“Her warm memories. I'd like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.”

“I'm watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don't deserve them. Her warm memories. I'd like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.”

“If I can't, then I'll paint the walls of her house red with my blood.”

“Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.”

“But memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.”

“The farmhouse sat on a rise at the end of a long dirt road, in a clearing surrounded by fruit trees and ninety acres of pines. It was painted white, and peeling, and some former hippie tenant had painted a mandala on the wall just inside the door with fine-point Magic Marker. I painted over it, but it bled through, again and again. I finally left it there, a pale and pastel version of itself, hanging ghostlike in the hall.”