But then again, that’s what the Book of Job was about to her, a cautionary tale about wanting there to be a God, wanting there to be someone who could enact what a God could...

She has been surprised by grief, its constancy, its immediacy, its unrelenting physical pain.

…she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk’s bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs,...

For all her culture’s attention to the physical, it seemingly has little to salve the creatural anguish of losing someone else’s body, their touch, their heat, their oceanic heart…she doesn’t want another body, she wants...

She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling...

Wandering is better than place sometimes, than home, than destination. Sometimes she can eke out the idea that wandering is possibility, chance, serendipity–he might be there, that place she didn’t think to look, hadn’t worked...