Candles Smell Quotes

I found the candles—atrocious air freshening ones that smelled like fake pine.

Way out in the country tonight he could smell the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the triangle eye and the singeing candle.

The holiday village had sprung up in Bryant Park, and the ice rink and booths were bustling with early Christmas shoppers. It smelled like fried food and scented candles, mixed with the occasional blast of diesel from the traffic inching along 42nd Street. When I think of how New York City smells, this is it.

When you smell our candles burning, what does it make you think of, my child?" Winterfell, she might have said. I smell snow and smoke and pine needles. I smell the stables. I smell Hodor laughing, and Jon and Robb battling in the yard, and Sansa singing about some stupid lady fair. I smell the crypts where the stone kings sit. I smell hot bread baking. I smell the godswood. I smell my wolf. I smell her fur, almost as if she were still beside me. "I don't smell anything," she said.

What did the candles smell like?” she asked. Was she kidding me? “Like Eau du Zombie. I don't know.

Dad had once said, Trust your mind, Rob. If it smells like shit but has writing across it that says Happy Birthday and a candle stuck down in it, what is it? Is there icing on it? he'd said. Dad had done that thing of squinting his eyes when an answer was not quite there yet.

It's so easy to wish for death when nothing's wrong with you! It's so easy to fall in love with death, and I've been all my life, and seen it's most faithful worshippers crumble in the end, screaming just to live, as if all the dark veils and the lillies and the smell of candles, and grandiose promises of the grave meant nothing. I knew that. But I always wished I was dead. It was a way to go on living

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. Bubbly, thick, stagnant sound. A sound you could smell. This man worked for the carnival,you dig? And to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. After a while, the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared... and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teethlike... little raspy incurving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it... but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street... shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags. Nobody loved it. And it wanted to be kissed, same as any other mouth. Finally, it talked all the time, day and night. You could hear him for blocks, screaming at it to shut up... beating at it with his fists... and sticking candles up it, but... nothing did any good, and the asshole said to him... "It is you who will shut up in the end, not me... "because we don't need you around here anymore. I can talk and eat and shit." After that, he began waking up in the morning with transparentjelly... like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands... like burning gasoline jelly and grow there. So, finally, his mouth sealed over... and the whole head... would have amputated spontaneously except for the eyes, you dig? That's the one thing that the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. Nerve connections were blocked... and infiltrated and atrophied. So, the brain couldn't give orders anymore. It was trapped inside the skull... sealed off. For a while, you could see... the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes. And then finally the brain must have died... because the eyes went out... and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye at the end of a stalk.

I KNEW IT WAS OVER when tonight you couldn't make the phone ring when you used to make the sun rise when trees used to throw themselves in front of you to be paper for love letters that was how i knew i had to do it swaddle the kids we never had against january's cold slice bundle them in winter clothes they never needed so i could drop them off at my mom's even though she lives on the other side of the country and at this late west coast hour is assuredly east coast sleeping peacefully her house was lit like a candle the way homes should be warm and golden and home and the kids ran in and jumped at the bichon frise named lucky that she never had they hugged the dog it wriggled and the kids were happy yours and mine the ones we never had and my mom was grand maternal, which is to say, with style that only comes when you've seen enough to know grace like when to pretend it's christmas or a birthday so she lit her voice with tiny lights and pretended she didn't see me crying as i drove away to the hotel connected to the bar where i ordered the cheapest whisky they had just because it shares your first name because they don't make a whisky called baby and i only thought what i got was what i ordered i toasted the hangover inevitable as sun that used to rise in your name i toasted the carnivals we never went to and the things you never won for me the ferris wheels we never kissed on and all the dreams between us that sat there like balloons on a carney's board waiting to explode with passion but slowly deflated hung slave under the pin- prick of a tack hung heads down like lovers when it doesn't work, like me at last call after too many cheap too many sweet too much whisky makes me sick, like the smell of cheap, like the smell of the dead like the cheap, dead flowers you never sent that i never threw out of the window of a car i never really owned

... the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker.

She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she slap breathes in light.

A heavy smell of sour wine, candles and overripe fruit hung in the air. And something else, that bought to mind a mixture of the scents of lilac and gooseberries.

The holiday village had sprung up in Bryant Park, and the ice rink and booths were bustling with early Christmas shoppers. It smelled like fried food and scented candles, mixed with the occasional blast of diesel from the traffic inching along 42nd Street. When I think of how New York City smells, this is it.

Leaning over the table, I close my eyes, take in a breath, and make my usual wish Let tomorrow be better than today. And I blow, almost instantly smelling the pungent stream of smoke curling into the air from the extinguished wick. It’s always the same wish. Every candle. Every time. I want a life I never want to take a vacation from. That’s my goal.

Abby took the box, and then tugged on my hand until we were in the entryway. It smelled like a combination of cleaner, candles, and kids. It smelled like home.

since I started the Saint Remi Auxiliary for the orphanage. The other auxiliary ladies babble on about Louis—how steadfast, gentle, and loyal he was, never once mentioning his failing wool and wine business. I’ve given them all Etiquette for Ladies. Their words drift to the ceiling with the candle smoke, as my fingers examine the gift Louis gave me last year for my thirty-ninth birthday. I’d hoped for canvas and paints, but he gave me a chatelaine. “Everything you ever need hanging from your belt.” He’d demonstrated each item with such pride, I hid my disappointment. “Thimble, watch, scissors, and measuring tape for your needlework, a funnel for your oils, a pencil, a pantry key, a wax letter seal, and a vial of smelling salts. Uncorking the

found my candle-end and had just knelt down by Heloïse’s basket to have a few words with her (she had a particularly nice warm-clean-dog smell after being asleep)

He smells like birthday-candle wishes.

Every meal contains some hint of pumpkin spice. If I’m not ingesting pumpkin, I’m breathing it in like an addict, lining every available surface of my home with candles that smell like food. Apple pie, pumpkin pie, pumpkin spice, apple pumpkin.

You know, I’ve got 1,000 candles in a closet in my home in Atlanta, and I suppose that is excessive. But I’ll tell you what: it’s the best-smelling closet you’ve ever been in in your life.

Morally Grey, Enemies to Lovers, Grumpy-slash-Sunshine,’ he read off the other candle labels. ‘Slow Burn, at least that one makes sense for a candle.’ He set the last candle down and found Kira laughing at him. ‘Here, this one suits you best,’ she said, handing him a candle with Cinnamon Roll written on the side. He sniffed it. ‘Smells good. Still don’t get what any of that means, though.

She sits and listens with crossed legs under the batik house-wrap she wears, with her heavy three-way-piled hair and cigarette at her mouth and refuses me - for the time being, anyway - the most important things I ask of her. It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, and from the bath she called out to me, "Darling, please bring me a towel." I took one of those towel robes that I had bought at the Bon Marche' department store and came along with it. The little bathroom was in twilight. In the auffe-eua machine, the brass box with teeth of gas burning, the green metal dropped crumbs inside from the thousand-candle blaze. Her body with its warm woman's smell was covered with water starting in a calm line over her breasts. The glass of the medicine chest shone (like a deep blue place in the wall, as if a window to the evening sea and not the ashy fog of Paris. I sat down with the robe over my; shoulder and felt very much at peace. For a change the apartment seemed clean and was warm; the abominations were gone into the background, the stoves drew well and they shone. Jacqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.

Like an abandoned dog who cannot find a smell or a track and roams along the roads, with no road, like the child who in a night of the fair gets lost among the crowd, and the air is dusty, and the candles fluttering,--astounded, his heart weighed down by music and by pain; that’s how I am, drunk, sad by nature, a mad and lunar guitarist, a poet, and an ordinary man lost in dreams, searching constantly for God among the mists.

AUTUMN NIGHTS A crispy, cozy night on my wooden porch, Rustling leaves under my feet, Pinecones and pumpkin lights everywhere, A soft wool blanket in my chair, The smell of warm apple spiced candles, What a delight! I'm really falling for this October night.

What smells good may not always taste good, I leaned this the day I tried to eat a scented candle.

I recently found a diary entry from college in which I described my classmates as 'a herd of mouth-breathing fucktard yokels who wade around in a miasma of cliché so thick you can practically smell the bacon and cabbage and cow shite and altar candles.' Even assuming I was having a bad day, I think this shows a certain lack of respect for cultural differences.

I found myself wondering what it would be like to have enough money to be able to hire someone to clean my house. I’d never been in that position before, and I honestly doubted I ever would be. If I ever had to, I thought, I’d give them a big tip and probably offer them food or leave them good-smelling candles, too. I’d treat them like a guest, not a ghost. An equal.

I pass by cottages with candles glowing in windows, rocking chairs on front porches where people sit with large books on their laps drinking steaming cups of golden milk or tea that smells of chamomile and night jasmine. The entire place feels like a storybook, an old world frozen in time.

The look he gives me makes me wonder if I’m in trouble. “I thought you were going out.” “I wanted to come back and say I’m sorry,” I tell him, and I put my arms around his waist and hug. “You shut the door in a way that made me sad, and I wanted to tell you that I’m going to do better.” “Do better at what? How’d I shut the door?” His other arm wraps around my shoulders. He crosses his feet behind my heels, and now his entire body is hugging me. Warm, soft, hard. I thought my mattress was heaven, but that’s before I laid myself on this person. How am I going to ever peel myself off? I inhale his birthday-candle pheromones. I want to know what his goddamn bones smell like. Let me start down in his DNA structure and work my way back out. I speak into his muscles. “You shut the door like you’ve just accepted that I don’t come back. I’m going to start being like you. Completely, one hundred percent honest.” I hover on the precipice and decide to try. “This is the best hug of my life.

I lit the candles and said out loud, “what am I waiting on? Someone to sell them in a garage sale for a quarter after I die?” And it was beautiful. And the smell was even more incredible than I remembered.

To lose such a love, is to smell the last scent of a candle before it is blown out. Such a love does not need to be relit or rekindled. It will find itself, in new days and new moments. And so, don't raise an anxious hand to relight what has already gone out. In those moments alone in the dark, you will hear the sound of your heart, pounding so hard that by its very own will, it will create a spark. Follow that light, follow that love, because that love is going to lead you within, to the true foundation of love.

We face each other, two candles flickering. Sami's sweat smells of chamomile and musk. When we dance, I am a bird shaking loose the night from its wings. I kiss him, my hand behind his jaw, his hands in my hair. He gasps into my mouth and goes soft as water, our bodies molten glass that I am shaping with my kiss, and I wonder if it's true that there is nothing on this earth that is not born of the sweet ache of flame.

I would hate to see the state of my house if I had displeased Amelia under my roof. The servents would revolt. No doubt I'd have gruel for dinner, holes in my shirts, and the most foul-smelling tallow candles they could find.

I lit a candle in a Catholic church for the first time that afternoon. Me, a Presbyterian. I lit a candle in the warm, dark, waxy-smelling air of Saint Adelbert’s. I put it beside the one that Mrs. Baker lit. I don’t know what she prayed for, but I prayed that no atomic bomb would ever drop on Camillo Junior High or the Quaker meetinghouse or the old jail or Temple Emmanuel or Hicks Park or Saint Paul’s Episcopal School or Saint Adelbert’s. I prayed for Lieutenant Baker, missing in action somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam near Khesanh. I prayed for Danny Hupfer, sweating it out in Hebrew school right then. I prayed for my sister, driving in a yellow bug toward California—or maybe she was there already, trying to find herself. And I hoped that it was okay to pray for a bunch of things with one candle.

James was sixteen, Cam seventeen, perhaps. She had looked round for someone who was not there, for Mrs. Ramsay, presumably. But there was only kind Mrs. Beckwith turning over her sketches under the lamp. Then, being tired, her mind still rising and falling with the sea, the taste and smell that places have after long absence possessing her, the candles wavering in her eyes, she had lost herself and gone under. It was a wonderful night, starlit; the waves sounded as they went upstairs; the moon surprised them, enormous, pale, as they passed the staircase window. She had slept at once.

His sister Kat, her husband, Morgan Williams, have been plucked from this life as fast as his daughters were taken, one day walking and talking and next day cold as stones, tumbled into their Thames-side graves and dug in beyond reach of the tide, beyond sight and smell of the river; deaf now to the sound of Putney's cracked church bell, to the smell of wet ink, of hops, of malted barley, and the scent, still animal, of woolen bales; dead to the autumn aroma of pine resin and apple candles, of soul cakes baking.

Valetta," he said, thinking she still looked good, then abandoning his Spidey sense long enough to let her take him in her arms, the skin of her bare shoulder in a halter top cool against his shoulder, the lady most definitely giving off that heavy 1978 Spencer's smell of love candles and sandlewood incense but, laid over top of it, the stink of cigarette, the instant-potatoes smell you might find in the interior of a beat-to-shit Toronado. "Damn.

The late nights binge-watching The X-Files on the couch they picked out together, the early mornings making toast while they’re still too tired to speak, the kids who will earn their first scars in the backyard and badly practice instruments at inconvenient times, and the way their favorite candle’s scent will gradually infuse the walls so that every time they come back from a trip, exhausted, and dump their bags inside the door, they’ll smell that they’re where they belong. All those moments throughout the days, weeks, months that don’t get marked on calendars with hand-drawn stars or little stickers. Those are the moments that make a life.

[Patricia Highsmith] was an extremely unbalanced person, extremely hostile and misanthropic and totally incapable of any kind of relationship, not just intimate ones. I felt sorry for her, because it wasn't her fault. There was something in her early days or whatever that made her incapable. She drove everybody away and people who really wanted to be friends ended up putting the phone down on her. It seemed to me as if she had to ape feelings and behaviour, like Ripley. Of course sometimes having no sense of social behaviour can be charming, but in her case it was alarming. I remember once, when she was trying to have a dinner party with people she barely knew, she deliberately leaned towards the candle on the table and set fire to her hair. People didn't know what to do as it was a very hostile act and the smell of singeing and burning filled the room.

A predator’s intention…… It is my intention to cause you fear such as you have never known. It is my desire to take your fear to a whole new level of terror. I can smell your fear as its sweet scent flows through my universe. This small universe that I have created and am permitting you to exist in. I say these things because you only exist right now because I have allowed it, for if I should choose, I could snuff you out as if extinguishing a candle flame. I will make you thank me later for allowing you to breathe. I will mix you a concoction of fear, pain, uncertainty, and arousal, such as you have never known. You see my curious little prey these all create very similar physical reactions. My little prey… they have common traits on the emotional side too. Curious prey, curious prey, let me growl my intentions into your curious ear. I will keep you in a constant state of fear, pain, uncertainty, and arousal. I know exactly what I am doing; I am a skilled and professional predator. It is my full intention to own you! I will keep you in a constant emotional whirlpool. This is the universe of my making, and you exist in it by my power, and by my choice. I want you in a constant state of fear, physical discomfort, pain, uncertainty, and arousal. I am purposely blurring the lines between your emotions, and your physical sensations. As I do this… I am creating a desire and a craving within you to be man handled and taken by me. I am intentionally working you into a state of intense arousal, and desperation. I am conditioning you to crave your new life as my prey…

Private moments held not a candle to coitus, not even the expensive kind of candle that made the whole room smell of far off seasons.

Always stop to smell the roses. If there are no roses available, scented candle should work.

A candle that smells like asshole would be an instant hit in prison.

She didn’t want to smell Yankee Candle and carpet cleaner and dust anymore.

As for describing the smell of a spaniel mixed with the smell of torches, laurels, incense, banners, wax candles and a garland of rose leaves crushed by a satin heel that has been laid up in camphor, perhaps Shakespeare, had he paused in the middle of writing Antony and Cleopatra — But Shakespeare did not pause. Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. Love, it must be supposed, was gradually losing its appeal. Smell remained. Now that they were established in Casa Guidi again, all had their avocations. Mr. Browning wrote regularly in one room; Mrs. Browning wrote regularly in another. The baby played in the nursery. But Flush wandered off into the streets of Florence to enjoy the rapture of smell. He threaded his path through main streets and back streets, through squares and alleys, by smell. He nosed his way from smell to smell; the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden. He went in and out, up and down, where they beat brass, where they bake bread, where the women sit combing their hair, where the bird-cages are piled high on the causeway, where the wine spills itself in dark red stains on the pavement, where leather smells and harness and garlic, where cloth is beaten, where vine leaves tremble, where men sit and drink and spit and dice — he ran in and out, always with his nose to the ground, drinking in the essence; or with his nose in the air vibrating with the aroma. He slept in this hot patch of sun — how sun made the stone reek! he sought that tunnel of shade — how acid shade made the stone smell! He devoured whole bunches of ripe grapes largely because of their purple smell; he chewed and spat out whatever tough relic of goat or macaroni the Italian housewife had thrown from the balcony — goat and macaroni were raucous smells, crimson smells. He followed the swooning sweetness of incense into the violet intricacies of dark cathedrals; and, sniffing, tried to lap the gold on the window- stained tomb. Nor was his sense of touch much less acute. He knew Florence in its marmoreal smoothness and in its gritty and cobbled roughness. Hoary folds of drapery, smooth fingers and feet of stone received the lick of his tongue, the quiver of his shivering snout. Upon the infinitely sensitive pads of his feet he took the clear stamp of proud Latin inscriptions. In short, he knew Florence as no human being has ever known it; as Ruskin never knew it or George Eliot either.

It smelled like sugar cookies as he walked through the door, though it was anyone's guess whether actual cookies were involved or if it was just candles made of lies and disappointment.

In Greek mythology, the goddess Iris sped messages to the gods on the rainbow's arc. Her flower bears no perfume, but steam distillation of the root, or rhizome, yields orris, a precious essence that smells of candle wax, but its impression in perfume is powdery, silvery green, violet-like- a prize of the perfumer's palette. How I wish I could summon the goddess to carry my message to those I love. -DB

Do you mark how the wisteria, sun-impacted on this wall here, distills and penetrates this room as though (light-unimpeded) by secret and attritive progress from mote to mote of obscurity's myriad components? That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.—See how the sleeping outflung hand, touching the bedside candle, remembers pain, springs back and free while mind and brain sleep on and only make of this adjacent heat some trashy myth or reality's escape: or that same sleeping hand, in sensuous marriage with some dulcet surface, is transformed by that same sleeping brain and mind into that same figment-stuff warped out of all experience. Ay, grief goes, fades; we know that—but ask the tear ducts if they have forgotten how to weep

She stands alone in Madame Manec’s room and smells peppermint, candle wax, six decades of loyalty. Housemaid, nurse, mother, confederate, counselor, chef—what ten thousand things was Madame Manec to Etienne?

But, imagining Scott’s nights here, I populated the emptiness. This had been one of his places and some small part of his spirit had been left here. Holding my own brief séance for my brother, I conjured vivid faces and loud nights. I saw that smile of his, sudden as a sunray, when he loved what you were saying. I saw the strained expression when he felt you must agree with him and couldn’t get you to see that. I caught the way the laughter would light up his eyes when he was trying to suppress it. I heard the laughing when it broke. He must have had some nights here. He had lived with such intensity. The thought was my funeral for him. Who needed possessions and career and official achievements? Life was only in the living of it. How you act and what you are and what you do and how you be were the only substance. They didn’t last either. But while you were here, they made what light there was – the wick that threads the candle-grease of time. His light was out but here I felt I could almost smell the smoke still drifting from its snuffing.

It didn’t matter where you put your unconditional love, once given, the stealing away of it was an assault to every sense. Smells were the worst—they could ambush you, put you smack back in the middle of the hottest part of the grief. The scent of a peaches-and-cream candle. The brand of deodorant she’d used. Her pillow back home. The smell of the bookstore in the evening, when I’d believed Barrons was dead. When you love too hard, you can lose the will to live without them. Everywhere you look is a great big sucking absence of what you once had and will never have again. And life gets weirdly flat and too sharp and painful at the same time, and nothing feels right and everything cuts.

Aren't you cold" Zulfikar shrugs off the plain black shawl he had around his shoulders and wraps it around Fatima Ghazala. "It smells like you," she says, drawing it close around her. "I didn't need that observation," Zulfikar mutters.

And then, suddenly, he is too close, the air between them snuffed like a candle. He smells of summer nights, of earth, and moss, and tall grass waving beneath stars. And of something darker. Of blood on rocks, and wolves loose in the woods.

There are several attitudes towards Christmas, Some of which we may disregard: The social, the torpid, the patently commercial, The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight), And the childish — which is not that of the child For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree Is not only a decoration, but an angel. The child wonders at the Christmas Tree: Let him continue in the spirit of wonder At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext; So that the glittering rapture, the amazement Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree, So that the surprises, delight in new possessions (Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell), The expectation of the goose or turkey And the expected awe on its appearance, So that the reverence and the gaiety May not be forgotten in later experience, In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium, The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure, Or in the piety of the convert Which may be tainted with a self-conceit Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children (And here I remember also with gratitude St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire): So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas (By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last) The accumulated memories of annual emotion May be concentrated into a great joy Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion When fear came upon every soul: Because the beginning shall remind us of the end And the first coming of the second coming.

Around three a.m. he feels a presence in the room. He sees, for the pulse of a moment, a figure at the foot of his bed, against the wall or painted onto it perhaps, not quite discernible in the darkness of foliage beyond the candlelight. He mutters something, something he had wanted to say, but there is silence and the slight brown figure, which could be just a night shadow, does not move. A poplar. A man with plumes. A swimming figure. And he would not be so lucky, he thinks, to speak to the young sapper again. He stays awake in any case this night, to see if the figure moves towards him. Ignoring the tablet that brings painlessness, he will remain awake till the light dies out and the smell of candle smoke drifts into his room and into the girl's room farther down the hall. If the figure turns around there will be paint on his back, where he slammed in grief against the mural of trees. When the candle dies out he will be able to see this. His hand reaches out slowly and touches his book and returns to his dark chest. Nothing else moves in the room. [298]

I remembered all the Christmases we’d celebrated, always with a huge tree, situated next to the staircase where I now sat. As a child, I’d sat upon that same step, huddled up against the balus- ters, studying the tree, its shape and decorations; enthralled by the magical light and shadows upon the walls around me. Dancing. Over Christmas the only light in the hallway had come from the silver candelabra burning on the hallway table. But on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day night small candles were attached to the branches of the tree, their soft light reflected in the vast chande- lier suspended high above and thrown back across the walls like stars across the universe. I remembered the smell, that mingling of pine and wax and burning logs: the smell of home, the smell of happiness. I’d sat there in my nightgown, listening to the chime of crystal; the laughter, music and voices emanating from another room, an adult world I could only imagine. And always hoping for a glimpse of Mama, as she whooshed across the marble floor, beautiful, resplendent . . . invincible.

They lit candles on the table, all while the apple tree shook and blossoms continued to fall. When the petals hit the flames of the candles, they hissed and popped into ash, leaving behind a scent that was so beautiful and sweet that it smelled like both yesterday and tomorrow.

But there's always time for hot chocolate, made with milk and grated nutmeg, vanilla, chili, brown sugar, cardamom, and 70 percent couverture chocolate- the only chocolate worth buying, she says- and it tastes rich and just slightly bitter on the back of the tongue, like caramel as it begins to turn. The chili gives it a touch of heat- never too much, just a taste- and the spices give it that churchy smell that reminds me of Lansquenet somehow, and of nights above the chocolate shop, just Maman and me, with Pantoufle sitting to one side and candles burning on the orange-box table.

But finally, when they stopped to sleep, not bothering with a tent, just bedding down in a hollow they’d trampled in the tall grass with their boots, Arin spoke. He slid a hand under her tunic to touch her bare back, then stopped. “Is this all right?” She wanted to explain that she hadn’t thought she’d ever bear anyone’s touch on her scarred back, that it should revolt him and revolt her. Yet his touch made her feel soft and new. “Yes.” He pushed the shirt up, seeking the lash marks, tracing their length. She let herself feel it, and shivered, and thought of nothing. But a tension grew. He was still, but for his hand. Kestrel said, “What’s wrong?” “Your life would have been easier if you had married the Valorian prince.” She drew herself up so that she could face him. The scent of black powder clung to them both. His skin smelled like a blown-out candle. “But not better,” she said.

You whining coward of a vampire who prowls the night killing alley cats and rats and staring for hours at candles as if they were people and standing in the rain like a zombie until your clothes are drenched and you smell like old wardrobe trunks in attics and have the look of a baffled idiot at the zoo.

It’s so easy to wish for death when nothing’s wrong with you! It’s so easy to fall in love with death, and I’ve been all my life, and seen its most faithful worshipers crumble in the end, screaming just to live, as if all the dark veils and the lilies and the smell of candles, and grandiose promises of the grave, meant nothing.

It had been three days since she’d left him alone in his home, having destroyed it with the specter of her presence. He couldn’t do anything in the house—not eat or bathe or light a fucking candle—without thinking of her. Without reliving her, smelling like almond cakes and looking like sin. So, he hadn’t gone home in three days.

You don’t concern yourself much with being liked, do you?” Tristan asked, half amused. No, I don’t.” He was doubtful that Tristan would be capable of understanding that, but the sensation of being liked was extraordinarily dull. It was the closest thing to vanilla that Callum could think of, though nothing was truly comparable. Being feared was a bit like anise, like absinthe. A strange and arousing flavor. Being admired was golden, maple-sweet. Being despised was woodsy, sulfuric aroma, smoke in his nostrils, something to choke on, when done properly. Being envied was tart, a citrusy tang, like green apple. Being desired was Callum’s favorite. That was smoky, too, in a sense, but more sultry, cloaked and perfumed in precisely what it was. It smelled like tangled bedsheets. It tasted like a flicker of a candle flame. It felt like a sigh, a quiet one; concessionary and pleading. He could always feel it on his skin, sharp as a blade. Piercing, like the groan of a lover in his ear. “Being liked is fairly ordinary, I’m afraid,” Callum said. “Intensely commonplace.

She's probably just tired of seeing you miserable.Like we all are," I add. "I'm sure...I'm sure she's as crazy about you as ever." "Hmm." He watches me put away my own shoes and empty the contents of my pockets. "What about you?" he asks, after a minute. "What about me?" St. Clair examines his watch. "Sideburns. You'll be seeing him next month." He's reestablishing...what? The boundary line? That he's taken, and I'm spoken for? Except I'm not. Not really. But I can't bear to say this now that he's mentioned Ellie. "Yeah,I can't wait to see him again. He's a funny guy, you'd like him.I'm gonna see his band play at Christmas. Toph's a great guy, you'd really like him. Oh. I already said that,didn't I? But you would. He's really...funny." Shut up,Anna. Shut.Up. St. Clair unbuckles and rebuckles and unbuckles his watchband. "I'm beat," I say. And it's the truth. As always, our conversation has exhausted me. I crawl into bed and wonder what he'll do.Lie on my floor? Go back to his room? But he places his watch on my desk and climbs onto my bed. He slides up next to me. He's on top of the covers, and I'm underneath. We're still fully dressed,minus our shoes, and the whole situation is beyond awkward. He hops up.I'm sure he's about to leave,and I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed,but...he flips off my light.My room is pitch-black. He shuffles back toward my bed and smacks into it. "Oof," he says. "Hey,there's a bed there." "Thanks for the warning." "No problem." "It's freezing in here.Do you have a fan on or something?" "It's the wind.My window won't shut all the way.I have a towel stuffed under it, but it doesn't really help." He pats his way around the bed and slides back in. "Ow," he says. "Yes?" "My belt.Would it be weird..." I'm thankful he can't see my blush. "Of course not." And I listen to the slap of leather as he pulls it out of his belt loops.He lays it gently on my hardwood floor. "Um," he says. "Would it be weird-" "Yes." "Oh,piss off.I'm not talking trousers. I only want under the blankets. That breeze is horrible." He slides underneath,and now we're lying side by side. In my narrow bed. Funny,but I never imagined my first sleepover with a guy being,well,a sleepover. "All we need now are Sixteen Candles and a game of Truth or Dare." He coughs. "Wh-what?" "The movie,pervert.I was just thinking it's been a while since I've had a sleepover." A pause. "Oh." "..." "..." "St. Clair?" "Yeah?" "Your elbow is murdering my back." "Bollocks.Sorry." He shifts,and then shifts again,and then again,until we're comfortable.One of his legs rests against mine.Despite the two layers of pants between us,I feel naked and vulnerable. He shifts again and now my entire leg, from calf to thigh, rests against his. I smell his hair. Mmm. NO! I swallow,and it's so loud.He coughs again. I'm trying not to squirm. After what feels like hours but is surely only minutes,his breath slows and his body relaxes.I finally begin to relax, too. I want to memorize his scent and the touch of his skin-one of his arms, now against mine-and the solidness os his body.No matter what happens,I'll remember this for the rest of my life. I study his profile.His lips,his nose, his eyelashes.He's so beautiful.

More ideas surged through her head in one quarter of an hour than she had ever had since she came into the world. “Mamma,” she said, “my cousin will never bear the smell of a tallow candle; suppose we buy a wax one?” And she darted, swift as a bird, to get the five-franc piece which she had just received for her monthly expenses. “Here, Nanon,” she cried, “quick!

Color has little to do with the quality of olive oil, and it offers no clues to whether an olive oil is rancid. Instead, use your nose and palate: does the olive oil smell like a box of crayons, candle wax, or the oil floating on top of an old jar of peanut butter? If so, it’s rancid. The sad truth is that most Americans, accustomed to the taste of rancid olive oil, actually prefer it.

I look into the chocolaterie. It looks warm in there, almost intimate. Candles are burning on the tables; the Advent window is lit with a rose glow. It smells of orange and clove from the pomander hanging above the door; of pine from the tree; of the mulled wine that we are serving alongside our spiced hot chocolate; and of fresh gingerbread straight out of the oven. It draws them in- three or four at a time- regulars and strangers and tourists alike. They stop at the window, catch the scent, and in they come, looking a little dazed, perhaps, at the many scents and colors and all their favorites in their little glass boxes- bitter orange cracknel; mendiants du roi; hot chili squares; peach brandy truffle; white chocolate angel; lavender brittle- all whispering inaudibly- Try me. Taste me. Test me.

Pa tugged him onto the grass. Pa rolled him over and he flopped where he was rolled. Pa felt his wrist and listened at his chest and then Pa lay down beside him. “He’s breathing,” Pa said. “He’ll be all right, in the air. I’m all right, Caroline. I’m plumb tuckered out, is all.” “Well!” Ma scolded. “I should think you would be! Of an the senseless performances! My goodness gracious! scaring a body to death, all for the want of a little reasonable care! My goodness! I--” She covered her face with her apron and burst out crying. That was a terrible day. “I don’t want a well,” Ma sobbed. “It isn’t worth it. I won’t have you running such risks!” Mr. Scott had breathed a kind of gas that stays deep in the ground. It stays at the bottom of wells because it is heaver than the air. It cannot be seen or smelled, but no one can breathe it very long and live. Pa had gone down into that gas to tie Mr. Scott to the rope, so that he could be pulled up out of the gas. When Mr. Scott was able, he went home. Before he went he said to Pa: “You were right about that candle business, Ingalls. I thought it was all foolishness and I would not bother with it, but I’ve found out my mistake.” “Well,” said Pa, “where a light can’t live, I know I can’t. And I like to be safe when I can be. But all’s well that ends well.

...it certainly wasn't Cedric's ignorance when he forced her into his bed so she could not back out of their wedding without being publicly ruined. He must have wondered how she had not fallen pregnant yet. Her hand gripped the sachet of herbs tighter, the smell batting up against her memory like a moth singeing itself on a candle. And she wasn't sure if she should thank or curse the gods for oblivious men who needn't be aware such things even existed.

At some point, economists must study the Business Family Wedding Gift Economy. It is an extraordinary, closed bubble. What happens is this: a woman marries into a conservative Indian business family. She may well be energetic and bright, but there’s no place for her at work, nor can she work elsewhere. So, instead, she’s urged to ‘take up something’. Scented candles, usually. Sometimes kurta design. Or necklaces, or faux-Rajasthani coffee tables. She then becomes a ‘success’, because every other woman in the family buys her candles as wedding presents, at hideously inflated prices. In return, she buys their kurtas as wedding presents. Eventually, everyone is buying everyone else’s hideous creations at hideously high prices, and nobody can ever tell anyone else their stuff sucks, and that nobody really likes the smell of lavender anyway. The most amazing thing is, this is not a very different economy from the one their husbands are in.

Then I wanted to take a bath so I ran water into the big sunken tub and poured in some bath salts and lit the candles in the square glass holders around the rim of the tub. There were big windows overlooking the garden. I opened them and smelled the jasmine and the wet earth. There was a little warm breeze and the garden tinkled and chimed like stars falling. I called you. I wanted a refill on my wine. I wanted to give you the jasmine and the wind chime stars. I’m sorry.

Another time, the power cut out and we dug up a headlamp and a few candles from one of the still-unpacked moving boxes. While the storm went on outside, we went round and placed the candles at various guiding points throughout the house. When I lit them in the kitchen, it smelled briefly of birthday cakes. I remember cooking a simple dinner, pulling the skins off the tomatoes in the near darkness, going by feel rather than by sight. Laurie had put the record player on, and danced slowly and achingly in front of the cat, who continued to glower from her cushion on the floor. We could barely see the food on the table, noticing only the shapes and textures of the vegetables in their bowls. I had taken the washing in and sheets were hung and draped over the rack, a ladder, a glass door. Outside, we could hear that the wind was strong, but inside it was still. I remembered thinking, as we ate, how such happiness could come from such simple things." (71)

She stands alone in Madame Manec's room and smells peppermint, candle wax, six decades of loyalty. Housemaid, nurse, mother, confederate, counselor, chef—what ten thousand things was Madame Manec to Etienne? To them all? German sailors sing a drunken song in the street, and a house spider over the stove spins a new web every night, and to Marie-Laure this is a double cruelty; that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.

