I’m reading and enjoying a book I was given for my birthday: THE CITY WE BECAME by award-winning writer N. K. Jemisin.

In it, the City of New York is “born” as a living city with the help of a young man who, not knowing what he’s doing but knowing what he has to do (if you follow me), serves as the city’s midwife and defends the newborn from the attack of something like an entity out of H. P. Lovecraft. It is, as I like to say about such squirmy things, exceedingly tentacular.

The young man is knocked into a coma by his effort, but that’s okay, because New York is too contentious to have just one avatar: It has one for the city overall and one for each borough. Unfortunately, the avatars, like the boroughs they represent, don’t get along all that well, but they must work together to defeat The Enemy.

Now, I’ve read me a bunch of H. P. Lovecraft, and I’m not all that crazy about him. I mean, you read one story about indescribable horrors in the attic and you’ve pretty much read them all.

Change my mind.

ANYWAY, my weariness with the repetitiveness of Lovecraft’s language (gibbous moons, anyone?) made me love this line, spoken to The Enemy by one of the avatars:

“…don’t bring your squamous eldritch bullshit here”

Yo, New YORK!

This post is part of Linda G. Hills weekly blog hop, One-Liner Wednesday. If you have a one-liner or just like them, follow the link.

A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: Something is indescribable.