The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.

Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult.

The truth was that the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.

What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.

Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.