...have a theory that she is in love with the dream of someone and not an actual person.

The rain increases and umbrellas sprout like mushrooms amongst the graves.

I find I think of myself not as a writer so much as someone who provides a gateway, a tangential route for readers to reach the circus. To visit the circus again, if only in their minds, when they are unable to attend it physically. I relay it through printed words on crumpled newsprint, words that they can read again and again, returning to the circus whenever they wish, regardless of time of day or physical location. Transporting them at will. When put that way, it sounds rather like magic, doesn't it? p.369

Could you do such things when you were a dancer?' Tara asks her, as Tsukiko pulls a leg up impossibly far over her head. 'I would have had a much busier social calendar if I could,' Mme. Padva replies with a shake of her head.

And then he tells her stories. Myths he learned from his instructor. Fantasies he created himself, inspired by bits and pieces of others read in archaic books with crackling spines.

Celia laughs and a curl of her hair falls across her cheek. Marco tentatively moves to brush it off her face, but before his fingers reach her, she pushes herself off the ledge, her silver gown a billowing cloud as she falls onto the pile of jewel-toned cushions.

It is difficult to see a situation for what it is when you are in the midst of it,” Tsukiko says. “It is too familiar. Too comfortable.