“I feel a shaking in me, and it's the ground. It's like the ground is shaking and I will slip through.Then, in a flash, his hands reach out and, like in a movie, really, the coffee cup falls to the cement steps with a sharp crack, and he grabs my arms and his face is filled with everything that is urgent and loving and meaningful in the world.I feel so powerful, like a god, thunderbolt in hand.And my thunderbolt hit.”

“Pretend you're me," she says. I can barely see her over the frothy mound.And it happens just like that.A feeling of sinking, a falling deep inside.And I'm her.And this is my house, and Matt French is my husband, tallying columns all day, working late into the night for me, for me.And here I am, my tight, my perfect body, my pretty, perfect face, and nothing could ever be wrong with me, or my life, not even the sorrow that is plainly right there in the center of it. Oh, Colette, it's right there in the center of you, and some kind of despair too. Colette----that silk sucking into my mouth, the weight of it now, and I can't catch my breath, my breath.”

“Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you’re a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.”

“If you didn't feel it on your body long after he'd left, was it really worth laying for him? I wanted to feel that.”

“No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all.”

“The drone in my ear, it’s like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever”

“Running so hard, her breath stippled with pain to go faster, hit the grass harder, move forward faster, like she could break through something in front of her, something no one else saw.”