Alexis M. Smith

“There's not a thing in the world that will not change, including you.”

“It's a strange product of infatuation, she thinks. To want to tell someone about mundane things. The awareness of another person suddenly sharpens your senses, so that the little things come into focus and the world seems more beautiful and complicated.”

“The woman seems ready to be pleased with the world.”

“She wants him to want to be looking at her.”

“Dear L--Fell asleep in a park. Started to rain. Woke up with my hat full of leaves. You are all I see when I open or close a book.Yours,M”

“We do not last, she thinks. In the end, only the stories survive.”

“You've been here before, Bell. Remember the stories you told me about wandering in the woods when you were a little girl? It scared the crap out of you, but you went out there all alone, knee-high to a bunny rabbit, and picked berries and climbed trees and found bird nests and came home all bug-bitten and mossy. And you loved every minute of it. It made you our beautiful Arctic Bell, impervious to cold and feared by mosquitoes. Aren't you glad you didn't stay by grandma's side, darning socks and baking gingerbread?Who darns socks?Girls nobody tells stories about.”

“They are in the middle of the sidewalk, face to face, between a tobacco shop and a trash can. Everything they’ve never said flows into the narrow space between them.”

“It’s never the wedding dresses, you know. We keep those, too, but only because they’re so blooming expensive. No. I’ve seen enough old ladies’ closets to know what we really hold on to. Not the till-death-do-us-part dresses. It’s those first lovely dresses: the slow dance dresses, the good-night-kiss dresses. It’s those first pangs we hold on to.”

“Isabel turns down Oak toward the little vintage shop at Fourth Avenue, thinking of lunch—the Chinese place in Old Town, casting around inside herself for hunger, imagining the tastes of things.”

“Her sister read that spiders have book lungs, which fold in and out over themselves like pages. This pleased Isabel immensely. When she learned later that humans do not also have book lungs, she was disappointed. Book lungs. It made complete sense to her. This way breath, this way life: through here.”

“They read. The sounds of paper between them as they turn and crease and carefully avoid touching each other.”

“The early morning sunlight warms a patch of linoleum, and she lets her feet bathe in it while the kettle heats on the stove.”

“Before Isabel could read, she loved books.”

“Monotonous and thankless as her job can be sometimes, she cheers at the thought of her coworkers - a dozen of them crammed into their little offices in the basement - all cleverly disguised as harmless geeks, all capable of saving the world if called upon.”