Sublime

Her family was a mirror in which she recognized her reflection.

Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages.

What’s as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation? Girl as blank slate. Girl as reflection of your desires, unmarred by her own.

Leni saw Mama softening, reshaping her needs to match his, imagining this new personality: Alaskan.

All children want to be ordinary, and she never was, and that had been difficult – but all adults want to be extraordinary, and now she amplifies her strangeness, delighting in her ignorance of worldly matters and her tendency to speak sometimes in a biblical cadence, telling men she meets that she was born in 1887 (this being the year they dug Bet

verisimilitude,

I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy. It had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father’s life; I hadn’t done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.