Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins.

Isn't it funny.I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than i ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.

without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life.

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.

If sinners where so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?

I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.

This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment only to be washed away.