I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.

“Hold still," my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he bu…”

“We lay there with our bodies touching, and as I shook, a powerful knowledge too…”

“To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a so…”

“I wondered if this longing in a three-year-old had sparked what came at eight. …”