“Nine years ago I was alive. Nine years ago Jessica Anne Porter was fifteen years old.”

“Be nice to her,” I muttered under my breath. “She’s my sister; she got sick. She lost her kid. For all I know, she may have eaten her.”

“The whole right side of his face was smashed in, concave forehead and crushed cheekbone and one eye bugging precariously from a broken socket. He was purplish-black, and dirty white: Maggots seethed from every pore and crawled across him in excited wriggly piles, blowflies waving and blooming and wilting, the bits of bone they'd scraped clean glinting like tiny mosaic tiles. Scraps of jeans and a leather jacket clung to the sticky seething mess of his flesh. He was big, big shouldered, a good foot taller; chit-chitter, he went, even standing still.”

“Nine years ago I was alive. Nine years ago Jessica Anne Porter was fifteen years old.”

“No, we wern't telling Teresa. Because she had that same smell on her skin too, that dead hoocow's awful sterile rot, and until I had some answers to throw in her face I was pretending everything was fine.”

“Isn't it wonderful when people do that, when you put all your faith in their being selfish and self -centered and not giving a damn and it turns out, all that time, you were wrong?”