“What I really wanted to do was linger in the tidy lines that Marcus had scored into the earth. I wanted to sit in the exact center of the spiral and wait for the plants to unfurl themselves. I wanted them to climb and rove over my limbs until I burst into bloom with them.”

“I looked at my sister's white knees nestled together like a pair of Brenda's eggs and had the urge, not for the first time, to crack her right open. I wanted to pick her ribs apart until I got to the messy center of her - surely somewhere inside my sister there must be some sort of mess, I thought - and dip my fingers in”

“Isn't that part of love, I wanted to ask, carrying someone else's ghosts for them?”

“We see what we want to see in life, regardless of whether it's really in front of us or not...”

“Sometimes I think I collect souls to make up for the ones I've lost over the course of my life.”

“Maybe the heavens were a kind of celestial grave, I thought, the way the earth is a repository for our flesh, and when we stared at the stars, we were really beholding a million lives twinkling back at us, asking us not to forget.”

“When you get back, I finally wrote, let's lay ourselves down in the fields outside, and sleep there for the night, whatever the weather. We'll let the crows roost on our shoulders and skulls, let them nudge our necks with their wings, and pick at our earlobes, nibbling all the rotten bits out of us until we're nothing more than sinew, bone, and teeth. Until we're so pure, you can see right through us down to the roots and dirt. Until even our memories are eaten alive.”