You mean he came to your school? The scandalous rodent-loaf!

These soldiers had done what they had done, and been done unto in return. This was how it went. In the cycle of slaughter, reprisal begat reprisal, forever.

Boredom is a terrible affliction of the soulless.

It seemed she was in a cathedral—if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone.

To a new generation of butterflies, hopefully less stupid than last. Maybe they were burgeoning even now in fat little cocoons. Or maybe not.

The thing he wished for most was a thing he had never wished for at all, not until he had discovered her. And it came true that night, and many nights after. A brief and shining span of happiness, it was the pivot point around which his whole life spun.

James often wondered at the chain of flukes it must have taken to bring him through with his own life and limbs intact. Once he might have believed it to be the work of Providence but it seemed to him now that to thank God for his life would be to suggest God had shrugged off all the others flicked them away like cigarette butts by the thousands and that seemed like abominable conceit. James Dorsey took no credit for being alive. His higher power these days was Chance.