“The cut is wide across her palm. A butcher’s kiss. The guilty knife lies at the bottom of the sink. A chef’s knife. There is nothing on the counter it could have been cutting.”

“In all the places Jude had been, he had always heard something. Remnants of sound carried on the wind, a continued frequency that permeated every corner of his life. Even in his most silent moments, there was still the indescribable hum of the world, barely perceptible yet unyielding. Here, under the streetlight, there was nothing.”

“The clay is never where your attention should be—to look for it is to fire a shot long after your target has passed your barrel. Rather, you join a dance with it, keeping it just on the periphery of your focus but never fully acknowledging it.”

“What about the time I laid against you like a ragdoll? My head to your chest, legs out, toddler-ish, my spine curved horribly and bent in two places like the doctor said it would be when I got to be all grown up.”

“The sickness, the daughter of her sickness, was inside of me. A creature slithered below the surface, swallowing its own tail, both so hungry and so scared of the bite.”

“The gentle smile had vanished, replaced by a frail, crooked imitation, and teary eyes, the same look from the portrait,”

“[…] she looks like a flower girl Sadie saw last summer at her aunt’s wedding; there is something so sombre about her and about that girl at the wedding too, and she wants to reach out and touch her, she doesn’t know why.”

“In this room, he is taught to hate, to carve, to examine minutely the details of another’s body laid bare.”

“…whenever I see a woman of a certain age I can’t help but wonder whether or not she has children, thinking of my mother who has always looked exactly the same…”