“Miranda looked up at him through a haze of desire, her will consumed by a fierce crackling heat, just like the dry twigs of the old woman's fire.”

“She felt like a dry branch, sticking out of the air. Brittle, covered in old bark. Maybe she was thirsty, but there was no water nearby. And above all the suffocating certainty that if a man were to embrace her at that moment she would feel not a soft sweetness in her nerves, but lime juice stinging them, her body like wood near fire, warped, crackling, dry.”

“His voice ripped through her, low, soft, and a little husky- like the hushed crackling of an old fashioned record player just before the music starts”

“The old woman had an old dog, but he hardly counted any more. He was so old that he looked like a stuffed dog. Once I took him for a walk down to the store. It was just like taking a stuffed dog for a walk. I tied him up to a stuffed fire hydrant and he pissed on it, but it was only stuffed piss.”

“There were thousands of children just like her in the world. She had walked through the fire and come out the other side scorched, but not consumed by it.”

“Their useless torches on dry hedges throw,That catch the flames, and kindle all the row;So burns the God, consuming in desire,And feeding in his breast a fruitless fire”