She laughed for his sake, something she’d never done. Giving away another piece of herself just to have someone else.

She knew that no part of this yearning made sense. Illogical behavior to fill an emptiness would not fulfill much more. How much do you trade to defeat lonesomeness?

In the mountains, she noticed, the time of sunset depended on where you stood on the hill.

Let’s face it, a lot of times love doesn’t work out. Yet even when it fails, it connects you to others and, in the end, that is all you have, the connections.

Maybe Ma was never coming home.

On some level he knew she behaved this way, but since the feather game, had not witnessed the raw, unpeeled core. How tormented, isolated, and strange.

Truths everyone should know, yet somehow, even though they lay exposed all around, seemed to lie in secret like the seeds.

The notes floated with the fog, dissipating into the darker reaches of the lowland forests, and seemed somehow to be absorbed and memorized by the marsh because whenever Kya passed those channels again, she heard his music.

“Unworthy boys make a lot of noise,”