Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.

She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

There was a time when she had indulged in the hypothetical for hours a day, plotting the map that had led her here. But no life is a line, and hers was an uneven orbit around a dark star, a moth circling a dead bulb, searching for the light it once held.

Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.

Sometimes it bursts from your imagination fully formed, sometimes you absorb from nonfiction, sometimes you're able to imprint your own autobiographical experiences on a world you never yourself were a part of. A decent number of the one-liners in the title story originally came up in conversations with my girlfriend or my neighbor.