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Show CHRYSALIS PAGE 37 life? I really am becoming some kind of a nut! I must not let this sort of emotional hysteria happen again. I must memorize every spot, not missing even one so that I'll know for sure. Every contour and line must become as familiar to me as constellations in the night sky. Here, on my left shoulder blade is my Polaris. Here Orion, here Draco the Dragon. . . .Now breathe deeply, and the shivering will stop. Still shaking, I manage to knock the perfume bottle off the edge of the shelf, and it shatters, spilling Emeraude over everything. I'm making enough noise to wake up the whole house. "Are you okay?" Mark calls. "I just broke a bottle." "So I heard. Good news travels fast." "They call me Grace," I say, "but not too often." "They do? I always wondered who they are." They say that a dying person's life flashes before his eyes in the space of a few minutes, through the fourth dimension into the fifth, in the time it takes to blink. Lying in the bed, in the dark, I am six years old again, watching snakes climb up the gray folds in the window-curtains, hearing the old photographs on the walls whisper to one another of times past in quiet, paper voices. My heart thumps monstrously loud. |