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In an empty, leaden voice, her mother said, “Hope. They prey on our hope. Sweeter than honey and more heady than wine, hope is the lure they use. They whisper in our ears that all those things we so desperately want we can someday have, and so we go around lusting and dreaming and letting our souls drag us around with want until finally we’re so tormented we don’t notice our soul has slid right out of our body like a snail slides out of its shell and we’ve been carved hollow. “And that’s what happened to the lovely Kalamazoo. Inch by inch, day by day, hope by hope, her soul slipped away and the goblins devoured every last morsel of it. Without her soul, the poor girl quickly wasted away and died, and when they buried her, nothing would grow around her grave, not even a milkweed, because a
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