Nevada Barr

From long experience she knew that she wore her loneliness like armor. Very few people ever recognized it for what it was. To the casual observer it looked very much like arrogance. Sometimes it was.

Anna drove with the window rolled down, breathing in the essence of autumn: an exhalation of a forest readying itself for sleep, a smell so redolent with nostalgia a pleasant ache warmed her bones and she was nagged with the sense of a loss she could not remember.

The exhilarating alignment of the heavens was sufficiently rare that she recognized her moment of joy, thus making the joy that much more potent.

Part of her soul ... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous.

Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly, It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.

Since joining the National Park Service fourteen years ago, Anna had worked every Fourth of July. ... Winding her way through the masses, trying not to get her fragile frame jostled, she realized she preferred it that way. Working on holidays, one wasn't required to have fun. There was no pressure, no disappointments. And she usually had a wonderful time.

Anna_ envied Joan__ deep connection with the human race. She was a member of the club. Anna was half convinced she__ been begotten by a passing alien life-form on a human woman. It was as good an explanation as any for the sense she had of being an outsider.

EMTs learned to love brave patients--they weren't nearly such a pain in the ass as the whiners--but not to trust them. In the name of courage, they would hide symptoms, not ask for help when there was help hovering around them anxious to give them succor...