I’m sorry for everything.” Then he turns and pushes back into the woods, and he’s gone.

I was glad when the Invalids were executed. Some people complained that lethal injection was too humane for convicted terrorists, but I thought it sent a powerful message: We are not the evil ones. We are reasonable and compassionate. We stand for fairness, structure, and organization. It’s the other side, the uncureds, who bring the chaos.

My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.

Mice? Fine. Flying mice? Not so fine.

I reach out and grab her wrist. It feels impossibly tiny in my hand, like this one time I found a baby bird near goose Point, and I picked it up and it died there, taking its final gasping fluttering breaths in my palm.

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

I'm so tired after dinner I fall asleep with my clothes on, almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, and so I forget to ask God, in my prayers, to keep me from waking up.