“My mouth was dry. Whispers carried on the wind as the maids around me bunched together in small groups, hysterical, morbid. I thought: who will clean the mess?”

“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.”

“Khan Tegas never looked at me. I'm a mucker maid. I guess I needed to be reminded of that. So, good. Fine. Sometimes my fancy gets to floating inside me, threatening to carry me away like a leaf on a wind. Better to be a stone.”

“For months I heard whispers and though it had seemed that they were carried to me on the wind, they were really coming from inside my own head.”

“Like every girl, I only need to look up and a little to the right of me to see the hysteria that belongs to me, the one that hangs om a hook like an empty jacket and flutters with disappointment that I cannot wear her all the time. I call her my hysteric, and this personal hysteric of mine is designer made (though I'm not sure who made her), flattering and comfortable, attractive even, if you're around people who like that sort of thing. She is not anyone, my hysteric; she is blank, electricity dancing around a filament, singing to kill.”

“I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.”