The silver world.

A Japanese soldier had played under the blossoms of a cherry tree in the Aprils of his childhood. He sat under them in the Aprils when, as luck or fate or the tree would have it, he was on leave. He grew old. His wife (he'd married) and his children (he'd had some) and all of his family died, and he lived. And then when the tree died, he felt it as a wound, and as an order. The people of the village where he lived planted a new tree. He pretended to be happy, for them. But in the winter he went to his dead tree and kneeled on a white cloth he'd placed on the ground, and sliced open his belly with his sword. In the death poem he left, he begged the tree to bloom once more, for he was dying for it. His blood soaked the cloth, and the earth, and the roots. He became the tree, and the tree had always been him. They bloom every year on the day of his death, not heeding the winter.

My aunt, whom I love, has a dear friend who has breast cancer but does not have medical insurance. No one really expects her to live. They go to the ocean every winter. They'll do it this year. They won't the next.

I've always wanted to be elderly. I already dress like an old man. But bodies die before we're done living in them, and I hate it. And I am afraid of watching friends hurt far more than I fear hurting.

If a woman was scorned in Japan, she'd dress for battle in the middle of the night, wearing three candles in her hair, a mirror around her neck. She'd go to the woods. She'd nail a doll bearing her lover's name to a cherry tree, telling the gods and the trees to kill the boy. Every night they didn't she'd hammer another nail into the doll, into the tree, and, there being more men than cherry trees in Japan, the gods and the trees would oblige.