The pain was electric and compact, reducing everything to its own sort of benumbment, making the world beyond my head seem small and dazed.

When we were leaving it was getting dark and my husband says to me “look at all of those moon crickets.” I confusingly asked him what he had meant by that. When we got into the car, he explained to me that all of the black people walking around under the moonlight look like a bunch of crickets scurrying around.

In 1453, the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople.

[…] there were rings of collyrium about her eyes.