She was walking through the woods near her house when she started thinking about the ways that so many things that had happened in her life didn't make any sense, or didn't make sense in retrospect, at least. From where she was now, or perhaps more accurately who she was now, the things she had done years ago seemed very far away, as if she was holding a shell up to her ear, translucent with swirls of shining pearl, ridges of bone, arcs of floating altars, whispered eons from the bottom of dark seas where grains of sand mirror tentacles and guide the circles of the stars, and she could hear faint rustlings, shadows of those years when she was running wild, a pretty girl in a convertible heading out of town.