Awestruck, Flora stared at the dishevelled sisters with their blazing faces and radiant ragged wings, who smelled of no kin but the wild high air.

She leaned out of the window slow and sleepy, and the light came through her nightdress like sand through a sieve.

I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.

In one of his darker moments, the irony started him laughing and he couldn't stop, and the sounds that came from him, before finally tapering into sobs, were so far from mirth they might have been the forced inversion of laughter-like a soul pulled inside out to reveal its rawest meats.

It came out sparkling like liquid sky.

Dorothy scratched her dark head, yawning wide, and white feathers floated out of her hair.