recognize each other even as we changed. [...] But now we are just the stories. You. Me. All of us. Just the raspy husk of ourselves. Mitchem says this is another way we're superior—because we are, at the same time, creator and creation.

There is more to say about the crow, but I don't know how to say it. I don't know why it is so hard. Like a confession. How do you confess? I kept the crow. I have it now. I wanted it. Not to eat. But terribly. I wanted it. Not sexually, but like that. It was that powerful. And terrible-seeming. The moment you realize you want something that is not yours. The moment you let yourself have it. I took it to my room and lay down on top of it, the crow. I just lay there with it under my chest. If I were living, my heart would have been pounding right where the crow was pressed between me and the carpet. I keep thinking about its black feathers. Its thin legs and clenched feet. I'm thinking about them now. I want to hold the crow in both hands and I only have the one and that seems like the whole truth of everything. 

I have a crow inside me and no one can know. I can feel it all the time. It is like the entire night sky and all the stars and every beautiful sound you can imagine. It is like being too excited to sleep. It is like being twelve years old and stripping off my clothes outside in the rain. Savage. Girl. Suddenly awake to the deviance available in every ordinary moment. The possibilities of my current situation had not occurred to me before now. The freedom. There is a crow in my chest.

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