“Later that evening I lay down in Min's empty bed upstairs and pulled her white sheet up over my head. I felt for my kneecaps and hip bones. I lay perfectly still, arms down, palms up. I closed my eyes and pretended I was floating in space, then at sea, then not floating at all.I hummed an old Beach Boys tune. In my room... Min had taught me how to play it on her guitar when we were kids.”

“I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my “living” room, not really sad, just floating; trying to imagine what it was to be dead. Nothing much came to me. I remember closing my eyes and whispering her name, trying to make her come back. As we stared at each other, neither of us moving, I felt some...thing go shut in my heart while something else swung open”

“I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating face up on the water, undrowned.”

“I have terrible nightmares, you know. Every night when I come home from a long day’s dying, I take off my skin and lay it nicely on my armoire. I take off my bones and hang them up on the hatstand. I set my scythe to washing on the old stove. I eat a nice supper of mouse-and-myrrh soup. Some nights I drink off a nice red wine. White does not agree with me. I lay myself down on a bed of lilies and still, I cannot sleep.”

“Just as I lay back, she sat up. I sat up, and she flopped back down. Awkward. That was my every move when it came to her. Now we were both lying down, staring up at the blue sky.”

“Ah, I could lay me down in this long grassAnd close my eyes, and let the quiet windBlow over me”