Blanket Rain Quotes

The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing—a blanket—the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water.

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!" When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

There are different wells within your heart. Some fill with each good rain, Others are far too deep for that. In one well You have just a few precious cups of water, That "love" is literally something of yourself, It can grow as slow as a diamond If it is lost. Your love Should never be offered to the mouth of a Stranger, Only to someone Who has the valor and daring To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife Then weave them into a blanket To protect you. There are different wells within us. Some fill with each good rain, Others are far, far too deep For that.

Give me a moon-blanket night to keep me warm a long-gone smile to comfort me a pair of rain-blue eyes to haunt me a simple soul ...to love me.

Jacob made me feel safe. He was like a living lullaby. A softly spoken word. The smell of coffee and toast in the morning or a cozy fleece blanket. The rain pattering on the roof on a day where you don’t have to go anywhere or do anything.

Wrapped in a police blanket, I watched the rain and smoked one black cigarette after another...

Rain is a lullaby heard through a thick, isolating blanket of clouds. It is the tinkling harp of water droplets; a moist breath whistling through willow reeds; a pattering beat background to the mourner's melody. Rain is a soft song of compassion for the brokenhearted.

Now let me say this: when you're traveling a good cloak is worth more than all of your other possessions put together. If you've nowhere to sleep, it can be your bed and blanket. It will keep the rain off your back and the sun from your eyes. You can conceal all manner of interesting weaponry beneath it if you are clever, and a smaller assortment if you are not. But beyond all that, two facts remain to recommend a cloak. First, very little is as striking as well-worn cloak, billowing lightly about you in the breeze. And second, the best cloaks have innumerable little pockets that I have an irrational and overpowering attraction toward.

Perhaps because it seems so appropriate, I don't notice the rain. It falls in sheets, a blanket of silvery thread rushing to the hard almost-winter ground. Still, I stand without moving at the side of the coffin.

I love storms—I just don’t like to be in them. I’d prefer to cuddle up under the blankets with a mug of tea and a book while listening to the rain fall.

You don't waste October sunshine. Soon the old autumn sun would bed down in cloud blankets and there would be weeks of gray rain before it finally decided to snow.

I stare at her chest. As she breathes, the rounded peaks move up and down like the swell of waves, somehow reminding me of rain falling softly on a broad stretch of sea. I'm the lonely voyager standing on deck, and she's the sea. The sky is a blanket of gray, merging with the gray sea off on the horizon. It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky. Between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.

Rain on roof outside window, gray light, deep covers and warm blankets. Rain and nip of autumn in air; nostalgia, itch to work better and bigger. That crisp edge of autumn.

As long as I can hear the sweet melody of your words, I need not; The angel’s secret, to be whispered in my ears As long as I can lace your silky fingers round my own, I need not; Pretty diamonds, nor big cash nor gold As long as I can watch the handsome sunshine of your face, I need not; Open skies, nor snowfall, nor the rain As long as I can gaze into the emeralds of your eyes, I need not; New colors, new wings or paradise As long as I can feel the tender tickle of your breath, I need not; The drifting wind, nor its call, nor caress As long as I can feel your soft lips upon mine, I need not; Melted sugar, nor the most expensive of wines As long as I can feel your warm body close to me I need not; A blanket, nor a bonfire's luxury As long as I can see you every morning I wake, I need not; A mirror, nor a cloud, nor shade As long as I can keep you in every petal of memories I need not: Dreams, nor desires, nor fantasies And as long as I can hold you in every moment that I breathe, I need not; Oxygen, nor blood, nor heartbeats.

Cold feet under a warm blanket, steam over an empty mug--rain splatters on dry window pane--open journals of closed memories... tears of laughter and joy of pain... schmaltz of diametric morning.

It is raining at the top of my roof and I'am inside my blanket in this chilling night with an open window, missing my love and listning the rain singing a lullaby to me.

When it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets our town with the smell of damp coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafé factory at the town’s eastern edge. I don’t like coffee but I like that smell. It’s comforting; it unites the town in a common sensory experience; it’s good industry, like the roaring rug mill that fills our ears, brings work and signals our town’s vitality. There is a place here—you can hear it, smell it—where people make lives, suffer pain, enjoy small pleasures, play baseball, die, make love, have kids, drink themselves drunk on spring nights and do their best to hold off the demons that seek to destroy us, our homes, our families, our town.

It was Will’s turn to flush. James lay like a sleeping Ganymede, his enervated beauty belying the cruelty and destruction he had rained down on the Stewards. Will hadn’t fluffed James’s pillow, but he had brought him a drink and a blanket. And hung his jacket to dry on the mantel. And his shirt.

Then, completely unbidden, a series of images flashed through my mind. Roger drumming on the steering wheel. Roger sleeping next to me in bed, the blanket falling of his shoulder. Watching me carefully as we drove through a rain-soaked Kansas night, asking me to talk to him. Offering me the last french fry.

She feels a splash of water on her hand and, turning, sees that the sky has become overcast with a blanket of ominous dark rose-colored cloud, and of a sudden the light fades from the lawn and the cedars. Steerpike, who is on his way back to the Earl's bedroom, stops a moment at a staircase window to see the first decent of the rain. It is falling from the sky in long, upright, and seemingly motionless lines of rosy silver that stand rigidly upon the ground as though there were a million harp strings strung vertically between the solids of earth and sky.

Time passed, unknowable amounts and I had no sense for it. There was just the blanket and grass, the cold of rain and the heat of Lilly like a small sun beside me, and we lay there until the clouds left and the SimStars reappeared.

Rain in the winter smelled simply like ice, the cold air burning the tips of ears, cheeks, and eyelashes. Winter rain was for hiding in quilts and blankets, for tying woolen scarves around noses and mouths–the moisture of rasping breaths stinging chapped lips.

She sat with her chin cupped in her hands, her eyes fixed on the window splashed with mud and rain, hoping with a sort of desperate interest that some ray of light would break the heavy blanket of sky, and but a momentary trace of that lost blue heaven that had mantled Helford yesterday shine for an instant as a forerunner of fortune.

And what is this wild summons? What art is asked of us? The gift offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw, dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a violet on the sill, stitch a quilt,; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air beds, sweep clean the corners. To hold the child’s hand, listen to the vagrant’s story, paint the elder friend's fingernails a delightful shade of pink while wrapped in a blanket she knit with deft young fingers of her past. To wander paths, nibble purslane, notice spiders. To be rained upon. To listen with changed ears and sing back what we hear.

Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air-conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a bad cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those three days was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

Himalayans (blackberries) seize the land, gobbling acres, blanketing banks, consuming abandoned farmhouses and their Studebakers and anything left alone in the rain for five minutes or longer.

Words have power, for better or worse. Like the smell of fresh rain on cut grass, Or the stench of a decaying corpse, Like the soft comfort of a warm blanket on your shoulders, Or the agony of a dagger splitting your chest in two. Use them wisely.

Why Roses Crave Thorns" Petals detach from a wilting bud—a single stem plucked before fully blossomed. They descend in hesitant swirls, too soft and limp to shatter like teardrops. One by one they light to blanket a single shadow below. She is a rose, young and innocent, with beauty incomparable to shame all others. She has flowered enough to stop the observer in his tracks, awestruck. He is compelled to reach out and touch. The petals delight at a silken caress, her bud everything desirable but defenseless—without a sharp edge to make an admirer pause, to warn the intrusive hand. ‘Stay back! Stay back!’ His fingers curl around the stem to tug, and suddenly the rose craves a thorn. It is madness not to want her and yet madness to cut her down. Let the flower thrive and blush to someday flaunt layers of silken favors! But the world will not have it. A single stem is severed in a selfish moment of desire—a yearning to hold and possess. Alone and forgotten her petals cry, raining in hesitant swirls where they accumulate to blanket her shadow below. Dry, withered, craving the thorns. Beautiful no more.

The people came out of their houses and smelled the hot stinging air and covered their noses from it. And the children came out of the houses, but they did not run or shout as they would have done after a rain. Men stood by their fences and looked at the ruined corn, drying fast now, only a little green showing through the film of dust. The men were silent and they did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men - to feel whether this time the men would break. The women studied the men's faces secretly, for the corn could go, as long as something else remained. The children stood near by drawing figures in the dust with bare toes, and the children sent exploring senses out to see whether men and women would break. The children peeked at the faces of the men and women, and then drew careful lines in the dust with their toes. Horses came to the watering troughs and nuzzled the water to clear the surface dust. After a while the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity and became hard and angry and resistant. Then the women knew that they were safe and that there was no break. Then they asked, Whta'll we do? And the men replied, I don't know. but it was all right. The women knew it was all right, and the watching children knew it was all right. Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole. The women went into the houses to their work, and the children began to play, but cautiously at first. As the day went forward the sun became less red. It flared down on the dust-blanketed land. The men sat in the doorways of their houses; their hands were busy with sticks and little rocks. The men sat still - thinking - figuring.

We’ve been lucky. The autumn happened to be dry and warm. We managed to dig the potatoes before the rain and cold set in. Minus what we owed and returned to the Mikulitsyns, we have up to twenty sacks, and it is all in the main bin of the cellar, covered above, over the floor, with straw and old, torn blankets. Down there, under the floor, we also put two barrels of Tonya’s salted cucumbers and another two of cabbage she has pickled. The fresh cabbage is hung from the crossbeams, head to head, tied in pairs. The supply of carrots is buried in dry sand. As is a sufficient amount of harvested black radishes, beets, and turnips, and upstairs in the house there is a quantity of peas and beans. The firewood stored up in the shed will last till spring.

Think about it: If you have saved just enough to have your own house, your own car, a modicum of income to pay for food, clothes, and a few conveniences, and your everyday responsibilities start and end only with yourself… You can afford not to do anything outside of breathing, eating, and sleeping. Time would be an endless, white blanket. Without folds and pleats or sudden rips. Monday would look like Sunday, going sans adrenaline, slow, so slow and so unnoticed. Flowing, flowing, time is flowing in phrases, in sentences, in talk exchanges of people that come as pictures and videos, appearing, disappearing, in the safe, distant walls of Facebook. Dial fast food for a pizza, pasta, a burger or a salad. Cooking is for those with entire families to feed. The sala is well appointed. A day-maid comes to clean. Quietly, quietly she dusts a glass figurine here, the flat TV there. No words, just a ho-hum and then she leaves as silently as she came. Press the shower knob and water comes as rain. A TV remote conjures news and movies and soaps. And always, always, there’s the internet for uncomplaining company. Outside, little boys and girls trudge along barefoot. Their tinny, whiny voices climb up your windowsill asking for food. You see them. They don’t see you. The same way the vote-hungry politicians, the power-mad rich, the hey-did-you-know people from newsrooms, and the perpetually angry activists don’t see you. Safely ensconced in your tower of concrete, you retreat. Uncaring and old./HOW EASY IT IS NOT TO CARE

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea-cosy. I can't say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring - I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn't a very good poem. I have decided my best poetry is so bad that I mustn't write any more of it. Drips from the roof are plopping into the water-butt by the back door. The view through the windows above the sink is excessively drear. Beyond the dank garden in the courtyard are the ruined walls on the edge of the moat. Beyond the moat, the boggy ploughed fields stretch to the leaden sky. I tell myself that all the rain we have had lately is good for nature, and that at any moment spring will surge on us. I try to see leaves on the trees and the courtyard filled with sunlight. Unfortunately, the more my mind's eye sees green and gold, the more drained of all colour does the twilight seem. It is comforting to look away from the windows and towards the kitchen fire, near which my sister Rose is ironing - though she obviously can't see properly, and it will be a pity if she scorches her only nightgown. (I have two, but one is minus its behind.) Rose looks particularly fetching by firelight because she is a pinkish person; her skin has a pink glow and her hair is pinkish gold, very light and feathery. Although I am rather used to her I know she is a beauty. She is nearly twenty-one and very bitter with life. I am seventeen, look younger, feel older. I am no beauty but I have a neatish face. I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic - two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud. I must admit that our home is an unreasonable place to live in. Yet I love it. The house itself was built in the time of Charles II, but it was grafted on to a fourteenth-century castle that had been damaged by Cromwell. The whole of our east wall was part of the castle; there are two round towers in it. The gatehouse is intact and a stretch of the old walls at their full height joins it to the house. And Belmotte Tower, all that remains of an even older castle, still stands on its mound close by. But I won't attempt to describe our peculiar home fully until I can see more time ahead of me than I do now. I am writing this journal partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel - I intend to capture all our characters and put in conversations. It ought to be good for my style to dash along without much thought, as up to now my stories have been very stiff and self-conscious. The only time father obliged me by reading one of them, he said I combined stateliness with a desperate effort to be funny. He told me to relax and let the words flow out of me.

Liall realized that this was the first time he had really been alone with Scarlet. He stood up and held out his hand. The blanket dropped from his shoulders. "Come here." Scarlet reached out to him tentatively and Liall quickly dragged him into his arms. He fits there perfectly, Liall thought, snug if not a little small. Scarlet did not respond at first, as if he would pull away, and for a moment Liall believed he had made a huge mistake. Then, surprisingly, Scarlet sighed and his arms went around Liall's back. Scarlet turned his head to rest his cheek against Liall's bare chest as hey listened to the rain batten on the roof. "Thank you for saving my life." Liall murmured.

Outside the window, the weather is beyond our control. The sun will rise and set every day, sometimes there’ll be rain, and at night the moon and stars light up the sky blanketed by the darkness, and when the night gives way to dawn, it’ll be yet another day. There’s nothing we can do to change what’s outside, but we can choose the weather in our heart. Our feelings are ours to decide, and there’s always happiness within us. The weather in our heart is ours, and ours alone.

THOSE BORN UNDER Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain. Henry, our mother, and I were Pacific Northwest babies. At the first patter of raindrops on the roof, a comfortable melancholy settled over the house. The three of us spent dark, wet days wrapped in old quilts, sitting and sighing at the watery sky. Viviane, with her acute gift for smell, could close her eyes and know the season just by the smell of the rain. Summer rain smelled like newly clipped grass, like mouths stained red with berry juice — blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. It smelled like late nights spent pointing constellations out from their starry guises, freshly washed laundry drying outside on the line, like barbecues and stolen kisses in a 1932 Ford Coupe. The first of the many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man’s hands after hours spent in a woodshop. Fall rain was not Viviane’s favorite. Rain in the winter smelled simply like ice, the cold air burning the tips of ears, cheeks, and eyelashes. Winter rain was for hiding in quilts and blankets, for tying woolen scarves around noses and mouths — the moisture of rasping breaths stinging chapped lips. The first bout of warm spring rain caused normally respectable women to pull off their stockings and run through muddy puddles alongside their children. Viviane was convinced it was due to the way the rain smelled: like the earth, tulip bulbs, and dahlia roots. It smelled like the mud along a riverbed, like if she opened her mouth wide enough, she could taste the minerals in the air. Viviane could feel the heat of the rain against her fingers when she pressed her hand to the ground after a storm. But in 1959, the year Henry and I turned fifteen, those warm spring rains never arrived. March came and went without a single drop falling from the sky. The air that month smelled dry and flat. Viviane would wake up in the morning unsure of where she was or what she should be doing. Did the wash need to be hung on the line? Was there firewood to be brought in from the woodshed and stacked on the back porch? Even nature seemed confused. When the rains didn’t appear, the daffodil bulbs dried to dust in their beds of mulch and soil. The trees remained leafless, and the squirrels, without acorns to feed on and with nests to build, ran in confused circles below the bare limbs. The only person who seemed unfazed by the disappearance of the rain was my grandmother. Emilienne was not a Pacific Northwest baby nor a daffodil. Emilienne was more like a petunia. She needed the water but could do without the puddles and wet feet. She didn’t have any desire to ponder the gray skies. She found all the rain to be a bit of an inconvenience, to be honest.

For three weeks it had rained every day. For those past three weeks, daybreak was a gloomy affair. The skies gradually moved from a thick blanket of dingy white clouds to the deepest shade of grey, peaking here and there in ominous black thunderheads

Very few people know where they will die, But I do; in a brick-faced hospital, Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul, Into three parts; the Dean Memorial Wing, in the classic cast of 1910, Green-grated in unglazed, Aeolian Embrasures; the Maud Wiggin Building, which Commemorates a dog-jawed Boston bitch Who fought the brass down to their whipcord knees In World War I, and won enlisted men Some decent hospitals, and, being rich, Donated her own granite monument; The Mandeville Pavilion, pink-brick tent With marble piping, flying snapping flags Above the entry where our bloody rags Are rolled in to be sponged and sewn again. Today is fair; tomorrow, scourging rain (If only my own tears) will see me in Those jaundiced and distempered corridors Off which the five-foot-wide doors slowly close. White as my skimpy chiton, I will cringe Before the pinpoint of the least syringe; Before the buttered catheter goes in; Before the I.V.’s lisp and drip begins Inside my skin; before the rubber hand Upon the lancet takes aim and descends To lay me open, and upon its thumb Retracts the trouble, a malignant plum; And finally, I’ll quail before the hour When the authorities shut off the power In that vast hospital, and in my bed I’ll feel my blood go thin, go white, the red, The rose all leached away, and I’ll go dead. Then will the business of life resume: The muffled trolley wheeled into my room, The off-white blanket blanking off my face, The stealing secret, private, largo race Down halls and elevators to the place I’ll be consigned to for transshipment, cased In artificial air and light: the ward That’s underground; the terminal; the morgue. Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap, A booted man in black with a peaked cap Will call for me and troll me down the hall And slot me into his black car. That’s all.

Bloody rain” says Mr Chivers Bouncing a basketball On the one dry patch of court bloody rain” he nods to our Sports class And gives us the afternoon off. Bloody rain all right As Annabel and I run to Megalong Creek hut Faster than we ever have in Chivers’s class And the exercise we have in mind We’ve been training for all year But I doubt if old Chivers Will give us a medal if he ever finds out. We high jump into the hut And strip down Climb under the blankets And cheer the bloody rain As it does a lap or two Around the mountain While Annabel and me Embrace like winners should Like good sports do As Mr. Chivers sips his third coffee And twitches his bad knee From his playing days While miles away Annabel and I Score a convincing victory And for once in our school life The words “Physical Education” Make sense…

I had to hide. I couldn’t let him take me to the police station, but I also couldn’t dial 911 to get them help. Maybe if I waited it out, they’d get better on their own? I dashed toward the storage tubs on the other side of the garage, squeezing past the front of Mom’s car. One, maybe two steps more, and I would have jumped inside the closest tub and buried myself under a pile of blankets. The garage door rolled open first. Not all the way—just enough that I could see the snow on the driveway, and grass, and the bottom half of a dark uniform. I squinted, holding a hand up to the blinding blanket of white light that seemed to settle over my vision. My head started pounding, a thousand times worse than before. The man in the dark uniform knelt down in the snow, his eyes hidden by sunglasses. I hadn’t seen him before, but I certainly hadn’t met all the police officers at my dad’s station. This one looked older. Harder, I remembered thinking. He waved me forward again, saying, “We’re here to help you. Please come outside.” I took a tentative step, then another. This man is a police officer, I told myself. Mom and Dad are sick, and they need help. His navy uniform looked darker the closer I got, like it was drenched straight through with rain. “My parents…” The officer didn’t let me finish. “Come out here, honey. You’re safe now.” It wasn’t until my bare toes brushed up against the snow, and the man had wrapped my long hair around his fist and yanked me through the opening, that I even realized his uniform was black.

And when spring comes to the City people notice one another in the road; notice the strangers with whom they share aisles and tables and the space where intimate garments are laundered. going in and out, in and out the same door, they handle the handle; on trolleys and park benches they settle thighs on a seat in which hundreds have done it too. Copper coins dropped in the palm have been swallowed by children and tested by gypsies, but it’s still money and people smile at that. It’s the time of year when the City urges contradiction most, encouraging you to buy street food when you have no appetite at all; giving you a taste for a single room occupied by you alone as well as a craving to share it with someone you passed in the street. Really there is no contradiction—rather it’s a condition; the range of what an artful City can do. What can beat bricks warming up to the sun? The return of awnings. The removal of blankets from horses’ backs. Tar softens under the heel and the darkness under bridges changes from gloom to cooling shade. After a light rain, when the leaves have come, tree limbs are like wet fingers playing in woolly green hair. Motor cars become black jet boxes gliding behind hoodlights weakened by mist. On sidewalks turned to satin figures move shoulder first, the crowns of their heads angled shields against the light buckshot that the raindrops are. The faces of children glimpsed at windows appear to be crying, but it is the glass pane dripping that makes it seem so.

Tosh throws up her hands. 'Tell me what you want!' What I want... To smell the desert after rain? To awake each morning beneath a soft Cheyenne blanket, skin still heavy with his scent? To rip out the flawed cog inside of me that brought it all to a screeching halt, then wind back through the years and do everything all over again. Perhaps that is what I want. A different ending.

We looked at the fire. “This is one hell of a date,” I said. “Trapped by a horde of vampires in the middle of a snow-covered field, huddling around a tiny fire on thin blankets,” Curran said. “Drink it in, baby. All this luxury just for you.” “At least it’s not raining.” We both looked up just in case a freak downpour decided to drench us, but the night sky was clear. Nothing but stars and desperation.

Finally, the rain stopped. The sky draped like a large, starry blanket over the world. The moonlight painted the tiny waves around me the color of my grandfather's hair. I lifted my hands and laughed hysterically. My fingers dripped lustrous, metallic water like mercury. Specks of light danced on the ocean surface, beckoning me to join them. Time melted into space, letting me flow with it into oblivion.

They looked so familiar that for a moment Claude feared he had doubled back to Mrs. Merritt's city, until a sudden wave of water blinded his wipers and drove him along with everyone else to the curb, where the crackling radio reported an old man had just now been swept from his backyard by a cloudburst, the latest in a series deluging Tulsa. Clinging there to the side of the hill, no hand brake, Claude rode out the storm, stuffing blankets into the cracks under the doors, watching overhead drips as best he could with the babyseat. When the car next in front crept away from the curb, Claude followed as far as a gas station. There he wondered aloud what lay ahead, but the attendant couldn't say, having swum to work just five minutes ago. Now as Claude pulled away the rain suddenly ceased, it seemed from exhaustion, and for the next hundred miles he spun his dial to catch the latest reports: that old man was still missing, he had last been seen floating downhill toward the river, he had been found, he was dead, he was dying, he was still missing... Claude turned off the radio, for he was beyond range of Tulsa, and Joplin had not heard the news yet. He raced in silence toward the night which he knew already had begun not far ahead.

I put my hand over Matilda's, caressing the little blue veins that swam just below the skin and squeezing the chunky black pearl-and-diamond ring that adorned her middle finger. Happiness washed over me. We were in a magical place between warm sky and cool grass, between a soft cashmere blanket and a glittering sky. There were so many stars they seemed to rain like confetti at a celebration, and I felt as if Matilda and I were its guests of honor.

That week—the week of the rain—was one of my dad’s bad times. So I went out to the site a lot. One day, I was just picking around one of the foundations. It was all cinder block and pits; hardly any of the building had actually gotten done. And then I saw this little box. A shoe box.” She sucks in a breath, and even in the dark I see her tense. The rest of her story comes out in a rush: “Someone must have left it there, wedged in the space underneath a part of the foundation. Except the rain was so bad it had caused a miniature mudslide. The box had rolled out into the open. I don’t know why I decided to look inside. It was filthy. I thought I might find a pair of shoes, maybe some jewelry.” I know, now, where the story is going. I am walking toward the muddy box alongside her; I am lifting the water-warped cover. The horror and disgust is a mud too: It is rising, black and choking, inside of me. Raven’s voice drops to a whisper. “She was wrapped in a blanket. A blue blanket with yellow lambs on it. She wasn’t breathing. I—I thought she was dead. She was … she was blue. Her skin, her nails, her lips, her fingers. Her fingers were so small.” The mud is in my throat. I can’t breathe. “I don’t know what made me try to revive her. I think I must have gone a little crazy. I was working as a junior lifeguard that summer, so I’d been certified in CPR. I’d never had to do it, though. And she was so tiny—probably a week, maybe two weeks old. But it worked. I’ll never forget how I felt when she took a breath, and all that color came rushing into her skin. It was like the whole world had split open. And everything I’d felt was missing—all that feeling and color—all of it came to me with her first breath. I called her Blue so I would always remember that moment, and so I would never regret.

Bilbo had never seen or imagined anything of the kind. They were high up in a narrow place, with a dreadful fall into a dim valley at one side of them. There they were sheltering under a hanging rock for the night, and he lay beneath a blanket and shook from head to toe. When he peeped out in the lightning-flashes, he saw that across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang. Then came a wind and a rain, and the wind whipped the rain and the hail about in every direction, so that an overhanging rock was no protection at all. Soon they were getting drenched and their ponies were standing with their heads down and their tails between their legs, and some of them were whinnying with fright. They could hear the giants guffawing and shouting all over the mountainsides.

Gregori tugged on her hair to force her back to him. "You make me feel alive, Savannah." "Do I? Is that why you're swearing?" She turned onto her stomach, propping herself up onto her elbows. He leaned into her, brushing his mouth across the swell of her breast. "You are managing to tie me up in knots. You take away all my good judgement." A slight smile curved her mouth. "I never noticed that you had particularly good judgement to begin with." His white teeth gleamed, a predator's smile, then sank into soft bare flesh. She yelped but moved closer to him when his tongue swirled and caressed, taking away the sting. "I have always had good judgement," he told her firmly, his teeth scraping back and forth in the valley between her breasts. "So you say.But that doesn't make it so. You let evil idiots shoot you with poisoned darts. You go by yourself into laboratories filled with your enemies. Need I go on?" Her blue eyes were laughing at him. Her firm, rounded bottom was far too tempting to resist. He brought his open palm down in mock punishment. Savannah jumped, but before she could scoot away, his palm began caressing, producing a far different effect. "Judging from our positions, ma petite, I would say my judgement looks better than yours." She laughed. "All right,I'm going to let you win this time." "Would you care for a shower?" he asked solicitously. When she nodded, Gregori flowed off the bed, lifted her high into his arms,and cradled her against his chest. There was something too innocent about him. She eyed him warily. But in an instant he had already glided across the tiled floor to the balcony door, which flew open at his whim, and carried her, naked, into the cold, glittering downpour. Savannah tried to squirm away, wiggling and shoving at his chest, laughing in spite of the icy water cascading over her. "Gregori! You're so mean. I can't believe you did this." "Well,I have poor judgement." He was grinning at her in mocking, male amusement. "Is that not what you said?" "I take it back!" she moaned, clinging to him, burying her fact on his shoulder as the chill rain pelted her bare breasts, making her nipples peak hard and fast. "Run with me tonight," Gregori whispered against her neck. An enticement. Temptation. Drawing her to him, another tie to his dark world. She lifted her head, looked into his silver eyes, and was lost.The rain poured over her, drenching her, but as Gregori slowly glided with her to the blanket of pine needles below the balcony,she couldn't look away from those hungry eyes.

First Day Of My Life" This is the first day of my life I swear I was born right in the doorway I went out in the rain suddenly everything changed They're spreading blankets on the beach Yours is the first face that I saw I think I was blind before I met you Now I don’t know where I am I don’t know where I’ve been But I know where I want to go And so I thought I’d let you know That these things take forever I especially am slow But I realize that I need you And I wondered if I could come home Remember the time you drove all night Just to meet me in the morning And I thought it was strange you said everything changed You felt as if you'd just woke up And you said “this is the first day of my life I’m glad I didn’t die before I met you But now I don’t care I could go anywhere with you And I’d probably be happy” So if you want to be with me With these things there’s no telling We just have to wait and see But I’d rather be working for a paycheck Than waiting to win the lottery Besides maybe this time is different I mean I really think you like me

PART TWO Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. —SIGMUND FREUD CHAPTER ONE Alicia Berenson’s Diary JULY 16 I never thought I’d be longing for rain. We’re into our fourth week of the heat wave, and it feels like an endurance test. Each day seems hotter than the last. It doesn’t feel like England. More like a foreign country—Greece or somewhere. I’m writing this on Hampstead Heath. The whole park is strewn with red-faced, semi-naked bodies, like a beach or a battlefield, on blankets or benches or spread out on the grass. I’m sitting under a tree, in the shade. It’s six o’clock, and it has started to cool down. The sun is low and red in a golden sky—the park looks different in this light—darker shadows, brighter colors. The grass looks like it’s on fire, flickering flames under my feet. I took off my shoes on my way here and walked barefoot. It reminded me of when I was little and I’d play outside. It reminded me of another summer, hot like this one—the summer Mum died—playing outside with Paul, cycling on our bikes through golden fields dotted with wild daisies, exploring abandoned houses and haunted orchards. In my memory that summer lasts forever. I remember Mum and those colorful tops she’d wear, with the yellow stringy straps, so flimsy and delicate—just like her. She was so thin, like a little bird. She would put on the radio and pick me up and dance me around to pop songs on the radio. I remember how she smelled of shampoo and cigarettes and Nivea hand cream, always with an undertone of vodka. How old was she then?

Diary of a Country Priest: So I said to myself that people are consumed by boredom. Naturally, one has to ponder for a while to realise this – one does not see it immediately. It is a like some sort of dust. One comes and goes without seeing it, one breathes it in, one eats it, one drinks it, and it is so fine that it doesn’t even scrunch between one’s teeth. But if one stops up for a moment, it settles like a blanket over the face and hands. One has to constantly shake this ash-rain off one. That is why people are so restless.7 It

In southern Laos, in the bamboo jungles along what was once the Ho Chi Minh trail, I visited a village whose weavers had produced cotton blankets with motifs that could not be misidentified: American fighter planes and “Huey” helicopters. It was as though I had found the exact opposite of a World War II cargo cult. This isolated culture living along the former Ho Chi Minh trail—one of the most heavily bombed pieces of real estate in history—had produced talismanic blankets in the hope that those wrapped in them would be protected from the terrible rain of bombs and bullets.

The winter solstice marks the longest night of the year and the promise that soon the sun will be back again. But winter is not merely a trial to be got through while we wait for warmer times. You must embrace the cold days and long dark nights and learn to find the joy in them, for there is much joy to be found. Hunker down and revel in the warmth of soft blankets when the weather is howling outside. Make the time to take time, not just for others but for yourselves. Read books, light candles, take long baths, watch the flames flickering in the fireplace or the rain dribbling down the windowpanes. Open your eyes to the beauty in the winter landscape and count your blessings every single day. Slow down. There will be time enough for buzzing around with the bees when the sun comes back. For now, let the moments stretch long and lazy. Recuperate, rejuvenate, reflect, and let winter soothe you. Let this winter solstice be the first of many times this winter that you come together to give thanks and appreciate the people in your life. Gratitude is everything. It is infinite, and even in death I know that the warmth of my gratitude for all of you lives on in the spirit of this season." -Augustus

So what if he saw? Now he knows. What never crossed my mind was that someone else who lived under our roof, who played cards with my mother, ate breakfast and supper at our table, recited the Hebrew blessing on Fridays for the sheer fun of it, slept in one of our beds, used our towels, shared our friends, watched TV with us on rainy days when we sat in the living room with a blanket around us because it got cold and we felt so snug being all together as we listened to the rain patter against the windows—that someone else in my immediate world might like what I liked, want what I wanted, be who I was

Like a strange rain, the water rose from the floor as I willed it to become like those stars Rhys had summoned in his blanket of darkness. I willed the droplets to separate until they hung around us, catching the light and sparkling like crystals on a chandelier. Rhys broke my stare to study them. 'I suggest,' he murmured, 'you not show Tarquin that little trick in the bedroom.' I sent each and every one of those droplets shooting for the High Lord's face. Too fast, too swiftly for him to shield. Some of them sprayed me as they ricocheted off him. But of us now soaking, Rhys gaped a bit- then smiled.

The last thing I remember ia an exquisitely beautiful green and silver moth landing on the curve of my wrist. The sound of rain on the roof of our house gently pulls me toward consciousness. I fight to return to sleep though, wrapped in a warm cocoon of blankets, safe at home. I'm vaguely aware that my head aches. Possibly I have the flu and this is why I'm allowed to stay in bed, even though I can tell I've been asleep a long time. My mother's hand strokes my cheek and I don't push is away as I would in wakefulness, never wanting her to know how much I crave that gentle touch. How much I miss her even though I still don't trust her. Then there's a voice, the wrong voice, not my mother's and i'm scared.

Risking a glance at the dignified young man beside her- what was his name?- Mr. Arthurson, Arterton?- Pandora decided to try her hand at some small talk. "It was very fine weather today, wasn't it?" she said. He set down his flatware and dabbed at both corners of his mouth with his napkin before replying. "Yes, quite fine." Encouraged, Pandora asked, "What kind of clouds do you like better- cumulus or stratocumulus?" He regarded her with a slight frown. After a long pause, he asked, "What is the difference?" "Well, cumulus are the fluffier, rounder clouds, like this heap of potatoes on my plate." Using her fork, Pandora spread, swirled, and dabbed the potatoes. "Stratocumulus are flatter and can form lines or waves- like this- and can either form a large mass or break into smaller pieces." He was expressionless as he watched her. "I prefer flat clouds that look like a blanket." "Altostratus?" Pandora asked in surprise, setting down her fork. "But those are the boring clouds. Why do you like them?" "They usually mean it's going to rain. I like rain." This showed promise of actually turning into a conversation. "I like to walk in the rain, too," Pandora exclaimed. "No, I don't like to walk in it. I like to stay in the house." After casting a disapproving glance at her plate, the man returned his attention to eating. Chastened, Pandora let out a noiseless sigh. Picking up her fork, she tried to inconspicuously push her potatoes into a proper heap again. Fact #64 Never sculpt your food to illustrate a point during small talk. Men don't like it. As Pandora looked up, she discovered Phoebe's gaze on her. She braced inwardly for a sarcastic remark. But Phoebe's voice was gentle as she spoke. "Henry and I once saw a cloud over the English Channel that was shaped in a perfect cylinder. It went on as far as the eye could see. Like someone had rolled up a great white carpet and set it in the sky." It was the first time Pandora had ever heard Phoebe mention her late husband's name. Tentatively, she asked, "Did you and he ever try to find shapes in the clouds?" "Oh, all the time. Henry was very clever- he could find dolphins, ships, elephants, and roosters. I could never see a shape until he pointed it out. But then it would appear as if by magic." Phoebe's gray eyes turned crystalline with infinite variations of tenderness and wistfulness. Although Pandora had experienced grief before, having lost both parents and a brother, she understood that this was a different kind of loss, a heavier weight of pain. Filled with compassion and sympathy, she dared to say, "He... he sounds like a lovely man." Phoebe smiled faintly, their gazes meeting in a moment of warm connection. "He was," she said. "Someday I'll tell you about him." And finally Pandora understood where a little small talk about the weather might lead.

The horse looked at him and it looked at the dog. He crossed the room and went out in the rain and walked around the side of the building. When he came back he had in his fist a threefoot length of waterpipe and with it he advanced upon the dog. Go on, he shouted. Git. The dog rose moaning and slouched away down the wall and limped out into the yard. When he turned to go back to his blankets it slank past him into the building again. He turned and ran at it with the pipe and it scrabbled away. He followed it. Outside it had stopped at the edge of the road and it stood in the rain looking back. It had perhaps once been a hunting dog, perhaps left for dead in the mountains or by some highwayside. Repository of ten thousand indignities and the harbinger of God knew what. He bent and clawed up a handful of small rocks from the gravel apron and slung them. The dog raised its misshapen head and howled weirdly. He advanced upon it and it set off up the road. He ran after it and threw more rocks and shouted at it and he slung the length of pipe. It went clanging and skittering up the road behind the dog and the dog howled again and began to run, hobbling brokenly on its twisted legs with the strange head agoggle on its neck. As it went it raised its mouth sideways and howled again with a terrible sound. Something not of this earth. As if some awful composite of grief had broke through from the preterite world. It tottered away up the road in the rain on its stricken legs and as it went it howled again and again in its heart’s despair until it was gone from all sight and all sound in the night’s onset.

So tell me about van living,” I say, swallowing a mouthful of sandwich. I’d preprepared the question. Asking questions is a tactic I use when small talk is required—it makes you appear interested while simultaneously putting all the effort of the conversation on the other party. “What do you like about it?” Wally is lying on the blanket, resting on one elbow. “Many things,” he says. “I find the small space cozy, like sleeping in a little cocoon. When it rains, I hear it pelting the roof; when it’s windy, I feel the wind up against the car. It’s like I’m out in it … but protected. What else? I like that I can’t have too many possessions, so when I do buy something, I have to consider whether I really need it. It means I only end up with things that are incredibly useful or very precious. I like that I’m not imprisoned by anything. Debt. Weather. Bad neighbors. My home is wherever I am.

Of all the plants, trees have the largest surface area covered in leaves. For every square yard of forest, 27 square yards of leaves and needles blanket the crowns. Part of every rainfall is intercepted in the canopy and immediately evaporates again. In addition, each summer, trees use up to 8,500 cubic yards of water per square mile, which they release into the air through transpiration. This water vapor creates new clouds that travel farther inland to release their rain. As the cycle continues, water reaches even the most remote areas. This water pump works so well that the downpours in some large areas of the world, such as the Amazon basin, are almost as heavy thousands of miles inland as they are on the coast. There are a few requirements for the pump to work: from the ocean to the farthest corner, there must be forest. And, most importantly, the coastal forests are the foundations for this system. If they do not exist, the system falls apart. Scientists credit Anastassia Makarieva from Saint Petersburg in Russia for the discovery of these unbelievably important connections. They studied different forests around the world and everywhere the results were the same. It didn't matter if they were studying a rain forest or the Siberian taiga, it was always the trees that were transferring life-giving moisture into land-locked interiors. Researchers also discovered that the whole process breaks down if coastal forests are cleared. It's a bit like if you were using an electrical pump to distribute water and you pulled the intake pipe out of the pond. The fallout is already apparent in Brazil, where the Amazonian rain forest is steadily drying out. Central Europe is within the 400-mile zone and, therefore, close enough to the intake area. Thankfully, there are still forests here, even if they are greatly diminished.

That night, I took a while falling asleep and when I did, I had a strange dream. She was sitting in my rocking chair and rocking herself, her dead eyes fixed on me. I lay on my bed, paralysed with fear, unable to move, unable to scream, my limbs refusing to move to my command. The room was suddenly freezing cold, the heater had probably stopped working in the night because the electricity supply had been cut and the inverter too had run out. At one point, I was uncertain whether I was dreaming or awake, or in that strange space between dreaming and wakefulness, where the soul wanders out of the body and explores other dimensions. What I knew was that I was chilled to the bones, chilled in a way that made it impossible for me to move myself, to lever myself to a sitting position in order to switch the bedside lamp on and check whether this was really happening. I could hear her in my head. Her voice was faint, feathery, and sibilant, as if she was whispering through a curtain of rain. Her words were indistinct, she called my name, she said words that pierced through my ears, words that meshed into ice slivers in my brain and when I thought finally that I would freeze to death an ice cold tiny body climbed into the quilt with me, putting frigidly chilly arms around me, and whispered, ‘Mother, I’m cold.’ Icicles shot up my spine, and I sat up, bolt upright in my bed, feeling the covers fall from me and a small indent in the mattress where something had been, a moment ago. There was a sudden click, the red light of the heater lit up, the bed and blanket warmer began radiating life-giving heat again and I felt myself thaw out, emerge from the scary limbo which marks one’s descent into another dimension, and the shadow faded out from the rocking chair right in front of me into complete transparency and the icy presence in the bed faded away to nothingness.

Near the exit to the blue patio, DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin Stick stand by a concrete scale model of the Jungfrau, ... socking the slopes of the famous mountain with red rubber hot-water bags full of ice cubes, the idea being to pulverize the ice for Pirate's banana frappes. With their nights' growths of beard, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, miasmata of foul breath, DeCoverley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier. Elsewhere in the maisonette, other drinking companions disentangle from blankets (one spilling wind from his, dreaming of a parachute), piss into bathroom sinks, look at themselves with dismay in concave shaving mirrors, slab water with no clear plan in mind onto heads of thinning hair, struggle into Sam Brownes, dub shoes against rain later in the day with hand muscles already weary of it, sing snatches of popular songs whose tunes they don't always know, lie, believing themselves warmed, in what patches of the new sunlight come between the mullions, begin tentatively to talk shop as a way of easing into whatever it is they'll have to be doing in less than an hour, lather necks and faces, yawn, pick their noses, search cabinets or bookcases for the hair of the dog that not without provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last night. Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast:flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which-- though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off--- the genetic chains prove labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations. . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects. . . .

What never crossed my mind was that someone else who lived under our roof, who played cards with my mother, at breakfast and supper at our table, recited the Hebrew blessing on Fridays for the sheer fun of it, slept in one of our beds, used our towels, shared our friends, watched TV with us on rainy days when we sat in the living room with a blanket around us because it got cold and we felt so snug being all together as we listened to the rain patter against the windows—that someone else in my immediate world might like what I liked, want what I wanted, be who I was. It would never have entered my mind because I was still under the illusion that, barring what I'd read in books, inferred from rumors, and overheard in bawdy talk all over, no one my age had ever wanted to be both man and woman—with men and women. But before he'd stepped out of the cab and walked into our home, it would never have seemed remotely possible that someone so thoroughly okay with himself might want me to share his body as much as I ached to yield mine.

What never crossed my mind was that someone else who lived under our roof, who played cards with my mother, ate breakfast and supper at our table, recited the Hebrew blessing on Fridays for the sheer fun of it, slept in one of our beds, used our towels, shared our friends, watched TV with us on rainy days when we sat in the living room with a blanket around us because it got cold and we felt so snug being all together as we listened to the rain patter against the windows—that someone else in my immediate world might like what I liked, want what I wanted, be who I was. It would never have entered my mind because I was still under the illusion that, barring what I'd read in books, inferred from rumors, and overheard in bawdy talk all over, no one my age had ever wanted to be both man and woman—with men and women. But before he'd stepped out of the cab and walked into our home, it would never have seemed remotely possible that someone so thoroughly okay with himself might want me to share his body as much as I ached to yield mine.

There were many skies. The sky was invaded by great white clouds, flat on the bottom but round and billowy on top. The sky was completely cloudless, of a blue quite shattering to the senses. The sky was a heavy, suffocating blanket of grey cloud, but without promise of rain. The sky was thinly overcast. The sky was dappled with small, white, fleecy clouds. The sky was streaked with high, thin clouds that looked like a cotton ball stretched a part. The sky was a featureless milky haze. The sky was a density of dark and blustery rain clouds that passed by without delivering rain. The sky was painted with a small number of flat clouds that looked like sandbars. The sky was a mere block to allow a visual effect on the horizon: sunlight flooding the ocean, the vertical edges of between light and shadow perfectly distinct. The sky was a distant black curtain of falling rain. The sky was many clouds at many levels, some thick and opaque, others looking like smoke. The sky was black and spitting on my smiling face. The sky was nothing but falling water, a ceaseless deluge that wrinkled and bloated my skin and froze me stiff.

Apples, heigh-ho,” said Trumpkin with a rueful grin. “I must say you ancient kings and queens don’t overfeed your courtiers!” They stood up and shook themselves and looked about. The trees were thick and they could see no more than a few yards in any direction. “I suppose your Majesties know the way all right?” said the Dwarf. “I don’t,” said Susan. “I’ve never seen these woods in my life before. In fact I thought all along that we ought to have gone by the river.” “Then I think you might have said so at the time,” answered Peter, with pardonable sharpness. “Oh, don’t take any notice of her,” said Edmund. “She always is a wet blanket. You’ve got that pocket compass of yours, Peter, haven’t you? Well, then, we’re as right as rain. We’ve only got to keep on going northwest--cross that little river, the what-do-you-call-it?--the Rush--” “I know,” said Peter. “The one that joins the big river at the Fords of Beruna, or Beruna’s Bridge, as the D.L.F. calls it.” “That’s right. Cross it and strike uphill, and we’ll be at the Stone Table (Aslan’s How, I mean) by eight or nine o’clock. I hope King Caspian will give us a good breakfast!” “I hope you’re right,” said Susan. “I can’t remember all that at all.” “That’s the worst of girls,” said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. “They never carry a map in their heads.” “That’s because our heads have something inside them,” said Lucy.

They had very little grub and they usually run out of that and lived on straight beef; they had only three or four horses to the man, mostly with sore backs, because the old time saddle ate both ways, the horse's back and the cowboy's pistol pocket; they had no tents, no tarps, and damn few slickers. They never kicked, because those boys was raised under just the same conditions as there was on the trail―corn meal and bacon for grub, dirt floors in the houses, and no luxuries. They used to brag they could go any place a cow could and stand anything a horse could. It was their life. In person the cowboys were mostly medium-sized men, as a heavy man was hard on horses, quick and wiry, and as a rule very good natured; in fact it did not pay to be anything else. In character there like never was or will be again. They were intensely loyal to the outfit they were working for and would fight to the death for it. They would follow their wagon boss through hell and never complain. I have seen them ride into camp after two days and nights on herd, lay down on their saddle blankets in the rain, and sleep like dead men, then get up laughing and joking about some good time they had had in Ogallala or Dodge City. Living that kind of a life, they were bound to be wild and brave. In fact there was only two things the old-time cowpuncher was afraid of, a decent woman and being set afoot.

I studied the wings, the arm around my waist. 'Please don't drop me. And please don't-' We shot into the sky, fast as a shooting star. Before my yelp finished echoing, the city had yawned wide beneath us. Rhys's hand slid under my knees while the other wrapped around my back and ribs, and we flapped up, up, up into the star-freckled night, into the liquid dark and singing wind. The city lights dropped away until Velaris was a rippling velvet blanket littered with jewels, until the music no longer reached even our pointed ears. The air was chill, but no wind other than a gentle breeze brushed my face- even as we soared with magnificent precision for the House of Wind. Rhys' body was hard and warm against mine, a solid force of nature crafted and honed for this. Even the smell of him reminded me of the wind- rain and salt and something citrus-y I couldn't name. We swerved into an updraft, rising so fast it was instinct to clutch his black tunic as my stomach clenched. I scowled at the soft laugh that ticked my ear. 'I expected more screaming from you. I must not be trying hard enough.' 'Do not,' I hissed, focusing on the approaching tiara of lights in the eternal wall of the mountain. With the sky wheeling overhead and the lights shooting past below, up and down became mirrors- until we were sailing through a sea of stars. Something tight in my chest eased a fraction of its grip.

Wind in a Box" —after Lorca I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice. I want to learn to walk without blinking. I want to outlive the turtle and the turtle’s father, the stone. I want a mouth full of permissions and a pink glistening bud. If the wildflower and ant hill can return after sleeping each season, I want to walk out of this house wearing nothing but wind. I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with you weighing less than a chill. I want to fight off the bolts of gray lighting the alcoves and winding paths of your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgings of snow. I want to fight off the wind. I want to be the wind and I want to fight off the wind with its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging screen doors, its gilded boxes, and neatly folded pamphlets of noise. I want to fight off the dull straight lines of two by fours and endings, your disapprovals, your doubts and regulations, your carbon copies. If the locust can abandon its suit, I want a brand new name. I want the pepper’s fury and the salt’s tenderness. I want the virtue of the evening rain, but not its gossip. I want the moon’s intuition, but not its questions. I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter every room in a strange electrified city and find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror, but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch. I do not want to be the yellow photograph or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman, I want to be pure flame. I want to be your song. Terrance Hayes, Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006) When I leave this body, Woman, I want to be pure flame. I want to be your song

There is a story that illustrates this view. A long time ago in China there lived a very greedy monk. Whenever there was some temple donation, or a distribution of money from a rich layman, this monk was always the first in line. He officiated at many ceremonies, accumulating enough money to buy even the nicest house in town! He was so greedy for money, it seemed he took pleasure only in the joy of collecting it, and never spent any of it. He never even bothered to spend it on himself. His clothes were still quite shabby despite the fact that everyone knew he had a lot of money. “There’s the greedy monk in his ragged clothes,” the laypeople would say. “He’s so cheap he won’t even buy something for himself.” Then one day, it started to rain, and the rain did not stop for several weeks. The little town below the temple was washed out. Houses were destroyed, farms were submerged weeks before the big harvest, and cattle perished. The whole town faced a terrible winter without food or housing. The villagers were very sad and frightened. Then one day, the villagers woke up to find a great number of carts filling the village square. The carts were loaded with many bags of rice and beans, blankets, clothing, and medicine. There were several new ploughs, and four sturdy oxen to pull them! Standing in the middle was the “greedy monk,” in his shabby, patched clothes. He used half his money to buy these supplies, and he gave the rest to the mayor of the town. “I am a meditation monk,” he told the mayor. “Many years ago I perceived that in the future this town would experience a terrible disaster. So ever since then I have been getting money for this day.” When the villagers saw this, they were ashamed of their checking minds. “Waaah, what a great bodhisattva he is!” This is the story of the greedy monk.

Mikhail didn’t flinch away from the blade. His black eyes snapped open, blazing with power. Slovensky fell backward, scrambling away on all fours to crouch against the far wall. Fumbling in his coat, he jerked out the gun and held it pointed at Mikhail. The ground rolled almost gently, seemed to swell so that the concrete floor bulged, then cracked. Slovensky grabbed for the wall behind him to steady himself and lost the gun in the process. Above his head a rock fell from the wall, bounced dangerously close, and rolled to a halt beside him. A second rock, and a third, fell, so that Slovensky had to cover his head as the rocks rained down in a roaring shower. Slovensky’s cry of fear was high and thin. He made himself even smaller, peering through his fingers at the Carpathian. Mikhail had not moved to protect himself. He lay exactly as Slovensky had positioned him, those dark eyes, two black holes, windows to hell, staring at him. Swearing, Slovensky tried to lunge for the gun. The floor bucked and heaved under him, sending the gun skittering out of reach. A second wall swayed precariously, and rocks cascaded down, striking the man about the head and shoulders, driving him to the floor. He watched a curious, frightening pattern form. Not one rock touched the priest’s body. Not one came close to Mikhail. The Carpathian simply watched him with those damn eyes and that faint mocking smile as the rocks buried Slovensky’s legs, then fell on his back. There was an ominous crack, and Slovensky screamed under the heavy load on his spine. “Damn you to hell,” Slovensky snarled. “My brother will track you down.” Mikhail said nothing, simply watching the havoc Gregori created. Mikhail would have killed James Slovensky outright, without the drama Gregori had such a flair for, but he was tired, his body in a precarious state. He had no wish to drain his energy further. Raven would be in the vampire’s hands for the time it took Gregori to heal him. He couldn’t allow himself to think of what Andre might do to her. For the first time in centuries of living, Mikhail was forced to rely on another being. Gregori. The dark one. A royal pain in the neck. I read your thoughts, my friend. Mikhail stirred, pain shafting through him. More rocks fell on Slovensky in retaliation, covering him like a blanket, beginning to form a macabre grave. As you were meant to. Gregori moved into the room with his familiar silent glide, grace and power clinging to him as he strode through the wreckage of the wall. “This is becoming a bad habit.” “Oh, shut up,” Mikhail said without rancor.

The fact is that the estimate of fatalities, in terms of what was calculable at that time—even before the discovery of nuclear winter—was a fantastic underestimate. More than forty years later, Dr. Lynn Eden, a scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, revealed in Whole World on Fire71 the bizarre fact that the war planners of SAC and the Joint Chiefs—throughout the nuclear era to the present day—have deliberately omitted entirely from their estimates of the destructive effects of U.S. or Russian nuclear attacks the effects of fire. They have done so on the questionable grounds that these effects are harder to predict than the effects of blast or fallout, on which their estimates of fatalities are exclusively based, even though, as Eden found, experts including Hal Brode have disputed such conclusions for decades. (A better hypothesis for the tenacious lack of interest is that accounting for fire would reduce the number of USAF warheads and vehicles required to achieve the designated damage levels: which were themselves set high enough to preclude coverage by available Navy submarine-launched missiles.) Yet even in the sixties the firestorms caused by thermonuclear weapons were known to be predictably the largest producers of fatalities in a nuclear war. Given that for almost all strategic nuclear weapons, the damage radius of firestorms would be two to five times the radius destroyed by the blast, a more realistic estimate of the fatalities caused directly by the planned U.S. attacks on the Sino-Soviet bloc, even in 1961, would surely have been double the summary in the graph I held in my hand, for a total death toll of a billion or more: a third of the earth’s population, then three billion. Moreover, what no one would recognize for another twenty-two years were the indirect effects of our planned first strike that gravely threatened the other two thirds of humanity. These effects arose from another neglected consequence of our attacks on cities: smoke. In effect, in ignoring fire the Chiefs and their planners ignored that where there’s fire there’s smoke. But what is dangerous to our survival is not the smoke from ordinary fires, even very large ones—smoke that remained in the lower atmosphere and would soon be rained out—but smoke propelled into the upper atmosphere from the firestorms that our nuclear weapons were sure to create in the cities we targeted. (See chapter 16.) Ferocious updrafts from these multiple firestorms would loft millions of tons of smoke and soot into the stratosphere, where it would not be rained out and would quickly encircle the globe, forming a blanket blocking most sunlight around the earth for a decade or more. This would reduce sunlight and lower temperatures72 worldwide to a point that would eliminate all harvests and starve to death—not all but nearly all—humans (and other animals that depend on vegetation for food). The population of the southern hemisphere—spared nearly all direct effects from nuclear explosions, even from fallout—would be nearly annihilated, as would that of Eurasia (which the Joint Chiefs already foresaw, from direct effects), Africa, and North America. In a sense the Chiefs

It rained for four days and four nights, hard. Aniline wasn’t used to it. At first in the neighborhoods, ditches adjacent to the streets handled the flood. The water finished filling the ditches and hid the potholes in the roads. Rain then brimmed the streets over, making Aniline into Venice. It eventually spread out in the low spots in the driveways, invaded lawns, and crept up towards the house foundations. People wandered into the café with squelching boots and comments ranging from philosophical to querulous. Then the weather broke. They had two intensely hot days. Banks of mist rose off the saturated yards and fields. The roads drained, and a blanket of mud covered the pavements. As if all this wasn’t enough, a super-cell thunderstorm rolled towards them to give them another taste of violent Texas weather.

AJ cursed God and the local meteorologists for the blanket of blue sky that kidnapped the seventy percent chance of rain.

The day was stifling, humidity in the high nineties, a threat of rain on the horizon. Though it was full light, the sun was not shining. A thick miasma of haze blanketed the sky, turning the blue to gray. Nashville in the summer. The

It wasn’t about me anymore. I had a child. A husband who needed me to be there for him in the midst of what was turning out to be a terrible time to be making a living in agriculture. I didn’t have time to get mired in the angst of my own circumstances anymore. I didn’t have time for the past. My family--my new family--was all that mattered to me. My child. And always and forever, Marlboro Man. And then he appeared--walking down the basement steps in his Wranglers and rain-drenched boots. He stepped into the basement, a warm, gentle smile on his face. It was Marlboro Man. He was there. “Hey, Mama…,” he called. “It’s all fine.” The storm had passed us by, the funnel cloud dissipating before it could do any damage. “Hey, Daddy,” I answered. It was the first time I’d ever called him that. Looking on the ground at the water bottles and granola bars, he asked, “What’s all this for?” I shrugged. “I wasn’t sure how long I’d be down here.” He laughed. “You’re funny,” he said as he scooped our sleeping baby from my arms and threw the blanket over his shoulder. “Let’s go eat. I’m hungry.” We walked across the yard to our cozy little white house, where we ate pot roast with mashed potatoes and watched The Big Country with Gregory Peck…and spent the night listening to a blessed September thunderstorm send rain falling from the sky.

I come for the woman,” the Comanche repeated, never taking his gaze from her. “And I bring my finest horses to console her father for his loss. Fifty, all trained to ride.” His black sidestepped and whinnied. The Indian swayed easily with his mount. “Send me the woman, and have no fear. She will come to no harm walking in my footsteps, for I am strong and swift. She will never feel hunger, for I am a fine hunter. My lodge will shelter her from the winter rain, and my buffalo robes will shield her from the cold. I have spoken it.” Aunt Rachel crossed herself. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray--” “We don’t sell our womenfolk,” Henry called back. “You sicken my gut, tosi tivo. After you had bedded her, you would have sold her to that dirty old man.” With a sneer twisting his lips, he lifted Tom Weaver’s wool riding blanket from his horse’s withers and tossed it to the dirt. “Better you sell her to me. I am young. I will give her many fine sons. She will not wail over my death for many winters.” “I’d rather shoot her, you murdering bastard,” Henry retorted. “Then do it and make your death song.” The Comanche wheeled his horse, riding close to the window where Loretta stood. “Where is the herbi with such great courage who came out to face us once before? Does she still sleep? Will you hide behind your wooden walls and let your loved ones die? Come out, Yellow Hair, and meet your destiny.

No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.” His words were very enlightening to me. Later, after I thought about it a bit, I realized that it wasn’t Buddhist philosophy at all, but was more akin to some modern physics theories. The abbot also told me he wasn’t going to discuss Buddhism with me. His reason was the same as my high school teacher’s: With my sort, he’d just be wasting his time. That first night, I couldn’t sleep in the tiny room in the temple. I didn’t realize that this refuge from the world would be so uncomfortable. My blanket and sheet both became damp in the mountain fog, and the bed was so hard. In order to make myself sleep, I tried to follow the abbot’s advice and fill myself with “emptiness.” In my mind, the first “emptiness” I created was the infinity of space. There was nothing in it, not even light. But soon I knew that this empty universe could not make me feel peace. Instead, it filled me with a nameless anxiety, like a drowning man wanting to grab on to anything at hand. So I created a sphere in this infinite space for myself: not too big, though possessing mass. My mental state didn’t improve, however. The sphere floated in the middle of “emptiness”—in infinite space, anywhere could be the middle. The universe had nothing that could act on it, and it could act on nothing. It hung there, never moving, never changing, like a perfect interpretation for death. I created a second sphere whose mass was equal to the first one’s. Both had perfectly reflective surfaces. They reflected each other’s images, displaying the only existence in the universe other than itself. But the situation didn’t improve much. If the spheres had no initial movement—that is, if I didn’t push them at first—they would be quickly pulled together by their own gravitational attraction. Then the two spheres would stay together and hang there without moving, a symbol for death. If they did have initial movement and didn’t collide, then they would revolve around each other under the influence of gravity. No matter what the initial conditions, the revolutions would eventually stabilize and become unchanging: the dance of death. I then introduced a third sphere, and to my astonishment, the situation changed completely. Like I said, any geometric figure turns into numbers in the depths of my mind. The sphereless, one-sphere, and two-sphere universes all showed up as a single equation or a few equations, like a few lonesome leaves in late fall. But this third sphere gave “emptiness” life. The three spheres, given initial movements, went through complex, seemingly never-repeating movements. The descriptive equations rained down in a thunderstorm without end. Just like that, I fell asleep. The three spheres continued to dance in my dream, a patternless, never-repeating dance. Yet, in the depths of my mind, the dance did possess a rhythm; it was just that its period of repetition was infinitely long. This mesmerized me. I wanted to describe the whole period, or at least a part of it. The next day I kept on thinking about the three spheres dancing in “emptiness.” My attention had never been so completely engaged. It got to the point where one of the monks asked the abbot whether I was having mental health issues. The abbot laughed and said, “Don’t worry. He has found emptiness.” Yes, I had found emptiness. Now I could be at peace in a bustling city. Even in the midst of a noisy crowd, my heart would be completely tranquil.

She opened her eyes to a morning she didn’t want. With great reluctance, she lifted her head and looked around the single room. The cabin was cold. The fire had been out for hours, and the cold and damp of the unseasonably cold spring had crept relentlessly in while she huddled under her worn blankets waiting for her life to go away. It hadn’t. Life had lingered to ambush her again with cold and damp, disappointments and loneliness.

Curling up on an engulfing couch as snow drifts down outside, toes hidden beneath warm blankets; lying sideways on a cushioned chaise while cool sea breezes gently stir the sunny afternoon air; hiding under the covers with a flashlight while rain beats down outside, all of these anchored by a collection of thoughts and ideas bound together, alone in whatever world the author created.

outdoors in winter in most parts of the country, as long as they have adequate shelter from wind, rain, and snow. A shed open on one side is an ideal shelter for all seasons. Horses grow a long winter coat and store a layer of fat beneath their skin, both of which provide excellent insulation. However, when a horse is kept in a heated stable, he does not adapt and is more likely to suffer from chilling and pneumonia when taken outside. Horse blankets can be used to prevent chilling. For a horse in winter with a dry coat, or one who is used to being inside, the blanket is beneficial when the wind-chill temperature drops below 20°F (-6.6°C). For a horse in summer with a wet coat, wind-chill discomfort becomes a factor at temperatures below 60°F (15.5°C). Use common sense. If your horse has adapted to outside conditions, he probably does not need a blanket. However, for old horses, who are unable to regulate their body temperature well, or show horses without their natural haircoat, a blanket is a thing of comfort. Digestible energy is the principal dietary concern in cold weather. Protein, vitamin, and mineral needs increase slightly. In winter, it is important to feed a ration that helps the horse create internal heat. High-quality hay is best for this, and is a better choice than grain. This is because roughage is digested by bacterial fermentation in the cecum and colon, which produces a great deal of heat.

Ideally my penultimate day would be spent attending a giant beach party thrown in my honor. Everyone would gather around me at sunset, and the golden light would make my skin and hair beautiful as I told hilarious stories and gave away my extensive collection of moon art to my ex-lovers. I and all of my still-alive friends (which, let’s face it, will mostly be women) would sing and dance late into the night. My sons would be grown and happy. I would be frail but adorable. I would still have my own teeth, and I would be tended to by handsome and kind gay men who pruned me like a bonsai tree. Once the party ended, everyone would fall asleep except for me. I would spend the rest of the night watching the stars under a nice blanket my granddaughter made with her Knit-Bot 5000. As the sun began to rise, an unexpected guest would wake and put the coffee on. My last words would be something banal and beautiful. “Are you warm enough?” my guest would ask. “Just right,” I would answer. My funeral would be huge but incredibly intimate. I would instruct people to throw firecrackers on my funeral pyre and play Purple Rain on a loop.

The clouds blanketed the city, and the rain sounded like bricks hitting the roof. I hope my cat’s not still sleeping up there.


St. Lawrence River May 1705 Temperature 48 degrees During the march, when Mercy was finding the Mohawk language such a challenge and a pleasure to learn, Ruth had said to Eben, “I know why the powwow’s magic is successful. The children arrive ready.” The ceremony took place at the edge of the St. Francis river, smaller than the St. Lawrence but still impressive. The spray of river against rock, of ice met smashing into shore, leaped up to meet the rain. Sacraments must occur in the presence of water, under the sky and in the arms of the wind. There was no Catholic priest. There were no French. Only the language of the people was spoken, and the powwow and the chief preceded each prayer and cry with the rocking refrain Listen, listen, listen. Joanna tugged at Mercy’s clothes. “Can you see yet?” she whispered. “Who is it? Is he from Deerfield?” They were leading the boy forward. Mercy blinked away her tears and looked hard. “I don’t recognize him,” she said finally. “He looks about fourteen. Light red hair. Freckles. He’s tall, but thin.” “Hungry thin?” worried Joanna. “No. I think he hasn’t got his growth yet. He looks to be in good health. He’s handsomely made. He is not looking in our direction. He’s holding himself very still. It isn’t natural for him, the way it is for the Indians. He has to work at it.” “He’s scared then, isn’t he?” said Joanna. “I will pray for him.” In Mercy’s mind, the Lord’s Prayer formed, and she had the odd experience of feeling the words doubly: “Our Father” in English, “Pater Noster” in Latin. But Joanna prayed in Mohawk. Mercy climbed up out of the prayers, saying only to the Lord that she trusted Him; that He must be present for John. Then she listened. This tribe spoke Abenaki, not Mohawk, and she could follow little of it. But often at Mass, when Father Meriel spoke Latin, she could follow none of it. It was no less meaningful for that. The magic of the powwow’s chants seeped through Mercy’s soul. When the prayers ended, the women of John’s family scrubbed him in sand so clean and pale that they must have put it through sieves to remove mud and shells and impurities. They scoured him until his skin was raw, pushing him under the rough water to rinse off his whiteness. He tried to grab a lungful of air before they dunked him, but more than once he rose sputtering and gasping. The watchers were smiling tenderly, as one smiles at a new baby or a newly married couple. At last his mother and aunts and sisters hauled him to shore, where they painted his face and put new clothing, embroidered and heavily fringed, on his body. As every piece touched his new Indian skin, the people cheered. They have forgiven him for being white, thought Mercy. But has he forgiven them for being red? The rain came down harder. Most people lowered their faces or pulled up their blankets and cloaks for protection, but Mercy lifted her face into the rain, so it pounded on her closed eyes and matched the pounding of her heart. O Ruth! she thought. O Mother. Father. God. I have forgiven.

There are times when Los Angeles is the most magical city on Earth. When the Santa Ana winds sweep through and the air is warm and so, so clear. When the jacaranda trees bloom in the most brilliant lilac violet. When the ocean sparkles on a warm February day and you're pushing fine grains of sand through your bare toes while the rest of the country is hunkered down under blankets slurping soup. But other times, like when the jacaranda trees drop their blossoms in an eerie purple rain, Los Angeles feels like only a half-formed dream. Like perhaps the city was founded as a strip mall in the early 1970s and has no real reason to exist. An afterthought from the designer of some other, better city. A playground made only for attractive people to eat expensive salads.

ON A WARM, drowsy afternoon in early September, Ed Murrow, Vincent Sheean, and Ben Robertson, a correspondent for the New York newspaper PM, stopped at the edge of a field several miles south of London. The three had spent the day driving down the Thames estuary in Murrow’s Talbot Sunbeam roadster, enjoying the sun and looking for dogfights between Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Their search had been fruitless, and they stopped to buy apples from a farmer. Stretching out on the field to eat them, they drowsily listened to the chirp of crickets and buzzing of bees. The war seemed very far away. Within minutes, however, it returned with a vengeance. Hearing the harsh throb of aircraft engines, the Americans looked up at a sky filled with wave after wave of swastika-emblazoned bombers that clearly were not heading for their targets of previous days—the coastal defenses and RAF bases of southern England. Following the curve of the Thames, they were aimed straight at London. In minutes the sky over the capital was suffused with a fiery red glow; black smoke billowed up into a vast cloud that blanketed much of the horizon. When shrapnel from antiaircraft guns rained down around the American reporters, they dived into a nearby ditch, where, stunned, they watched the seemingly endless procession of enemy aircraft flying north. “London is burning. London is burning,” Robertson kept repeating. Returning to the city, they found flames sweeping through the East End, consuming dockyards, oil tanks, factories, overcrowded tenements, and everything else in their path. Hundreds of people had been killed, thousands injured or driven from their homes. Under a blood-red moon, women pushed prams piled high with their salvaged belongings. That horrific evening marked the beginning of the Blitz: from September 7 on, London would endure fifty-seven straight nights of relentless bombing. Until then, no other city in history had ever been subjected to such an onslaught. Warsaw and Rotterdam had been heavily bombed by the Germans early in the war, but not for the length of time of the assault on London. Although

I have told the reader that Tim Gamelyn's father was a retired non-commissioned officer who lived near Dublin on a small private income and a pension. It will be seen that Tim's people did not roll in wealth any to speak of. They owned a small farm with five cows, twenty pigs and a flock of hens. There was beer always in the cellar, bacon hanging up in the kitchen and a bucket of soft soap in the out-house. In the top lean-to room where Tim slept, in the winter time the rain and sleet drifted cheerily in through the cracks and covered the army blankets which covered him. But he didn't lie awake thinking about it—boys like Tim who help on farms start playing shut-eye as soon as they hit the pillow. Old Sergeant Gamelyn came of an ancestry which,

The neon lights of the ‘All Live, All Nude’ sign flickered in the rain, showering the street with sparks that sizzled and flared in the cold night, an electric cadence to match the distant rumble of thunder as dark clouds continued to roll in off the lake and blanket the Windy City in an autumnal thunderstorm.

