I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. He didn't want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn't want to look at me anymore, either.

I'm not a slash-and-burn kind, and I'm also not a posterity kind. They just kind of exist on my hard drive. It's like walking down the street - what you leave behind is still there, even if you never go back and revisit it.

Like a medical procedure,' Ruth said. 'Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.

Hold still," my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.

There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.

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