Evie replied with an eye-roll. “Do you think you can manage to not steal anything while I’m gone?” “The only thing I’m trying to steal is your heart, doll.” Sam smirked. “You’re not that talented a thief, Sam Lloyd.

She knew what it was to wait for someone who would never come home. She knew that grief, like a scar, faded but never really went away.

Or perhaps it is some combination of spirit and desire, love and hope, some alchemy that we each possess and can put to use, if we first know where to look without flinching.

Just once, she'd like to be the exciting one, the girl somebody wanted.

She was tired of being told how it was by this generation, who’d botched things so badly. They’d sold their children a pack of lies: God and country. Love your parents. All is fair. And then they’d sent those boys, her brother, off to fight a great monster of a war that maimed and killed and destroyed whatever was inside them. Still they lied, expecting her to mouth the words and play along. Well, she wouldn’t. She knew now that the world was a long way from fair. She knew the monsters were real.

I feel like I swallowed a Magritte. Like on the inside, I'm made of clouds and floating eyes, green apples, and slowly rising men in bowler hats.

But aren't many gardens beautiful because they are imperfect?...aren't the strange, new flowers that arise by mistake or misadventure as pleasing as the well-tended and planned?