Air Balloon Quotes

You should date a girl who reads. Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn. She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book. Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice. It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world. Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series. If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype. You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

If we feel uncomfortable with the harrowing ugliness in the world and the infuriating violence in our environs, we must not wait to speak out loud, louder, and louder until the hot-air balloon of indifference and intolerance finally blast into pieces. (“Not without the past”)

who knows if the moon's a balloon,coming out of a keen city in the sky--filled with pretty people? ( and if you and I should get into it,if they should take me and take you into their balloon, why then we'd go up higher with all the pretty people than houses and steeples and clouds: go sailing away and away sailing into a keen city which nobody's ever visited,where always it's Spring)and everyone's in love and flowers pick themselves

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

We should all have personal hot air balloons and drift serenely through the clouds.

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight-Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck-tonight you could almost taste time.

Every day was like a day out of someone else's life. Nothing had ever happened to me, and now everything was happening to me -- and by everything, I really meant Lena. An hour was both faster and slower. I felt like I had sucked the air out of a giant balloon, like my brain wasn't getting enough oxygen. Clouds were more interesting, the lunchroom less disgusting, music sounded better, the same old jokes were funnier, and Jackson went from being a clump of grayish-green industrial buildings to a map of times and places where I might run into her. I found myself smiling for no reason, keeping my earphones in and replaying our conversations in my head, just so I could listen to them again. I had seen this kind of thing before. I had just never felt it.

If she were Scarlett, someone would have come to her rescue by now. Julian would have probably flown in on a hot-air balloon, and then sprouted wings to soar down and carry her away. Unfortunately Tella wasn't the sort of girl people saved - she was the one they left behind....But she was also the sort they underestimated.

After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.

I'll be out of my mind and you'll be out of ideas pretty soon. So let's spend the afternoon in a cold hot air balloon. Leave your jacket behind. Lean out and touch the tree tops over town. I can't wait to kiss the ground wherever we touch back down.

You make my frown turn upside down and now my worries are gone.

I like that hot air balloon.' I pointed to the ceiling where an antique looking wooden hot air balloon hung. 'Yeah, I like it too. Partly because it's cool looking, but also partly because of the irony. It weighs a ton. In this office, anything can fly. No matter what is weighing it down. Even wooden balloons. Cool, huh?

The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself - that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn't go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that's the scary part. How you didn't stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown's trick balloons. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air of a tire.

it is clear to me that things are starting to regenerate. There is a gentle tingling in my face, centered below the cheekbones that occurs from time to time throughout the day. At night there is a subtle throbbing in my throat that is accompanied by a noise that varies from a churning sound to something akin to slowly letting air out of a balloon. It is fascinating that I’m literally hearing those long dormant cells struggling to come back to life.

Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you’re bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon.

Did I miss?" you asked. "You didn't exactly miss," said Pooh, "But you missed the balloon." "I'm so sorry," you said, and you fired again, and this time you hit the balloon and the air came slowly out, and Winnie-the-Pooh floated down to the ground.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.... Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

The evening light was like honey in the trees When you left me and walked to the end of the street Where the sunset abruptly ended. The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itself To the fragile forget-me-not flower. You climbed aboard. Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones, Dreams I had, including suicide, Puff out the hot-air balloon now. It is bursting, it is about to burst

Bloated!" he cried. The corresponding hieroglyph flew through the air, bursting against a demon's chest in a spray of light. Instantly, the demon swelled like a water balloon and rolled screaming down the pyramid. "Flat!" Thoth blasted another demon, who collapsed and shriveled into a monster-shaped doormat. "Intestinal problems!" Thoth yelled. The poor demon who got zapped with that one turned green and doubled over.

I totally remember what it felt like to be so full…Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you’re bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon…You try like hell to fill yourself up with fresh air, from you and from other people. But back then…it was so damn effortless to feel full, you know? All you had to do was breathe

Talent is like letting two balloons up into the air: the most interesting thing isn’t watching which one climbs fastest, but which one has the longest string,

Upon the occasion of history's first manned flight - in the 1780's aboard the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloons - someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. "What use," he replied, "is a newborn baby?

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.

The Hot Air Balloon Charm Life Can Be Filled with Adventure If You Let Yourself Soar

Gloria watched the swollen white orb of a hot-air balloon rising over Navy Pier and knew she had to break it off with Oliver, for he was the type who would never enjoy hot-air balloons, Van Morrison songs, or mess, whether from orgasm or otherwise. But who was she to be dreaming about mess today?

Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder.

But the trouble with sainthood these days is the robe-and-halo imagery that gets stuck onto it." Carl got that brooding look again. "People forget that robes were street clothes once... and still are, in a lot of places. And halos are to that fierce air of innocence what speech balloons in comics are to the sound of the voice itself. Shorthand. But most people just see an old symbol and don't bother looking behind it for the meaning. Sainthood starts to look old-fashioned, unattainable... even repellent. Actually, you can see it all around, once you learn to spot it.

I’m building a hot air balloon out of my love for you. I’m starting with the hot air, and then I’m going to surround that with saran wrap, because after all, I’m only using leftovers.

If you want to change something, change it. Don't just sit around sighing all day like a balloon losing air.

Hoping is such hard work. It tires you out and you never seem to get any kind of reward. Hoping feels like you’re a balloon that has a pinhole that slowly leaks air.

It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however, that shortly thereafter, the Wizard absconded from the Palace. He left in the way he had first arrived-- a hot-air balloon-- just a few hours before seditious ministers were to lead a Palace revolt and to hold an execution without trial.

The ability to talk to other people seemed to be leaking out of me like air out of an old balloon.

Write - because you will explode if you don't, your brain will expand with words like a balloon filling with air....

From here, their neighbors’ houses look like dots on the ground or balloons in the air.

To Have Without Holding: Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch, to love and let go again and again. It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the work that gutters like a candle in a cave without air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can't do it, you say it's killing me, but you thrive, you glow on the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloon bright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionate diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding, to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice, hunger and anger moment by moment balanced.

He thought about himself, and the whole Earth, Of Man the wonderful, and of the Stars, And how the deuce they ever could have birth; And then he thought of Earthquakes, and of Wars, How many miles the Moon might have in girth, Of Air-balloons, and of the many bars To perfect Knowledge of the boundless Skies; And then he thought of Donna Julia's eyes.

In the 1770s, when he was in Paris, Benjamin Franklin witnessed the flight of one of the first hot-air balloons. As the balloon soared into the air, someone asked Franklin: “What good is it?” Franklin responded: “What good is a new-born baby?

How can I explain this? Why is it you can never hope to describe the emotion Africa creates? You are lifted. Out of whatever pit, unbound from whatever tie, released from whatever fear. You are lifted and you see it all from above. Your pit, your ties, your fear. you are lifted, you slowly rise like a hot-air balloon, and all you see is the space and the endless possibilities for losing yourself in it.

Just as a balloon too full of air eventually bursts, a person too full of sadness eventually breaks. Fractures like a cracked bone. Shatters like glass. Snaps like a rubber band.

The balloons’ snub noses swung left and right in the fickle breeze, giving them the anxious air of compasses abandoned by north.

You know, Camille, life is like a hot-air balloon. To go higher we have to know how to lighten the load and to throw overboard all those things that prevent us rising.

Remember, these are special balloons. They work quite differently from the ones you are used to. No, these balloons do not take air. ” This scared her. “Then, what?” “They take their souls.

As I stepped out to face myself in the mirror, reaching a hand to smooth away the steam, I saw myself differently. It was as if I had grown again as I slept, but this time just to fit my own size. As if my soul had expanded, filling out the gaps of the height that had burdened me all these months. Like a balloon filling slowly with air, becoming all smooth and buoyant, I felt like I finally fit within myself, edge to edge, every crevice filled.

But the resurrection of a dead person from the grave, and his ascension through the air, is a thing very different, as to the evidence it admits of, to the invisible conception of a child in the womb. The resurrection and ascension, supposing them to have taken place, admitted of public and ocular demonstration, like that of the ascension of a balloon, or the sun at noon day, to all Jerusalem at least. A thing which everybody is required to believe, requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal; and as the public visibility of this last related act was the only evidence that could give sanction to the former part, the whole of it falls to the ground, because that evidence never was given. Instead of this, a small number of persons, not more than eight or nine, are introduced as proxies for the whole world, to say they saw it, and all the rest of the world are called upon to believe it. But it appears that Thomas did not believe the resurrection; and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I; and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas.

Self-esteem" is a balloon that must be kept perpetually inflated by the hot air of approval ("valued," not "valuable"), and it collapses at the first contact with reality.

And yet Branson (a notorious risk addict with a penchant for crash-landing hot air balloons) is far from the only one willing to stake our collective future on this kind of high-stakes gamble. Indeed the reason his various far-fetched schemes have been taken as seriously as they have over the years is that he, alongside Bill Gates with his near mystical quest for energy “miracles,” taps into what may be our culture’s most intoxicating narrative: the belief that technology is going to save us from the effects of our actions. Post–market crash and amidst ever more sinister levels of inequality, most of us have come to realize that the oligarchs who were minted by the era of deregulation and mass privatization are not, in fact, going to use their vast wealth to save the world on our behalf. Yet our faith in techno wizardry persists, embedded inside the superhero narrative that at the very last minute our best and brightest are going to save us from disaster.

My theory,” Maisie said, “is that the best, worst, happiest, saddest, scariest, and most memorable moments are all connected. Those are the important times, good and bad. The rest is just filler.” She pointed to the balloon. “The rest is nothing but hot air.

The challenge is, to live in a house from which meaning has departed, like air leaking from a balloon. A slow leak, yet lethal. And one day, the balloon is flat: it is not a balloon any longer. By

Hopes were high. But just like a balloon pushed past its breaking point, hope is fragile. One lungful of air too many and the balloon bursts leaving ugly, shriveled fragments behind, impossible to piece back together.

Look—my feet don’t hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I’m rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I’m not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you’ll burn.

How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below you. You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away and all is lost.

The later-afternoon air of our exhalations hung in brief clouds before us. The thought balloon of my own breath said, "How have I found myself here?" It was not a theological question. It was one of transportation and neurology.

Use every person's skill set to the fullest. Both optimists and pessimists contribute. An optimist invents the hot air balloon, and a pessimist invents the parachute." - Ramesh Lohia and Surbhi Lohia, consultants, Six Sigma, KaizeniSixSigmaKaizen. In Quality Quotes, Sep 1, 2016, Knowledge Center, ASQ [ AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR QUALITY]

The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself -- that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn't go all at once with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that's the scary part. How you don't stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown's trick balloons with the Burma-Shave slogans on the sides. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you. You could go on wearing blue-jeans, you could keep going to Springsteen and Seger concerts, you could dye your hair, but that was a grownup's face in the mirror just the same. It all happened while you were asleep, maybe, like a visit from a Tooth Fairy.

The tear on my mother’s cheek got larger and larger. It detached from her face and became a shiny globe, widening outward like an inflating balloon. At first the tear floated in the air between them, but as it expanded it took my mother and father into itself. I saw them suspended, separate but beginning to slowly drift towards one another. Then my mother looked past my father’s shoulder, looked through the bright skin of the tear, at me. The tear enlarged until at last, it took me in, too. It was warm and salt. As soon as I got used to the strange light inside the tear, I began to swim clumsily towards my parents.

As everything becomes bad in you, all the good goes out of the world like air out of a big broken balloon.

nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look--my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.

Uh," said Alec. "Can you fly a hot-air balloon?" "Of course! Magnus declared. "Did I ever tell you about the time I stole a hot-air balloon to rescue the queen of France?" Alec grinned as if Magnus was making a joke. Magnus smiled back. Marie Antoinette had actually been quite a handful. "It's just," Alec said thoughtfully, "I've never even seen you drive a car." He stood to admire the balloon, which was glamoured to be invisible. As far as the mundanes around them were concerned, Alec solemnly gazed at the open air. "I can drive. I can also fly, and pilot, and otherwise direct any vehicle you like. I'm hardly going to crash the balloon into a chimney," Magnus protested. "Uh-huh," said Alec, frowning. "You seem lost in thought," Magnus remarked. "Are you considering how glamorous and romantic your boyfriend is?" "I'm considering," said Alec, "how to protect you if we crash the balloon into a chimney.

Dreams are strange curiosities,” he said, eyes still on the balloon. “Sure, everyone possesses the ability to lay their heads down and imagine, but to do so without limitations or doubt? That is something else entirely. Dreams are boundless, shapeless things. Given strength and form from individual imaginations. They’re wishes.” He looked at me, then reached out and removed my hatpin. “All it takes is one shard of doubt to wedge itself into them”—he swiftly stuck the balloon with my pin, and the air whooshed out as it descended to the ground—“and they deflate. If you can dream without limits, you can soar to great heights. Let the magic of your imagination set you free.

To distract himself he started making a mental list of all the ways he could leave Chapel Bluff. He could go by train. Plane. Motorcycle. Last night Beverly had invited all three of them - him, Ryan, and Tyler - to stay for dinner. Matt had refused. Ryan had likewise refused because his wife had dinner waiting for him at home. Tyler had leapt at the chance. Matt had been the one who'd decided to put distance between himself, Kate, and Beverley. Even so, it rankled that Tyler had slipped right into his empty spot at the dinner table. That Kate had found someone so much more charming than him to talk to. That Kate seemed so delighted to turn her back on him. He could leave by four-wheeler. Mountain bike. Skateboard. "You're a design genius, young lady." Tyler said to Kate. "That's a perfect place for that sideboard." "Why thank you," Kate replied. Matt ground his teeth and imagined leaving by Greyhound bus. He'd even have settled for a horse. Hot air balloon. Donkey cart.

Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won’t cut it anymore.

I am nothing but oxygen and hydrogen, A luminous sphere of plasma Held together by helium and gravity, And like a balloon I float on earth, Waiting to be released back into the sky, Waiting to go back in the reverse Direction from which I came, Traveling through a warm tunnel of light, And out into a cold, dark abyss Where I will explode into a thousand pieces. I shall leave behind my body, Just like air abandons the skin of a shattered balloon, And the magnetic dust that carries my Heart and spirit will lift us back To congregate and shine With the stars. Home again, In the fluorescent Kingdom of the constellations, I will once again be called by My soul’s true name. And my heart, It will flicker again, With every memory from its many Lifetimes, And with every wish Made by a child. SONG OF THE STAR by Suzy Kassem

Life is an immense bag inflated with air and I blow into it reason and feeling, substance, matter, flesh, bones, blood, and the body lived and torn to the point of exhaustion to annul the void. Maybe I already have everything inside me, yes maybe I do and I just want a pair of lips to blow into the balloon with me.

I was feeling all fertile and blossoming there for a second. And now I just feel like me, on earth. I was floating a little bit there before. I was like a very small version of a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. I was puffy and needed handlers. I was lumbering through the air, a couple inches off the ground. I was veering toward lampposts.

People's personalities took up space, he sometimes thought. When they were trapped in a house or a job or a school together, they rubbed up against each other, squeaked like balloons, and made sparks. Ryan's parents both had large, gleaming, hot-air-balloon personalities. Sometimes it was hard to fit them into the same house, and Ryan had learned the art of suddenly making himself take up less space, demand less, so that his parents were not chafing against each other as much.

A story is like a giant jigsaw puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle that would cover the whole floor of a room with its tiny pieces. Buts it's not that sort of puzzle that comes with a box. There is no lid with a picture on it so that you can see what the puzzle will look like when it's finished. And you have only some of the pieces. All you can do is keep looking and listening, sniffing about in all sorts of places, until you find the next piece. And then you'll be amazed where that next piece will take you. Suddenly your puzzle can have a whole new person in it, or it can go from being on a train to a hot air balloon, from city to country, from love to sadness to loneliness and back to love. Pieces can come to you at any time. When you're having a cup of tea or sitting on a bus or talking with a friend.it will be like a bell going off in your head. That's what comes next you'll think. And that's why it's serendipity. Serendipity is luck and chance and fate all tumbled into one.

they went, either. But they’d been doing it every summer, for as long as I’d been alive. “How old was your mom?” Irene asked, toe-nabbing her flip-flops and standing up, stretching her arms far above her so I could just see a thin line of her stomach. That feeling that being with Irene kept giving me when I least expected it again floated up in me like a hot-air balloon and I looked away. “She was twelve,” I said. “Just like us.” Eventually we wandered away from my house, no plan, just the two of us

I feel I must burst because of all that life offers me and because of the prospect of death. I feel that I am dying of solitude, of love, of despair, of hatred, of all that this world offers me. With every experience I expand like a balloon blown up beyond its capacity. The most terrifying intensification bursts into nothingness. You grow inside, you dilate madly until there are no boundaries left, you reach the edge of light, where light is stolen by night, and from that plenitude as in a savage whirlwind you are thrown straight into nothingness. Life breeds both plenitude and void, exuberance and depression. What are we when confronted with the interior vortex which swallows us into absurdity? I feel my life cracking within me from too much intensity, too much disequilibrium. It is like an explosion which cannot be contained, which throws you up in the air along with everything else

I dreamed you a field of running horses, Selah. For you, Bianca, a balloon the size of the sky, my body a kite you can throw into the air. Pull me by string and horse. Tell me everything won't end in death. That everything doesn't end with February. Dead wildflowers wrapped around a crying baby's throat. I've slowed my heartbeat to three beats a minute. I've redrawn the clouds into birds, a fox chasing them into the mountains. I'm going to move my hand today. I vomit ice cubes. There's a ghost next to me. Get up, Dad. (Light Boxes)

Remember nothing of the sort! Built by faith indeed! That simply means the workmen weren't paid properly. And as for the frescoes, I see no truth in them. Look at that fat man in blue! He must weigh as much as I do, and he is shooting into the sky like an air- balloon.

What falls on air yet's lighter than balloon? What betrays time yet folds into a cut? Who flutters at the sight of song then bellows into flight? What height is halved by precipice, what gorge dissolved by trill? Who telling tales upbraids a stump when prattle veils its want? Stone breaks it not, nor diamonds, yet splits with just one word: it's used for casting devils out; still, fools obey it first.

Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing The world is full of women who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself if they had the chance. Quit dancing. Get some self-respect and a day job. Right. And minimum wage, and varicose veins, just standing in one place for eight hours behind a glass counter bundled up to the neck, instead of naked as a meat sandwich. Selling gloves, or something. Instead of what I do sell. You have to have talent to peddle a thing so nebulous and without material form. Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way you cut it, but I've a choice of how, and I'll take the money. I do give value. Like preachers, I sell vision, like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes or war, it's all in the timing. I sell men back their worst suspicions: that everything's for sale, and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see a chain-saw murder just before it happens, when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple are still connected. Such hatred leaps in them, my beery worshipers! That, or a bleary hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads and upturned eyes, imploring but ready to snap at my ankles, I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge to step on ants. I keep the beat, and dance for them because they can't. The music smells like foxes, crisp as heated metal searing the nostrils or humid as August, hazy and languorous as a looted city the day after, when all the rape's been done already, and the killing, and the survivors wander around looking for garbage to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion. Speaking of which, it's the smiling tires me out the most. This, and the pretense that I can't hear them. And I can't, because I'm after all a foreigner to them. The speech here is all warty gutturals, obvious as a slam of ham, but I come from the province of the gods where meaning are lilting and oblique. I don't let on to everyone, but lean close, and I'll whisper: My mothers was raped by a holy swan. You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. That's what we tell all the husbands. There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around. Not that anyone here but you would understand. The rest of them would like to watch me and feel nothing. Reduce me to components as in a clock factory or abattoir. Crush out the mystery. Wall me up alive in my own body. They'd like to see through me, but nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look - my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.

I wondered how good it would feel to have that smile directed at me, to be the cause of a smile like that-and suddenly, my new crush on Jesse Lerner grew into a massive, inflated balloon that was so strong it could have lifted the two of us up into the air if we'd grabbed on.

I lean back into your body - memory is a shade of the color blue. Painted the walls white, the clocks went back an hour and who knew you'd be the one? I am okay with chopsticks, you know how to please just about any man. Your cheeks a hot air balloon lifting up into the sky, a kind of yellow vibrant, tastes like the milkshakes in Pulp Fiction. The McDonald's lobby is now open 24 hours in case you really want a big mac or some french fries and do not have a car. It might make you fat but it might be worth it. The ones who will love you regardless.

The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time. I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole "soul" question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket.

Parents choosing a school for their children—an innocent, important, humdrum, private affair which a lethal blend of bitter division and too much money had transmuted into a monstrous clerical task, into box files of legal documents so numerous and heavy they were hauled to court on trolleys, into hours of educated wrangling, procedural hearings, deferred decisions, the whole circus rising, but so slowly, through the judicial hierarchy like a lopsided, ill-tethered hot-air balloon. If the parents could not agree, the law, reluctantly, must take the decisions.

To have without holding Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch ; to love and let go again and again. It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the work that gutters like a candle in a cave without air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can’t do it, you say it’s killing me, but you thrive, you glow on the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloon bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionate diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding, to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice, hunger and anger moment by moment balanced.

I totally remember what it felt like to be so full.” “Full of what?” “I don't know. Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you're bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon.

One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling. Werner’s head swivels lightly on his neck. The wind is strong and gusting stronger, and the corners of the tent strain against their guy ropes, and where the flaps at the two ends come up, he can see trees buck and sway. Everything rustles. Werner zips his old notebook and the little house into his duffel and the man beside him murmurs questions to himself and the rest of the ruined company sleeps. Even Werner’s thirst has faded. He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters. Out there, through the open flaps of the tent, clouds hurtle above treetops. Toward Germany, toward home. Silver and blue, blue and silver. Sheets of paper tumble down the rows of cots, and in Werner’s chest comes a quickening. He sees Frau Elena kneel beside the coal stove and bank up the fire. Children in their beds. Baby Jutta sleeps in her cradle. His father lights a lamp, steps into an elevator, and disappears. The voice of Volkheimer: What you could be. Werner’s body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed. “Ernst,” says the man beside him. “Ernst.” But there is no Ernst; the men in the cots do not reply; the American soldier at the door of the tent sleeps. Werner walks past him into the grass. The wind moves through his undershirt. He is a kite, a balloon. Once, he and Jutta built a little sailboat from scraps of wood and carried it to the river. Jutta painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality. But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and the flat black water swallowed it. Jutta blinked at Werner with wet eyes, pulling at the battered loops of yarn in her sweater. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.” Did they? He hopes they did. He seems to remember a little boat—a more seaworthy one—gliding down a river. It sailed around a bend and left them behind. Didn’t it? The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn’t the wind move the light? Across the field, an American watches a boy leave the sick tent and move against the background of the trees. He sits up. He raises his hand. “Stop,” he calls. “Halt,” he calls. But Werner has crossed the edge of the field, where he steps on a trigger land mine set there by his own army three months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth.

Some guns were fired to give notice that the departure of the balloon was near. ... Means were used, I am told, to prevent the great balloon's rising so high as might endanger its bursting. Several bags of sand were taken on board before the cord that held it down was cut, and the whole weight being then too much to be lifted, such a quantity was discharged as would permit its rising slowly. Thus it would sooner arrive at that region where it would be in equilibrio with the surrounding air, and by discharging more sand afterwards, it might go higher if desired. Between one and two o'clock, all eyes were gratified with seeing it rise majestically from above the trees, and ascend gradually above the buildings, a most beautiful spectacle. When it was about two hundred feet high, the brave adventurers held out and waved a little white pennant, on both sides of their car, to salute the spectators, who returned loud claps of applause. The wind was very little, so that the object though moving to the northward, continued long in view; and it was a great while before the admiring people began to disperse. The persons embarked were Mr. Charles, professor of experimental philosophy, and a zealous promoter of that science; and one of the Messrs Robert, the very ingenious constructors of the machine. {While U.S. ambassador to France, writing about witnessing, from his carriage outside the garden of Tuileries, Paris, the first manned balloon ascent using hydrogen gas by Jacques Charles on the afternoon of 1 Dec 1783. A few days earlier, he had watched the first manned ascent in Montgolfier's hot-air balloon, on 21 Nov 1783.}

And so it went. OxyContin first, introduced by reps from Purdue Pharma over steak and dessert and in air-conditioned doctors’ offices. Within a few years, black tar heroin followed in tiny, uninflated balloons held in the mouths of sugarcane farm boys from Xalisco driving old Nissan Sentras to meet-ups in McDonald’s parking lots. Others,

You know how they say that right before you die your life flashes before your eyes? It doesn’t. That is just a notion they came up with for books and movies to make death seem romantic. Here’s what really happens: Your intestines feel like a dishrag that’s being wrung dry and your stomach acts like a balloon when you let the air out of it

...I witnessed a piece of her soul leave her body. Until that day, I had thought souls left bodies at the time of death, all at once. But when I saw Olivia's face, her arms crossed in front of her, the tears streaming down her cheeks, and the rose-colored hives blooming upward and outward across her chest, I knew everything I had believed about souls leaving bodies was wrong. Souls leave bodies in tiny gasps, like when you hold the lip of a balloon tightly and let out the air a little bit at a time" -Molly

Figure it out, Luna. I don’t wanna be sixty when you decide.” I pressed my lips together. Don’t do it, Luna. Everything is not fine and dandy. Don’t do it. Don’t— Let it go. Let it— I didn’t. “So I have… two years… before then?” I whispered, grimacing at the joke that I shouldn’t have made so that we could focus on the serious topic of our conversation. So I could hold on to the distance I was supposed to put between us because he was my boss. What I got was silence. Freaking silence. The sigh that came out of him reminded me of what I figured a hot air balloon would sound like if it deflated. “I should’ve fired you the other day.” I sucked in a breath, and my entire upper body turned to him. He was smirking. He thought he was being funny. He was… joking. These mocking, laughing eyes I had never seen before slid over to me, and the second they spotted my expression, they changed. My name came out a grumble. “I was playing.” Sure, he’d been. His mouth went so tight, it was edged in white. “I was messing with you,” he insisted, seriously. He was messing with me. Those long fingers flexed again. “You that mad at me?” he asked. “I’m not mad at you.” “Upset with me?” I didn’t look at him as I said, “No.” I wasn’t. I wasn’t. “I just…” What could I say? “You don’t ever joke around with me. I’m just surprised.” I started to crack my knuckles but stopped. “Okay, maybe I am a little upset with you, but I’m almost over it.” Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him glance at me again, and I could barely hear his voice when he spoke again. “I joke around outside of work,” he said softly. I wasn’t going to overthink it. Did that come out defensively, or was it my imagination? “That’s good.” I was such a sucker. I really was.

I am nothing but oxygen and hydrogen, a luminous sphere of plasma held together by helium and gravity, And like a balloon I float on earth, waiting to be released back into the sky, where I will explode into a thousand pieces. I shall leave behind my body, just like air abandons the skin of a shattered balloon, and the magnetic dust that carries my heart and spirit will lift us back to congregate and shine with the stars. Home again, in the fluorescent kingdom of the constellations, I will once again be called by my soul’s true name.

Looking up, she watched the balloons dance at the tops of their strings. Hanging by a ribbon at the end was a little white card. She wouldn't even open it, she told herself.She knew who they were from anyway. Who else? No,she wasn't going to open it.In fact,she was going to find a pin and pop every last balloon. What were they but a bunch of hot air? It was ridiculous.To prove a point, Shelby let the strings go so the balloons drifted up to the ceiling. If he thought he was going to win her over with silly presents and clever little notes...he was absolutely right, dammit. Shelby jumped up, swearing when she missed the strings by inches.Hauling over a chair,she climbed into it and grabbed the card. The yellow's for sunshine, the pink's for spring.Share them with me. Alan. "You drive me crazy," she muttered, standing in the chair with the balloons in one hand and the card in the other. How did he know,how could he know just the sort of thing that would get to her? Strawberries and pigs and balloons-it was hopeless. Shelby stared up at them, wishing she didn't need to smile.

He had never experienced anything like this before outside the Zone. And it had happened in the Zone only two or three times. It was as though he were in a different world. A million odors cascaded in on him at once—sharp, sweet, metallic, gentle, dangerous ones, as crude as cobblestones, as delicate and complex as watch mechanisms, as huge as a house and as tiny as a dust particle. The air became hard, it developed edges, surfaces, and corners, like space was filled with huge, stiff balloons, slippery pyramids, gigantic prickly crystals, and he had to push his way through it all, making his way in a dream through a junk store stuffed with ancient ugly furniture … It lasted a second. He opened his eyes, and everything was gone. It hadn't been a different world—it was this world turning a new, unknown side to him. This side was revealed to him for a second and then disappeared, before he had time to figure it out.

Can I get you anything?" I couldn't remember if the Amrita family drank human blood or animal blood. "I'm just hiding out from my little sisters. They giggle." She tilted her head. "Where are all your famous brothers?" "Around." She rolled her eyes. "Are they as insufferable as mine?" I rolled my eyes back. "Worse." She looked unconvinced. "I only have the one," she pointed out. "My family has daughters the way yours has sons. His rarity has made Haridas's head roughly the size of a hot-air balloon." I had to grin. "I have seven of those." "Seven what?" Quinn interrupted, leaning in the doorway. "Seven heroically patient big brothers of which I am the obvious favorite?" "Something like that," I allowed. "You know, if you replace 'brother' with 'baboon'?

And there was something familiar about the cadence of the words. The language. It was him. I wrote: I know who you are. I recognize your voice. by kidzero I felt a little dizzy after I sent it, maybe because I had been holding my breath. A new message pinged and the air rushed out of me like a deflated balloon. you shouldn't be talking to strangers anyway. who am I? by anonymous I didn't really know his name or anything about him, but I couldn't admit that now. I wanted to keep talking to him. I quickly typed: You are the Unidentified. The Unidentified refuses to be typecast, target-marketed, corporate-identified, defined. by kidzero

As the book progresses, it takes on a more and more unstable character — filled with unpredictable associations and departures, marked by increasingly rapid shifts in tone — until you reach a point where you feel the whole thing being to levitate, to rise ponderously off the ground like some gigantic weather balloon. By the last chapter, you've traveled so high up into the air, you realize that you can't come down again without falling, without being crushed.

You think the dead control us.” “Sure.” “I’m gonna tell you a secret,” she said, and he rolled onto his side. She had fresh gauze on her hand, and she picked at the edge. “We’re in charge of them. I mean, my friend Julian? When I thought he was dead, all the things we’d ever said to each other, all my memories of him, they were mine. One of the weirdest things about seeing him again was that something left me. Some kind of energy. Like the air whooshing out of a balloon.

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight—Tomás shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck—tonight you could almost touch Time.

Ford leaped to the controls—only a few of them made any immediate sense to him so he pulled those. The ship shook and screamed as its guidance rocket jets tried to push it every which way simultaneously. He released half of them and the ship spun round in a tight arc and headed back the way it had come, straight toward the oncoming missiles. Air cushions ballooned out of the walls in an instant as everyone was thrown against them. For a few seconds the inertial forces held them flattened and squirming for breath, unable to move. Zaphod struggled and pushed in manic desperation and finally managed a savage kick at a small lever

The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself—that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn’t go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that’s the scary part. How you don’t stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown’s trick balloons with the Burma-Shave slogans on the sides. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you. You could go on wearing bluejeans, you could keep going to Springsteen and Seger concerts, you could dye your hair, but that was a grownup’s face in the mirror just the same. It all happened while you were asleep, maybe, like a visit from the Tooth Fairy.

Supporting this theory is the Law of Energy Conservation, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed in a closed system. According to this law, all energy in the universe has already been made and our physical bodies are merely containers for our own personal energy. If the body is a container of energy, then when it dies its energy is released back into the universe the same way air is released back into the atmosphere when a balloon pops. But does it remain intact with all of its knowledge, experiences, emotions, and identity or does it simply dissipate back into the environment and lose everything that it was? This is a critical question for our field and one of the keys we all seek to unlock.

Balloon sinuplasty, as it’s commonly called, creates more space for mucus and infection to pass out, and air and mucus to pass in. In one unpublished case-control study, Nayak found that, of the 28 selected sinusitis patients who received the procedure, 23 needed no other treatment. Sometimes the nostrils are the problem, not the sinuses. Nostrils that are too small or that collapse too easily during an inhale can inhibit the free flow of air and contribute to breathing problems. This condition is so common that researchers have an official name for it, “nasal valve collapse,” and an official measurement, called the Cottle’s maneuver. It involves placing an index finger on the side of one or both nostrils and gently pulling each cheek outward, lightly spreading the nostrils open. If doing this improves the ease of nasal inhales, there’s a chance that the nostrils are too small or thin.

We have a long distance to travel,' said the Angel of Death to our friend Gil, as soon as they had left the Villa. 'I will order my chariot.' And he struck the ground with his foot. A hollow rumbling, like that which precedes an earthquake, sounded under the ground. Presently there rose round the two friends an ash-colored cloud of vapor, in the midst of which appeared a species of ivory chariot, resembling the chariots we see in the bas-reliefs of antiquity. A brief glance would have sufficed (we will not disguise the fact from out readers) to show that the chariot was not made of ivory, but solely and simply of human bones polished and joined together with exquisite skill, but retaining still their natural form. The Angel of Death gave his hand to Gil and they ascended the chariot, which rose into the air like the balloons of the present day, but with the difference that it was propelled by the will of its occupants. ("The Friend of Death")

Snow and soot covered the ancient tree's broken branches and seared bark. It wasn't dead, not quite yet. Here and there tiny shoots of green struggled to emerge, but they weren't doing well. The end was near. A shadow loomed, and a creature settled into the drifts, and old, wounded thing of the skies, as near death as the tree. Pinions drooping, it laboriously began building a nest--a place of dying. Stick by stick, it pecked among the ruined wood on the ground, piling the bits higher until it was clear that it was not a nest at all. It was a pyre. The bloody, dying thing settled in atop the kindling, and crooned soft music unlike anything ever heard before. A glow began to build, surrounding the beast soon in a rich purple lambience. Blue flames burst forth. And the tree seemed to respond. Aged, ruined branches curled forward toward the heat, like an old man warming his hands. Snow shivered and fell, the green patches grew and began to fill the air with the fragrance of renewal It was not the creature on the pyre that was reborn, and even in sleep, that surprised Gordon. The great bird was consumed, leaving only bones. But the tree blossomed, and from its flowering branches things uncurled and drifted off into the air. He stared in wonderment when he saw that they were balloons, airplanes, and rocket ships. Dreams. They floated away in all directions, and the air was filled with hope.

In the Volksgarten “I’d like to have a blue balloon! A blue balloon is what I’d like!” “Here’s a blue balloon for you, Rosamunde!” It was explained to her then that there was a gas inside that was lighter than the air in the atmosphere, as a consequence of which, etc. etc. “I’d like to let it go—,” she said, just like that. “Wouldn’t you rather give it to that poor little girl over there?” “No, I want to let it go—!” She lets the balloon go, keeps looking after it, till it disappears in the blue sky. “Aren’t you sorry now you didn’t give it to the poor little girl?” “Yes, I should’ve given it to the poor little girl.” “Here’s another blue balloon, give her this one!” “No, I want to let this one go too up into the blue sky!”— She does so. She is given a third blue balloon. She goes over to the poor little girl on her own, gives this one to her, saying: “You let it go!” “No,” says the poor little girl, peering enraptured at the balloon. In her room it flew up to the ceiling, stayed there for three days, got darker, shriveled up and fell down dead, a little black sack. Then the poor little girl thought to herself: “I should have let it go outside in the park, up into the blue sky, I’d’ve kept on looking after it, kept on looking—!” In the meantime, the rich little girl gets another ten balloons, and one time Uncle Karl even buys her all thirty balloons in one batch. Twenty of them she lets fly up into the sky and gives ten to poor children. From then on she had absolutely no more interest in balloons. “The stupid balloons—,” she said. Whereupon Aunt Ida observed that she was rather advanced for her age! The poor little girl dreamed: “I should have let it go up into the blue sky, I’d’ve kept on looking and looking—!

The ghost was not a ghost at all, or so it claimed - it claimed to be a psychic energy baby, birthed in some ethereal dimension, and pulled into the phone by the powerful magnetism of phone signals. It remembered with perfect clarity how it came to be - remembered coalescing from the membranous surface of the world, streaked with reflected light, humming with surface tension under the pressure of emptiness underneath. The Psychic Energy Baby found form among the emanations of people's minds and the susurrus of their voices, it found flesh in the shapes of their lips and eyes made, the surprise of 'o's and the sibilations of 's's; its skin stretched taut like a soap bubble, forged from the wet sound of lips touching; its thoughts were the musky smells and the nerves twined around the transparent water balloons of the muscles like stems of toadflax, searching restlessly for every available crevice, stretching along cold rough surfaces. Its veins, tiny rivers, pumped heartbeats striking in unison, the dry dallying of billions of ventricular contractions. And it spoke, spoke endlessly, it spokes words that tasted of dark air and formic acid. It could speak long before it took it's final shape. And when it happened, when all the sounds and smells and words in the world, when all the thoughts had aligned so that it could become - then it found itself pulled into the wires, surrounded by taut copper and green and red and yellow insulation; twined and quartered among the cables, rent open by millions of voices that shouted and whispered and pleaded and threatened, interspersed with the rasping of breaths and tearing laughter. It traveled through the criss-crossing of the wires so fast that it felt itself being pulled into a needle, head spearing into the future while its feet infinitely receded into the past, until it came into a dark quiet pool of the black rotary phone, where it could reassemble itself and take stock.