Shanny

“At night she began cooking things in the kitchen, things too strange to mention. She steeped oleander in boiling water, and the roots of a vine with white trumpet flowers that glowed like faces. She soaked a plant collected in moonlight from the neighbors’ fence, with little heart-shaped flowers. Then she cooked the water down; the whole kitchen smelled like green and rotting leaves. She threw out pounds of the wet-spinach green stuff into somebody else’s dumpster. She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She sat on the roof and talked to the moon.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“The sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“She's never where she is,' I said. 'She's only inside her head.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander