The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

I was in the air around him, I was in the cold mornings he had now with Ruth, I was in the quiet time he spent alone between studying.

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

He had had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.

His cruelty was in his absence. Even when he came and sat at her dinner table and ate her food, he was not there.