1. "Nora, what would happen if I lit this match and put it near your arm? Would you ignite? Would the match go out? Nora, I bet your ashes would be snow white. I bet I could convince someone that they were baking flour and then they'd make you into a dessert to bring to their book club."

2. On September third, five girls went into the woods in St. Charlotte, Oregon and didn't come back the next morning. Summer wouldn't leave and all the neighbors smelled the expiration. Summer was rancid and overdone. Summer would be stepped on ungratefully the next morning when all the leaves fell off the trees at once.

3. "Nora, what would happen colored your entire stomach with a black permanent marker? Would your blood turn black and cold? Would it leak into your fingers and the tip of your nose? Tell me Nora, what would you do if I ruined your skin forever?"

4. There had been a party on the night of the second of September and the shame of the young people was expiring too. Before hibernation they needed to become wild and diseased, red-eyed and too hot to wear anything at all but skin. As skin exponentially exposed itself, spines went numb and voices grew higher and unhuman.

5. "Nora, are you proud of how you will bend down whenever I tell you to? Have I put you in context and given you a reason to exist here? If I suddenly deserted you, how obsolete would you become? How ugly and withered would you become?"

6. The five girls loosened their teeth with howls and ran their fingernails up an down the walls. They slaughtered the implications of their white shoulder blades and broke bottles with their bare feet. When the temperature peaked, they ran and howled and chose to ignore their bleeding toes.

7. "Nora, one day you will wake up and find that you have become useless during the night. You will call me and tell me about it and I will pick you up and then dump you into the ocean. I'll recycle you, I promise."

8. In the morning the boys lifted their hips off the bed of broken glass and whimpered. The other girls fell from the rafters and licked each other's wounds. The one remaining human in the room, a ugly girl with small breasts, would forlornly drag her thumbs across the faces of the ones who wouldn't wake up. She would count all the girls she hated and realize that five where missing.

9. "Nora, if I killed you what sort of sound would you make? I bet you would sound hollow like a whale and the sound would rattle in your ribcage and echo. I would like to paint a picture of you if you die because you are more beautiful when you're still. In fact, when you aren't still you make me too nervous to breathe. Be still, Nora."

10. The five girls would be found hidden and quite alive under a pile of leaves, naked still, and open-eyed. When discovered by their fathers, they would be left to spend the winter in the forest where nature would teach them about harsh, cruel things.