Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring. - Margaret Atwood

"None of them was willing to be a girl," he said. "You can see why not."
"I know, right? I don't blame them," she said with a hard edge to her voice. "Being a girl is the pits, trust me."

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me — drawing on my skin — not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.

But underneath that is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful. It's like being wakened suddenly in the middle of the night, by a hand over your face, and you sit up with your heart going fast, and no one is there. And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but ripe and splitting open of its own accord.

And inside the peach there's a stone.