You’re so beautiful for a bigger girl.” I couldn’t tell you how many times I had heard that non-compliment. It baffled me how anyone ever thought they were giving me kudos for managing to be pretty and thick. My second favorite was, “If you lost a few pounds, you’d be so much prettier.” I always wanted to respond with a, “Yeah? You’d be so much hotter with a few extras inches on your dick,” but I never did. I just smiled and pretended like calling me pretty with a disclaimer should make me happy.

You are the Calipha of Khorasan, and you have the ear of the king. More important, you have his heart. And, most important, you are a fearsome thing to behold in your own right.

At nineteen, I became cold and hard and looked forward to the end of my bleak existence.

Like ghosts, words are disembodied presences. Therefore, in some senses, talking about ghosts in literature is as hopeless (and perhaps also as important) as talking about words in literature, or ideas in literature. All stories are ghost stories, if only because each word, each random collection of syllables, is intended to conjure forth an unreal reality, to embody and animate a strange imaginary entity that is both there and not there, actual and not actual. Writers try to capture ghosts out of their own experience, snaring them in print so as to release them into readers' minds - or better yet, into the dark corners of readers' bedrooms.