“My soft voice and demeanor were useless. In a pint jar, I carried a cremated friend, like flesh scraped from a cistern.”

“I want to scrape earwax out of your ears like the last of the chunky peanut butter in a jar. I’d love it if you ate one of my world famous Listening Sandwiches.”

“When carrying a jar of honey to give to a friend for his birthday, don't stop and eat it along the way.”

“His voice was terrifying and seemed to scrape across my skin as if it were a tangible thing. Something inside me agreed, as if it were even possible to give something like that. I didn’t even really believe in a soul, but in that moment I could feel it writhing inside me.”

“The doctors removed my wasteland exterior by debriding me, scraping away the charred flesh. they brought in tanks of liquid nitrogen containing skin recently harvested from corpses. The sheets were thawed in pans of water, then neatly arranged on my back and stapled into place. Just like that, as if they were laying strips of sod over the problem areas behind their summer cabins, they wrapped me in the skin of the dead. My body was cleaned constantly but I rejected these sheets of necro-flesh anyway; I've never played well with others. So over and over again, I was sheeted with cadaver skin.”

“My eyes feel all soft, all soft as flesh. I'm going to sleep.”