The Lovely Bones

All I could do was talk, but no one on Earth could hear me.


In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.


The truth was that the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.


“Sometimes I think clues find their way in good time,” he said. “If they want to be found, that is.” It was cryptic, sort of a Confucius-says answer, but it worked on almost every civilian.


Odd girls who had found each other in the strangest way—in the shiver she had felt when I passed.


This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.


“When the dead are done with the living,” Franny said to me, “the living can go on to other things.”


Late at night the air above hospitals and senior citizen homes was often thick and fast with souls.


When Buckley stood on the iron chair—“Now scoot up my back,” my father said, stooping forward, “and grab on to my shoulders,” not knowing if he'd have the strength to lift him up from there—I crossed my fingers hard in heaven and held my breath. In the cornfield, yes, but, in this moment, repairing the most basic fabric of their previous day-to-day lives, challenging his injury to take a moment like this back, my father became my hero.


Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.


Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.

...small forgotten moments with Buckley, the accidents of love that happened with his son.


I felt, if I were to say any word, churned. Not as a verb but as an adjective. Happy + Frightened = Churned.


I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light... still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.


In some way I could not account for—had they reached a state of bliss? were my parents back together forever? had Buckley begun to tell someone his troubles? would my father's heart truly heal?—I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always.


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.