It kills me sometimes, how people die.

It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.

And then there's the sickness I feel from looking at legs I can't touch, or at lips that don't smile at me. Or hips that don't reach for me. And hearts that don't beat for me.

Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would smile at the beauty of destruction.

If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter.

Liesel observed the strangeness of her foster father's eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver.

For at least twenty minutes she handed out the story. The youngest kids were soothed by her voice, and everyone else saw visions of the whistler running from the scene. Liesel did not. The book thief saw only the mechanics of the words--their bodies stranded on the paper, beaten down for her to walk on. Somewhere, too, in the gaps between a period and the next capital letter, there was also Max. She remembered reading to him when he was sick. It he in the basement? she wondered. Or is he stealing a glimpse of the sky again?