The book smelled dusty and old but also carried a sweet tang, a hint of something inviting. She opened to the first page and started to read, pronouncing the words in a reverent whisper.
Smell is the voice of the soul...
I’m the sheen on water, Rin thought. I’m a looking glass. I’m not real.
The three girls were sitting and lying beside her, holding one another, weeping, their arms and legs and hair tangled like the roots of close trees, sobs shaking them like leaves in a high wind.
Clearly she was expected to say something, but panic at having to speak stole the thoughts from her head.
What? Don’t British women know how to use their knees?
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.
Rin slept inside the oak’s thought. Its own memories of weather and growth continued to hum, and like a pond, its stillness reflected back herself.
Miss Hayes, have you stopped to consider that you might have this all backward? That in fact you are my fantasy?
I couldn’t remember the last time I had stayed up into the squeaky hours of the night because I couldn’t put a book down, and that was a tragedy.
Her smile was peculiar – it made her nose wrinkle, not as though she smelled something unpleasant, but more that she was so amused, her whole face wanted to be a part of the smile.
Why was the judgement of the disapproving so valuable? Who said that their good opinions tended to be any more rational than those of generally pleasant people?
Oh, but I like my geese. Like cats, they can’t be told what to do, and like dogs, they’re loyal, and like people, they talk every chance they get.
Some people are born with the first word of a language resting on their tongue though it may take some time before they can taste it.
And new, too. Remade. Ready to move again. Listening was the start, she decided. Doing was the next step.
I wonder if everyone who faces death hurts like this. It’s as though for the first time I realize how much just being alive makes my body ache. But I don’t want that ache to stop.
Ani felt a stirring, a hope, a winged thing waking up in her chest and brushing her heart with it’s feathers.
He looked at her, and the clarity of his dark eyes struck her heart with a sensation of a wound touched.
She answered by standing and kissing him first and held his cheeks and closed her eyes and felt sure as bones and deep as blood that she had found her place.
Her nightmare clung to her like the smell of smoke to cloth.
A heart is a heart in a child or a man.