“It's not my goal to freak you out.""Too bad," I answered. "Because that one was so solid it didn't even touch the net." Swish.”

“Too sick and freaked out not to want a bullet for every passer by, too sick and freaked out to breathe, too sick and freaked out to care, too sick and freaked out to think of anything but the annihilation of my mind and denial of my life. So sick and freaked out that I think everyone is my friend.”

“I'm telling you this because you didn't ask. I've got it all here, growing like a tumor in my throat. I'm telling you because if I don't, I will choke on it. Everybody knows what happened, but nobody asks. And Elvis the EMT doesn't count because when he asked, he didn't even listen to me answer because he was listening to my sister's heart not beat with his stethoscope. I want to tell. It's mine to tell. Even if you didn't ask, you have to hear it.”

“Sure. What's the worst that could happen." Twenty minutes later, we had our answer. "I can't frecking believe this."I cringed. "I'm so sorry.""I'm bald!" Giguhl continued. "I look like a freak.""It's not that bad," I said. But it was. Oh, my lord was it bad. I'd never seen an uglier cat in my entire life.”

“I wanted to imprint his touch, his taste, even the scent of him so solidly inside me that no one could take them away from me.”

“I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”