Excerpt: Almost Nirvana.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: this excerpt is from a scene I went off on a tangent with, and after I wrote it, I was reminded of the opening of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a book I haven't read yet. But it is sitting, new and pristine, on my table, waiting for me. That opening was the reason I bought the book.

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Breakfast was a glass of orange juice with the pulp still floating around in the juice; some mornings, most of the time in the winter, Sam would wake up feeling especially clever and perverted, and would imagine that these little white bits floating around were sperms. But then her screwy logic fell apart, because that would mean that the insides of women were all orange, and as far as her health and bio classes were concerned, this was not the case. Still, she liked to imagine this. Who was the bigot who stood up and declared that our insides had to be red and pink, like Valentine’s Day? How come our insides could not be all purple? Could not be all yellow? Could not be all green? What if our insides were like a rainbow, and the brain was red and the blood and nerves and bones in our toes were violet, and the spaces and organs and systems in between were the entire spectrum, orange and yellow and green and blue and indigo? What if we ourselves were little rainbows? What if each baby, when it was born, contained an entire spectrum within itself? Wouldn’t that be amazing? That would be an even bigger miracle than the bones and organs themselves, or so Sam thought.