Life doesn’t need magic to be magical. (But a little bit sure doesn’t hurt.)

"Death," said Akiva. His life was leaving him fast now that he no longer held his wound. His eyes just wanted to drift closed. "I'm ready." "Well, I'm not. I hear it's dull, being dead." She said it lightly, amused, and he peered up at her. Had she just made a joke? She smiled. Smiled. He did, too. Amazed, he felt it happening, as if her smile had triggered a reflex in him. "Dull sounds nice," he said, letting his eyes flutter closed. "Maybe I can catch up on my reading."

Skip meeting him? The butterflies, the pounding heart, the blushing? The part where you enter each other's magnetic fields for the first time, and it's like invisble lines of energy are drawing you together-

I shudder to think. I might wear lace collars and laugh flower petals and pearls. People might try to pat me. I see them think it. My height triggers the puppy-kitten reflex- Must touch-and I've found that since you can't electrify yourself like a fence, the next best thing is to have murderer's eyes.

I am one of billions. I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form. I will be ungathered. The stardust will go on to be other things someday and I will be free.

Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned petting, that needed no one. Why couldn't she be that cat?

Bitter, bitter, this desolation of angels.