Cart Girl Quotes

Friday morning, Kylie, Miranda, and Della, each carting suitcases, walked the trail to meet up with their parents. They walked slowly, like condemned prisoners moving to their executions. “I’m going to be peeing on a drug test stick every hour,” Della muttered. Miranda sighed. “I’m going to screw up at my competition and my mom is going to give me up for adoption.” “I’m going to a ghost hunt,” Kylie added. Both girls looked at her. “Don’t ask.

You’re mine,” he said hoarsely, lifting his head and staring deep into her eyes, willing her to believe. “If you leave, I will follow. Do you hear me? I will follow and find you and cart you home.

Crazy isn´t always what they say it is. It´s not always the old woman wearing sneakers and a skirt and a scarf, wandering around with a shopping cart, hollering at no one, nothing, tumbling through years in her head. No. Sometimes it is a girl wearing boots and jeans and a sweater, arms crossed in front of her, shivering, wandering through the streets at night, all night, murmuring to no one, nothing, tumbling through the strange unreal dimensions in her head.

boys don't like smart girls they like push-around-in-a-cart kinda girls target-for-their-dart kinda girls meat-for-their-shark kinda girls

It seems that a fully lived life is going to be a bit of a roller coaster, not a flat go-cart track that just takes you around and around in a safe little circle.

I want to meet this one,” he said. “I need to meet the girl who has taken our wandering Alexander’s horse and cart.

roller coaster, not a flat go-cart track that just takes you around and around in a safe little circle.

The next day brought more visitors. Sarah was eating a simple luncheon with Charis, Ariel, and Guinevere and was experiencing for the first time in her life the pleasure of talking freely with other girls she trusted. It wasn't that they talked about anything of importance. Indeed, most of their conversation was hopelessly trivial- Mordecai would have shaken his head sadly over such frivolity, Sarah reflected with an inward smile. But to talk so openly, and to laugh so unrestrainedly, was somehow far more significant than any single thing that was said.

The Mania Speaks You clumsy bootlegger. Little daffodil. I watered you with an ocean and you plucked one little vein? Downed a couple bottles of pills and got yourself carted off to the ER? I gifted you the will of gunpowder, a matchstick tongue, and all you managed was a shredded sweater and a police warning? You should be legend by now. Girl in an orange jumpsuit, a headline. I built you from the purest napalm, fed you wine and bourbon. Preened you in the dark, hammered lullabies into your thin skull. I painted over the walls, wrote the poems. I shook your goddamn boots. Now you want out? Think you’ll wrestle me out of you with prescriptions? A good man’s good love and some breathing exercises? You think I can’t tame that? I always come home. Always. Ravenous. Loaded. You know better than anybody: I’m bigger than God.

In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who won’t survive a trip across the ocean. A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money. If you were a thing—a cart or a horse or a slave—your value determined your possibilities.

And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When The Rapture Comes” says the man with a cart of empty bottles at the corner of church and lincoln while I stare into my phone and I say I know oh I know while trying to find the specific filter that will make the sun’s near-flawless descent look the way I might describe it in a poem and the man says the moment is already right in front of you and I say I know but everyone I love is not here and I mean here like on this street corner with me while I turn the sky a darker shade of red on my phone and I mean here like everyone I love who I can still touch and not pass my fingers through like the wind in a dream but I look up at the man and he is a kaleidoscope of shadows I mean his shadows have shadows and they are small and trailing behind him and I know then that everyone he loves is also not here and the man doesn’t ask but I still say hey man I’ve got nothing I’ve got nothing even though I have plenty to go home to and the sun is still hot even in its endless flirt with submission and the man’s palm has a small river inside I mean he has taken my hand now and here we are tethered and unmoving and the man says what color are you making the sky and I say what I might say in a poem I say all surrender ends in blood and he says what color are you making the sky and I say something bright enough to make people wish they were here and he squints towards the dancing shrapnel of dying light along a rooftop and he says I love things only as they are and I’m sure I did once too but I can’t prove it to anyone these days and he says the end isn’t always about what dies and I know I know or I knew once and now I write about beautiful things like I will never touch a beautiful thing again and the man looks me in the eyes and he points to the blue-orange vault over heaven’s gates and he says the face of everyone you miss is up there and I know I know I can’t see them but I know and he turns my face to the horizon and he says we don’t have much time left and I get that he means the time before the sun is finally through with its daily work or I think I get that but I still can’t stop trembling and I close my eyes and I am sobbing on the corner of church and lincoln and when I open my eyes the sun is plucking everyone who has chosen to love me from the clouds and carrying them into the light-drunk horizon and I am seeing this and I know I am seeing this the girl who kissed me as a boy in the dairy aisle of meijer while our parents shopped and the older boy on the basketball team who taught me how to make a good fist and swing it into the jaw of a bully and the friends who crawled to my porch in the summer of any year I have been alive they were all there I saw their faces and it was like I was given the eyes of a newborn again and once you know what it is to be lonely it is hard to unsee that which serves as a reminder that you were not always empty and I am gasping into the now-dark air and I pull my shirt up to wipe whatever tears are left and I see the man walking in the other direction and I chase him down and tap his arm and I say did you see it did you see it like I did and he turns and leans into the glow of a streetlamp and he is anchored by a single shadow now and he sneers and he says have we met and he scoffs and pushes his cart off into the night and I can hear the glass rattling even as I watch him become small and vanish and I look down at my phone and the sky on the screen is still blood red.

The cart was grotesque, and automatically attracted attention. A peasant was walking beside it. The cart listed sharply to one side and moved forward at a walking pace. And over all its groaning plunder hung the wet, leaden word “town”; it brought to life in the girl’s head a number of images as fleeting as the cold October brilliance which flew along the street and fell upon the water.

If I ever have more than $37 in my pocket I´m going to open a school for girls with bad attitudes where we basically talk to therapists all day while wearing soft pants and occasionally taking a field trip to the nearest elote cart.

ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Girl Without Hands Walking through the ruins on your way to work that do not look like ruins with the sunlight pouring over the seen world like hail or melted silver, that bright and magnificent, each leaf and stone quickened and specific in it, and you can't hold it, you can't hold any of it. Distance surrounds you, marked out by the ends of your arms when they are stretched to their fullest. You can go no farther than this, you think, walking forward, pushing the distance in front of you like a metal cart on wheels with its barriers and horizontals. Appearance melts away from you, the offices and pyramids on the horizon shimmer and cease. No one can enter that circle you have made, that clean circle of dead space you have made and stay inside, mourning because it is clean. Then there's the girl, in the white dress, meaning purity, or the failure to be any colour. She has no hands, it's true. The scream that happened to the air when they were taken off surrounds her now like an aureole of hot sand, of no sound. Everything has bled out of her. Only a girl like this can know what's happened to you. If she were here she would reach out her arms towards you now, and touch you with her absent hands and you would feel nothing, but you would be touched all the same.

Stepping forward, Girl stares out the doorway, into the sun. “I used to tread the world freely in Mira,” she smiles gently. “My feet would feel the bare earth sifting its way between my toes. I’d push a cart full of wares, hearing it roll along the bumpy terrain, catching stones and flicking them up into the air.

Outside the internet café a gypsy kid and his girl sold punnets of chestnuts from a roasting cart and kissed. They looked like the year 1583. The air was dark blue and had the smoke of old poetry at dusklight.

He chuckled. “Most girls want jewelry. Instead you want a balloon. How did I get to lucky? Which color do you want?” “That one,” I pointed to a pale blue one. The gray haired man running the balloon cart seemed to find Caeden and me very amusing. “Mommy! Mommy!” A little kid behind me shrieked. “I want one! Boon! Boon!” “No,” she said, from the tone of her voice I could tell she was exhausted. “Boon! Boon!” the little girl cried as the mom picked her up and balanced her on her hip. I looked over at Caeden and saw him holding two balloons. He grinned. “What? I heard someone else wanted a balloon and I just can’t resist a damsel in distress.

Ball?" said one of the Pistons with interest. "We like balls." Dimity gave them her best, most haughty look. "Yes, but are you certain they like you?" "What's that supposed to mean?" Sophronia whispered to her. Pillover joined them, as confident in his new situation as if he had always expected to set off with his sister and two other girls in a farm cart. "I don't know," replied Dimity as they drove away. "It sounded good at the time.

But what if I do live? What if we win? What then?" He parted the bottle's mouth from his. "What then? Ah." He smiled beatifically. "Then the world goes on, my friend. Children run down muddy streets. Dogs bark at passing carts. Friends sit and drink brandy together." "Doesn't sound much different from what we have," I observed sourly. "To go through all this and make no difference at all." "Yes." He agreed beatifically. His eyes filled with tears. "Not much different from the wondrous and amazing world we have now. Boys falling in love with girls that aren't right for them. Wolves hunting on the snowy plains. And time. Endless time unwinding for all of us. And the dragons, of course. Dragons sliding across the sky like beautiful jewelled ships.

For about five minutes, as I tried to get the Vespa to start, I fell in love with her. The oversized raincoat made her look about eight, as though she should have had matching Wellies with ladybugs on them, and inside the red hood were huge brown eyes and rain-spiked lashes and a face like a kitten’s. I wanted to dry her gently with a big fluffy towel, in front of a roaring fire. But then she said, “Here, let me—you have to know how to twist the thingy,” and I raised an eyebrow and said, “The thingy? Honestly, girls.” I immediately regretted it—I have never been talented at banter, and you never know, she could have been some earnest droning feminist extremist who would lecture me in the rain about Amelia Earhart. But Cassie gave me a deliberate, sideways look, and then clasped her hands with a wet spat and said in a breathy Marilyn voice, “Ohhh, I’ve always dreamed of a knight in shining armor coming along and rescuing little me! Only in my dreams he was good-looking.” What I saw transformed with a click like a shaken kaleidoscope. I stopped falling in love with her and started to like her immensely. I looked at her hoodie jacket and said, “Oh my God, they’re about to kill Kenny.” Then I loaded the Golf Cart into the back of my Land Rover and drove her home.

Outside, Her Ladyship coaxed her dog back toward the house, lifting both dog and cart up the few steps to her door. Gabe turned away from the window, rubbing his temples. "The situation is untenable, and that makes the house unsellable. No one wants to live next to a barnyard. I've tried reasoning with her, but when it comes to those animals, she's surprisingly tenacious." Tenacious, indeed. And sufficiently reckless to trespass in a house after midnight and recover a parrot from a near-naked stranger's shoulder. However, even that degree of tenacity had poor odds against sheer ruthlessness. Lady Penelope Campion had a softness for animals.

I have often raised an eyebrow at hearing him sing, as I push a cart down some Safeway aisle, of the spiritual complexities induced by he admixture of Cuervo Gold, cocaine, and nineteen-year-old girls (in the hands of a man of, shall we say, a certain age). At which point I look around Frozen Foods and wonder: "Is anyone else hearing this?

In South Texas I saw three interesting things. The first was a tiny girl, maybe ten years old, driving in a 1965 Cadillac. She wasn't going very fast, because I passed her, but still she was cruising right along, with her head tilted back and her mouth open and her little hands gripping the wheel. Then I saw an old man walking up the median strip pulling a wooden cross behind him. It was mounted on something like a golf cart with two spoked wheels. I slowed down to read the hand-lettered sign on his chest. JACKSONVILLE FLA OR BUST I had never been to Jacksonville but I knew it was the home of the Gator Bowl and I had heard it was a boom town, taking in an entire county or some such thing. It seemed an odd destination for a religious pilgrim. Penance maybe for some terrible sin, or some bargain he had worked out with God, or maybe just a crazed hiker. I waved and called out to him, wishing him luck, but he was intent on his marching and had no time for idle greetings. His step was brisk and I was convinced he wouldn't bust. The third interesting thing was a convoy of stake-bed trucks all piled high with loose watermelons and cantaloupes. I was amazed. I couldn't believe that the bottom ones weren't crushed under all that weight, exploding and spraying hazardous melon juice onto the highway. One of nature's tricks with curved surfaces. Topology! I had never made it that far in mathematics and engineering studies, and I knew now that I never would, just as I knew that I would never be a navy pilot or a Treasury agent. I made a B in Statics but I was failing in Dynamics when I withdrew from the field. The course I liked best was one called Strength of Materials. Everybody else hated it because of all the tables we had to memorize but I loved it, the sheared beam. I had once tried to explain to Dupree how things fell apart from being pulled and compressed and twisted and bent and sheared but he wouldn't listen. Whenever that kind of thing came up, he would always say - boast, the way those people do - that he had no head for figures and couldn't do things with his hands, slyly suggesting the presence of finer qualities.

When I was a little girl I didn’t like the smell of the hops in the carts. Nor in the fields. Je n’aime pas les houblons. No, my God, not a bit. The man that owns the brewery said to me and my sister to go to the brewery and drink the beer, and then we’d like the hops. That’s true. Then we liked them all right. He had them give us the beer. We liked them all right then.

In America the quirk was that people were things. Best to cut your losses on an old man who won’t survive a trip across the ocean. A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money. If you were a thing—a cart or a horse or a slave—your value determined your possibilities. She minded her place.

No fainting in the middle of the road,” said a voice close to my ear as a heavy arm landed across my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. I looked up to see Mal’s familiar face, a smile in his bright blue eyes as he fell into step beside me. “C’mon,” he said. “One foot in front of the other. You know how it’s done.” “You’re interfering with my plan.” “Oh really?” “Yes. Faint, get trampled, grievous injuries all around.” “That sounds like a brilliant plan.” “Ah, but if I’m horribly maimed, I won’t be able to cross the Fold.” Mal nodded slowly. “I see. I can shove you under a cart if that would help.” “I’ll think about it,” I grumbled, but I felt my mood lifting all the same. Despite my best efforts, Mal still had that effect on me. And I wasn’t the only one. A pretty blond girl strolled by and waved, throwing Mal a flirtatious glance over her shoulder. “Hey,

The reason these diatribes are heard by more than just the occasional potted plant or captured hero is this: sparks quite frequently find themselves surrounded by people whether they want to be or not. We are not just talking about the stereotypical traveler whose cart breaks down during a storm and thus must seek shelter at the lone castle glimpsed through the trees and so finds himself at a timely ringside seat for the revelation of the latest abomination of science (although there is no denying this happens far more than is statistically probable). No, your seriously steeped-in-madness dabbler in the esoteric sciences usually finds themself taxed with a rag-tag collection of hangers-on, typically consisting of minions, constructs, adventurers, and those unique, unclassifiable, individuals whose raison d’être appears to be to remind us of what a strange world it is. Even more interestingly, it appears that the greater the spark, the more of these individuals they spontaneously accumulate.

I do love Oregon." My gaze wanders over the quiet, natural beauty surrounding us, which isn't limited to just this garden. "Being near the river, and the ocean, and the rocky mountains, and all this nature ... the weather." He chuckles. "I've never met anyone who actually loves rain. It's kind of weird. But cool, too," he adds quickly, as if afraid to offend me. "I just don't get it." I shrug. "It's not so much that I love rain. I just have a healthy respect for what if does. People hate it, but the world needs rain. It washes away dirt, dilutes the toxins in the air, feeds drought. It keeps everything around us alive." "Well, I have a healthy respect for what the sun does," he counters with a smile." "I'd rather have the sun after a good, hard rainfall." He just shakes his head at me but he's smiling. "The good with the bad?" "Isn't that life?" He frowns. "Why do I sense a metaphor behind that?" "Maybe there is a metaphor behind that." One I can't very well explain to him without describing the kinds of things I see every day in my life. The underbelly of society - where twisted morals reign and predators lurk, preying on the lost, the broken, the weak, the innocent. Where a thirteen-year-old sells her body rather than live under the same roof as her abusive parents, where punks gang-rape a drunk girl and then post pictures of it all over the internet so the world can relive it with her. Where a junkie mom's drug addiction is readily fed while her children sit back and watch. Where a father is murdered bacause he made the mistake of wanting a van for his family. In that world, it seems like it's raining all the time. A cold, hard rain that seeps into clothes, chills bones, and makes people feel utterly wretched. Many times, I see people on the worst day of their lives, when they feel like they're drowing. I don't enjoy seeing people suffer. I just know that if they make good choices, and accept the right help, they'll come out of it all the stronger for it. What I do enjoy comes after. Three months later, when I see that thirteen-year-old former prostitute pushing a mower across the front lawn of her foster home, a quiet smile on her face. Eight months later, when I see the girl who was raped walking home from school with a guy who wants nothing from her but to make her laugh. Two years later, when I see the junkie mom clean and sober and loading a shopping cart for the kids that the State finally gave back to her. Those people have seen the sun again after the harshest rain, and they appreciate it so much more.

I want to know all of your family—your aunt and her husband and her son and also your uncle the pastor. I anticipate your uncle the pastor! He will try to convert me, maybe?” “Are you kidding? Uncle Theron couldn’t convert a kitten.” “Theron,” Pyotr repeated. He made it sound like “Seron.” “You are doing this to torture me?” “Doing what?” “So many th names!” “Oh,” Kate said. “Yes, and my mother’s name was Thea.” He groaned. “What is the surname of these people?” he asked. After the briefest pause, she said, “Thwaite.” “My God!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. She laughed. “I’m pulling your leg,” she told him. He lowered his hand and looked at her. “I was just kidding,” she clarified. “Really their surname is Dell.” “Ah,” he said. “You were joking. You made a joke. You were teasing me!” And he started capering around the cart. “Oh, Kate; oh, my comical Kate; oh, Katya mine…” “Stop it!” she said. People were staring at them. “Quit that and tell me which syrup you want.” He stopped capering and selected a bottle, seemingly at random, and dropped it into the cart.

A blood-drenched cart is driving by, In that cart a Cossack lies, Pierced his heart, empty his glance, In his right hand he holds a lance, And from this lance the blood runs down, A river of blood pours on the ground. Above the stream a maple bows, Above the maple caws a crow. Over the Cossack his mother cries. Don’t weep, mother, dry your eyes! For your son has wed a wife, The fairest young girl of his life. In the wide field a house of clay, No windows to let in the day. And that’s the end of all our song. The fish and crayfish did a dance … And if you don’t love me, may your mother catch a chill!

I had received on two different occasions letters from Gilberte and from Robert. Gilberte wrote me (about September, 1914) that much as she would have liked to remain in Paris in order to get news from Robert more easily, the perpetual “taube” raids over Paris had given her such a fright, especially on her little girl’s account, that she had fled from Paris by the last train which left for Combray, that the train did not even reach Combray and it was only thanks to a peasant’s cart upon which she had made a ten hours journey in atrocious discomfort that she had at last been able to get to Tansonville.

Do you hear me? I only knew I had to have you.” Not only have her, but keep her. Make her his own. Even now, the thought of letting her walk away . . . he couldn’t bear it. No. He wouldn’t allow it. This wasn’t tenderness that filled him with a fiery resolve. It was possession. Pure, raw, wild. If she could glimpse the brutish, primal impulses coursing through him, she would run like a rabbit flees a ravening wolf. And he would catch her. “You’re mine,” he said hoarsely, lifting his head and staring deep into her eyes, willing her to believe. “If you leave, I will follow. Do you hear me? I will follow and find you and cart you home.

...at Newsweek only girls with college degrees--and we were called "girls" then--were hired to sort and deliver the mail, humbly pushing our carts from door to door in our ladylike frocks and proper high-heeled shoes. If we could manage that, we graduated to "clippers," another female ghetto. Dressed in drab khaki smocks so that ink wouldn't smudge our clothes, we sat at the clip desk, marked up newspapers, tore out releveant articles with razor-edged "rip sticks," and routed the clips to the appropriate departments. "Being a clipper was a horrible job," said writer and director Nora Ephron, who got a job at Newsweek after she graduated from Wellesley in 1962, "and to make matters worse, I was good at it.

