“I won't put in a load of laundry, because the machine is too loud and would drown out other, more significant noises - namely, the shuffling footsteps of the living dead.”

“Footsteps shuffled on the stair/Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair/Spread out in fiery points/Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.”

“He has to wair for another load of laundry to get done. So I wait with him. I lean back against the couch, sitting really low the way I like. I scrunch over and put my head on his shoulder. We sit like that for a long time. Watching other people's laundry dry. <3”

“It feels weird, being out in the real world again. Around people just living their lives like normal. Their presence is oppressive. The very fact that the world is going on as usual, like nothing ever happened, makes me want to scream. I know it's irrational to expect everything to grind to a halt because of June, but still. A wave of anxiety builds in my chest, my head pounding so loud it drowns out the noise of people talking and tapping away on their laptops.”

“We used to have a dog named Snoopy, you know, a real live dog. I suppose people who love Snoopy won't like it, but we gave him away. He fought with other dogs, so we traded him in for a load of gravel.”

“Above all, there has never been a community that did not cohabit with its dead. But today, socially, the dead are no more. They are deceased. They are ontic has-beens. And with the vanishing of the dead, the most significant distinction between homo and all other primates is gone. When you show me a paleolithic skull, I recognize it as human not because of the cubic measure of the brain or because of the hand tools found in the grave but because of signs of burial. These reveal that this "person" lived a life on the borderline between the seen and the unseen, in the presence of the living and the dead. Neither the dead nor other invisible beings had to show themselves to be considered social realities.”