“As her husband held her close, she could feel the pulse of other choices, other lives, opening up beneath her. Her past crackled behind her like a terrible lightning, branches and branches, endless, and then nothing.”

“Be a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.”

“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.”

“She feels like someone has planted a tree in her chest and then pressed fast foward on the world, branches growing and twisting and pushing her apart from the inside.”

“She's held onto her sobriety better than she held into her husband.”

“And then she closed her eyes, and they could no longer touch her. She no longer embraced what they threatened. Linh was there, and when she reached for his hand, her own had become stiff and brittle, her arms become branches, and from her kees to her groin to her belly to her breasts came a covering, an armor of gnarled bark, and her hair, when she reached for it, had th easpect of leaves. She opened her eyes, alive, and she turned to look deeply and without fear into her boy soldier's face......the leader came and knelt down to look at Helen, and her mouth so full of liquid she gagged, spitting out Buddha and fragments of stone. The man picked up the small medallion and stared at her in wonder.”