It is an autumn New York morning, and therefore glorious; it is his first day of his long journey, the day before the interview, and his clothes are still clean and neat, socks still paired, blue suit unwrinkled, toothpaste still American and not some strange foreign flavor. Bright-lemon New York light flashing off the skyscrapers, onto the quilted aluminum sides of food carts, and from there onto Arthur Less himself. Even the mean delighted look from the lady who would not hold the elevator, the humor-free girl at the coffee shop, the tourists standing stock-still on busy Fifth Avenue, the revved-up accosting hawkers (“Mister, you like comedy? Everybody likes comedy!”), the toothache sensation of jackhammers in concrete—none of it can dull the day. Here is a shop that sells only zippers. Here are twenty of them. The Zipper District. What a glorious city.

I don't have a girlfriend." "Right." Daniel looked at me just long enough to make me squirm, and only just avoid flattening a granny who was crossing against the light her shopping cart. "Excuse me?" I sighed. "Let me guess. She's as tall as you are and looks like she spends her leisure time in a lace bra and angel wings." "Jesus,Ella, what was in that cup?" "What? Guys like you always have girlfriends like that." He reached out and jabbed a button on the dash. It took two tries,but the music stopped. "Sounds good to me, but there's no girlfriend-" I got it, a little late. Apparently, I'm slow that way. "Ah.I get it now." I slapped my forehead. It was unsatisfactorily silent; his glove was that thick. "Slow.Okay." "You look like an ordinary girl, but in truth-" I gave him the Hand.It looked silly in his glove. "Truth: I am a completely ordinary girl. There are tons of us around.Always have been.

After Laurie was born, Russell and Dantzel were waiting for the nurse to bring their new baby to them. Dantzel had been under anesthetic during delivery and hadn’t yet seen her little girl. Suddenly she said, “I hear our baby crying.” “You’re kidding,” Russell replied. “You haven’t even seen her yet.” But Dantzel insisted, “That’s our baby. I know her voice.” She asked Russell to check, so he walked into the corridor and down to a large cart that carried babies in their bassinets from the nursery to their mothers’ rooms. There was only one baby crying. “They all looked alike to me, so I checked the I.D. tag and found that the one crying was labeled ‘Baby Girl Nelson, Room 571.’ That was an inspiration to me. Dantzel knew her child’s voice even before she had ever heard it. I couldn’t help but think about the Savior’s statement that ‘my sheep know my voice.’” In this case, the “shepherd” knew the voice of her sheep.

Unlike Kate, by then I’d had a job. In fact, I’d had sixteen jobs, not including the years I worked as a babysitter before I could legally be anyone’s employee. They were janitor’s assistant (humiliatingly, at my high school), fast-food restaurant worker, laborer at a wildlife refuge, administrative assistant to a Realtor, English as a Second Language tutor, lemonade cart attendant, small town newspaper reporter, canvasser for a lefty nonprofit, waitress at a Japanese restaurant, volunteer coordinator for a reproductive rights organization, berry picker on a farm, waitress at a vegetarian restaurant, “coffee girl” at an accounting firm, student-faculty conflict mediator, teacher’s assistant for a women’s studies class, and office temp at a half a dozen places that by and large did not resemble offices and did not engage me in work that struck me as remotely “officey,” but rather involved things such as standing on a concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves and—with a pair of tweezers—placing two pipe cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyor belt for eight excruciating hours a day.

Eena focused on the younger version of herself. Her hair was tied back with a pink ribbon. The ruffled dress she wore was soiled up to the waist in wet grains of sand. A short, square shovel was gripped tightly as the child concentrated on her digging efforts. Curious, Eena stepped closer to the girls. Ian followed along silently. Eena could feel his eyes on her, searching her profile before turning to the sand scene. She approached her younger self and stopped to watch. At first, she smiled at the darling ponytailed child. Then the spoiled girl’s mouth opened. “Angee,” the five-year-old called the younger version of Angelle. “Go get water.” The older child jumped up at the command. “Yes, Eena.” “A whole bucket full.” “Yes, Eena.” “Angee, don’t step on my holes!” The older girl quickly picked up her foot, checking to be sure there were no child-made burrows nearby. She nodded at the little five-year-old. “Okay, Eena, I’ll be careful.” Instead of being grateful, the ponytailed child tilted her head and bugged out her eyes. “Hurry up, Angee!” “Okay, okay.” The young Angelle lifted her skirt to watch for surrounding holes while carting a bucket in her other hand towards the lake. Eena frowned at the sight. She heard Ian snicker beside her. “I was a brat,” she admitted ruefully. “You still are.

