but it was a certainty: one day everyone would be gone, one way or another, and then the moss would grow and the rain would wash everything away, even history.

She wasn’t completely blind. She saw shapes and sudden colors, a flashing shadow-world. Her eyes showed her the dark mystery-forest where we get lost in our dreams.

all she could do was tell stories, the same thing she had done all of her life. Different stories now, though: good ones. And they were more powerful than any lie she ever told her sister. She felt like she was finally becoming human, because out of all the life on Earth this is the one thing only people do. What other animal tells stories? Or

a basset hound she’d named after her dead husband because she could not imagine living out the rest of her life not saying his name.

Helen wasn’t evil, but there was a part of her that certainly was. She discovered this part almost accidentally, with her sister on a rainy summer’s day.

she was rigid, so transfixed on what was before her he thought that if he touched her she would crack and shatter like a sheathing of river ice.

She was crying now, though she couldn’t tell the tears from the rain.

He felt unclean, calloused, well on his way to becoming the man he had never meant to become.

He was so old, he did look like he knew everything there was to know. He looked wise. Only he knew that being old taught you only one thing: that being young is better.