The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

Nakota started to make fun of the bear and I told her to go fuck herself, right out loud in the store, I said if she lived to be a thousand she would never begin to approach the unconscious purity of that bear.

(from Kathe Koja's THE CIPHER)

Motes swarmed, slow dazzle, great glittering gouts of surges tiny as electric sparks, and where their waves touched became no shore at all, no blood and bone but part of the new, the latticing of some vast personal underpinning, I had been right to speculate on the worst. I was becoming a process.