War is being reminded that you are completely at the mercy of death at every moment, without the illusion that you are not. Without the distractions that make life worth living.

Besides, secretly, without knowing it herself, she had been waiting for a Beast to go to.

I pounded through the houses, staggering down the hallways, falling down the steps. It was a hot streaky dawn full of insecticides, exhaust, flowers that could make you sick or fall in love. My battered Impala was still parked there on the side of the road and I wanted to lie down on the shredded seats and sleep and sleep. But I thought of the bones; I could hear them singing. They needed me to write their song.

You have to make your own family, your own life.

She went out in the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the graffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it, went to parties in hotel rooms where white-skinned, lingerie-clad rock stars had been staying the night their husbands shot themselves in the head, listened to music in nightclubs where stunning boyish actors had OD'd on the pavement.

Pulling heads off Barbies, sticking them on the TV antenna and ruining the reception. But thats how witch babies are.

It's important to tell your story. It's important to listen.