““I’ll never be put in a box and lowered into the earth. I’ll never grow old and watch the veins on my hands begin to work their way out of my skin. … It was funny, now, the way all the inner workings of old people moved to the outside. Their muscles and their sinews got hard and ropy and hung on the outside of their skins. Their veins rose up, so where you hadn’t been able to see them before you could see them now. There were little blue ones that appeared on the forehead, jagged like a saw blade, where the skin had once been smooth. There were others like cords wrapping their way across the backs of hands, and along legs. And pulses turned up where they never had been before. The throat one now, you didn’t even know it was there, until one day you saw it, naked and exposed, pumping your blood for everybody to see. … I won’t be like that, Margaret thought. I won’t ever get old and I won’t ever die. I couldn’t. …””
