My first job was scooping ice cream at Friendly's in Albany, New York. I hated the work, most of my colleagues, and the uniform, and I more or less lost my taste for ice cream permanently.

The world was floods above and fire below

People always did like to talk, didn't they? That's why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

The storm dropped a house on her head.

So she listened hard. And she began to evolve, because stories work their magic that way. They build conviction and erode conviction in equal measure.

Well, the family always was bright, and brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly.

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls.