Please feel free to take this personally.

She’s really gone, then. The little girl with the back of her shirt sticking out like a duck tail, the one who needed help reaching the dishes, and who begged to see the frosted cakes in the bakery window. Time and tragedy have forced her to grow too quickly, at least for my taste, into a young woman who stitches bleeding wounds and knows our mother can hear only so much.

If my holding out those berries was an act of temporary insanity, then those people will embrace insanity too.

My mother just wanted me to forget it. So, of course, every word was immediately, irrevocably branded into my brain.

Do i really want him dead? What i want... what i want is to have him back.

I just...I just miss him. And I hate being so alone.

I can see the first apple teetering when I let the third arrow go, catching the torn flap and ripping it from the bag. For a moment, everything seems frozen in time. Then the apples spill to the ground and I'm blown backward into the air.