Nothing is ever certain.

Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.

She wasn’t actually speaking to me, she was singing a kind of lullaby of talk. But, eventually, the music stopped.

Horror on earth is real and it is everyday. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled...

No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.

Oh sweetheart, do you really think if youseal it up, that the pain’s gonna go away?

This little girl’s grown up by now,” she said.Almost.Not quite.I wish you all a long and happy life.

I forgive you,” I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.

Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.

There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet...

Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.

You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.

He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.

I knew my mother’s limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.

What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child

I fell in love with you again; While you were away – Jack Salmon

Samuel walked out to Lindsey then, and there she was in his arms, my sweet butterball babe, born ten years after my fourteen years on Earth: Abigail Suzanne. Little Susie to me. Samuel placed Susie...

There wasn’t a lot of bullshit in my heaven.

The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at an outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down...

Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I’d spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized...

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a...

How to Commit the Perfect Murder” was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.

I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind...

The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: “booze affects material as it does people.

In the fall he picked up his phone one afternoon to hear Grandma Lynn.’Jack,’ my grandmother announced, ‘I am thinking of coming to stay.’ My father was silent, but the line was riddled with his...

Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.

Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.

At some point, to counter the list of the dead, I had begun keeping my own list of the living. It was something I noticed Len Fenerman did too. When he was off duty he...

I never let myself yearn for Buckley, afraid he might see my image in a mirror or a bottle cap. Like everyone else I was trying to protect him.

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

For me the saddest thing was that these animals smelled the brokenness in him – the human defect – and kept away.

I would do what I did best, I thought. I would wait. It was only a matter of time, after all.

How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?

…y vi, mientras Samuel daba el atrevido paso de besar a Lindsey delante de toda la familia, que emprendían por fin el vuelo, alejándose de mi muerte.

You save yourself or you remain unsaved.

We lay there with our bodies touching, and as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I...

Fucking bastards are simple by nature.

I was like I was in science class: I was curious.

Ruth, que quería que todos creyeran lo que ella sabía: que los muertos realmente nos hablan, que, en el aire que rodea a los vivos, los espíritus se mueven, se entremezclan y ríen con nosotros....

Heaven is comfort, but it’s still not living.

She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any...

Outside the hospital, a young girl who was selling small bouquets of daffodils, their green stems tied with lavender ribbons. I watched as my mother bought out the girl’s whole stock. Nurse Eliot, who remembered...

That night my mother had what she considered a wonderful dream. She dreamed of the country of India, where she had never been. There were orange traffic cones and beautiful lapis lazuli insects with mandibles...

My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.

Placing blame was easier than adding up the mounting figures of what he’d lost.

Only by thinking I had freedom had I come to understand how imprisoned I was.

Murderers are not monsters, they’re men. And that’s the most frightening thing about them.