She does it so authentically you don’t even notice the hack, and you almost think that the letters just slipped off the pages and fell to the floor like a pile of dead ants.

that she could swear she’d never seen before, and sometimes even entire scenes that she had no recollection of writing.

Now, with my Mu-Mu, one does not need to bother with such messy things, because my little spiders can neatly undo you if you stop wanting to be.

what had caught her attention just now was not a sound, but rather its absence:

I was still thinking about what she said about waves, and it made me sad because I knew that her little wave was not going to last and soon she would join the sea again, and even though I know you can’t hold on to water, still I gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away.

jillion miles away in time and space, like the beautiful Earth from outer space, and me and Dad were astronauts, living in a spaceship,

Whales are time beings.

You can’t hold on to water or keep it from leaking away. This was a lesson that Tepco learned in the weeks following the tsunami, when they pumped thousands of tons of seawater into the reactor vessels at the Fukushima nuclear plant in an attempt to cool the fuel rods and prevent the reactor meltdowns that in fact had already happened.

It was the corroboration from the real world that she’d been waiting for, and it had slipped away. Was she cheating to want to know more than what the girl had written?