“So much of life is invisible, inscrutable: layers of thoughts, feelings, outward events entwined with secrecies, ambiguities, ambivalences, obscurities, darknesses strongly present even to the one who's lived it- maybe especially to the one who's lived it. I didn't seek to find her, wandered instead within and among her fragments of language-notebooks, drafts, journals, fictions, letters, essays, and found there whole worlds like spinning planets, lived in their cold light and burning light, wondering where I was, where they might take me. Curious, I heard a monster's voice and followed-”

“Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the and of things inside it. Blue hills most gentle in calm light, then stretches of assailAnd ransack. Such tangles of charred wreckage, shrapnel-bits Singling and singeing where they fall. I feel the stumbling gait of what I am,The quiet uproar of undone, how to be hidden is a tempting, violent thing— Each thought breaking always in another.All the unlawful elsewheres rushing in.”

“As the lights fade to a distant glow, I look back toward the city and imagine, somewhere in all of those lives, a little girl who is a lot like me. Maybe she rides in a car thinking about someone living far away from these lights and people. Even though our lives are separated by so much I wonder if she imagines the world through eyes like mine.”

“I never saw so much life left in someone who had lived so much," said Bernice Latelle, a gospel singer who lived in Bessie's neighborhood and heard her at the Wander Inn. "I don't think anybody or anything could break that woman's spirit.”

“She cannot chain my soul.Yes, she could hurt me. She'd already done so. But what was one more beating? A flogging, even? I would bleed, or not. Scar, or not. Live, or not. But she could no longer harm Ruth, and she could not hurt my soul, not unless I gave it to her.This was a new notion to me and a curious one.”

“You know what's really freaky? Wes segues. "The fact that the psycho in question was the same guy who was after Debbie Marcus."The whole fiasco with Debbie Marcus had happened at around the same time that I was getting stalked. But instead of taking her seriously, people chalked her stories up to pranks and practical jokes, concluding that Debbie had gotten paranoid as a result.But there was obviously a lot more to it."Actually, its not nearly as freaky as the fact that Camelia decided to go to the psycho's house without even calling us first," Kimmie says."I already told you guys, I didn't have my phone.""And you've obviously never heard of a collect call," Wes says."Nor have you heard of nine-one-one." Kimmie's barbell-pierced eyebrow rises high. "Because I hear that's free as well.”

“I can see us, living in the woods, her wearing that A, me with a S maybe, S for silent, S for stupid, for scared. S for silly. For shame.”