It doesn't matter that I can't remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.

I watch my heart disappearing into her rosebud mouth. My Valentine's jest somehow seems less funny.

The young woman was crying, in the way that grownups cry, keeping it inside as much as they can, and hating it when it still pushes out at the edges, making them ugly and funny-looking on the way.

It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.

I think hell is something you carry around with you, not somewhere you go.

Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.

The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and coming down the lane with me, then.