“This is how it is”

The expression This is how it is names a thought Flora forms without knowing what she means by it. It comes as she watches the returned dead gather and dance around a lamppost, a scene whose solemn, almost primordial order resists explanation. The phrase does not resolve that mystery. Its force comes from the gap between its calm assertion and the bewildering spectacle before Flora—and, later, the terror and destruction surrounding her.

The Thought and the Dance

The thought occurs during a night-time gathering in a courtyard. A dead woman turns toward a dead man beneath a lamppost, drawn to the light; Flora watches as if the woman were being pulled toward a beloved. More of the returned dead emerge from nearby doors, and when about fifteen have assembled, they begin to move in a clockwise circle around the lamp. The ring is irregular: some stumble or bump into others, but they resume their places, and the circling continues.

Flora sees the movement as more than a crowd’s disordered wandering. The lamppost becomes the circle’s fixed centre; the dead move around it while their shadows glide across the surrounding buildings. The image brings to her mind an account she has read of captive monkeys or gorillas gathering and moving around a pole, a primitive rite organized around a central axis. Yet the scene exceeds that comparison. Flora is tearful and mesmerized, and imagines that this dance might be what keeps the Earth turning. That sense of cosmic significance is not presented as an explanation she can prove; it is the intensity of her response to what she sees.

Only after the enchantment begins to recede does she notice pale ovals appearing in windows around the courtyard. They are onlookers: returned dead too weak to come outside, or perhaps unwilling to join the circle. Flora cannot tell which. The spectacle therefore holds both movement and stillness, participation and watching. It is within this mixture of awe, uncertainty, and incomprehension that she forms This is how it is, without being able to say what the thought means.

An Assertion Without an Explanation

The expression sounds conclusive, but its place in the scene makes it less a settled answer than a moment of recognition without knowledge. Flora does not identify a rule governing the dance, explain why the returned dead gather, or claim to understand their intentions. The thought arrives when her ordinary interpretive habits seem inadequate: the scene recalls an animal ritual, suggests a cosmic mechanism, and remains at the same time a group of vulnerable bodies stumbling around a lamp. The phrase holds these incompatible scales together without resolving them.

Its plainness also contrasts with Flora’s intensely figurative perception. She has watched the dead woman move toward the lamplight as if toward a true love, and the circle as if it sustained the planet. Against those expansive images, the thought offers no elaboration. It simply registers that the scene is happening. That brevity matters: the phrase gives Flora a verbal shape for an experience she cannot explain, while explicitly leaving its meaning unknown even to her.

The expression should not be mistaken for a repeated spoken motto. In the evidence here, Flora forms it as a thought while watching the dance. Its later significance comes through contrast with what the narrative shows, rather than through a second explicit use of the words. The thought’s apparent acceptance does not mean that Flora has become passive or that the events are harmless. Instead, it marks the limits of what she can understand at the moment she witnesses them.

Destruction and the Limits of Acceptance

Later, Flora stands before tangled bodies and considers the change she had once wished she could foresee. What has happened, she observes, has not brought a discernible transformation: terror has produced more terror, hatred more hate, and the result is a pile of burned bodies. White caterpillars emerge from some of the bodies, while the smell of the bonfire drives her back despite her face mask. The image sharply alters the emotional register of the earlier circle. There, the returned dead’s motion seemed continuous and almost world-sustaining; here, bodies are reduced to remains, and what emerges from them is strange and physically repellent.

This aftermath gives the phrase a darker resonance without turning it into a promise of order. The dance’s repeated circling may have seemed to Flora like a pattern large enough to hold the world together, but the later scene offers no assurance that violence can be absorbed into such a pattern. Her reflection stresses repetition of a different kind: fear and hatred reproduce themselves, ending in destruction. Read beside that consequence, This is how it is can sound like an effort to register reality as it presents itself, not an endorsement of it or a claim that its suffering is necessary.

From Witnessing to Intervention

Flora’s later encounter with Eva further clarifies the difference between acknowledging events and accepting them without action. At apartment C, Flora finds Eva in the hallway, a bandage covering half her face. She steps forward, takes Eva by the shoulders, and establishes a mental link. Closing her mind to what is happening outside, Flora addresses Eva inwardly and urges her to come out and listen. Eva resists, insisting that she wants to live; Flora answers that the door is closed and communicates two possible departures for the soul: being collected or disappearing.

The earlier thought is not repeated in this exchange. Instead, the narrative places Flora’s baffled observation of the dance alongside a later moment in which she acts within a crisis she cannot simply explain away. As Eva’s soul nears the surface, the Fisher approaches, drawn toward its catch. Flora’s role has shifted from mesmerized witness to participant in an intimate struggle over Eva’s departure. The movement from watching the returned dead circle beneath a lamp to holding Eva by the shoulders links the expression to a wider tension in Flora’s experience: events may arrive with a force she cannot account for, but recognition does not prevent her from responding.

The expression’s significance therefore remains deliberately unsettled. It captures the instant when Flora can only acknowledge what she sees, while the scenes around it resist turning that acknowledgment into a complete understanding of death, violence, or release. The dance offers a pattern; the burned bodies expose its limits; and Flora’s intervention shows that even amid those limits, action remains possible.