Because Horror On Earth Is Real And

He Had Been My Almost. My Might-have-been. I Was Afraid Of What I Wanted Most - His Kiss. Still, I Collected Kiss Stories. -susie Salmon

To Transform Experience And Thought Into Language And Narrative - That Is Beautiful Even If That Beauty Is In Brokenness.

She Liked To Imagine That When She Passed, The World Looked After Her, But She Also Knew How Anonymous She Was. Except When She Was At Work, No One Knew Where She Was At Any Time Of Day And No One Waited For Her. It Was Immaculate Anonymity.

The Dead Are Never Exactly Seen By The Living, But Many People Seem Acutely Aware Of Something Changed Around Them. They Speak Of A Chill In The Air. The Mates Of The Deceased Wake From Dreams And See A Figure Standing At The End Of Thier Bed, Or In A Doorway, Or Boarding, Phantomlike, A City Bus.

These Were The Lovely Bones That Had Grown Around My Absence: The Connections-sometimes Tenuous, Sometimes Made At Great Cost, But Often Magnificent-that Happened After I Was Gone. And I Began To See Things In A Way That Let Me Hold The World Without Me In It. The Events That My Death Wrought Were Merely The Bones Of A Body That Would Become Whole At Some Unpredictable Time In The Future. The Price Of What I Came To See As This Miraculous Body Had Been My Life.