But Max said: “Last summer I spent working these peace booths at state fairs. We’d go around in this bigole pickup with this knocked-down booth in th… - John Crowley

She knew - she knew by now - that there really can be a person, one at least, that you can embrace as easily and wholly as though the two of you were one thing, a thing that once upon a time was broken into pieces and is now put back together. And how could she know this unless he knew it too? It was part of the wholeness, that he must; and that too she knew. With her he was for a moment whole, they were whole: as whole as an egg, and as fragile.

One by one the lights burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer, but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if ever there was a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing; that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn't as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous and shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.

Seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story.