She fell into the spine, between the pages 80 and 81. Never before, she thought, had words reached into her, beneath tissue and through sinew, to touch her bones. She grasped at the strings, over and over, sliding across sentences, from the bottom of one page to the corner of the next, still falling, falling, because they would not rewrite themselves, would not mean something else, something not so close. The taste was bitter when her mouth caught on the lip of a phrase, and she understood how love and hate could exist together in a single breath. Inhaling in shallows, she allowed her body to lay still, her eyes to fall open like two pregnant water droplets ready to burst. Her gaze naturally drew upwards, but she saw nothing for the words were already inside her, had been hers before she ever read them. The impulse to flee was…