Why am I seeking logic or sanity here? I'd asked myself at the moment. There hasn’t been any so far. - Dan Simmons

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.”

I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead.

The story of Rachel’s unique illness was no secret in Crawford, of course. The fact of it had spread through the college the first year of Rachel’s return and the entire town knew soon after. Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial—some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else’s misfortune out of their voices and gazes—but mostly the community had folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young.