Your head will be fine,” said Miri. “It’s your neck you should worry about.

Really, becoming a writer sounds more like a mental illness than a professional choice.

They finished laughing and caught their breaths, and looked at each other, and Ani thought Geric looked at her too long, as though he forgot he was looking, as though he did not wish to do anything else. She looked back. Her took heart took its time quieting down.

The woman gestured to a seat and put on a patient face. An impatient sort of patient face, like an impatient face dressing up as a patient one for Halloween.

She touched the healthy folds of skin around the baby's neck, wrists, and thighs, the dark lines crying for life made in his forehead, and thought how people start with wrinkles and end with wrinkles, grow into their skin and then live to grow out of it again.

Writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

Geric," she called. He turned back around. "What kind of flowers were they?" "I don't rightly know," he said. He made faltering gestures with his hands, forming their size and shape from the air. "They were yellow, and smallish, and had lots of petals." "Thank you," she said. "They were beautiful.