She wished she had a little yellow house of her own, with a flower box full of real flowers and herbs – pansies and rosemary – and a sweet lover who would swing dance with her in the evenings and cook...
She pushed the gardener away and called for them. In her sleep she had seen love. It was poisoning. It was possessing. Devouring. Or it was seven pairs of boots climbing up the stairs to find her.
Same Bat time, same Bat place.
Pain didn't ever really stop, he thought; it just changed forms.
My baby brother would never call Hex soft. Not Hex.And not me, either. Not anymore. Not any fucking more.
You turned your head to look at me. Your eyes looked so big in your face, so mysterious — wide and flickering like a butterfly-wing mask. When you saw me the wails turned to sobs, and then just quiete...
Why else were we here except to love?
When someone so young and lovely vanishes they leave a cutout in the atmosphere; they don't fade. They leave a place for the sun rays to cut through and burn us, melt all the important ice to floods.
What are you going to do if you find art, Pen? You going to steal some and put it in the van? I'm going to remember. When there was art.
The lesson of this life is not for me to touch you again. It is to accept who I am now and not feel shame.
The circus tent was flowing pale in the rain like a fleshy flower lit from within. It seemed to bloom in the downpour. Drops of rain caught on Rafe's eyelashes, blinding him as the circus light struck...
Take my eye, I say. I have another.
She felt their envy and this broke her. The story ended, she couldn’t tell the rest, they’d hate her, she had to stop, she wasn’t any good, shut up you bad, bad, bad ugly girl and you don’t deserve an...
Part of me wanted to swoon into nothing, but the other women’s bones were talking. I didn’t see the bones but I knew they were there, under the house. The little runaway bones of skinny, hungry girls...
Maybe he was real. Maybe I'd made him up. Either way, he didn't think I needed him anymore. Maybe he was right.
Love is the worst earthquake there is. Can crush you to the thickness of your bones. Love can be like cancer sometimes. Terminal. It can make you vomit. It can make you want to cut it out. It can take...
Like Beauty. But she only pricked her finger. I had a spindle through my heart.
If Death is your father, you don't ever have to worry about what part of his body the disease will strike next. If Death is your lover, you don't have to be afraid that he will ever leave you.
I want to be untouchable and beautiful and completely dead inside.
I embody death, not peace. The only choice in this world we have made from our betrayals and our weakness and our greed.