My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
I wish you all a long and happy life
Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.
How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.
I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.
So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything.
Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"
If I had but an hour of love,if that be all that is given me,an hour of love upon this earth,I would give my love to thee.
There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.
I watched my beautiful sister running . . . and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.
Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.
Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.
Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.
I fell in love with you again; While you were away - Jack Salmon
What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.
You're not supposed to look back, you're supposed to keep going.
or simply:
