We?re here and we?re not going anywhere.

Nobody's being disrespected as far as their beliefs. If people want to go to church, I don't have a problem with that. We're trying to work with the community.

There's only one free person in this society, and he is white and male.

The past had already been dealt with, to one end or another, it was certain, fixed, the horror of it was already over.
For the living at least. They grieved, yes, but they were not trapped in the terror of the moment.
Not so for my poor, elegant wraiths. They were like the old-fashioned zoetropes you find at the seaside: a tiny slice of a world in a box, brief yet somehow also eternal.

I imagined her poised, a humerus in one hand, a toothbrush in the other, as she gently brushed away the last remnants of the person who had once used that arm to shake hands, open doors, lift a mug of tea. I wondered if it was so very different from how I myself looked when I sat on the floor of my finds room, perhaps sitting cross-legged, at the centre of a circle of newly cleaned bones, a tibia in one hand, a toothbrush in the other …

The reflection was that of a putrefying corpse. By some trick of the light, her face seemed sallow and slipping, the patches of darkness giving the appearance of skin sloughing off in small pockets. I’d almost forgotten the knife in my panic; the woman was far more dangerous than the weapon. Blood drizzled down the blade, obscuring the macabre reflection of Natalya’s face and suddenly I was transfixed by a thought that should have been immediate:
Whose blood is that?