The Virgin Suicides

So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over back-yard fences, or related over the years in psychiatric offices, that we are certain only of the insufficiency of explanations.

It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.