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There is a wilderness in little girls. We could not contain it. It made magic of the rain and a temple of the forest.
We tried to forget. We didn’t tell the story. Not the real one. Not ever.
They couldn’t help digging the edge of a fingernail under your scabs so they could feel the shape of your wounds.
I’d grabbed a fistful to keep and shoved the rest into trash bags, holding my breath the whole time.
The Olympic National Forest belonged to the owls,
That she was more than the bones we’d found in the forest, and the magic we’d made from them.
Mom took off—fed up with him and with me and with a town too stubborn to realize it was already dead.
But the truth was, I hadn’t seen him that day. I hadn’t seen anything at all.
We knew the world was cruel and dirty and dull, and it was all so brutally unfair that we refused to accept it. There was magic in the world. We only had to find it.
She’d said raising kids was a bit like that. You had to harden them, before they were ready to go out safely into the world. If you put them out too soon, all at once, the shock of it would wither them. They would never grow to full bloom.
The meaning of belief has changed over the ages. We tend to think of it as a matter of fact. I believe this thing is true; I hold it to be factual. But once, it meant something different, a meaning that lingers when we say I believe in you. It is not a statement of factual existence, but one of faith and loyalty. To believe is to hold dear, to cherish, to claim as a truth more fundamental than fact.
The flesh does not acknowledge linear time, a therapist had once told me. The past is written alongside the present on our skins.
“I’ve been in enough bar fights to know you don’t tangle with crazy,”
Her illness was a wildfire, and the game was the spark that set it ablaze.
did. I understood the weight of a secret, and the urge to bury yourself beneath it.
could almost see the shift behind her eyes, her lies rebalancing. It was a neat trick.
The mist of blood hung in the air longer, drifting down with the rain as the gunshot faded.