He turns and walks away, moving so quickly that the candle flames shiver with the motion of the air. “I miss you,” Isobel says as he leaves, but the sentiment is crushed by the clatter of the beaded curtain falling closed behind him.

Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.

Taking his time, as though he has all of it in the world, in the universe, from the days when tales meant more than they do now, but perhaps less than they will someday, he draws a breath that releases the tangled knot of words in his heart, and they fall from his lips effortlessly. "The circus arrives without warning.

Because I do not wish to know,” he says. “I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark.

Her father picks different names for her as they change locales, but he uses Miranda often, presumably because he knows how much it annoys her.

We cannot go backward,' Marco says. 'A great deal is not how it used to be.

I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.