At the window, with it open, as rain sang across the land once dry, so the rain slipped in threads of current down cracks and toward the lows, the man wiped his glasses free of spray—beads that had hit the sill and splattered at him. He cleared his throat, put the glasses back on, picked up a cigarette weaving smoke into the pale-yellow room—a light cast by a single bulb dangling above the kitchen table from a cord, makeshift. “Would you say,” said the man now ashing his cigarette, smoke staining his words, his eyes toward the rain, “that I am very brave?” He then looked at the woman, wrapped in a blanket, her eyes tight against the chill, her body frail with age and labor, her hair winced gray by days. She tightened the blanket across her shoulders, leaned against a wall—faded white paint, cracked and spotting. “These days?” she said, and looked now at the rain, sighed as if she knew it only came to wash her off the land, to hoist their home from its foundation in a torrent toward the death of it—nature ravaging its boards and bones to splinters and shingles and scraps and refuse that would toss wildly in the breath of flood until it came to rest unrecognizable. She closed her eyes. Turned from the man. “I wouldn’t even call you handsome.

When Charlotte shivered, he took off his oilskin and draped it around them like a blanket. “Is that better?” “Yes, thank you.” She nestled closer without invitation. “This is a dickens of a way to court a lassie.” He dropped an arm around her shoulders. To his surprise, she laid her head on his shoulder. The pungent scents of wet sheep and dirty straw tinged the air, but even through all that, he caught a faint and alluring hint of Charlotte. Flowers. Rain. Female. He closed his eyes, happy, despite the weather and his aches and pains.

My, my, have you ever seen such a nauseatingly tender, sickeningly domestic, scene?" drawled a voice that was, despite the words, ripe with amusement.  Turning, Charles saw Lucien, with Gareth, Nerissa, and Juliet standing beside him.  "Congratulations.  And what will our newest de Montforte be named, eh?" "Mary," said Charles, getting to his feet.  "After both our mothers." "Mary Elizabeth," Amy added, gazing at her husband and daughter. "A girl, then," murmured Lucien. "A girl."  Charles came forward, holding a fold of the blanket back so that everyone could see his daughter.  He was beaming with excitement.  Bursting with pride.  "Isn't she just beautiful?  Have you ever seen anything so precious?  Look at her little fingers!  Look at that head of black hair!  Look how perfect, how sweet, how exquisite she is —" Lucien shook his head, secretly amused that something so tiny could reduce not only a de Montforte, but an army major, to this.  With a heavy sigh, he raised a brow and looked at the Wild One.  "It would seem, my dear Gareth, that I owe you ten pounds after all," he murmured, with a rueful smile that could not disguise his delight in having yet another niece to spoil.  "Though how you knew it would be a girl is beyond me." A sudden gust of wind lashed the window, peppering it with rain.  "That's how I knew," said Gareth, handing Gabriel to Juliet and picking up a squirming Charlotte.  "With a storm on the make, how could we have expected anything but a female!" Laughter rang around the room at his wry observation.  Congratulations and well-wishes were said, and Mary Elizabeth de Montforte was passed around so that all could see her.  After inspecting his new niece, Lucien, feeling more than a little smug for his part in getting yet another brother safely married off, moved to the door. "I say, Luce, where are you going?" Charles asked. Lucien smiled.  "Well, someone's got to tell Andrew,

She laughed. “Good. You still haven’t told me what you were afraid of.” I thought for a moment. Drowsiness was settling on me like a blanket. “Of getting involved. Like you said, I haven’t been with someone for a long time.

We let him sag to the paving beside the pool’s edge. Can we really do it? Who will do it? Which of us has the stomach? But the sun is rising higher. There’s no time to think. A stone goddess waits, her hand protruding just so, ready to crack a drunken falling head, something that might explain his injury. The water is strewn with rose petals, plucked off by the rain, that will tuck over his body like a thick pink blanket. We wait, hanging on to our old selves a little longer. Then Flora nods, and the nod travels from one of us to the other like a parcel of light, a binding acknowledgment of a sisterhood that is bigger than Harry, lust, love, or marriage, a loyalty that rides above all others. In the end, it doesn’t matter who does it—Flora first, a firm hand in the small of his back, then Pam, a second later, harder, with her foot—since we all watch him sink beneath the surface, the back of his shirt bulging with air, like a lung holding on to its last breath. We lean forward, peering through a gap in the

An indistinct cacophony blanketed the area like fog: people shouting into mobile phones, street-stall hawkers exhorting potential customers, cars and horns and jackhammers. A couple of pigeons soared from one rooftop to another, flapping their wings in seeming laughter at the seething mass below.

I’ve had one rather insistent fantasy over the course of this beautiful Maine afternoon,” he said, hearing the rough edge come back into his voice, his hunger for her making his mouth go as dry as Cameroo in April. Her lips curved upward, and that gleaming light flickered to life in her eyes. “Does it involve pillaging?” “Aye,” he said, a bit of the pirate back in his voice. Het let the blanket slide from his fingers, then put his palms on her hips, wrapping his fingers around her so the tips pressed gently into the firm curve at the top end of her bum. His thumbs rubbed over her hip bones, pressing against the tight wrap of her dress. He felt a little shudder go through her and had to dig deep for what little restraint he had left. He kept his gaze tipped up and on hers. “I stood by the rail as you steered this big beast through that maze of bobbing boats in the harbor and imagined what it would be like if I walked over to stand behind you, to wrap my hands around your hips.” He did sink his fingertips into her softness a bit then, and was rewarded with a little gasp from her. Her parted lips called to him like a siren, but he remained where he was. “I wanted to slide them up, cup your breasts, find out if they’d fit as perfectly in my hands as I’ve imagined.” His actions mirrored his words, and he felt her intake of breath as he slid his palms up, over her rib cage. She didn’t stop him, and his gaze shifted to his hands as he slowly circled her breasts, all pushed up and bound tightly within her dress…and, indeed, perfectly shaped for his hands. Her body twitched under his hands as he rain his palms up and over her nipples, and she let out a little moan. He could feel them grow harder, pushing at the silky, gathered fabric, pushing against his hands. “I wanted to slide my fingertips under the top edge, here,” he said, curling his fingers until they slid under the inside edge of her bodice, “and tug it down, slowly, so the soft, silky fabric would rub over your nipples, making them stand up, full and pink and hard, just for me.” She took a swift intake of breath as he began to do what he’d described. He kept his attention focused solely on what he was doing, wondering why in the hell he thought torturing himself further was a good idea. By the time he got rid of her clothes, he might not be able to get his own off, or ever father children, but then he glanced up, saw her eyes were lit like the fire of glittering emeralds, but decided he’d gnaw his clothes off if necessary.

mother was under virtual sentence of death, and Vicky flew to the bedside and knelt beside her. ‘Oh, Mama,’ she whispered, stricken with guilt. ‘I should have been here.’ Juba heated rounded river stones in the open fire and wrapped them in blankets. They packed them around Robyn’s body, and then covered her with four karosses of wild fur. She fought weakly to throw off the covers, but Mungo held her down. Despite the internal heat of the fever and the external temperature of the hot stones trapped under the furs, her skin was burning dry and her eyes had the flat blind glitter of water-worn rock crystal. Then as the sun touched the tree-tops and the light in the room turned to sombre orange, the fever broke and oozed from the pores of her marble pale skin like the juice of crushed sugar cane from the press. The sweat came up in fat shining beads across her forehead and chin, each drop joining with the others until they ran in thick oily snakes back into her hair, soaking it as though she had been held under water. It ran into her eyes, faster than Mungo could wipe it away. It poured down her neck and wetted and matted the fur of the kaross. It soaked through the thin mattress and pattered like rain on the hard dry floor below. The temperature of her body plunged dramatically, and when the sweat had passed, Juba and the twins sponged her naked body. She had dehydrated and wasted, so that the rack of her ribs stood out starkly, and her pelvis formed a bony hollowed basin. They handled her with exaggerated care, for any rough movement might rupture the delicate damaged walls of the renal blood vessels and bring on the torrential haemorrhage which so often ended this disease. When

Up in the thickets and caverns of the mountains, night falls as a thick wool blanket over everything. Mountain dark is sweet. Breezes blow with a clean smell, especially when there’s rain on the way. The forests release an organic smell of life, new sprouts of sassafras and privet, flowering laurel, and the damp layers of leaves and fallen logs, mushrooms sprinkled across their tops like freckles on a young girl’s nose. The trees sway above, their leaves rustling and dancing in the summer, pine needles and the evergreen cedars swishing when it’s cold.

Sitting in the courtyard, I watch the woman sweeping. I luxuriate in the sound of the bristles of her besom against the ground. She sweeps in an invisible pattern only she understands. I study her hands. They are blackened with chimney dust— not unlike the soft dust she’s now sweeping. It rises in a cloud above her, which makes me wonder: Where does it come from? The dust on our overworked hands and travelled shoes. The dust we inhale and cough into our handkerchiefs. The house dust, the road dust, the concrete dust, and cosmic dust. Where are they born? Perhaps they come from our aged bodies. We shed our skins like we shed our beauty— not all at once. And we walk freely on this blanket of dust without paying any mind to our ancestors, though we walk on them! Tread softly, for you tread on Yeats’s wrists and Poe’s elbows. You tread on van Gogh’s ears and Keller’s eyes. You breathe in your grandfather’s lover and the little girl you were when you were four. You smell them after the first rain in a long dry spell, or when an old lamp smoulders the bulb quite well. These all serve as reminders of our dusty secret: we are all dust under dust under dust. So next time it settles, remember to ask the dust!

You want thirst so that you can enjoy beverages. You want winter so that you can enjoy blankets. You want rain so that you can enjoy being protected by the solid roof. You want villains so that you can feel protected by your heroes.

Could we go somewhere that's inside and not raining?" she asked. She kissed him again and tasted espresso. "I have a place like that in mind." He gently pulled her hair as she bit his lower lip. "And I have an idea of how to warm you up." She rubbed her thumb against the back of his neck. "Don't tell me you have those nifty hand warmers." His hands spread across her rain-soaked back, and then slid down, down, down until they rested at the curve of her ass. "What I have in mind will warm up more than just your hands," she eventually said. "A heated blanket? I do love those.