Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.

There was something not quite right about her eagerness, an eerie kind of voyeurism in her need for bad news.

That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him.

It wasn't right. He knew that, but it was like falling: once you started you couldn't stop until something stopped you.

After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?

Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.

He fished in his pocket for his keys and instead pulled out the last geode, gray and smooth, earth-shaped. He held it, warming in his palm, thinking of all mysteries the world contained: layers of stone, concealed beneath the flesh of earth and grass; these dull rocks, with their glimmering hidden hearts.