All too infrequently do I encounter a new voice as delightful, compelling, and intelligent as that of Molly Tanzer.

All too infrequently do I encounter a new voice as delightful, compelling, and intelligent as that of Molly Tanzer.

Language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we should use all the words we have.

Normal is a bitter pill that we rail against.

Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time.

No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the minds of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary.

Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter.