What has been your biggest accomplishment? Your biggest failure?

There is a street in a suburb of London with rows of shoulder-to-shoulder brick houses just like you'd see on many similar streets.  Tiny front yards and fences blocking view of the backs.  Driveways and sidewalks and pavement keep it warm in the sun and keep the residents shoveling in the snow.  Some houses have newly replaced roofs or windows.  Some will need them replaced soon.  Some are well past their ideal replacement date.  Attempts have been made by most residents to not only keep their homes neat, but also to provide a little "curb appeal", usually with a colorful door or some potted flowers.

One home, however, has an additional feature, added some months before: a knot of reporters and paparazzi with frayed ends of oglers, opportunists, curious and angry.

What is the last book you have read?

The travel agency couldn't guarantee where I would emerge, they couldn't guarantee my safety, and they couldn't guarantee I'd be able to return.  I didn't care.

Most people who traveled via InterPlane Agency were thrill seekers.  Adventurers.  Wealthy beyond imagining and bored with living their pampered lives.  I was none of these.  I sought comfort.  I was a chicken.  I had to sell everything I had to afford the trip, and I even had to lie on a loan application.  Banks don't like it when their loans are used to send the person owing money to a world from which they can't send payments.  I had never had a pampered life, and I was too scared and stressed and depressed to be bored.

The last book I read was Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin, an excellent book of short stories all revolving around the ability to take vacations into alternative dimensions.  As she does in much of her writing, Le Guin explores alien ways of thinking and, in doing so, highlights humankind's faults and difficulty with empathy.

If you had to perform some talent for us today, what would you do? What does your talent mean to you?

"Jorah slipped and fell into the gorge.  I can't see him anywhere.  I can't get down to him."  Filan was flushed and panting, having run the entire distance back to the Hall after his friend disappeared, hands scrabbling and useless, down the steep embankment to the rocks he knew were below.

Donno the Blacksmith was in conference with Hammon, so the Council's leader asked Donno to fetch other strong men and as long a rope as possible.  Even as he began the trek back to the gorge following the distraught Filan, Hamm began composing what he'd say to Prince Edman, Jorah's father.  At least they could bring up the boy's body to identify.  Other, lesser folk who had fallen, or jumped, into the gorge had only been left, buried only by rockfall.

What is the nicest thing you have done for someone?

When I was little, I thought I had a guardian angel, but then the priest at my church said that guardian angels don't leave candy or toy cars or books.  Father Mayer probably thought I was lying to him to have something to say, but it was my honest belief.  I was disappointed when he wasn't awestruck by my close acquaintance with an actual angel and I vowed never to tell anyone else.

If you had amnesia and were granted only one thing to write down from your memory, what would you write?

I'm not positive my grandmother knew who I was, but she always smiled and patted my hands just like she used to, so I don't think it mattered.  My mother didn't like to visit the nursing home.  She had a phobia about any hospital-like place combined with an acute sense of smell, so Mom was always dancing on her toes, edging towards the exit whenever we visited.  Gram was always nice.  Always friendly.  Always.  Except in my mother's tales of her childhood.  I wondered if that's the way it always went: time mellows all.

Gram was in the hallway, lined up against the wall with three other old people in their wheelchairs, too.  At least, in the wheelchairs of the moment.  Nothing is permanent in a nursing home.  Nobody owns anything exclusively.  The clothing you came with finds it way to other people, and you appear dressed in a sweater you never saw before, but, of course, in this ward, it didn't matter.  Nobody remembered.  Not only wheelchairs and clothing, but glasses and even teeth traveled.  Nothing, especially memory, was permanent.

I knelt by Gram's chair to be at eye level and let her know I was there.  I knew we wouldn't stay long as Mom already had her hand over her nose.  The other old people in the chairs made noises and looked in our general direction.  "Hi, Gram, it's June."

Gram turned her dark brown eyes, ringed with the blue of age, and smiled, her front tooth missing.  That was new.  Gram's hands were still strong and, even now, warmer than mine.  "So cold!"  Maybe not even remembering I was her granddaughter, Gram still chafed my hands in hers to warm them.

"You look good, Gram," I smiled.  She did.  They'd given her a haircut that she'd never chosen, but that suited her.  Nobody in a nursing home got the perm or color they used to get.

Gram looked down at my arms across the afghan in her lap and said, "You're so white!"

"Yeah, I know," I said.  "It runs in the family."

Do you support euthanasia?

I woke up in the middle of the night to growling bowels.  This was when I learned that growling bowels in the middle of the night is a sign.  A terrible sign.  I got to the bathroom and couldn't decide which end to put over the toilet first.  My head won and my underwear lost.

Wasn't I empty yet?  How could there be more?  The consistency and color changed, but it didn't stop the heaving and churning.  I lost a concept of time, knowing only my traitorous body.  When I finished heaving, I would kneel before the sink and rinse my burning mouth.  Eventually, I couldn't get up high enough to reach the water taps.  I no longer cared about the cleanliness of the bathroom floor, the toilet or myself.  I wanted the agony of my quivering digestive system to end, and I didn't care how.

My head lay on the curved carpet that hugged the front of the toilet.  I made bargains in my head.  Please don't let me throw up again.  Please calm down.  Please don't open me up and flush me out again.  If I hold really, really still, will you stop?

24 hour flu.  One day of my life.  I lay there, shaking my head slowly from side to side, willing my body to obey, but my thoughts were detached, too.  If I had to feel like this all the time, like a cancer patient in treatment, could I make it?  Would I want to?  My frightened, honest voice said I would rather die than feel like this.