My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.
After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.
I forgive you,” I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.
Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.
She wasn’t actually speaking to me, she was singing a kind of lullaby of talk. But, eventually, the music stopped.
What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child
Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.
Oh sweetheart, do you really think if youseal it up, that the pain’s gonna go away?
I could not imagine my youngest standing above her soiled grandmother in the wing chair and saying, “mother, let’s kill her. “That’s the only choice.
Murderers are not monsters, they’re men. And that’s the most frightening thing about them.
This little girl’s grown up by now,” she said.Almost.Not quite.I wish you all a long and happy life.
You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.
How to Commit the Perfect Murder” was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.
No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.
Try to breathe,” he said, and for the first time the only thought in my head after an instruction like that wasn’t Fuck you.I breathed.
Our only kiss was like an accident- a beautiful gasoline rainbow.
For me the saddest thing was that these animals smelled the brokenness in him – the human defect – and kept away.
Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.
I knew my mother’s limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.
Soon she noted that teachers in subjects besides gym didn’t report her if she cut. They were happy not to have her there: her intelligence made her a problem. It demanded attention and rushed their lesson plans forward.
Placing blame was easier than adding up the mounting figures of what he’d lost.
I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.
How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?
The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: “booze affects material as it does people.
I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 P.M.
I like gardening – it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.