I need to tell you a story, a tale of fate and emergence.

I wouldn__ call Gabriel Walsh if I was on fire._ She pursed her lips. __o, I might. To sue everyone responsible__rom the person who lit the match to those who made my clothes. But I__ wait until the fire was out. Otherwise, he__ just stand there until I was burned enough for a sizable settlement.

He prefers his adventures second hand.

It's in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that "way leads on to way"; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It's the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don't. Maybe in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.

No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.