I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

we lived in the gaps between the stories

... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.