Quote 1: She was scared a bit about moving, leaving Knoxville. I couldn’t believe it. I told her there’s trees, mountains, rivers, birds singing in your ears, we’ve got the whole rest of the world over there, other than people, which are just one thing. Going wherever we wanted to without adults, even at night. The woods. I got caught up in telling her all this and almost forgot my messed up life because in some ways she was worse off than me. She’d never even seen a lightning bug. That is just tragic. I gold her the different ones. One kind goes totally dark, then they all blink together, thousands, one big sparkly pop all up and down the creek. It can thrill a person senseless.”

Quote 2: “… where did it come from, this wanting disease? From how I got born, or the ones that made me, or the crowd I ran with later? Everybody warns about bad influences, but it’s these things already inside you that are going to take you down. The restlessness in your gut, like tomcats gone stupid with their blood feuds, prowling around in the moon-dead dark. The hopeless wishes that won’t quit stalking you: some perfect words you think you could say to somebody to make them see you, and love you, and stay. Or could say to your mirror, same reason.”

Quote 3: “I found a good rock and watched the sun melt into the Cumberlands. layers of orange like a buttermilk pie cooling on the horizon. Clouds scooting past, throwing spots of light and dark over the mountain so I saw the curve of every treetop edged in gold like the scales of a fish. Then poured off, easing them back into shadow. I got all caught up in the show, waking up from my long cold swim underwater. Breaking the surface is a shock, the white is so white, the blue so blue. The air that’s your breath.”