“You're carrying so much excess baggage,” a therapist she saw only once had told her. He was employing the expensive sifting-of-tea-leaves voice that she holds with utmost contempt.“Baggage?” Julia had repeated. She stood up. “Like I'm dragging bundles of old clothes? I'm carrying artifacts that breathe fire. I'm talking about a language of smoke. These are three-dimensional creatures that can mate. I'd no more leave them go by the side of the trail than I would my child. I'll carry them until someone amputates my arms.”

“Francisca recognized that she was decoding an entire process, detail by detail. She was learning a certain alphabet, a geography, a language which would become a revelation. This compelled her to stay. There were artifacts everywhere. She was assembling a lost civilization. When she viewed it in its entirety, she would become someone else.”

“They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?”

“Jocelyn: 'I've dated a few nice boys. Though if things got serious, I ended it. I didn't want to involve some poor guy in all the stuff I was carrying around.'Noah: 'Excess baggage, you mean?'Jocelyn: 'More like three suitcases, a couple of steamer trunks, and a carry-on.”

“I have more baggage than baggage claim. I'm damaged goods. I'm not good at...” she released him for a moment and fingered between the two of them “this.” “Well, I think you're dancing just fine, Miss Gerhart.” he smirked. He knew that was not what she meant, but he had hoped to lighten their mood. Maybe if he could get her to relax she would give him a chance.”

“The night stayed outside. She was surprised. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. Instead, blue things flew in, pieces of glass or tin, or necklaces of blue diamond, perhaps. The air was the blue of a pool when there are shadows, when clouds cross the turquoise surface, when you suspect something contagious is leaking, something camouflaged and disrupted. There is only this infected blue enormity, elongating defiantly. The blue that knows you and where you live and it's never going to forget.”

“I feel you're far away,” the man might say. He is observing you, calculating, forming equations he may take to a representative of the patriarchy, such as a doctor, a lawyer, or military official. He is considering physical incarceration and/or biochemical imprisonments such as occur with antidepressants. He is dangerous.This is a juncture where you may smile. This is optional. You might allow your lips to form the ambiguous seductive shape of slow regret. Or let your mouth fill with too much night, incinerated maple leaves and fox teeth. What you mean is, not yet.”