You could love someone so strongly, for so long, and still forget—until the memories returned.

Funny how they’re corpses if you didn’t know them, but bodies if you did.

Maybe we should all find one,” I say. Or maybe, just for once, I should wait for someone to find me first.

My nerves still spark like ricocheting tracer bullets.

I will dive to find Rosalie. She is out there, floating for me if I can only swim long enough, climbing up through silent silver bubbles up and up and free.

Judge not what is best by pleasure, though to nature seeming meet, created as thou art to nobler end, holy and pure, conformity divine. It’s Milton, Paradise Lost, something Ashey said to me when I told him I wasn’t into porn. He’s always quoting stuff like that; he thinks it will inspire me. It does.

It was true. Nothing was ever lost. And nothing was ever forgotten, no matter how painful. The city was like a heart that way. She had four chambers, too. She had arteries that led in and out. She kept things moving. She kept the oxygen flowing in and out, in and out, clean for dirty, dirty for clean, the filthy midnight whispers for the purest morning prayers

her searches told her all mothers felt this way, at one time or another. There always came a day—no matter how hard one tried, no matter how tightly one locked the door and barred the windows—when the outside world would come creeping in. When your baby’s head would turn away from the glowing hearth of home and toward the glitter of false promises.

She blew a light and watched a fire start. They would never leave her, now. I have no mouth, the city thought as she went to sleep, but I could kiss you.