…People are rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It is not fair, to treat people as if they are finished beings. Everyo… - Kathleen Winter

It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.

The politeness was unbearable. They avoided touching each other, careful as strangers on a train. . . A family can go on for years without the love that once bound it together, like a lovely old wall that stays standing long after rain has crumbled the mortar.

When there was another world to remember, a lost world, she could imagine visiting it again. She could imagine the comfort of being there for a week, then coming back to face her real life.

Wally Michelin had stomped through kindergarten and grades one and two with a certainty Wayne found fascinating . . . Wayne was in love with her from the moment he heard her crumbly voice. So in love he wished he could become her. If there was a way he could make himself into a ghost without a body - a shadow - or transparent like the lures his father used to catch Arctic char, he would have done it. He would have transformed into his father’s lure, slipped under Wally Michelin’s divinely freckled skin, and lived inside her, looking through her eyes.