“The whole world is a wood, Bartholomew, and everyone in it is fashioned of birch bark. Frail as paper.” He began to cry, and I did, too. “Oh, gargoyle.” I used to think his sadness, his heavy emotion, such a futile thing. An irreconcilable flaw. But as I kept to Maude’s room, watching Benji drink and Rory go silent and feeling my own tongue struggle to put to words the defeat I felt, I began to think I’d been telling myself the wrong story about my peculiar batlike gargoyle. Sadness, like birch bark, had all the appearance of frailty. And yet… The tree prevailed.
