She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.
She wonders what her daughter will do.She wonders what her daughter will be.
Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.
Whenever it rains you think of her.
Thirty-five years a showgirl that she admits to, and her feet hurt, day in, day out, from the high heels, but she can walk down steps with a forty-pound headdress in high heels, she's walked across a stage with a lion in high heels, she could walk through goddamn Hell in high heels if it came to that.
And then, her business joyfully concluded, she forgets him utterly and forever, and she turns her attention to the next.
One day she won't love you too. It will break your heart.
She rides rollercoasters but never screams when they plummet or twist and upside down.
If you told her the jacket was yours she'd just shrug and give it back to you. It's not like she cares, not one way or the other.
She remains on the edges of time, implacable, unhurt, beyond, and one day you will open your eyes and see her, and after that, the dark.
It is not a reaping. Instead, she will pluck you, gently, like a feather, or a flower for her hair.
This is what they do for a living. They walk in, take what they need, walk out again.
It's not glamorous. It's just business. It may not always be strictly legal.
It's just business.
She found the first body in a stairwell.
That night, after the shower, which could not wash what she had had to do away, not really, she said to her husband, "I'm scared."
"Of what?"
"That this job is making me hard. That it's making me someone else. Someone I don't know any more."
He pulled her close, and held her, and they stayed touching, skin to skin, until dawn.
The smell of cordite always makes her think of the fourth of July.You use the gifts God gave you. That was what her mother had said, which makes their falling out even harder, somehow. Nobody will ever hurt her. She'll just make her faint vague wonderful smile and walk away.
It's not about the money. It's never about the money.
Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.
Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months' pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.
Some of the girls were boys.
The view changes from where you are standing.
Words can wound, and wounds can heal.
All of these things are true.
Written by Neil Gaiman.
Inspired by Tori Amos.
