"Desire is a rift. Dental floss was stuck between Evan’s teeth. Hot water ran from the tap. Instead of a mirror, a void on the wall. Jars of cream on the shelf. The toothbrush quivered. Steam rose. We are alone and we are all of us strangers."
"Some time ago, perhaps before you were even born, a young girl was walking in her garden. She may have been called Mary—that's what most of the stories about her say."
"Right here, thank you, Lena spoke up from the backseat as they reached the narrow street below Olga’s Sublime. The morning clouds were still low and thick over the port, the rundown homes stacked into the hillside still drained of color."
"There, and not there. Outside the hostel window the town is hidden by fog. The pier down below dissolves into the colourless distance, like a bridge into the clouds. At times the fog disperses a little, and the contours of islands appear a little way out to sea. Then they’re gone again."
"That morning, hours after the cock crowed but before the townhall bell chimed eight, Bridey mounted narrow steps leading up from the kitchen, holding tight to the fluted handles of a silver oval on which Mr. Hollingworth’s breakfast quivered."
"For all the years of her life, this was the story Chaya-Libbe told. The missing parts stayed missing."
"'I don’t believe in ghosts,’ Khalid said, his first day on the job as a security guard at Kenilworth Castle."
"No one saw the avalanche because it all fell apart so slowly, not day by day, not even hour by hour, not minute by minute, but it fell apart, it was falling apart the whole time and you could see, if you wanted to see it, if you didn’t refuse to see it, you could see it falling apart because it was an avalanche, it had to be an avalanche because what else could it be?"
"Every morning regularity and service act as a bulwark against inner noise. I work as much as I can. My days might seem endless, but that’s how I want them. "
"It had been sixteen years since I last saw you, as I was getting on that bus. At the start of the summer the potholes in the track up to the cottage filled with frogspawn but it was nearly halfway through August and nothing much grew there any more. This place was a boat in another life."
"Welcome to Zimmer Land,” Lady Justice says. I flash my ID badge at Mariam. She frowns at me from her chair in the front box office."
"We walk down the halls like we are coming to beat you up. Even the teachers move out of the way."
“And somehow Steve came to your attention,” Sandy said. “Why?” Gretchen looked at the ceiling for a moment, and then back at Sandy. “There were only twelve students in the class, you pretty much notice everyone,” she said evenly.
"It was early spring in Paris and our yearlong efforts to get pregnant had failed. The fertility clinic tested Connall and the problem wasn't his sperm, so that left me to measure my basal temperature, take pills, inject myself, explore homeopathic cures."
"Willa spent a restless hour walking around the empty third floor trying to choose a room for her office."
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