“So lonely! Shyly they glanced at each other across the dining room table in whose polished cherrywood surface candle flames shimmered like dimly recalled dreams. One said, “We should purchase a RepliLuxe,” as if only now thinking of it, and the other said quickly, “RepliLuxes are too expensive and you hear how they don’t survive the first year.”
“I received my acceptance to the colony in the mail. Or rather my husband had laid it out for me when I got home. The letter said I should be proud of my acceptance, and that almost no one, or at any rate very few, was chosen .”
“The sun shone hard and the wind billowed in from the west the day I first killed a man. He was more of a boy, really. He’d been spotted leaping up from a ditch near the site of an IED that had ripped through the belly of an Eleven-Fourteen up-armored Humvee, killing one soldier instantly and imprisoning four others in the truck’s bombed-out cab.”
