been getting back into the dark-hunters series via audiobooks at work, and it's been a real trip seeing what terribly off-base accents the reader gives any of the male leads (and also trying to badly explain the plot to one of my coworkers to watch his ever-increasing disappointment at why these books exist as concepts)

Say no more; I can make it longer for you (and also not as long as it could be)

SPOILER: Click to show

I wanted to hold on to the house the way you'd hold on to a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn't.

—

She wasn't resting. She was not in a state of peace. She was in no state, not being. The peace to be had, I thought, watching them pull the sheet over her head, was mine.

—

I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.

—

I fell past whole galaxies, mercurial waves of light strobing through my body, blinding me over and over, my brain throbbing from the pressure, my eyes leaking as though each teardrop shed a vision of my past.

—

'We're mostly empty space. We're mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we're all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness. We could walk through walls if we put our minds to it, people say. What they don't mention is that walking through a wall would most likely kill you. Don't forget that."

I may have read Mysterious Skin because of your post awhile back too.

More recently, I finished Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman to try and give his writing another shot because American Gods bored me half to death way back when. Was better

SPOILER: Click to show

I could go down to the sea tonight, drag myself down there on my hands and knees. Give myself to the water and the dark. And to the girl. Let her suck the meat from off these tangled bones, transmute me to something incorruptible and ivory: to something rich and strange. But that would be foolish.

—

I feel dirtied. I feel tarnished. I feel befouled. Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your will, and thus it is good. But sometimes you leave blood on Your instruments.

—

Lies and half-truths fall like snow, covering the things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape, unrecognizable after a snowfall; that is what she has made of my life.

A trilogy: Jade City, Jade War, and Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee, featuring gangs and a simple but intriguing power system that could be fun to try in rp

SPOILER: Click to show

It seemed unthinkable that she would never again feel the cool, heavy texture of his presence. Yet there it was—a truth more immutable and unforgiving than gravity on a falling body.

...

The possibility of death was like the weather—you could make attempts to predict it, but you would likely be wrong, and no one would change their most important plans due to threat of rain.

...

His futile anger had solidified into dignified resignation—the expression of a captive bear coming to the realization that it must debase itself to eat.

First up, the short story anthology Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter.

SPOILER: Click to show

Petals dropped from a red rose in a silver bowl on to the low, round, blood-coloured mahogany table with a soft, faint, exhausted sound, as of a pigeon's fart.

--
He told me not to kill him. That was how he reminded me I could kill him, if I wanted to. Up till then, I had not wanted to but when he called me his murderer, I became so. He sealed his own fate. It was his own fault, what happened.

--
Before his sons' bewildered eyes, their father began to grow insubstantial. He unbecame. All at once he lost his outlines and began to waver on the air. It was twilit evening. Mama slept on the bed with a fresh mauve bud of flesh in a basket on the chair beside her. The air shuddered with the beginning of absence. He said not one word to his boys but went on evaporating until he melted clean away, leaving behind him in the room as proof he had been there only a puddle of puke on the splintered floorboards.

--
Did she die of the loneliness of the prairies? Or was it anguish that killed her, anguish, and nostalgia for the close, warm, neighborly life she had left behind her when she came to this emptiness. Neither. She died of the pressure of that vast sky, that weighed down upon her and crushed her lungs until she could not breathe any more, as if the prairies were the bedrock of an ocean in which she drowned.

Bonus anecdote of me, laughing at one story having four pages of glossary despite being only a page long, only to see this two lines in:

SPOILER: Click to show

Here the sloops of war and the dollymops flash it to spie a dowry of parny; there the bonneters cooled their longs and shorts in the hazard drums.

In every snickert and ginnel, bone-grubbers, rufflers, shivering-jemmies, anglers, clapperdogeons, peterers, sneeze-lurkers and Whip Jacks with their morts, out of the picaroon, fox and flimp and ogle.

Second, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong.

SPOILER: Click to show

I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else. I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.

--
To them it was just my crazy grandma mumbling away again. But you and I could hear it. Eventually you put down your slice of pineapple cake—untouched, the glasses clinking as the corpses, fleshed from Lan's mouth, piled up around us.

--
The bullet was always here, the boy thinks, older even than himself—and his bones, tendons, and veins had merely wrapped around the metal shard, sealing it inside him. It wasn't me, the boy thinks, who was inside my mother's womb, but this bullet, this seed I bloomed around. Even now, as the cold creeps in around him, he feels it poking out from his chest, slightly tenting his sweater. He feels for the protrusion but, as usual, finds nothing. It's receded, he thinks. It wants to stay inside me. It is nothing without me. Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears.

--
The phrase with its sound of a boot step sinking, then lifted, from mud. The slick muck of it wetting our tongues as we apologized ourselves back to making our living. Again and again, I write to you regretting my tongue.

--
Something in him knew she'd be there. That she was waiting. Because that's what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.

--
We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another.

--
The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.

--
I never wanted to build a "body of work," but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work. Take it or leave it. The body, I mean.

--
I wanted the word to fall, like a screw in a guillotine, but it didn't. His voice, it went higher and higher, and my hands, they grew pinker with each inflection. I watched my skin intensify until, at last, I looked up—and it was dawn. It was over. I was blazed in the blood of light.

--
Despite my vocabulary, my books, knowledge, I find myself folded against the far wall, bereft. I watch two daughters care for their own with an inertia equal to gravity. I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can't, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.

--
The howl returns, the sound deep and vacuous, as if it had walls, something you could hide in. It must be wounded. Only something in pain could make a sound you could enter.

And this is me trying to keep these brief. Both of them had a heck ton more that I liked