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“I hope he was warm when he died. Perhaps he remembered the sun for a minute” (183).

“I could feel a breath of air on my cheek; it came from the sky I could see, but it smelled of smoke and ruin. Our house was a castle, turreted and opened to the sky” (177).

“I stood in the open doorway and saw that the lawn was marked with the tires of cars and the feet which had danced” (173).

“Although I did not perceive it then, time and the orderly pattern of our old days had ended” (171).

“Nothing was orderly, nothing was planned; it was not like any other day” (169).

“It seemed that all the wealth and hidden treasure of our house had been found out and torn and soiled”(168).

“I thought that we had somehow not found our way back correctly through the night, that we had somehow lost ourselves and come back through the wrong gap in time, or the wrong door, or the wrong fairy tale” (167-168).

“It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years” (161).

“There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out” (143).

“I looked at the house with all the richness of love I contained” (141).

“I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and the bark grew over his mouth” (129).

“I sat very quietly, listening to what she had almost said. Time was running shorter, tightening around our house, crushing me” (122).

“I stood outside in the sunlight and looked in at him lying still in the dark room and tried to think of ways I might be kinder” (117).

“I watched her while she swept up the glass, today would be a glittering day, full of tiny sparkling thing”(89).

“When I woke up the early morning mists were wandering lightly along the creek, curling around my face and touching me. I lay there laughing, feeling the almost imaginary brush of the mist across my eyes, and looking up into the trees”(83).

“…but the air of change was so strong that there was no avoiding it; change lay over the stairs and the kitchen and the garden like fog”(73).

“…we would sit warmly together in the kitchen where we were guarded by the house and no one from outside could see so much as a light” (72).

“Constance knelt in the dirt, both hands buried as though she were growing” (66).

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it” (65).

“I wanted to be kinder…” (62)

Repetition

“All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women” (61).

“On Thursday, which was my most powerful day, I went in the big attic and dressed in their clothes” (60).

“I had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps someday they would grow as dragons” (59).

“All the omens spoke of change. I woke up on Saturday morning and thought I heard them calling me; they want me to get up, I thought before I came fully awake and remembered that they were dead” (58).

“A change was coming, and nobody knew it but me” (57).

prediction…


merricat definitely murked her fam