‘Only I can meet her insatiable need, and she won’t let me provide.’

‘183,671 other people die, including Queen Elizabeth II.’

‘Why are the victims always pixilated out like they are the guilty ones?’

‘Words like “baby” or “foetus” were carefully avoided; the visit handled with matter-of-fact precision.’

‘Every morning since her disappearance I pounded the sidewalks.’

‘You imagined it in a large bed, a romantic headboard like something from a fin de siècle Parisian novel.’

‘There is no embarrassment— that was swallowed by the acid— but I know that future me, anxiously retracing the events of this night, will be horrified.’

‘Mother and daughter laugh together, at the fact they can now connect.’

‘Cleaning delivered very little in terms of salary or cachet, but she could sleep well every night knowing that she had done something honest and good.’

‘Once, long ago, it had been her shyness that trapped her.’

‘The room was silent save for the rustling sound of clothes while Ting slowly undressed.’

‘I want to reach under and wrestle the agony out of my being or crawl out of my own wretched skin but sane people don’t dig and claw at their own flesh.’

‘Her hand is trembling when I take hold of it. Everything begins to make sense now.’

‘They come to me when my pain is at its worst: a yawning bear, black throated.’

‘Heterosexual women don't feel what I feel when I look at your pictures.’

‘She didn’t have that tenderness for me that the boys got in abundance.’

‘Apparently no one wanted to invest in who the Stanford computer science department had anointed as the frontrunner for producing machine consciousness.’

‘He had taken her secret with him.’

‘One minute, a student would be walking to class or eating a baggy of trail mix, and the next minute she would explode into a screaming gulf of fire.’

‘The radio is talking about the spate of recent attacks. There is no link between them, other than they are all unprovoked acts of violence against women.’