It's the picnic principle. Things taste better outdoors. And if it's a forbidden thing, so much the better.

Secrets press inside a person. They press the way water presses at a dam. The secrets and the water, they both want to get out.

I was asking about lust, wasnʼt I? I was fairly certain of it. But isnʼt love supposed to come before lust? It does in the dictionary.

That’s where proper stories begin, don’t they, when the handsome stranger arrives and everything goes wrong?

It is true that I can trip over anything and nothing – a speck of dust, a patch of sunlight, an idea. I move through life like a person with one eye, through a landscape that looks flat, but is really tricked out with hidden depths and shallows. It didn’t use to be so, but no matter. I navigate the world well enough in my own way.

Let’s hope she’s like the others, who look only at the surface. Let’s hope she’d never think that a girl with black-velvet eyes and cut-glass cheekbones could be a witch.

Witches don’t look like anything. Witches are. Witches do.