That doesn't happen," she explained. "Stars fall. They don't go back up again." "You could be the first," he told her.

She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, 'Will she be the same?

Nice' in a bodyguard is about as useful as the ability to regurgitate whole lobsters.

You're sick. Sick and evil and weird.

He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.

Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.

And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him.