She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox’s tongue. She tastes like hope.

I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form.

Is it good or bad?" she asked Issa. The wrong question, she knew. She just couldn't help herself. "It's both, sweet girl," said Issa. "like everything.

She could smell the boy spice beneath the thrift-store aroma of his jacket, and the rubbing and the smell began to work to soften her -- like butter before you add sugar, in the first steps of making something sweet. It was her first experience of how bodies could meld together, how breath could slip naturally into rhythm. It was hypnotic. Heady. And she wanted more.

...something was starting to take shape, out of magic and will. Smoke and bone.

There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward-toward what?

My tiny scary friend is coming