My mom is having a Scentsy party tomorrow," he said. "The scented-wax thingies? Random. But go on." He laced his fingers together on his lap. "I was thinking... I know how much you love to smell things." I nodded. I could spend hours in a candle store sticking my nose inside every jar. "True. I do love to smell." "Well, instead of going on your suicide mission, you could just come to the party. We could go smell crazy and even sneak a few of my mom's JELL-O shots. Eh?" He poked a finger in my ribs. "Epic, right?

He said, One of the Fathers has told us that joy always depends on pain. Pain is part of joy. We are hungry and then think how we enjoy our food at last. We are thirsty...He stopped suddenly, with his eyes glancing away into the shadows, expecting the cruel laugh that did not come. He said, We deny ourselves so that we can enjoy. You have heard of rich men in the north who eat salted foods, so that they can be thirsty—for what they call the cocktail. Before the marriage, too, there is the long betrothal... Again he stopped. He felt his own unworthiness like a weight at the back of the tongue. There was a smell of hot wax from where a candle drooped in the nocturnal heat; people shifted on the hard floor in the shadows. The smell of unwashed human beings warred with the wax. He cried out stubbornly in a voice of authority, That is why I tell you that heaven is here: this is a part of heaven just as pain is a part of pleasure. He said, Pray that you will suffer more and more and more. Never get tired of suffering. The police watching you, the soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get from the jefe because you are too poor to pay, smallpox and fever, hunger...that is all part of heaven—the preparation. Perhaps without them, who can tell, you wouldn't enjoy heaven so much. Heaven would not be complete. And heaven. What is heaven? Literary phrases form what seemed now to be another life altogether—the strict quiet life of the seminary—became confused on his tongue: the names of precious stones: Jerusalem the Golden. But these people had never seen gold.

The moon is not out yet, but there are stars, and the world that these Delawareans probably take as ordinary or even ugly—the mounds of kelp and sea litter, the hard stonelike sand, the rocks spattered with the candle wax of bird droppings, the smell of rot and life, the waves breaking into applause, and everywhere, everywhere, unstoppable life hidden or crawling or swimming—is, to anybody else (to me), extraordinary, beautiful, exotic, strange. Somewhere in the water, the fish lie listening, arranged like magic daggers in the dark.

Light breaks where no sun shines - 1914-1953 Light breaks where no sun shines; Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart Push in their tides; And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads, The things of light File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones. A candle in the thighs Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age; Where no seed stirs, The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars, Bright as a fig; Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs. Dawn breaks behind the eyes; From poles of skull and toe the windy blood Slides like a sea; Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky Spout to the rod Divining in a smile the oil of tears. Night in the sockets rounds, Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes; Day lights the bone; Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin The winter's robes; The film of spring is hanging from the lids. Light breaks on secret lots, On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain; When logics dies, The secret of the soil grows through the eye, And blood jumps in the sun; Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

The studio was filled with candles. Some Escoffier had brought earlier for their luncheon- they were made from beeswax and filled the air with a sweet caramel scent. The rest were Sarah's. There were exotics such as blood orange oil, frankincense and myrrh. The flowers he had picked- roses, peonies and a spray of lilies- opened into full blossom under the heat of so many flames and joined the heady mix. Like dozens of tiny flickering stars, the candles and their scents made the dark night seem even darker, made the cream of her skin seem incandescent.

What could you give me," I ask, my voice shaking, "To make me forget . . . that you forgot about me?" My mother hesitates for a moment, and then walks stiffly to her shelves. She pulls down three containers and a glass missing bowl. She opens the seals. I smell nutmeg, summertime, a distillation of hope. But she does not mix me a poultice or make a roux for me to swallow. She doesn't wrap my wrists with green silk or tell me to blow out three squat candles. Instead, she comes hesitantly around her workbench. She folds me into her arms, even as I tire to break free. She refuses to let go, the whole time that I cry.

When I arrived in the stables, he startled me from behind the door. Without a word, he grabbed me up in his arms and carried me into the loft. There he had lit a dozen candles, and strewn rose petals and blankets over a bed of sweet-smelling hay.” “A dozen lit candles in a stable full of dry hay? You’re lucky you survived the experience, sweetheart. You could have been tinder.” Sophia raised her eyebrows and stiffened her posture. “Our love was an inferno. I thought I would go up in flames, so glorious was our pleasure that night.” He covered his eyes with a hand and laughed, loud and long. “What a vivid romantic imagination you have.

Everything at St. Agnes was comforting to Ronan. The presence of his wiry father, with his smell of lemon and boxwood. His mother entertaining Matthew by subtly casting shadow animals with her hands on the pew before them. Declan reading the bulletin with his eyebrows furrowed as if he very much disagreed with the way they were running things but needed to know anyway. God. Ronan always felt the presence of a god, capital G, when he was in church, but especially on rainy days like this, when the church was hushed and dim, all the stained-glass horrors in the windows dulled to dark gems, the interior lights shimmering and dreamy behind the incense and candle smoke.

During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about whalers. The title was, “Dan Coopman,” wherefore I concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one “Fitz Swackhammer.” But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and St. Pott’s, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for his trouble ... (Chapter 101: The Decanter)

When the card came back you couldn't have found any red on it with a microscope. The pitchman handed down a ponderous mohair Teddybear and Ballard slapped down three dimes again. When he had won two bears and a tiger and a small audience the pitchman took the rifle away from him. That's it for you, buddy, he hissed. You never said nothin about how many times you could win. Step right up, sang the barker. Who's next now. Three big grand prizes per person is the house limit. Who's our next big winner. Ballard loaded up his bears and the tiger and started off through the crowd. They lord look at what all he's won, said a woman. Ballard smiled tightly. Young girls' faces floated past, bland and smooth as cream. Some eyed his toys. The crowd was moving toward the edge of a field and assembling there, Ballard among them, a sea of country people watching into the dark for some midnight contest to begin. A light sputtered off in the field and a blue tailed rocket went skittering toward Canis Major. High above their upturned faces it burst, sprays of lit glycerine flaring across the night, trailing down the sky in loosely falling ribbons of hot spectra soon. burnt to naught. Another went up, a long whishing sound, fishtailing aloft. In the bloom of its opening you could see like its shadow the image of the rocket gone before, the puff of black smoke and ashen trails arcing out and down like a huge and dark medusa squatting in the sky. In the bloom of light too you could see two men out in the field crouched over their crate of fireworks like assassins or bridge blowers. And you could see among the faces a young girl with candy apple on her lips and her eyes wide. Her pale hair smelled of soap, woman child from beyond the years, rapt below the sulphur glow and pitch light of some medieval fun fair. A lean sky long candle skewered the black pools in her eyes. Her fingers clutched. In the flood of this breaking brimstone galaxy she saw the man with the bears watching her and she edged closer to the girl by her side and brushed her hair with two fingers quickly.

She got to her feet instantly, overcome by the sudden need to get to the matches. She groped her way across the floor, got to the night stand and felt for the box. She opened it, took out a match, and lit it. She nearly had to squint in the sudden flare of brightness as the sulfury smell hit her nose. The pulsing circle of light that surrounded her right hand was so warm and welcome she almost felt like crying. When the match nearly burned down, she lit another, then found the candle and lit it. When it was going, the warm glow made the place look much different. It brought out the color of the wood all around her. It also made the shadows look even darker off in the corners, where the light didn’t reach.

The sing it together: My soul doth magnify the Lord, Laura's deep voice and Virginia's light one. The strangeness comes over Laura once again: how two different melodies can become at once single and disparate; something that overflows, as if there is too much of itself for a single note to bear. They go on to And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my savior; then, Laura is no longer Laura, but only a vessel for whatever overflowing thing is passing through her, and the sound is both hers and not hers, and she is and is not part of it, and Virginia's hair smells like candle wax, and Laura thinks, This, this is the sound Robert Lawrence heard; this is the thing that could shipwreck your soul, if you only let it; it is a thing her body can do.

They all look alike to me,’ the lieutenant said. Something you could almost have called horror moved him when he looked at the white muslin dresses—he remembered the smell of incense in the churches of his boyhood, the candles and the laciness and the self-esteem, the immense demands made from the altar steps by men who didn’t know the meaning of sacrifice. The old peasants knelt there before the holy images with their arms held out in the attitude of the cross: tired by the long day’s labour in the plantations they squeezed out a further mortification. And the priest came round with the collecting-bag taking their centavos, abusing them for their small comforting sins, and sacrificing nothing at all in return—except a little sexual indulgence.

Pure? What does it mean? The tongues of hell Are dull, dull as the triple Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable Of licking clean The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin. The tinder cries. The indelible smell Of a snuffed candle! Love, love, the low smokes roll From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel, Such yellow sullen smokes Make their own element. They will not rise, But trundle round the globe Choking the aged and the meek, The weak Hothouse baby in its crib, The ghastly orchid Hanging its hanging garden in the air, Devilish leopard! Radiation turned it white And killed it in an hour. Greasing the bodies of adulterers Like Hiroshima ash and eating in. The sin. The sin. Darling, all night I have been flickering, off, on, off, on. The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss. Three days. Three nights. Lemon water, chicken Water, water make me retch. I am too pure for you or anyone. Your body Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern—— My head a moon Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive. Does not my heat astound you! And my light! All by myself I am a huge camellia Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush. I think I am going up, I think I may rise—— The beads of hot metal fly, and I love, I Am a pure acetylene Virgin Attended by roses, By kisses, by cherubim, By whatever these pink things mean! Not you, nor him Nor him, nor him (My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)—— To Paradise.

They followed through the double doors and along the narrow corridor beyond, which was lined with more portraits of famous Healers and lit by crystal bubbles full of candles that floated up on the ceiling, looking like giant soapsuds. More witches and wizards in lime-green robes walked in and out of the doors they passed; a foul-smelling yellow gas wafted into the passageway as they passed one door, and every now and then they heard distant wailing. They climbed a flight of stairs and entered the “Creature-Induced Injuries” corridor, where the second door on the right bore the words “DANGEROUS” DAI LLEWELLYN WARD: SERIOUS BITES. Underneath this was a card in a brass holder on which had been handwritten Healer-in-Charge: Hippocrates Smethwyck, Trainee Healer: Augustus Pye.

Sue stepped into a haven that smelled of candles and lemon-scented dish soap, a cabinet of curiosities, one of which was the bathtub smack dab in the middle of the small kitchen. Bob Roy’s railroad flat was four tight, connected rooms, each stuffed with koombies, knickknacks, doodads, furniture pieces of any style, shelves, books, photos in frames, trophies bought from flea markets, old records, small lamps, and calendars from decades before. “I know,” he said. “It looks like I sell magic potions in here, like I’m an animated badger from a Disney cartoon.” He lit a burner on the stove with a huge kitchen match, then filled a shiny, Olde English–style kettle with water from the tap. As he prepared cups on a tray he said, “Tea in minutes, titmouse. Make a home for yourself.

She lifted the cup to her lips. “You make good coffee.” “You haven’t tasted it yet.” “I can smell it. And I love the way it smells.” It’s not the coffee, he thought. Not all of it, at any rate. “Well, I love your perfume,” he said, because he was a dolt. She frowned. “I’m not wearing any. I mean, other than the soap and shampoo I use.” “Well, I like them, then. And I’m glad you stayed.” “Is this what you planned?” Their eyes met. Shit, she was perfect. Radiant as the candles had been. “You making it all the way to the coffee? Yeah, I guess a date was what I was after.” “I thought you agreed with me.” Man, that breathless quality in her voice made him want to have her up against his naked chest. “Agreed with you?” he said. “Hell, if it would make you happy, I’d say yes to anything. But what are you specifically referring to?” “You said…I shouldn’t date anyone.” Ah, right. “You shouldn’t.” “I don’t understand.” Fuck him, but he went for it. Rehv put his numb elbow on the table and leaned into her. As he closed the distance, her eyes got wider, but she didn’t pull back. He paused, to give her a chance to tell him to cut the shit. Why? He had no clue. His symphath side was into pauses only for analysis or to better capitalize on a weakness. But she made him want to be decent. Ehlena didn’t tell him to step off, however. “I don’t…understand,” she whispered. “It’s simple. I don’t think you should date anyone.” Rehv moved in even closer, until he could see the flecks of gold in her eyes. “But I’m not just anyone.” -Ehlena & Rehv

I suddenly realised she was playing Chopin's Scherzo in B Flat Minor and I closed my eyes to hide the tears; when the interval came Pipi kissed me on both cheeks – he was always so grateful when anyone praised his mistresses. We went down to talk to her, she simpered prettily, looked very pleased with herself and flirted with him, and when he told her that she had made me cry she blushed with pleasure, I smiled and shook hands with her, and he grinned with delight; I looked at him as if he were an idiot: he had never seen my mother at the piano, with her mane of black hair flowing down over her shoulders, playing by the light of two tiny candles – they were cheaper than electricity – while the room smelled of cooking fat. The supper often burned as I stood entranced because she was playing Chopin.

Alistair’s voice was surprisingly gentle when he asked, “So you didn’t want to be champion?” “No,” Isobel answered, even though it felt like admitting something terrible. “I didn’t. I…still don’t. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can pretend that it isn’t real. That I’m still in my bed at home.” In the room that Isobel had wasted a spell to ruin, just because she’d been angry and scared. Suddenly, the candles in the room snuffed out all at once, pitching them from the already dim candlelight into total blackness. It took her a second to realize that he’d extinguished them with a spell, for her. So she couldn’t see where she truly was. But she could still smell it—the rot, the mold, the damp, earthy odor of the cave walls. “You want to know something funny?” he asked. “I’m a choice between staying here or going home, I’d still choose here. With you.

After we've stuffed ourselves, we scatter around the living room, falling into a comfortable quiet. The living room is a majestic place - I mean, it is massive - with vaulted log ceilings and old wood floors covered in wide woven rugs. Along one long wall, the fire crackles and snaps, heating the room to just below too warm. It's wood from town and nothing smells like it. I want to find a candle of this, incense, room spray. I want every living room in every house I live in for the rest of time to smell like the Hollis cabin does on December evenings. The hearth is expansive; when we were about seven, our chore was sweeping out the fireplace at the end of the holiday, Theo and I could almost stand up inside it. The flames actually roar to life. Even once they mellow into a rumbling, crackling simmer, the blaze still feels like a living, breathing creature in here with us.

I am an urchin, standing in the cold, elbowed aside by the glossy rich visitors in their fur coats and ostentatious jewellery, being fussed into the hotel by pompous-looking doormen. 'No problem. I'd better get home, actually Mr – Gustav. A drink is very tempting, but maybe not such a good idea after all.' I pat my pockets. 'And I'm skint.' 'Pavements not paved with gold yet, eh?' He moves on along the facade of the grand hotel to the corner, and waits. He's staring not back at me but down St James Street. I wage a little war with myself. He's a stranger, remember. The newspaper headlines, exaggerated by the time they reach the office of Jake's local rag: Country girl from the sticks raped and murdered in London by suave conman. Even Poppy would be wagging her metaphorical finger at me by now. Blaming herself for not being there, looking out for me. But we're out in public here. Lots of people around us. He's charming. He's incredibly attractive. He's got a lovely deep, well spoken voice. And he's an entrepreneur who must be bloody rich if he owns more than one house. What the hell else am I going to do with myself when everyone else is out having fun? One thing I won't tell him is that my pockets might be empty, but my bank account is full. 'One drink. Then I must get back.' He doesn't answer or protest, but with a courtly bow he crooks his elbow and escorts me down St James. We turn right and into the far more subtle splendour of Dukes Hotel. 'Dress code?' I ask nervously, wiping my feet obediently on the huge but welcoming doormat and drifting ahead of him into the smart interior where domed and glassed corridors lead here and there. The foyer smells of mulled wine and candles and entices you to succumb to its perfumed embrace.

