“Thus Betty scraped through a second bitter crisis, one that might have shattered a character more brittle. But she had grown sharp as bile from this, her latest shock, and each passing day increased her edge. Worse, there was no one now to notice her shrinking humanity and cry halt...by turns she would become lightheaded, cackling away like one insane. It was the lightness of one who has nothing more to lose.”

“She had missed him so long now, that the feeling had become a part of her. As each day passed, the missing distanced itself from her heart. One day she woke, and realized the missing was there but the pain was gone. Missing without pain is tolerable. Pain linked to heartache is intolerable.”

“But of course, it had all been her – by her and about her, and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky”

“She was doing it because she had nothing to lose, because her life was one of constant, day to day frustration.”

“She expected the pain, when it came. But she gasped at its sharpness; it was not like any pain she had felt before. He kissed her and slowed and would have stopped. But she laughed, and said that this one time she would consent to hurt, and bleed, at his touch. He smiled into her neck and kissed her again and she moved with him through the pain. The pain became a warmth that grew. Grew, and stopped her breath. And took her breath and her pain and her mind away from her body, so that there was nothing but her body and his body and the light and fire they made together.”

“What words she had thought to write on the face of the moon were washed away from her as she submerged, trying to disturb no one, nothing. Trying not so much as to interrupt a current, even trying not to shatter into soft-edged platelets the green moon in the reflection. Trying to sidestep having any influence at all, now and till the end of her life.”