“Our human flesh is better than most things at keeping pace with its own decay, and yet it takes so little – a tiny knife dragged across the windpipe, a dropped roof tile, a puddle three inches deep – to unmake a man or woman. It’s amazing, given everything’s fragility, that we don’t live in a smashed world, all order and structure utterly undone, the whole land heaped with bone, charred wood, carelessly shattered glass. It amazes me sometimes that anything is still standing.”
