After a minute Damien looked over her cube wall. His head was right above the Mardi Gras mask hung on her wall. She didn’t particularly want to go to… - Maureen F. McHugh

We enter into all major relationships with no real clue of where we are going: marriage, birth, friendship. We carry maps we believe are true: our parents’ relationship, what it says in the baby books, the landscape of our own childhood. These maps are approximate at best, dangerously misleading at worst.

So what's wrong with capitalism?"
He sighs. For a minute I wonder if maybe he's a capitalist. But then he says, "It's not a fair system."
"That's stupid," I say. "Things aren't fair. Only little kids expect things to be fair.

Nothing prepares you for the death of a child. Nothing teaches you how to live with it.