Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.

Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness.

I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.

No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.

I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.

If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.