“As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag.”

“The sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. "I think she listens," she said, too softly to be heard.”

“That night my mother had what she considered a wonderful dream. She dreamed of the country of India, where she had never been. There were orange traffic cones and beautiful lapis lazuli insects with mandibles of gold. A young girl was being led through the streets. She was taken to a pyre where she was wound in a sheet and placed up on a platform built from sticks. The bright fire that consumed her brought my mother into that deep, light, dreamlike bliss. The girl was being burned alive, but, first, there had been her body, clean and whole.”

“She told her journal about me passing by her in the parking lot, about how on that night I had touched her-literally, she felt it, reached out. What I had looked like then. How she dreamed about me. How she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow. How maybe if she was assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day. When she was imagining me, she felt better, less alone, more connected to something out there. To someone out there. She saw the corn field in her dreams, and a new world opening, a world where maybe she could find a foothold too. “You’re a really good poet Ruth,” she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydream of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me.”

“Do you ever think of her?' she asked.They were quiet again. All the time,' Ruth said. A chill ran down my spine. 'Sometimes I think she's lucky, you know. I hate this place.'Me too,' Ray said. 'But I've lived other places. This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.'You're not implying...'She's in heaven, if you believe in that stuff.'You don't?'I don't think so, no.'I do,' Ruth said. 'I don't mean la-la angel wing crap, but I do think there's a heaven.'Is she happy?'It is heaven, right?'But what does that mean?'The tea was stone-cold and the first bell had already rung. Ruth smiled into her cup. 'Well, as my dad would say, it means she's out of this shithole.'~pgs 82-83”

“The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at an outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: 'booze affects material as it does people'.”

“And there she was, alone and walking out in the cornfield while everyone else I cared for sat together in one room. She would always feel me and think of me. I could see that, but there was no longer anything I could do. Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose tot ell it, even to one person at a time.”