As I have thus suggested that the Devil himself has politically spread about this Notion[Pg 269] concerning his appearing with a Cloven-Foot, so I doubt not that he has thought it for his Purpose to paint this Cloven-Foot so lively in the Imaginations of many of our People, and especially of those clear sighted Folks who see the Devil when he is not to be seen, that they would make no Scruple to say, nay and to make Affidavit too, even before Satan himself, whenever he sat upon the Bench, that they had seen his Worship’s Foot at such and such a Time; this I advance the rather because ’tis very much for his Interest to do this, for if we had not many Witnesses, viva voce, to testify it, we should have had some obstinate Fellows always among us, who would have denied the Fact, or at least have spoken doubtfully of it, and so have rais’d Disputes and Objections against it, as impossible, or at least as improbable; buzzing one ridiculous Notion or other into our Ears, as if the Devil was not so black as he was painted, that he had no more a Cloven-Foot than a Pope, whose Apostolical Toes have so often been reverentially kiss’d by Kings and Emperors: but now alas this Part is out of the Question, not the Man in the Moon, not the Groaning-Board, not the speaking of Fryar Bacon’s Brazen-Head, not the Inspiration of Mother Shipton, or the Miracles of Dr. Faustus, Things as certain as Death and Taxes, can be more firmly believ’d: The Devil not have a Cloven-Foot! I doubt not but I could, in a short Time, bring you a thousand old Women together, that would as soon believe there was no Devil at all; nay, they will tell you, he could not be a Devil without it, any more than he could come into the Room, and the Candles not burn blue, or go out and not leave a smell of Brimstone behind him.

I jumped then. It seemed I heard a child laugh. My imagination, of course. And then, when I should have known better, I headed for the closet and the high and narrow door at the very back end and the steep and narrow dark stairs. A million times I’d ascended these stairs. A million times in the dark, without a candle, or a flashlight. Up into the dark, eerie, gigantic attic, and only when I was there did I feel around for the place where Chris and I had hidden our candles and matches. Still there. Time did stand still in this place. We’d had several candle holders, all of pewter with small handles to grasp. Holders we’d found in an old trunk along with boxes and boxes of short, stubby, clumsily made candles. We’d always presumed them to be homemade candles, for they had smelled so rank and old when they burned. My breath caught! Oh! It was the same! The paper flowers still dangled down, mobiles to sway in the drafts, and the giant flowers were still on the walls. Only all the colors had faded to indistinct gray—ghost flowers. The sparkling gem centers we’d glued on had loosened, and now only a few daisies had sequins, or gleaming stones, for centers. Carrie’s purple worm was there only now he too was a nothing color. Cory’s epileptic snail didn’t appear a bright, lopsided beach ball now, it was more a tepid, half-rotten squashy orange. The BEWARE signs Chris and I had painted in red were still on the walls, and the swings still dangled down from the attic rafters. Over near the record player was the barre Chris had fashioned, then nailed to the wall so I could practice my ballet positions. Even my outgrown costumes hung limply from nails, dozens of them with matching leotards and worn out pointe shoes, all faded and dusty, rotten smelling. As in an unhappy dream I was committed to, I drifted aimlessly toward the distant schoolroom, with the candelight flickering. Ghosts were unsettled, memories and specters followed me as things began to wake up, yawn and whisper. No, I told myself, it was only the floating panels of my long chiffon wings . . . that was all. The spotted rocking-horse loomed up, scary and threatening, and my hand rose to my throat as I held back a scream. The rusty red wagon seemed to move by unseen hands pushing it, so my eyes took flight to the blackboard where I’d printed my enigmatic farewell message to those who came in the future. How was I to know it would be me? We lived in the attic, Christopher, Cory, Carrie and me— Now there are only three. Behind the small desk that had been Cory’s I scrunched down, and tried to fit my legs under. I wanted to put myself into a deep reverie that would call up Cory’s spirit that would tell me where he lay.

The late nights binge-watching The X-Files on the couch they picked out together, the early mornings making toast while they're still too tired to speak, the kids who will earn their first scars in the backyard and badly practice instruments at inconvenient times, and the way their favorite candle's scent will gradually infuse the walls so that every time they come back from a trip, exhausted, and dump their bags inside the door, they'll smell that they're where they belong. All those moments throughout the days, weeks, months that don't get marked on calendars with hand-drawn stars or little stickers. Those are the moments that make a life. Not grand gestures, but mundane details that, over time, accumulate until you have a home, instead of a house. The things that matter. The things I can't stop longing for. There's only one place that feeling exists for me, only one person with whom I belong.

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?” “Nah I had to go relieve myself.” After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.” After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.

There have been times love has made my human Instincts into animal ones. Once in a dark lit bar, my love said my poems were shit And I, in the light of the candles, Pushed a sword into myself and fell over a cliff Into a neverending ocean. Once a man 5 years my younger Loved me and then gave me up. I raged around him like a bear. I once cheated on a new boyfriend with an old boyfriend. I cheated on an old boyfriend with a new one. Love has the ability to make the world kind, The specifics of one man always blends into another And turns back into my mother’s kisses on my cheek. It is I who loves, but it is in turn The world that loves me back. The world loves And I love back, the specifics of it Once in tune. Once we kissed and I was Mesmerized by the blondness of his cheek With the light on it and the sweet smell of the earth. But still the light on the cheek is the desert lizards Who will eat us in the afterworld and in the light of the moon Ther is the exhaust of love falling over everything

Several days later I decided to go on a good long jog, trusting that Chip would not leave Drake again. As I was on my way back I saw Chip coming down the road in his truck with the trailer on it. He rolled up to me with his window down and said, “Baby, you’re doing so good. I’m heading to work now. I’ve got to go.” I looked in the back, thinking, Of course, he’s got Drake. But I didn’t see a car seat. “Chip, where’s Drake?” she said, and I was like, “Oh, shoot!” She took off without a word and ran like lightning all the way back to the house as I turned the truck around. She got there faster on foot than I did in my truck. I sure hope no one from Child Protective Services reads this book. They can’t come after me retroactively, can they? Chip promised it would never happen again. So the third time I attempted to take a run, I went running down Third Street and made it all the way home. I walked in, and Chip and Drake were gone. I thought, Oh, good. Finally he remembered to take the baby. But then I noticed his car was still parked out front. I looked around and couldn’t find them anywhere. Moments later, Chip pulled up on his four-wheeler--with Drake bungee-strapped to the handlebars in his car seat. “Chip!” I screamed, “What in the heck are you doing?” “Oh, he was crying, and I’d always heard my mom say she would drive me around the neighborhood when I was a baby, and it made me feel better,” Chip said. “He loved it. He fell right to sleep.” “He didn’t love it, Chip. He probably fell asleep because the wind in his face made it impossible to breathe.” I didn’t go for another run for the whole first year of Drake’s life, and I took him to the shop with me every single day. Some people might see that as a burden, but I have to admit I loved it. Having him in that BabyBjörn was the best feeling in the world. Drake was a shop baby. He would come home every night smelling like candles. We had friends who owned a barbecue joint, and their baby always came home smelling like a rack of ribs. I liked Drake’s smell a whole lot better.

The road climbs curving out of wet ground thick with cedars, and up onto a plateau meadow where Jersey cows, beautiful as deer, watching them with Juno eyes. Along the trail the ferns are dense, drooping with wet, twenty kinds of them. Again he does not know them (in my experience, ferns are an exclusively feminine expertise), and she tells him: hayscented fern, wood fern, sensitive fern, cinnamon fern, ostrich fern, interrupted fern, Christmas fern, bracken, maidenhair - names that are as pleasant to his ear as the woods smells are to his nose. In the intervals between clumps of spruce, the moss spreads a green carpet, inches thick, feather-soft, with candles of ground pine and the domes of spotted orange mushrooms rising out of it... Those aren't toadstools, Those are mushrooms. Deadly Amanita mushrooms. Ne mangez pas. You know everything that grows here. That's wonderful." Not so wonderful. I grew up here. I grew up in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, too, but I couldn't tell you the name of one thing that grows there. One, maybe Lilacs. You didn't grow up with my mother.

They climbed out of the pit to find a banquet awaiting them. A long table, four high-backed Untan-style chairs, a candelabra in the centre bearing four thick-stemmed beeswax candles, the golden light flickering down on silver plates heaped with Malazan delicacies. Oily santos fish from the shoals off Kartool, baked with butter and spices in clay; strips of marinated venison, smelling of almonds in the northern D'avorian style; grouse from the Seti plains stuffed with bull-berries and sage; baked gourds and fillets of snake from Dal Hon; assorted braised vegetables and four bottles of wine: a Malaz Island white from the Paran Estates, warmed rice wine from Itko Kan, a fullbodied red from Gris, and the orange-tinted belack wine from the Napan Isles. Kalam stood staring at the bounteous apparition, as Stormy, with a grunt, walked over, boots puffing in the dust, and sat down in one of the chairs, reaching for the Grisian red. 'Well,' Quick Ben said, dusting himself off, 'this is nice. Who's the fourth chair for, you think?' Kalam looked up at the looming bulk of the sky keep. 'I'd rather not think about that.' Snorting sounds from Stormy as he launched into the venison strips.

Jung told the Society that apparitions (ghosts) and materializations were “unconscious projections” or, as he spoke of them to Freud, “exteriorisations.” “I have repeatedly observed,” Jung told his audience, “the telepathic effects of unconscious complexes, and also a number of parapsychic phenomena, but in all this I see no proof whatever of the existence of real spirits, and until such proof is forthcoming I must regard this whole territory as an appendix of psychology.” This sounds scientific enough, but a year later20 when Jung was again in England, he encountered a somewhat more real ghost. Jung spent some weekends in a cottage in Aylesbury outside of London rented by Maurice Nicoll, and while there was serenaded by an assortment of eerie sounds—dripping water, knocks, inexplicable rustlings—while an unpleasant smell filled the bedroom. Locals said the place was haunted, and one particularly bad night, Jung opened his eyes to discover an old woman’s head on the pillow next to his; half of her face was missing. Jung leaped out of bed, lit a candle, and waited until morning in an armchair. The house was later torn down. One would think that having already encountered the dead on their return from Jerusalem, Jung wouldn’t be shaken by a fairly standard English ghost, but the experience rattled him.

I left Brookstone and went to the Pottery Barn. When I was a kid and everything inside our house was familiar, cheap, and ruined, walking into the Pottery Barn was like entering heaven. If they really wanted people to enjoy church, I thought back then, they should make everything in church look and smell like the Pottery Barn. My dream was to surround myself one day with everything in the store, with the wicker baskets and scented candles, the brushed-silver picture frames. But that was a long time ago. I had already gone through a period of buying everything there was to buy at the Pottery Barn and decorating my apartment like a Pottery Barn outlet, and then getting rid of it all during a massive upgrade. Now everything at the Pottery Barn looked ersatz and mass-produced. To buy any of it now would be to regress in aspiration and selfhood. I didn’t want to buy anything at the Pottery Barn so much as I wanted to recapture the feeling of wanting to buy everything from the Pottery Barn. Something similar happened at the music store. I should try to find some new music, I thought, because there was a time when new music could lift me out of a funk like nothing else. But I wasn’t past the Bs when I saw the only thing I really cared to buy. It was the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which had been released in 1965. I already owned Rubber Soul. I had owned Rubber Soul on vinyl, then on cassette, and now on CD, and of course on my iPod, iPod mini, and iPhone. If I wanted to, I could have pulled out my iPhone and played Rubber Soul from start to finish right there, on speaker, for the sake of the whole store. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to buy Rubber Soul for the first time all over again. I wanted to return the needle from the run-out groove to the opening chords of “Drive My Car” and make everything new again. That wasn’t going to happen. But, I thought, I could buy it for somebody else. I could buy somebody else the new experience of listening to Rubber Soul for the first time. So I took the CD up to the register and paid for it and, walking out, felt renewed and excited. But the first kid I offered it to, a rotund teenager in a wheelchair looking longingly into a GameStop window, declined on the principle that he would rather have cash. A couple of other kids didn’t have CD players. I ended up leaving Rubber Soul on a bench beside a decommissioned ashtray where someone had discarded an unhealthy gob of human hair. I wandered, as everyone in the mall sooner or later does, into the Best Friends Pet Store. Many best friends—impossibly small beagles and corgis and German shepherds—were locked away for display in white cages where they spent their days dozing with depression, stirring only long enough to ponder the psychic hurdles of licking their paws. Could there be anything better to lift your spirits than a new puppy?

Marcelina loved that miniscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth. Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie. Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore. But the joy began in the lobby with Luesa the receptionist in her high-collared white dress saying “Good afternoon, Senhora Hoffman,” and the smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and brightness of the frosted glass panels and the bare wood floor and the cream-on-white cotton wall hangings, the New Age music that she scorned anywhere else (Tropicalismo hippy-shit) but here told her, “you’re wonderful, you’re special, you’re robed in light, the universe loves you, all you have to do is reach out your hand and take anything you desire.” Eyes closed, lying flat on the reclining chair, she felt her work-weary crow’s-feet smoothed away, the young, energizing tautness of her skin. Two years before she had been to New York on the Real Sex in the City production and had been struck by how the ianqui women styled themselves out of personal empowerment and not, as a carioca would have done, because it was her duty before a scrutinizing, judgmental city. An alien creed: thousand-dollar shoes but no pedicure. But she had brought back one mantra among her shopping bags, an enlightenment she had stolen from a Jennifer Aniston cosmetics ad. She whispered it to herself now, in the warm, jasmine-and vetiver-scented sanctuary as the botulin toxins diffused through her skin. Because I’m worth it.

He was in a room filled with people, and it was warm, with firelight glowing on a hearth. He could see through a window that outside it was night, and snowing. There were colored lights: red and green and yellow, twinkling from a tree which was, oddly, inside the room. On a table, lighted candles stood in a polished golden holder and cast a soft, flickering glow. He could smell things cooking, and he heard soft laughter. A golden-haired dog lay sleeping on the floor. On the floor there were packages wrapped in brightly colored paper and tied with gleaming ribbons. As Jonas watched, a small child began to pick up the packages and pass them around the room: to other children, to adults who were obviously parents, and to an older, quiet couple, man and woman, who sat smiling together on a couch. While Jonas watched, the people began one by one to untie the ribbons on the packages, to unwrap the bright papers, open the boxes and reveal toys and clothing and books. There were cries of delight. They hugged one another. The small child went and sat on the lap of the old woman, and she rocked him and rubbed her cheek against his. Jonas opened his eyes and lay contentedly on the bed, still luxuriating in the warm and comforting memory. It had all been there, all the things he had learned to treasure. “What did you perceive?” The Giver asked. “Warmth,” Jonas replied, “and happiness. And—let me think. Family. That it was a celebration of some sort, a holiday. And something else—I can’t quite get the word for

When all else fails, try a different tool. When all else fails, try a different methodology. When all else fails, try a different objective. When all else falls, ask for help. When all else fails, find someone else to ask. When all else fails, get a third opinion. When all else fails, get another perspective. When all else fails, get a research librarian to guide you to other tools, methodologies, perspectives, philosophies, objectives. When all else fails, find a professional to do it. When all else fails, find a child to figure it out. When all else fails, weep, moan, and pound the walls. When all else fails, unplug and plug back in. When all else fails, shake up the system. When all else fails, shake up your system--stretch, run, go to the gym and punch a bag. When all else fails, laugh at the quandary. When all else fails, laugh at yourself. When all else fails, light a scented candle and watch the flame as you drink in the smell. When all else fails, drink water. When all else fails, immerse yourself in water--hot, cold, or hot then cold. When all else fails, sing an anthem to the trees, the ground, the distant view. When all else fails, dance a rhumba, dance a tango, dance a forest witchie ritual. When all else fails, take a nap. When all else fails, go away completely, however long feels necessary. When all else fails, try and figure out what's to be gained or learned if this was the way it absolutely needed to happen. When all else fails, accept that this is the way it is. When all else fails, love as is. When all else fails, walk away.

Chicken Francese, or lamb chops, or plump spinach gnocchi that she'd roll out by hand and drop into boiling salt water. When her brothers came home for the holidays, she'd spend days in the kitchen, preparing airy latkes and sweet and sour brisket; roast turkey with chestnut stuffing; elaborately iced layer cakes. She'd stay in the kitchen for hours, cooking dish after dish, hoping that all the food would somehow conceal their father's absence; hoping that the meals would take the taste of grief out of their mouths. "After my father died, I think cooking saved me. It was the only thing that made me happy. Everything else felt so out of control. But if I followed a recipe, if I used the right amounts of the right ingredients and did everything I was supposed to do..." She tried to explain it- how repetitive motions of peeling and chopping felt like a meditation, the comfort of knowing that flour and yeast, oil and salt, combined in the correct proportions, would always yield a loaf of bread; the way that making a shopping list could refocus her mind, and how much she enjoyed the smells of fresh rosemary, of roasting chicken or baking cookies, the velvety feel of a ball of dough at the precise moment when it reached its proper elasticity and could be put into an oiled bowl, under a clean cloth, to rise in a warm spot in the kitchen, the same step that her mother's mother's mother would have followed to make the same kind of bread. She liked to watch popovers rising to lofty heights in the oven's heat, blooming out of their tins. She liked the sound of a hearty soup or grain-thickened stew, simmering gently on a low flame, the look of a beautifully set table, with place cards and candles and fine china. All of it pleased her.

Eastern Standard Time Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address only those in my own time zone, this proper slice of longitude that runs from pole to snowy pole down the globe through Montreal to Bogota. Oh, fellow inhabitants of this singular band, sitting up in your many beds this morning— the sun falling through the windows and casting a shadow on the sundial— consider those in other zones who cannot hear these words. They are not slipping into a bathrobe as we are, or following the smell of coffee in a timely fashion. Rather, they are at work already, leaning on copy machines, hammering nails into a house-frame. They are not swallowing a vitamin like us; rather they are smoking a cigarette under a half moon, even jumping around on a dance floor, or just now sliding under the covers, pulling down the little chains on their bed lamps. But we are not like these others, for at this very moment on the face of the earth, we are standing under a hot shower, or we are eating our breakfast, considered by people of all zones to be the most important meal of the day. Later, when the time is right, we might sit down with the boss, wash the car, or linger at a candle-lit table, but now is the hour for pouring the juice and flipping the eggs with one eye on the toaster. So let us slice a banana and uncap the jam, lift our brimming spoons of milk, and leave it to the others to lower a flag or spin absurdly in a barber's chair— those antipodal oddballs, always early or late. Let us praise Sir Stanford Fleming the Canadian genius who first scored with these lines the length of the spinning earth. Let us move together through the rest of this day passing in unison from light to shadow, coasting over the crest of noon into the valley of the evening and then, holding hands, slip into the deeper valley of night.

While the indecisive customer hovered over an array of perfumes that Nettle had brought out for her, the American girls browsed among the shelves of perfumes, colognes, pomades, waxes, creams, soaps, and other items intended for beauty care. There were bath oils in stoppered crystal bottles, , and tins of herbal unguents, and tiny boxes of violet pastilles to freshen the breath. Lower shelves held treasure troves of scented candles and inks, sachets filled with clove-saturated smelling salts, potpourri bowls, and jars of pastes and balms. Nettle noticed, however, that while the younger girl, Daisy, viewed the assortment with only mild interest, the older one, Lillian, had stopped before a row of oils and extracts that contained pure scent. Rose, frangipani, jasmine, bergamot, and so forth. Lifting the amber glass bottles, she opened them carefully and inhaled with visible appreciation. Eventually the blond woman made her choice, purchased a flacon of perfume, and left the shop, a small bell ringing cheerfully as the door closed. Lillian, who had turned to glance at the departing woman, murmured thoughtfully, "I wonder why it is that so many light-haired women smell of amber..." "You mean amber perfume?" Daisy asked. "No- their skin itself. Amber, and sometimes honey..." "What on earth do you mean?" the younger girl asked with a bemused laugh. "People don't smell like anything, except when they need to wash." The pair regarded each other with what appeared to be mutual surprise. "Yes, they do," Lillian said. "Everyone has a smell... don't say you've never noticed? The way some people's skin is like bitter almond, or violet, while others..." "Others have a scent like plum, or palm sap, or fresh hay," Nettle commented. Lillian glanced at him with a satisfied smile. "Yes, exactly!" Nettle removed his spectacles and polished them with care, while his mind swarmed with questions. Could it be? Was it possible that this girl could actually detect a person's intrinsic scent? He himself could- but it was a rare gift, and not one that he had ever known a woman to have.

It had been a relief to get back downstairs. They took their time, looking for anything which might indicate where Ballard was now. It was Scott who found the dungeon. Chains and a system of pulleys opened the floor, and with more than a little trepidation, they descended the ancient stone steps into the darkness. Suzy whined, and for once refused to follow her master. Brooke patted her head and said, “You keep guard up here, girl, okay?” Suzy was more than eager to remain right where she was. Because it was morning, neither had brought a starlight collector, but they’d found some candles and a holder. The stench was putrid, the foul-smelling air making them gag as they plunged bravely downward into the darkness. When they reached the bottom, the malodorous stench was overwhelming. Brooke held the candle holder up, moving it back and forth. The mix of candlelight and gloomy shadows revealed a room of torture apparatuses; a spiked Judas chair; a spiked cabinet which could be shut on its victims, known as an Iron Maiden; a Guillotine; a Brazen Bull where a victim could be roasted to death; a Strappado for painfully dislocating arms; a sawhorse-looking device called a Spanish Donkey, used during the Inquisition to slice a wedge through the body, beginning at the genitals; a Catherine Wheel, used as late as the nineteenth century for criminal punishment in Germany; a Judas Cradle, which worked on the same principle as the Spanish Donkey. On a long table, were various tools of torture, including a Head Crusher; a Knee Splitter; a Spanish Tickler, or Cat’s Paw; a Heretic’s Fork; the Pear of Anguish; the Boot; the Tongue Tearer and the Breast Ripper. Brooke had taken a class on Medieval times once, not realizing how much cruelty the age had fostered. Scott was not as familiar with the period and its various devices, but there was no doubt as he gazed upon their shadowed contours in the candlelight, something unimaginably heartless, and sickeningly inhuman existed in the depths of this outwardly beautiful castle. It was like discovering the inside of the gorgeous, smiling woman you’d just met was filled with worms.

Another day, sheltering beneath trees in a rain-shower, I uncovered a doorway long obliterated by undergrowth. After pulling shrubbery aside, I stepped inside a long deserted summerhouse, fronted by cracked marble columns and ironwork, the rear extending deep into the hillside. Though still filthy, even after I cleared away the tenacious vines, the windowpanes gave sufficient greenish light for me to sketch indoors. In a cobwebbed corner stood a gardener's burner that must once have coaxed oranges or other delicate shrubs to life. With that alight, I found a chair and sat with my shawl muffled around me as I sketched. The marble statues that lined the walls were fine copies of the Greek masters, with muscular limbs and serene faces, though sadly disfigured with a blueish-green patina. As an exercise, I copied a figure of a handsome boy, admiring the sculptor's rendering of tensed muscle, the body frozen just an instant before extending in action. My mind drifted to Michael, the uncertainty hanging over us, my urges to please him, my need to move beyond this stupid impasse. As I sketched the statue's blind eyes I half-heartedly followed his line of sight. I stood and looked more closely at the statue. "What are you looking at?" I said out loud. A green stain blotted the boy's cheek, ugly but also strangely beautiful, for the color was a peacock's viridian. For the first time I noticed the description, "HARPOCRATES- SILENCE", engraved on the pediment, and had a vague recollection of a Roman boy-god who personified that virtue. He held one index finger raised coyly to his lips, while his other hand pointed towards a low arch in the wall. I paced over to the spot at which he pointed. The niche was filled with gardener's trellis that I removed with rising excitement. Behind stood an oak doorway set low in the wall. As I lifted the latch, it opened onto a blast of chilly darkness. Lighting the stub of a candle at the stove, I propped the door open and ventured inside. At once I knew this was no gardeners' store, but another tunnel burrowing into the hillside. Setting forth with the excitement of new discovery, my footsteps rang out and my breath fogged before me in clouds. The place had a mossy, mineral smell, and save for the dripping of water, was silent. Though at first the tunnel ran straight, it soon descended an incline, and my feet splashed into muddy puddles. Who, I wondered, had last passed through that door?

and Bran was suddenly afraid. Old sour-smelling Yoren looked up at Robb, unimpressed. “Whatever you say, m’lord,” he said. He sucked at a piece of meat between his teeth. The youngest of the black brothers shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “There’s not a man on the Wall knows the haunted forest better than Benjen Stark. He’ll find his way back.” “Well,” said Yoren, “maybe he will and maybe he won’t. Good men have gone into those woods before, and never come out.” All Bran could think of was Old Nan’s story of the Others and the last hero, hounded through the white woods by dead men and spiders big as hounds. He was afraid for a moment, until he remembered how that story ended. “The children will help him,” he blurted, “the children of the forest!” Theon Greyjoy sniggered, and Maester Luwin said, “Bran, the children of the forest have been dead and gone for thousands of years. All that is left of them are the faces in the trees.” “Down here, might be that’s true, Maester,” Yoren said, “but up past the Wall, who’s to say? Up there, a man can’t always tell what’s alive and what’s dead.” That night, after the plates had been cleared, Robb carried Bran up to bed himself. Grey Wind led the way, and Summer came close behind. His brother was strong for his age, and Bran was as light as a bundle of rags, but the stairs were steep and dark, and Robb was breathing hard by the time they reached the top. He put Bran into bed, covered him with blankets, and blew out the candle. For a time Robb sat beside him in the dark. Bran wanted to talk to him, but he did not know what to say. “We’ll find a horse for you, I promise,” Robb whispered at last. “Are they ever coming back?” Bran asked him. “Yes,” Robb said with such hope in his voice that Bran knew he was hearing his brother and not just Robb the Lord. “Mother will be home soon. Maybe we can ride out to meet her when she comes. Wouldn’t that surprise her, to see you ahorse?” Even in the dark room, Bran could feel his brother’s smile. “And afterward, we’ll ride north to see the Wall. We won’t even tell Jon we’re coming, we’ll just be there one day, you and me. It will be an adventure.” “An adventure,” Bran repeated wistfully. He heard his brother sob. The room was so dark he could not see the tears on Robb’s face, so he reached out and found his hand. Their fingers twined together. EDDARD “Lord Arryn’s death was a great sadness for all of us, my lord,” Grand Maester Pycelle said.

Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detail—the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re dead. Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that’s the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things. Nonetheless, fifty years later, I ask you: has the immersion ever again been so complete as it was in those streets, where every block, every backyard, every house, every floor of every house—the walls, ceilings, doors, and windows of every last friend’s family apartment—came to be so absolutely individualized? Were we ever again to be such keen recording instruments of the microscopic surface of things close at hand, of the minutest gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrzeit candles and cooking smells, by Ronson table lighters and Venetian blinds? About one another, we knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who ordered what on his hot dog at Syd’s; we knew one another’s every physical attribute—who walked pigeon-toed and who had breasts, who smelled of hair oil and who oversalivated when he spoke; we knew who among us was belligerent and who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb; we knew whose mother had the accent and whose father had the mustache, whose mother worked and whose father was dead; somehow we even dimly grasped how every family’s different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive difficult human problem. And, of course, there was the mandatory turbulence born of need, appetite, fantasy, longing, and the fear of disgrace. With only adolescent introspection to light the way, each of us, hopelessly pubescent, alone and in secret, attempted to regulate it—and in an era when chastity was still ascendant, a national cause to be embraced by the young like freedom and democracy. It’s astonishing that everything so immediately visible in our lives as classmates we still remember so precisely. The intensity of feeling that we have seeing one another today is also astonishing. But most astonishing is that we are nearing the age that our grandparents were when we first went off to be freshmen at the annex on February 1, 1946. What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened. That the results are in for the class of January 1950—the unanswerable questions answered, the future revealed—is that not astonishing? To have lived—and in this country, and in our time, and as who we were. Astonishing.

ESTABLISH STABLE ANCHORS OF ATTENTION Mindfulness meditation typically involves something known as an anchor of attention—a neutral reference point that helps support mental stability. An anchor might be the sensation of our breath coming in and out of the nostrils, or the rising and falling of our abdomen. When we become lost in thought during practice, we can return to our anchor, fixing our attention on the stimuli we’ve chosen. But anchors can also intensify trauma. The breath, for instance, is far from neutral for many survivors. It’s an area of the body that can hold tension related to a trauma and connect to overwhelming, life-threatening events. When Dylan paid attention to the rising and falling of his abdomen, he would be swamped with memories of mocking faces while walking down the hallway. Other times, feeling a constriction of his breath in the chest echoed a feeling of immobility, which was a traumatic reminder. For Dylan, the breath simply wasn’t a neutral anchor. As a remedy, we can encourage survivors to establish stabilizing anchors of attention. This means finding a focus of attention that supports one’s window of tolerance—creating stability in the nervous system as opposed to dysregulation. Each person’s anchor will vary: for some, it could be the sensations of their hands resting on their thighs, or their buttocks on the cushion. Other stabilizing anchors might include another sense altogether, such as hearing or sight. When Dylan and I worked together, it took a while until he could find a part of his body that didn’t make him more agitated. He eventually found that the sense of hearing was a neutral anchor of attention. At my office, he’d listen for the sound of the birds or the traffic outside, which he found to be stabilizing. “It’s subtle,” he said to me, opening his eyes and rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “But it is a lot less charged. I’m not getting riled up the same way, which is a huge relief.” In sessions together, Dylan’s anchor was a spot he’d rest his attention on at the beginning of a session or a place to return to if he felt overwhelmed. If he practiced meditation at home—I’d recommended short periods if he could stay in his window of tolerance—he used hearing as an anchor, or “home base” as he called it. “I finally feel like I can access a kind of refuge,” he said quietly, placing his hand on his belly. “My body hasn’t felt safe in so long. It’s a relief to finally feel like I’m learning how to be in here.” Anchors of attention you can offer students and clients practicing mindfulness—besides the sensation of the breath in the abdomen or nostrils—include different physical sensations (feet, buttocks, back, hands) and other senses (seeing, smelling, hearing). One client of mine had a soft blanket that she would touch slowly as an anchor. Another used a candle. For some, walking meditation is a great way to develop more stable anchors of attention, such as the feeling of one’s feet on the ground—whatever supports stability and one’s window of tolerance. Experimentation is key. Using subtler anchors does come with benefits and drawbacks. One advantage to working with the breath is that it is dynamic and tends to hold our attention more easily. When we work with a sense that’s less tactile—hearing, for instance—we may be more prone to drifting off into distraction. The more tangible the anchor, the easier it is to return to it when attention wanders.

I don't want to work in a kitchen, I want to work in my kitchen. I want chairs that don't match and a porch with a swing. I want mason jars filled with wildflowers in the center of rustic wooden tables. I want flickering candles and a fire in a fireplace. I want mismatched dishes and old-timey silver. I want people to be able to smell what's cooking a mile away so that even though they don't know the address, they'll still find us. I want a honky-tonk band and couples dancing under colorful lanterns. I want a place that feels like home. A place where I belong. I stare at Momma's skillet, on the stovetop waiting for me to fry up those chicken fried steaks. She may not have loved me. She may not have even liked me. But goddamn if that woman didn't teach me how to cook.

I could smell the dirt of the fields waking up, see the mountains with every tree lighting up on top like a candle, first neon green of spring.

Up here in this cozy little space with its candles and cats, every room smelling like woodsmoke and herbs, Vivi was home. Maybe she and Gwyn could do face masks or something. Have another drink or five. Listen to Taylor Swift.

She lit a couple of candles, making the place smell of roses and bergamot. It was quiet, except for the rain softly hitting the windows. Being inside when it rains makes you forget that anything else could be happening.

There are daysI don't want modern lighting, I crave the smell of brown old books, I crave for scenery that speak more contemporary, sometimes I shut my room, light a candle, play Mozart and read James Joyce one of the hardest books I ever tasted. There are days I want to make love, to listen to the dialogue of hearts, the whispers of love, the craziness of loving, there are days I pump whiskey in my well, discharge everything that kills, the poison in my gutter..... above all I pray to…

Even though I feel them for him, I had to hold back, to know for sure. I just had to hold back. That’s we he drifted off… Why did he fall asleep on me? Was it because I’m boring or is he just exposed? My head thumping still, I know was not thinking clearly, so I staggered back down the long hallway back into the dwindling party. I see one of the double-hung windows. Without anyone observing I reach my hand forward and place it on the big old sill, there is an electric candle with a night light bulb sitting in the middle. I crack the window to let out the smoke and smells out, and to get some much-needed air. A fine stream of rain-sh snow is gusting in on my face, it’s cold but feels so-so good, even though it’s winter. Enjoying the freezing air and the sensation of a hundred of little sparkly flacks. I squeezed my eyes closed tightly and promised myself that I’ll never forget the moment I just had with him. Funny I wanted to forget about all the sound, the tacky lights, and smalls of my friends and their mindless hilarity that they're tittering about. For some reason… I wanted to forget about all the heated hookups and the many bodies that were around me. What surpasses me the most about this, is that this is what I lived for and sacrificed so much to gain… to have the gathering and wanting of others that are popular, it's everything I ever wanted. Yet it seemed at that moment, I was better off before not having it. Before I became this girl… the girl that I’m not… not truly on the inside. When I open my eyes, I get the shock of my life. My little sis is standing in the doorway, staring at me. With that look holding me. She must have snuck out and followed me to this party with some of her older girlfriends, she has been messing with the wrong crew lately. I knew what happened to her tonight just by looking at her face, I knew. And if I find that boy, I’ll rip his sagging balls off! Then again, I was not much older than her when I went to my first party. I was horrified, she was doing what I did, back when I felt like I was dying inside. I was dead long before I wound up dead. I just wonder if she feels the same…? I wonder if I am the cause. How would let her in… and how did she get so popular already?

When I was a child, charlottes--- French desserts made traditionally out of brioche, ladyfingers, or sponge and baked in a charlotte mold--- were everywhere. Charlotte au chocolat wasn't the only variety, though being chocolate, it had the edge on my mother's autumn-season apple charlotte braised with brioche and poached in clarified butter, and even on the magnificent charlotte Malakoff she used to serve in the summer: raspberries, slivered almonds, and Grand Marnier in valleys of vanilla custard. But it is charlotte au chocolat, being my namesake dessert, that I remember most, for we offered it on the menu all year long. I walked into the pastry station and saw them cooling in their rusted tin molds on the counter. I saw them scooped onto lace doilies and smothered in Chantilly cream, starred with candied violets and sprigs of wet mint. I saw them lit by birthday candles. I saw them arranged, by the dozens, on silver trays for private parties. I saw them on customers' plates, destroyed, the Chantilly cream like a tumbled snowbank streaked with soot from the chocolate. And charlottes smelled delightful: they smelled richer, I thought, than any dessert in the world. The smell made me think of black velvet holiday dresses and grown-up perfumes in crystal flasks. It made me want to collapse and never eat again.

It's his smell. It's rattling me.  Not just a glimpse of it like at the party, but his entire scent.  Spicy, like clove and carnal. It’s the smell of black magic at midnight. When witches stand around their brew at night with the moon and candles burning the room. Incents wisping in the air. Ancient spells and occult sorcery sting my nose. It’s smoke, timber and I hate how much I love this smell.

Mort chuckled when she staggered through the tomb door. “Witch Slayer, are you? Another lovely title to add to your repertoire.” “How do you know about that?” she asked, setting down her candle. “Oh, I can smell her on you,” Mort said. “Smell her fury and wickedness.

When I think of you, I don’t think of chains. I think of laughter in the dark and the sweet smell of all your bloody candles which means that we’ll never be caught short by a power cut. I think of the man who builds dangerous book towers on his bedside table that threaten life and limb, and who makes my house a real home by making me buy fucking orange sofas. The man who makes me face the prospect that I’m going to have to continue buying bookshelves until one day either our floors collapse or we give up and buy a new house. I think of being in love with my best friend and staying that way.

Now that they had moved back into the main house, Nat back into her tiny room (though she did have occasional sleepovers at Karen and Vinod’s) and he and his wife into theirs, a familial charm had fallen over him, best exemplified by the contradictory smells of bacon in the mornings and Sabbath candles on Friday night. He

Along a shelf built into the wall over the head of the bed there were candles and vials. Without thinking, I picked one up and opened it. It smelled like honeysuckle, and a little bit like mint. When I set it down, I saw that my fingers were covered in dust. I looked up and saw, through a skylight, the dark barreling clouds. French and English knelt on the bed to look at the postcards, and I got in between them, my eyes traveling from hunting scenes (bare-breasted women on horseback) to Istanbul (dolphins in the Bosporus).

[…] the ephemeral period of a new relationship when everything domestic could be erotic. When watching someone pour milk on their cereal or towel-dry their hair was more entrancing than the ocean. When smelling their morning breath or unwashed scalp was exciting because it took you one step further into their high-walled palace of privacy, where you hoped only you were allowed to roam. Sexed-up to saturation point, therefore trying out the novelty of being humdrum. If this turned into a long-term relationship, one day we’d be only humdrum and we’d have to revisit the novelty of being sexy again — arranging ‘date nights’ and putting on our best clothes for each other and purposefully lighting candles. We trick ourselves into being close until we really are close, then we trick ourselves into seeming distant to stay as close as we can for as long as possible. (P. 97)

When you get the candles it, I recommend a new pair of panties.” I step back and survey her from head to toe—dark, innocent beauty just waiting to be defiled. “You wouldn’t want Mom and Dad to smell your wet pussy all over the kitchen when they return.

Candles, made and sold by licensed chandlers, were heavily taxed, which encouraged their clandestine manufacture. 75 The best-quality ones were of beeswax – some were made from thin sheets of beeswax wrapped round a flax or cotton wick and others were laboriously manufactured as solid candles. 76 Such candles were favoured by the wealthy and the Church, and they were better for chandeliers (often called ‘lustres’) in public buildings like theatres, where the light would be reflected and magnified by the numerous pieces of glass (‘drops’). Beeswax candles might also be mounted in candelabra or candlesticks, or fixed on wall brackets. Also of high quality were candles of spermaceti, a waxy oil from the head of sperm whales. Unlike beeswax candles, these could be made in moulds. Both beeswax and spermaceti candles burned slowly and brightly, producing little smoke or smell.

I picked up the orange candle and brought it to my nose, inhaling deeply. I groaned. This was the most perfect pumpkin spice candle I had ever smelled. I was going to have to get it. I set it down and picked up a darker orange candle, and smelled it. It was cinnamon spice.

high-church atheist” (as I called him), yet with a deep love for the Methodist Hymnal, the King James’ Bible, the church music of Byrd, Tallis, Purcell, etc, the sight of candles, and the smell of incense.

I lift the blanket to my nose, taking a deep whiff. The steamer trunk is lined with cedar, and the Clark blankets have a distinct Clark blanket smell. I’d bottle it if I could. The sea, the grass, citronella candles, and wool blankets from the cedar-lined chest—the perfume of Summer Wind.

brand of cat food popularized by reality stars, which promises to make your feline’s shit smell like a Diptyque candle.

sprinkled salt in a line ringing Kelsie’s bed first, then grabbed candles from a box in the closet. They weren’t the kind I had in my trailer. They were the kind with edible wax that smelled like molten candy.

Mr. Weasley conjured up candles to light the darkening garden before they had their homemade strawberry ice cream, and by the time they had finished, moths were fluttering low over the table, and the warm air was perfumed with the smells of grass and honeysuckle. Harry was feeling extremely well fed and at peace with the world as he watched several gnomes sprinting through the

Well, come along then.” St. Just held out a hand. “We will feed you and then see what’s to be done with you.” The child stared at his hand, frowned, and looked up at his face, then back down at his hand. The earl merely kept his hand outstretched, his expression calm. “Meat pies,” he mused aloud. “Cheese toast, cold cider, apple tarts, strawberry cobbler, sausage and eggs, treacle pudding, clean sheets smelling of sunshine and lavender, beeswax candles…” He felt a tentative touch of little fingers against his palm, so he closed his hand around those fingers and let his voice lead the child along. “Berry tarts, scones in the morning, ham, bacon, nice hot tea with plenty of cream and sugar, kippers, beefsteak, buttered rolls and muffins…” “Muffins?” the child piped up wistfully. St. Just almost smiled at the angelic expression on the urchin’s face. Great blue eyes peered out of a smudged, beguiling little puss, a mop of wheat blond curls completing a childish image of innocence. “Muffins.” The earl reiterated as they gained the side terrace of the manor and passed indoors. “With butter and jam, if you prefer. Or chocolate, or juice squeezed from oranges.” “Oranges?” “Had them all the time in Spain.” “You were in Spain?” the child asked, eyes round. “Did you fight old Boney?” “I was in Spain,” the earl said, his tone grave, “and Portugal, and France, and I fought old Boney. Nasty business, not at all as pleasant as the thought of tea cakes or clean linen or even some decent bread and butter.” “Bread

There in the middle of the rooftop—in a circle of lighted candles scented with the smell of vanilla—sat a four-poster bed adorned with throw pillows.

Man, no wonder Kat left you. You smell, your hair is knotted, and you haven't shaved in how many days? Forget fighting the gallu. One whiff of you would kill them." He looked at Kish as he stood up. "Don't strike a match. The alcohol fumes alone would send him up like a Roman candle." "Shut up," Sin snarled as he got up and grabbed the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's off the coffee table. He headed for his bedroom so that he wouldn't have to put up with their nagging anymore. At least that was the plan, but the walls were so thin, he couldn't help but overhear them. "When was the last time he changed those clothes?" Damien asked. "I think it was the last time he bathed ... the day Kat left." Sin heard the sound of glasses clinking together. Damien cursed. "How much shit is he drinking?" "Let me put it to you this way ... I restock the cabinet twice a day now." "Damn, how can he fight the demons and be that wasted?" "I think you were right earlier. He strikes a match and breathes at them. Like a human blowtorch.

You look like a monkey, and you smell like one too!” Nine-year-old Frank Hardy looked at his brother, Joe, and laughed as their friend Paul McMahon blew out the candles on his huge birthday cake, which was decorated to look like a dinosaur. Everyone cheered as Paul blew out all ten candles on the first try.

Drake was a shop baby. He would come home every night smelling like candles. We had friends who owned a barbecue joint, and their baby always came home smelling like a rack of ribs. I liked Drake’s smell a whole lot better. A

He knew he was not making enough of an effort. Margaret, with her news, her reports and small jokes, her flying starts at conversation, was trying so much harder. Every evening she had some disastrous item to offer up. Tonight the dog, but often it was a story from the news online: “Did you hear about—?” a tornado carrying away a trailer park in Nebraska, pirates kidnapping a family off their sailboat, the stoning of schoolgirls in Kabul, as if to say, “See? What’s happening to us is not so bad.” Then again she might offer something she’d heard on the radio while making dinner, a little mystery explained, how habits are formed or why people applaud after theater performances. She was trying, he realized with a stab of grief, to be interesting. Candles on the table, a vase of flowers, something baked for dessert. It was graceful of her, it was valiant. And all he wanted was for her to stop. The lawn mower from down the street quit and he could hear the cricket again. Margaret was gazing up at the oak trees, leaves dark now but trunks banded with gold. “You know”—he stood up to collect their glasses—“I was thinking I might mow the grass tonight. I might really enjoy something like that.” “Oh, I wish I’d known, Bill. It’s already done. The landscape guys were here yesterday. I got them to put more mulch around the hydrangeas.” Mulch. That explained the smell. Another fusillade of acorns hit car roofs along the street. This time Margaret had her hand on Binx’s collar, holding him back as he lunged forward, toenails scratching the patio slates.

Martin suggests, let's see Chartres on the way back. The cathedral with its bleached stone and green roofs is visible across miles of flat fields and popular breaks. Approaching it through the dog's leg alleyways of the old town, its proportions are dizzying. Pigeons wheel about its height like cliff birds. The afternoon light begins to go; a battery of floodlights makes an unearthly theatre of spires, pinnacles and buttresses. Martin quotes Ruskin. ' "Trees of stone" '. Inside the cathedral is humbling, it's like walking into the belly of a whale. The glass is a deep rich crimson of blue, eliminating what daylight's left. Furtive figures scurry off into angles of shadow. The medieval darkness is pricked with lighted candles. Martin says it's like Debussy's 'Drowned Cathedral'. 'La Cathédrale Engloutie'. I don't know it, but he's right, exactly right. The weeping wax smells cloyingly sweet. While a priest intones, worshippers kneel and pray in whispers - and it seems to me that what they're begging from the mother of God is hope, and luck, and to be spared this survival game, living from minute to minute to minute. It's what drowning must be like. You find you've somersaulted head-over-heels and upside-down and you're travelling backwards through a vast, lightless place. So much sweet, lulling darkness in the middle of the world, it 'is' a kind of dying...

I remember the rain, the lightning across the sky and the thunder that followed, pounding against the glass windows of the inn. The smell of mint and beeswax candles, the ringing of wind chimes spinning with the storm. The hollow sensation of loneliness, of broken illusions and dreams disappearing rapidly, like a bucket of water upturned into the sea.

The personality of the learning brain that emerges from all this work on external and internal cues is of a shifty-eyed dinner companion. It is tracking the main conversation (the homework assignment, the music notation, the hard facts) and occasionally becoming engaged in it. At the same time, it’s also periodically having a quick look around, taking in the room, sketching in sights and sounds and smells, as well as noting its internal reactions, its feelings and sensations. These features—the background music, a flickering candle, a pang of hunger—help our companion recall points made during the conversation later on, especially when the topic is a new one.

Stressed out' I wish I found some better sounds no one’s ever heard I wish I had a better voice that sang some better words I wish I found some chords in an order that is new I wish I didn't have to rhyme every time I sang I was told when I get older all my fears would shrink But now I’m insecure and I care what people think My name's Blurryface and I care what you think My name's Blurryface and I care what you think Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out We're stressed out Sometimes a certain smell will take me back to when I was young How come I’m never able to identify where it’s coming from I’d make a candle out of it if I ever found it Try to sell it, never sell out of it, I’d probably only sell one It’d be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose Same clothes homegrown a stone’s throw from a creek we used to roam But it would remind us of when nothing really mattered Out of student loans and tree-house homes we all would take the latter My name's Blurryface and I care what you think My name's Blurryface and I care what you think Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out We used to play pretend, give each other different names We would build a rocket ship and then we’d fly it far away Used to dream of outer space but now they’re laughing at our face Saying, "Wake up, you need to make money" Yeah We used to play pretend, give each other different names We would build a rocket ship and then we'd fly it far away Used to dream of outer space but now they're laughing at our face Saying, "Wake up, you need to make money" Yeah Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out Used to play pretend, used to play pretend, bunny We used to play pretend, wake up, you need the money Used to play pretend, used to play pretend, bunny We used to play pretend, wake up, you need the money We used to play pretend, give each other different names We would build a rocket ship and then we’d fly it far away Used to dream of outer space but now they’re laughing at our face Saying, "Wake up, you need to make money" Yeah

Finally, there is one item that I have in my living room that I take way too much shit over, but I don’t care and if you are serious about playing this game to win, you won’t care either. The magic item is scented candles. Girls love a place that smells nice, so I sacrifice some of my man card by making sure my place doesn’t smell like pizza and stale beer.

She fell asleep within minutes, unaware that the rain that had been falling since evening had turned to sleet, or that the roads were becoming impassable. As she slept, she began to dream, but instead of a continuous scene, it consisted of images flashing through her mind, like looking at old pictures in an album. Cat was sitting at the kitchen table. Her mother was standing beside her, laughing as she set a birthday cake in front of her. There were four candles on her cake, and her daddy was taking a picture. “Smile,” he’d said. She looked up just as the flash went off. She was still blinking from the flash when the image shifted. It was cold. The blowing wind burned her skin. She was at a cemetery, staring down at a small, flat marker. Cat couldn’t read, but somehow she knew it bore hermother’s name. She could hear her father crying. It scared her worse than the fact that her mother had gone away. “Daddy…where did she go?” “Heaven.” “Is it far?” “Yes.” “Can we go, too?” She never heard his answer, because the image shifted again. This time, she was being led through a long series of hallways. The smell of orange oil from wood polish burned her nose. The sound of her footsteps echoed on the tiled floors. Yesterday she’d been in the hospital. She’d asked to go home. But someone had told her she couldn’t go home because there was no one left to take care of her. The horror of that knowledge had frightened her so much that she’d been afraid to ask what came next. She walked through an open door as a woman said her name. The woman took her by the hand, and they walked away. She couldn’t see the woman’s face. She never remembered the faces, and it didn’t matter, because they never stayed the same.

It didn’t take peering at the brass plates at the bottom of the paintings to guess who they must have been: my very own Lord and Lady Uppington, presiding over Uppington Hall in paint as they once had in the flesh. One could almost picture them stepping out of their frames to play host, sweeping aside the tourists and signaling the silent harp into song. The re-enactors were all wrong; from their costumes, they were late Regency, 1820 or so, rather than the pre-Regency period in which I was interested. There was a wide gap between the two, in style and in outlook. But the servants would probably have looked very much the same, in their livery in the Uppington colors, and so would the pre-Victorian Christmas decorations. If I ignored the “party guests” and the other tourists, it was just possible to picture what it might have been like two hundred years ago, when Lord and Lady Uppington had held Christmas at the family seat. I paused, struck by the symmetry of it. It would have been almost exactly two hundred years ago, wouldn’t it? December 1803 to December 2003. It would have been Colin’s ancestors’ first Christmas together after the mad upheaval of their marriage the previous spring. There would have been candles, just as there were now, and the smell of oranges and cloves. There would have been gaily gowned ladies and excited children and tables laden with ratafia biscuits and dried fruit and the inevitable sticky sweet slices of mince pie….

