They haven't killed us yet," I say, and I imagine that one day I will fly a plane over Portland, over Rochester, over every fenced-in city in the whole country, and I will bomb and bomb and bomb, and watch all their buildings smoldering to dust, and all those people melting and bleeding into flame, and I will see how they like it. If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit. This is the way the world is made now.

I put my forehead on his collarbone, place one hand on his chest. Its rhythm reassures me: He is real, and he is now.

Amor deliria nervosa isn't a disease of love. It's a disease of selfishness.

Not gray, exactly. Right before the sun rises there's a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color-not really gray but sort of, or sort of white, and I've always really liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.

It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.

I need him to know that I came for him. I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him.

Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.