“I looked to the window. Patch was gone, but a single black feather was pressed to the outer pane, held in place by last night's rain. Or angel magic.”

“Go to hell, I whispered. The night darker than ever, leaned in against the window panes.”

“The ticking was gone from my mind and all was quiet everywhere in the world and I held the curtain like I held the sound of the bullets going into the draft horse, his favourite, in the barn, one two three, and I stood at the window in Stevie’s jacket and looked and waited and still the rain kept coming down outside one two three and I was thinking oh what a small sky for so much rain.”

“She stood, in a room of crumbling plaster, pressed to the window-pane, looking up at the unattainable form of everything she loved. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.”

“Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.”

“Even after she was gone, he passed her place each day: something white in a high window - not a face,but the white belly of a pigeon beating its wingsagainst the pane in the boarded-up house.”