October 31st dawned damp and cold, but by nine in the morning the misty rain had dissipated, and blue sky broke through. By eleven the sun had dried the leaves to crisp colors, and the world smelled of apples and burning wood smoke and candles and pumpkin innards.

ave you noticed the focus these days is back on the simple things of life? What's the first thing you do when you pick a rose? You smell the fragrance. Maybe it brings back a memory of the time you picked flowers for your mom. Perhaps it's time to recapture some of that girlhood simplicity. A lavender sachet in your drawer can be an unexpected and simple pleasure. Spray a little cologne on your notepaper or even on the bathroom throw rug. Or better yet, boil a little pot of cinnamon and enjoy the aroma. Put on lively music while you do your housework. Light candles for a quiet yet festive atmosphere. When we find satisfaction in the little things in life, we are happier and more willing to look for the positive in bigger things. olor in your home can make a world of difference. It can help you redefine spaces. If an area is too large, add a throw rug in a complementary color and create a "get together" spot. Add some soft colored curtains for a change of seasons. The idea is to create intimacy, a place that's inviting on a chilly evening or a warm spring afternoon. The richer the colors, the more welcoming the space. Red is great for warmth. Go for it! And shades of cranberry and plum work well. Experiment and step out of your comfort zone. Your home can be a place that gives you a feeling of quiet for thinking about what really counts in life and also be a festive atmosphere for celebrating. on't put all your emotional eggs in one basket. Our work consumes much of our time, and that's natural. And for some of you, that's 95 percent of your awake hours. Is it time to change your focus-to make life a little easier and less stressful for

The dark came down on All Hallows’ Eve. We went to sleep to the sound of howling wind and pelting rain, and woke on the Feast of All Saints to whiteness and large soft flakes falling down and down in absolute silence. There is no more perfect stillness than the solitude in the heart of a snowstorm. This is the thin time, when the beloved dead draw near. The world turns inward, and the chilling air grows thick with dreams and mystery. The sky goes from a sharp clear cold where a million stars burn bright and close, to the gray-pink cloud that enfolds the earth with the promise of snow. I took one of Bree’s matches from its box and lit it, thrilling to the tiny leap of instant flame, and bent to put it to the kindling. Snow was falling, and winter had come; the season of fire. Candles and hearth fire, that lovely, leaping paradox, that destruction contained but never tamed, held at a safe distance to warm and enchant, but always, still, with that small sense of danger. The smell of roasting pumpkins was thick and sweet in the air. Having ruled the night with fire, the jack-o’-lanterns went now to a more peaceful fate as pies and compost, to join the gentle rest of the earth before renewal. I had turned the earth in my garden the day before, planting the winter seeds to sleep and swell, to dream their buried birth. Now is the time when we reenter the womb of the world, dreaming the dreams of snow and silence. Waking to the shock of frozen lakes under waning moonlight and the cold sun burning low and blue in the branches of the ice-cased trees, returning from our brief and necessary labors to food and story, to the warmth of firelight in the dark. Around a fire, in the dark, all truths can be told, and heard, in safety. I pulled on my woolen stockings, thick petticoats, my warmest shawl, and went down to poke up the kitchen fire. I stood watching wisps of steam rise from the fragrant cauldron, and felt myself turn inward. The world could go away, and we would heal.

The wonderful thing about Moab is that everything happens in a story-book setting, with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish and Wyeth and Joe Coll, and all the rest of them, whichever way you look. Imagine a blue sky—so clear-blue and pure that you can see against it the very feathers in the tails of wheeling kites, and know that they are brown, not black. Imagine all the houses, and the shacks between them, and the poles on which the burlap awnings hang, painted on flat canvas and stood up against that infinite blue. Stick some vultures in a row along a roof-top—purplish—bronze they’ll look between the tiles and sky. Add yellow camels, gray horses, striped robes, long rifles, and a searching sun-dried smell. And there you have El-Kerak, from the inside. From any point along the broken walls or the castle roof you can see for fifty miles over scenery invented by the Master-Artist, with the Jordan like a blue worm in the midst of yellow-and-green hills twiggling into a turquoise sea. The villains stalk on-stage and off again sublimely aware of their setting. The horses prance, the camels saunter, the very street-dogs compose themselves for a nap in the golden sun, all in perfect harmony with the piece. A woman walking with a stone jar on her head (or, just as likely, a kerosene can) looks as if she had just stepped out of eternity for the sake of the picture. And not all the kings and kaisers, cardinals and courtezans rolled into one great swaggering splurge of majesty could hold a candle to a ragged Bedouin chief on a flea-bitten pony, on the way to a small-town mejlis.

The living room and bedroom were acceptably neat, for a bachelor who lived alone, and smelled faintly of food that was made in cans and cooked in pots, and also of scented candles. The office was a mess, with stacks of paper everywhere.

Cemetery Nights V Wheel of memory, wheel of forgetting, bitter taste in the mouth--those who have been dead longest group together in the center of the graveyard facing inward. The sooner they become dust the better. They pick at their flesh and watch it crumble, they chip at their bones and watch them dissolve. Do they have memories? Just shadows in the mind like a hand passing between a candle and a wall. Those who have been dead a lesser time stand closer to the fence, but already they have started turning away. Maybe they still have some sadness. And what are their thoughts? Colors mostly, sunset, sunrise, a burning house, someone waving from the flames. Those who have recently died line up against the fence facing outward, watching the mailman, deliverymen, the children returning from school, listening to the church bells dealing out the hours of the living day. So arranged, the dead form a great spoked wheel-- such is the fiery wheel that rolls through heaven. For the rats, nothing is more ridiculous than the recently dead as they press against the railing with their arms stuck between the bars. Occassionally, one sees a friend, even a loved one. Then what a shouting takes place as the dead tries to catch the eye of the living. One actually sees his wife waiting for a bus and reaches out so close that he nearly touches her yellow hair. During life they were great lovers. Maybe he should throw a finger at her, something to attract her attention. Like a scarecrow in a stiff wind, the dead husband waves his arms. Is she aware of anything? Perhaps a slight breeze on an otherwise still day, perhaps a smell of earth. And what does she remember? Sometimes, when she sits in his favorite chair or drinks a wine that he liked, she will recall his face but much faded, like a favorite dress washed too often. And her husband, what does he think? As a piece of crumpled paper burns within a fire, so the thought of her burns within his brain. And where is she going? These days she has taken a new lover and she's going to his apartment. Even as she waits, she sees herself sitting on his bed as he unfastens the buttons of her blouse. He will cup her breasts in his hands. A sudden breeze will invade the room, making the dust motes dance and sparkle as if each bright spot were a single sharp eyed intelligence, as if the vast legion of the dead had come with their unbearable jumble of envy and regret to watch the man as he drops his head presses his mouth to the erect nipple.

When the petals hit the flames of the candles, they hissed and popped into ash, leaving behind a scent that was so beautiful and sweet that it smelled like both yesterday and tomorrow.

Have you brought me something?” he asked. “No.” She held up the mistletoe, looking for somewhere to toss it. “I was given this—” His brow rose. “By whom? Another man desiring to kiss you?” “No, of course…” She blinked at him. “You desire to…to…” She could not even say it. Her mind whirled, and she felt as though she’d been enchanted by the candles and the glitter and…him. He moved to close the distance between them, and she caught her breath. He smelled of something dark and masculine—leather and spicy musk. It had been a long time since she had been surrounded by such a masculine scent. She gripped the mistletoe more tightly, and he reached for her wrist, wrapping his fingers about it and lifting her hand. “Does that shock you?” he asked, the heat of his bare fingers penetrating the fabric of her gloves. “That a man would want to kiss you? You are a beautiful woman, Your Grace.” “Rowena,

I’m in agreement with you now about the not-watching part,” she said. Jane and Mr. Nobley walked back to the house in silence, the air around them thick, dragging with awkwardness. Witnessing confessions of love and first kisses can be enchanting when you’re with someone comfortable, someone you’ve already had that kiss with, and can laugh about it and feel cozy and remember your own first moment. Seeing it with Mr. Nobley was like having a naked-in-public dream. “It’s only natural to confuse truth and fantasy as they play parts in a theatrical,” said Jane. “They start to feel as their characters would.” “True. Which is one reason why I was hesitant to engage in this frivolity. I do not think pretending something can make it real.” “I find it a little alarming that we agree on something. But do you think, in their case anyway, do you think those feelings could run deeper?” Mr. Nobley stopped. He looked at her. “I wondered the same.” “I suppose it’s possible.” “It’s more than possible. They reside in compatible stations in life, they have like minds, their sentiments seem suited to each other.” “You sound like a textbook on matrimony. I’m talking about love, Mr. Nobley. Despite falling in love over a script, do you think they have a chance?” Mr. Nobley frowned and rubbed his sideburns briskly with the back of his fingers. “I…I knew Captain East in the past when he loved another woman. Her changes, her cruelty broke him. He was a shell for some time. If you had asked me last month if another woman’s attentions could make him a whole man again, I would have said that no man can recover from such a wound, that he will never be able to trust a woman again, that romantic love is not air or water and one can live without it. But now…” He breathed out. He had not looked away from her. “Now I do not know. Now I almost begin to think, yes. Yes.” “Yes,” she repeated. The moon hung in the sky just over his shoulder, peering as though listening in, breathless for what was next. “Miss Erstwhile.” “Yes?” He looked at the sky, he took several breaths as if trying to locate the right words, he briefly shut his eyes. “Miss Erstwhile, do you--” Captain East and Miss Heartwright passed by, walking close without touching. Mr. Nobley watched them, his frown deepening, then he looked back over his shoulder at nothing. What? What?! Jane wanted to yell. “Shall we go inside?” He offered his arm. She felt dumped-on-her-rear disappointment, but she took his arm and pretended she was just fine. Soon the warm safety of roof and walls cut off the luscious strangeness of night in the garden. Servants scurried, candles blazed, the preparations for the play were lively and unconcerned with a moment in the park. Without another word, Mr. Nobley left her alone, his jacket still around her shoulders. It smelled like gardens.

Josefina had grown up hearing tales of treasures hidden by thieves, gold mines with secret entrances, jars of coins buried by old men afraid of being robbed. She’d always enjoyed these legends, shared by good storytellers when shadows were long and imaginations ran high. She’d never heard of anyone actually finding lost treasure. But she’d never seen a map marked with landmarks and strange sketches, either. Josefina tried to push the image of the map from her mind so that she could go to sleep, but it was no use. Finally, afraid she might wake her sisters, she got up. Wrapping her rebozo around her shoulders against the cool night breeze, she tiptoed out of the sala. She lit a candle and crept to the storeroom where she and Teresita kept their remedios and dyes. Josefina loved the musty-spicy smells of the plant bundles hanging from poles overhead. She loved seeing bins and gourds and baskets filled with supplies that might help ward off illness or cure disease. Sitting on a banco, she savored the peaceful stillness. She could feel her muscles relaxing. Soon she would be ready for sleep. Then an unexpected sound jerked Josefina upright. The candle fell to the hard earthen floor and snuffed out. In the sudden darkness, Josefina strained to hear the sound that had disturbed her. There it was again! A faint crying sound. Was one of her sisters awake? Was Francisca in the courtyard, weeping for Ramón? Josefina cocked her head, but when she heard the sound again, she was sure it came from outside the house. Josefina stepped closer to the window, carefully avoiding a basket of pumpkin stems. Pressing a palm against the wall, she held her breath. And the sound came again, drifting through the open window above her head—a woman’s sob, low and full of anguish. Josefina’s bones turned to ice. Only one woman roamed at night, weeping and wailing: the ghost, La Llorona!

You’re working so hard, burning the candle at both ends. Up early, home late. When are you going to stop and smell the roses?

fingerprints fall all around me, into great indistinguishable peaks and slopes. The stars look like cusps, everything looks like a cusp. The streetlights still flow, the night smells like a new dime, and the mailbox seems to shine with the accumulation of all it has ever received. The seminarian is laughing and waving me toward the open door, but I am not cold and I am not coming back just yet. Places for people, wide spaces and small, little bodies floating down into their forms. I run even toward the church, till I can see the Marian grotto hidden on one side where the garden is pinched out like a series of matches. It is almost Christmas Eve. Tomorrow, in that church, the songs I like best will flame out their brief lives, there and then gone, while the people hold soft and slumping candles under their chins and circles of cardboard catch the notes of hot wax. They will return again next year.

stop making me laugh,” Valkyrie said from the bed. “You’re not a kid. You’re a grown-up. What age are you?” “Ninety-three.” “You’re ninety-three years old, for God’s sake.” “I’m really sorry, Val. I’m really sorry, everyone. Best behaviour from here on out.” Militsa glanced at the others, then nodded. “OK,” she said. “This is your last chance.” “I’ll be good,” Tanith promised. “All right,” Onosa said. “Valkyrie, close your eyes. Calm yourself.” Valkyrie breathed deeply, her whole body relaxing with each exhalation. Tanith kept her mouth shut. Onosa placed a curious-looking candle on a saucer beside the bed. “This is a Jericho Candle,” she said. “Jericho came up with it, tried calling it something fancy, but what’s the point of inventing something if you don’t put your own name to it, I ask you? When it’s lit, Valkyrie, you’ll be able to smell it, even in your astral form, and it will guide you back to your body. There are only a handful of these in the world, and they are a lot of trouble to make, so we shall light it every hour you are gone, and keep it lit for five minutes.

Monastery Nights I like to think about the monastery as I’m falling asleep, so that it comes and goes in my mind like a screen saver. I conjure the lake of the zendo, rows of dark boats still unless someone coughs or otherwise ripples the calm. I can hear the four AM slipperiness of sleeping bags as people turn over in their bunks. The ancient bells. When I was first falling in love with Zen, I burned incense called Kyonishiki, “Kyoto Autumn Leaves,” made by the Shoyeido Incense Company, Kyoto, Japan. To me it smelled like earnestness and ether, and I tried to imagine a consciousness ignorant of me. I just now lit a stick of it. I had to run downstairs for some rice to hold it upright in its bowl, which had been empty for a while, a raku bowl with two fingerprints in the clay. It calls up the monastery gate, the massive door demanding I recommit myself in the moments of both its opening and its closing, its weight now mine, I wanted to know what I was, and thought I could find the truth where the floor hurts the knee. I understand no one I consider to be religious. I have no idea what’s meant when someone says they’ve been intimate with a higher power. I seem to have been born without a god receptor. I have fervor but seem to lack even the basic instincts of the many seekers, mostly men, I knew in the monastery, sitting zazen all night, wearing their robes to near-rags boy-stitched back together with unmatched thread, smoothed over their laps and tucked under, unmoving in the long silence, the field of grain ripening, heavy tasseled, field of sentient beings turned toward candles, flowers, the Buddha gleaming like a vivid little sports car from his niche. What is the mind that precedes any sense we could possibly have of ourselves, the mind of self-ignorance? I thought that the divestiture of self could be likened to the divestiture of words, but I was wrong. It’s not the same work. One’s a transparency and one’s an emptiness. Kyonishiki.... Today I’m painting what Mom calls no-colors, grays and browns, evergreens: what’s left of the woods when autumn’s come and gone. And though he died, Dad’s here, still forgetting he’s no longer married to Annie, that his own mother is dead, that he no longer owns a car. I told them not to make any trouble or I’d send them both home. Surprise half inch of snow. What good are words? And what about birches in moonlight, Russell handing me the year’s first chanterelle— Shouldn’t God feel like that? I aspire to “a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration,” as Elizabeth Bishop put it. So who shall I say I am? I’m a prism, an expressive temporary sentience, a pinecone falling. I can hear my teacher saying, No. That misses it. Buddha goes on sitting through the century, leaving me alone in the front hall, which has just been cleaned and smells of pine.

Sight: If you’re standing at a high point in total darkness, you can see a candle 30 miles away. Sound: If you’re in a very quiet room, you can hear a watch ticking 20 feet away. Smell: You can smell a drop of perfume in about 800 square feet of space. Touch: You can feel a human hair on your skin. Taste: You can taste a teaspoon of sugar in two gallons of water.

My period began when I was eleven years old, three months after DeAnne thought it had. I woke up one morning to stickiness between my legs and the smell of raw meat in my bed. There was no one to tell. The news had preceded the occurrence. I practiced saying it anyway, "My periodblueberrymuffin starteduunsaltedbutter today oatmeal." This was a comforting sentence for me. I had just learned the trick of stringing together words to produce the tastes that I wanted. I was particularly fond of this thread: "walnut, elephant, candle, jogger." These words brought forth the following in this satisfying order: ham steak, sugar-cured and pan-fried; sweet potatoes baked with lots of butter; 7UP (though more of the lime than the lemon, like when it's icy cold); fresh strawberries, sweet and ripe.

My period began when I was eleven years old, three months after DeAnne thought it had. I woke up one morning to stickiness between my legs and the smell of raw meat in my bed. There was no one to tell. The news had preceded the occurrence. I practiced saying it anyway, "My periodblueberrymuffin startedunsaltedbutter todayoatmeal." This was a comforting sentence for me. I had just learned the trick of stringing together words to produce the tastes that I wanted. I was particularly fond of this thread: "walnut, elephant, candle, jogger." These words brought forth the following in this satisfying order: ham steak, sugar-cured and pan-fried; sweet potatoes baked with lots of butter; 7UP (though more of the lime than the lemon, like when it's icy cold); fresh strawberries, sweet and ripe.

His eyes darted around the hallway, across the woven blue rug and up to the framed photos of baguettes and cheese wedges that covered the walls. His skin warmed from the heat coming out of the nearby kitchen. The smell of butter and cream mingled together like the tastiest candle you could ever light. He'd never had the food at Lyon, but he already knew what he was missing.

The room smelled of incense and patchouli oil, and a small tin candle lantern cast the patterns of stars on to the walls.

Steam rises from the surface, smelling of soy and ginger and hot peppers. A fried egg sits atop the slices of braised pork, the golden yolk loose and glistening in the light of the candles. A thick layer of white rice covers the bottom of the bowl, sopping up the rich, porky juices. "So what exactly is this? Bibimbap?" "Similar. It's a riff on a Japanese dish---donburi. Meat and an egg with rice.

I loved the smell of books. There was nothing like digging my nose into a brand-new book and inhaling deeply. I wished someone would bottle the scent or turn it into a candle. They could call it Library. I would buy that.

There is nothing more romantic than candles and flowers, except candles that smell like flowers and flowers that can be burned, as they flicker light while you dine alone and ponder how much of a romantic you are.

The place was dark, but I could smell tallow, as if a candle had been burning and had recently been snuffed.

I climb into the passenger seat and slam the door. I sit with my arms crossed over my chest, my lips a tight line. This moment is so cruel. For a second I forget myself. All I want is to be the normal girl, with parents who let her date and a house that smells of seasonally appropriate candles and not fried onions. I slink back in the car seat. I know I can wish for life to be different. I can click my heels and hope I'm somewhere else. But in the end, I'm here. I'm me.

I never thought I could be smitten by a human scent. I love the smell of ocean, the wet damp fragrance of earth after rains, the season's first flower but the aroma of you is completely different! Your scent is the arousal of mind & body, it wraps around me & shrouds my fears, insecurities & negativities. It is a spark that lit the hope for love on a candle wick that was broken & frayed among the lies of the world. For some reason that I have been scared to admit, it smelt like time - Mahakal.... That could possibly I don't know but turn into forever, the push of destiny! Your scent is the the call of parallel universe that dreams out for a pseudo intimacy likewise in the same way Krishna did rashlila with gopinis. Lastly, yes I got my answers about how personality can be reformed by love which Bhagawatam wants to narrate but we can't understand residing in the delusions created by lust.... Thanks, Koyena [The divine lady] ❤❤

She is crouched in the dim, dust-speckled attic of an abandoned house on Sixth Street, surrounded by a small ocean of books and papers, hastily scrawled notes, and half-written spells for rust and sleep and sunlight, for changeling children and flying brooms. Candle-stubs puddle precariously close to piles of poorly folded cloaks in a dozen shades of charcoal and ink, still smelling of summer. I’m the middle of this mess Bella sits in a ring of salt, fingers cramped around a pen and sleeves rolled to the wrist, trying to ignore the feathered passing of hours. Her battered black-leather notebook is propped against a mug of cold coffee, the pages dog-eared and marked. It occurs to Bella that if their plan goes awry, it might be the only surviving record of events that isn’t skewed by Gideon Hill’s propagandizing. It isn’t much—part memoir, part grimoire, interspersed with rhymes and witch-tales, a scrapbooked record of their summer—but her fingers trail lovingly over the cover.

I hate the way blueberry candles smell. Have you ever had one burning in your house? They’re like breathing bad syrup.

Alistair’s voice was surprisingly gentle when he asked, “So you didn’t want to be champion?” “No,” Isobel answered, even though it felt like admitting something terrible. “I didn’t. I…still don’t. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can pretend that it isn’t real. That I’m still in my bed at home.” In the room that Isobel had wasted a spell to ruin, just because she’d been angry and scared. Suddenly, the candles in the room snuffed out all at once, pitching them from the already dim candlelight into total blackness. It took her a second to realize that he’d extinguished them with a spell, for her. So she couldn’t see where she truly was. But she could still smell it—the rot, the mold, the damp, earthy odor of the cave walls. “You want to know something funny?” he asked. “In a choice between staying here or going home, I’d still choose here. With you.

Magic sparked, the smell of it—like smoke from blown-out birthday candles—coating Loren’s tongue as it swept through her airways.

There was a tub filled with orange flowers and floating candles inside the bath and around the bathroom. The smell of lavender and eucalyptus cascaded in the air. It was so fucking sexy.

The late night binge-watching The X-Files on the couch they picked out together, the early mornings making toast while they're still too tired to speak, the kids who will earn their first scars in the backyard and badly practice instruments in inconvenient times, and the way their favorite candle's scent will gradually infuse the walls so that every time they come back from a trip exhausted, and dump their bags inside the door, they'll smell that they're where they belong. All those moments throughout the days, weeks, months that don't get marked on calendars with hand-drawn stars or little stickers. Those are the moments that make a life. Not grand gestures, but mundane details that, over time, accumulate until you have a home, instead of a house. Things that matter. The things I can't stop longing for. There's only one place that feeling exists for me, only one person with whom I belong.

The late night binge-watching The X-Files on the couch they picked out together, the early mornings making toast while they're still too tired to speak, the kids who will earn their first scars in the backyard and badly practice instruments in inconvenient times, and the way their favorite candle's scent will gradually infuse the walls so that every time they come back from a trip exhausted, and dump their bags inside the door, they'll smell that they're where they belong. All those moments throughout the days, weeks, months that don't get marked on calendars with hand-drawn stars or little stickers. Those are the moments that make a life. Not grand gestures, but mundane details that, over time, accumulate until you have a home, instead of a house. Things that matter. The things I can't stop longing for. There's only one place that feeling exists for me, only one person with whom I belong

God is Santa Claus for grown-ups, not a misery-guts, not an asshole; we've got enough of those in town already. I didn't believe; but the guy I didn't believe in wasn't like that. He was a warm, smiling chap, overflowing with benevolence; someone you looked up to with the same bafflement and confused wonder and absolute trust that you had for the giants who put you on your potty when you were two. He was a nice guy who would make it all right; who understood; the one guy you never had to explain your screw-ups to. He smelled good, too: of pews and old hassocks, floor polish and musty velvet drapes, of candle wax and mildewed pages. He resided in the tranquility that can fill even the heart of an unbeliever in old churches, where the eye and the spirit are soothed by the flicker of golden candlelight and the gentle but vivid hues from the stained-glass good guys above the altar. And the great thing about Him was, He was human. You could feel sorry for Him. I knew there could be only one reason why He let us suffer like this: He can't find a way to stop it. Like a roller-coaster ride that gets too scary, there's no way off. He set it in motion and now He's as helpless as the rest of us.

The old women were gone. They seemed to have ascended into the darkness like the waxy smoke from the candles after he capped them with the brass bell at the end of the snuffer. For a moment, staring into the darkness, he imagined the rafters full of smoky old women with hair sprouting from their chins. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Whispering in Italian, and Polish, and Latin about dead husbands and dead children. Like angels grown old but not allowed to die. He could smell them: the odor of candles.

A fanfare of plastic flags with cutout patterns of skeletons flapped noisily in the air and overhead a piñata swayed, waiting for the hard blows of the breaking ceremony. He searched through the crowd lined up for the puppet show, then glanced down Olvera Street. The street had been closed to traffic for a long time now and looked like a Mexican marketplace, with stands selling boldly colored ceramics and paper flowers. He didn't see Serena, but her brother, Collin, had said she had gone to the Día de los Muertos celebration with Jimena. He turned to see candy skulls with green sequin eyes and frosting lips staring back at him from a stall. When the vendor looked away, he grabbed three and tossed one into his mouth. The sugar dissolved with tangy sweetness. He spun around, sensing other eyes. An old woman shook her head at him as she placed a bowl of spicy-smelling sauce on her ofrenda. Orange flowers, white candles, and faded snapshots of her dead relatives covered the altar. Stanton liked the way some people waited for the spirits of their loved ones to come back and visit, while others were terrified at the thought. The old woman placed a sign on the table: SINCE DEATH IS INEVITABLE, IT SHOULD NOT BE FEARED, BUT HONORED. "Not for everyone," he said softly. She looked at him. "What's not for everyone?" "Death." He smiled.

He tried to remember what his mother's hair smelled like, realized he couldn't. He couldn't even remember her face. He could still hear the laughter in the courtyard, could still remember the timbre in Aldeti's viol and the way the candles flickered each time he kissed them good-night. One never forgets the taste of water or the smell of air. But water and air...is only water and air. He could remember the feel of his infant child in his arms twelve years ago, but could he hold on to everything for the rest of his life? They were all irrevocably behind him, now.

Candles and waterproof matches.” “Check.” “Weather radio, flashlight, batteries…” “Check, check, check…” “Hurricane-tracking chart, potable water, freeze-dried food, can opener, organic toilet paper, sensible clothes, upbeat reading material, baseball gloves, compass, whistle, signal mirror, first-aid kit, snake-bite kit, mess kit, malaria tablets, smelling salts, flints, splints, solar survival blanket, edible-wild-plant field almanac, trenching tool, semaphores, gas masks, Geiger counter, executive defibrillator, railroad flares, lemons in case of scurvy, Austrian gold coins in case paper money becomes scoffed at, laminated sixteen-language universal hostage-negotiation ‘Kwik-Guide’ (Miami-Dade edition), extra film, extra ammunition, firecrackers, handcuffs, Taser, pepper spray, throwing stars, Flipper lunch box, Eden Roc ashtray, Cypress Gardens felt pennant, alligator snow globe, miniature wooden crate of orange gumballs, acrylic seashell thermometer and pen holder, can of Florida sunshine…” “Check, check, check…. What about my inflatable woman?

The smells I associate with yoga are contradictory. Freshly showered bodies and sweat. Sandalwood from a scented candle mixed with hot feet on rubber mats. Head-clearing pure air, ozonic freshness- and deep oriental mystery. Stillness and invigorating renewal. Feminine grace and masculine strength. Anima and animus. My scents of yoga are: Madagascan Jasmine by Grandiflora Lime Basil and Mandarin Cologne by Jo Malone London Exhale by B Never Too Busy To Be Beautiful Pour Monsieur by Chanel Oud by Maison Francis Kurkdjian New West for Her by Aramis Black Lapsang by Bodhidharma Santal by Diptyque (my favorite candle for the yoga studio)

Some ways to increase the enjoyment of your food and mealtimes include: •Sitting down at a table to eat, versus eating standing up, in the car/bus, or at your desk. •Making your environment a pleasant one. For example, dim the lights, light a candle, have soft music playing, or eat outside. •Compose your meals with a variety of colors and textures. •Take a few deep breaths or pause for a moment of gratitude before the meal. •Engage in mindful eating, i.e., let yourself savor each bite of food, slow your chewing, and really notice how the food feels, smells, and tastes. •Choose foods you like, and do not force yourself to eat things you do not like the taste of.

Beginning a mindfulness practice, no matter how small, can be immensely helpful in healing disordered eating, as well as helping in other areas of your life. For this activity, you may begin by simply choosing one piece of food—such as a piece of chocolate, a raisin, a slice of watermelon—or a complete meal. 1Create a relaxing ambiance by putting on quiet or soothing music, lighting a candle, or dimming the lights. 2Become aware of your hunger level. 3Sit down at a table. 4Note the smell, texture, and temperature of your food. 5Take the time to chew. Try for at least 10 chews per bite, and note whether you prefer to chew on one side of your mouth or the other. Pause to take a drink, and notice the qualities of what you are sipping (is it cold, warm, bubbly, refreshing?). 6Put your utensils down while you chew. 7Periodically notice your hunger level until you end your meal.

The pie pantry had a familiar scent, warm and earthy like flour, yeast, and dough, with top notes of apples and spices. Sam unconsciously wrapped her arms around her body- the smells greeting her like a warm hug- and smiled. I actually just used the words "top notes," Sam laughed to herself, thinking of her roommate, Lily, who had worked at Yankee Candle while in college, and- although she never purchased a single grocery item save for Oreos- bought candles for their tiny apartment constantly, describing the scents in flowery,, over-the-top descriptions. A cinnamon stick candle didn't just smell like cinnamon, Sam mused, trying to remember how Lily had described it. Oh, yes: its top notes were cinnamon, its middle notes were clove and cardamom, and its base notes were cedarwood and bay leaf.

Lindsey’s apartment smelled like a Yankee Candle and looked like a Barbie Dreamhouse.

When the house grew as quiet and dark as the night outside, Sylvie lit a candle that smelled like cranberries and pumpkins. She lay on her bed in a white, sheer nightgown and watched the flame throw shadows around the room. It took a long while to center herself, for her breathing to grow steady and deep. She had no idea where Callum might be. She knew his neck show was south, somewhere in Oregon, so she focused on that particular element to guide her. Since the connection had been made, since she had already found him once, she knew she could do so again. She felt that familiar click of her body letting go and she went. Sylvie found herself in another hotel room. This one was bigger and more lavish than the previous one. He was sleeping, half-naked. The sight of his bare skin, the defined muscles on his torso, took her breath away. She didn't want to talk to him at all, she wanted to climb underneath the sheet beside him, she wanted to touch every inch of his body and open herself up so he could fill her.

At last I came upon the hedge maze. Far from the warm circles of light cast by torch and lamp, the leaves and twigs here were wedged in a silver lacework of starlight and shadow. The entrance was framed by two large trees, their branches still bare of any new growth. In the darkness, they seemed less like garden posts marking the way into the labyrinth than two silent sentinels guarding the doorway to the underworld. Shapes writhed in the shadows beyond the archway of bramble and vine, both inviting and intimidating. Yet I was not frightened. The hedge maze smelled like the forest outside the inn, a deep green scent of growth and decay, where life and death were intermingled. A familiar scent. A welcoming scent. The scent of home. Removing my mask, I crossed the threshold, letting darkness swallow me whole. There were no torches or candles lit upon the paths, and neither moonlight nor starlight penetrated the dense bramble. Yet my footing along these paths was sure, every part of me attuned to the wildness around me. Unlike the maze of Schönbrunn Palace, a meticulously manicured and man-made construction, this labyrinth breathed. Nature creeped in along the edges, reclaiming groomed, orderly, and civilized corridors into a twisting tangle of tunnels and tracks, weeds and wildflowers. Paths grew vague, roots unruly, branches untamed. Somewhere deep in the labyrinth, I could hear the giggles and gasps of illicit encounters in the shrubbery. I was careful of my step, lest I trip over a pair of trysting lovers, but when I came upon no one else, I let myself fall into a meditative state of mind. I wandered the recursive spirals of the hedge maze, turn after turn after turn, feeling a measure of calm for the first time in a long time.

The candles burned low and flickered before sizzling softly and leaving a trace smell of burn. When I'd lit them a few hours before, I thought, as I always did, about my grandmothers, who had also done this every week. I had no idea if any of them ever felt the way I did, only that they had lived and raised their families as part of this world. If I were to leave, would I be ceding my connection to them as well; would they have ceased to claim me as their own?

Smelling food can trick your brain into thinking you've eaten. A recent study found that those who inhaled peppermint scent every 2 hours, ate 2700 calories LESS per week than they normally did. This translates to fat loss of more than ¾ pound a week from sniffing peppermint or over 3 pounds per month! Vanilla also works so you can keep vanilla-scented drops or even candles around the office and take a sniff occasionally. What could be simpler than sniffing your way to significant weight loss?

It still had that wonderful smell that old churches have: part damp, part old hymn books, and the lingering scent of burned-out candles.

She could smell him again. The odor of secret things locked up in storage. Boxes of paperback novels that had grown moldy from the dampness. A leather ball glove. Incense and half-burned candles. Faded jeans and flannel shirts.

A second-hand bookshop draws me in a as a moth to a candle. Each shop is a small shrine to the power of beauty and words. Tightly packed shelves of old hardback novels; heavy tomes on art and design; teetering piles of poetry. There are copies of the Children's Encyclopedia used as a doorstop and wooden crates of paperbacks going for a song. Some are rare, with a price to match, others a fraction of their original cost. A book for everyone, I guess. Yes, it's the thought of words put together with such care, the pages whose surface has been worn by years of handling; the tired bindings and torn-edged covers where a book has been in less kind hands than it should. (A chance to give a damaged book a kinder home.) But even more, it is the smell that makes me want to enter every second-hand bookshop I pass. A smell that is dusty, a cross between an old leather saddle and a country church.

Each Christmas my parents would light candles for the table, flames that softened the twinkling pink lights of the tree and infused the air with the smell of beeswax. As the candles burned low into the late afternoon, their shadows hid the gaudy paper crowns and detritus of Christmas crackers that lay torn, their snaps exploded. The flames made everyone's eyes sparkle, the sugar crystals on the fruit jellies glisten and the edges of the room dim and more interesting. By five o'clock, instead of a scene of brightly colored carnage, it was like peering at a fairy-tale world through a piece of golden gauze.

She didn’t like the smell of my dick,” he repeated, then flickered the candle again and held it up to Quincy’s tip.