Motor-scooter riders with big beards and girl friends who bounce on the back of the scooters and wear their hair long in front of their faces as well as behind, drunks who follow the advice of the Hat Council and are always turned out in hats, but not hats the Council would approve. Mr. Lacey, the locksmith,, shups up his shop for a while and goes to exchange time of day with Mr. Slube at the cigar store. Mr. Koochagian, the tailor, waters luxuriant jungle of plants in his window, gives them a critical look from the outside, accepts compliments on them from two passers-by, fingers the leaves on the plane tree in front of our house with a thoughtful gardener's appraisal, and crosses the street for a bite at the Ideal where he can keep an eye on customers and wigwag across the message that he is coming. The baby carriages come out, and clusters of everyone from toddlers with dolls to teenagers with homework gather at the stoops. When I get home from work, the ballet is reaching its cresendo. This is the time roller skates and stilts and tricycles and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys, this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher's; this is the time when teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips shows or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG's; this is the time when the fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know on Hudson street will go by. As the darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet goes under lights, eddying back nad forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe's sidewalk pizza, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop. I know the deep night ballet and its seasons best from waking long after midnight to tend a baby and, sitting in the dark, seeing the shadows and hearing sounds of the sidewalk. Mostly it is a sound like infinitely patterning snatches of party conversation, and, about three in the morning, singing, very good singing. Sometimes their is a sharpness and anger or sad, sad weeping, or a flurry of search for a string of beads broken. One night a young man came roaring along, bellowing terrible language at two girls whom he had apparently picked up and who were disappointing him. Doors opened, a wary semicircle formed around him, not too close, until police came. Out came the heads, too, along the Hudsons street, offering opinion, "Drunk...Crazy...A wild kid from the suburbs" Deep in the night, I am almost unaware of how many people are on the street unless someone calls the together. Like the bagpipe. Who the piper is and why he favored our street I have no idea.

Reverend Mahakasyapa, the Maras who play the devil in the innumerable universes of the ten directions are all Bodhisattvas dwelling in the inconcievable liberation, who are playing the devil in order to develop living beings through their skill in liberative technique. Reverend Mahakasyapa, all the miserable beggars who come to the Bodhisattvas of the innumerable universes of the ten directions to ask for a hand, a foot, an ear, a nose, some blood, muscles, bones, marrow, an eye, a torso, a head, a limb, a member, a throne, a kingdom, a country, a wife, a son, a daughter, s slave, a slave-girl, a horse, an elephent, a chariot, a cart, gold, silver, jewels, pearls, conches, crystal, coral, beryl, treasures, food, drink, elixers, amd clothes -- these demanding beggars are usually Bodhisattvas living in the inconcievable liberation who, through their skill in liberative technique, wish to test and thus demonstrate the firmness of the high resolve of the Bodhisattvas. Why? Reverend Mahakasyapa, the Bodhisattvas demonstrate that firmness by means of terrible austerities. Ordinary beings have no power to be this demanding of Bodhisattvas, unless they are granted the oppurtunity. They are not capable of killing and depriving in that manner without being freeluy given the chance. Reverend Mahakasyapa, just as a glowworm cannot eclipse the light of the sun, so Reverend Mahakasyapa, it is not possible without special allowance that an ordinary person can thus attack and deprive a Bodhisattva. Reverend Mahakasyapa, just as a donkey could not muster an attack on a wild elephant, even so, Reverend Mahakasyapa, one who is not himself a Bodhisattva cannot harass a Bodhisattva. Only one who is himself a Bodhisattva can harass another Bodhisattva, and only a Bodhisattva can tolerate the harassment of another Bodhisattva.....

While his patience frayed, in the end, it was Meena who snapped first. Whether it was the fact a woman touched him, hanging on to his arm, gushing at how beautiful the wedding was, or the fact that Meena couldn’t handle the frustration of the last few days, it didn’t matter. With a snarled, “Get your hands off my husband!” Meena sliced through the crowd, skirts hiked. She leaped the last few feet and soared through the air to tackle the lioness at his side, who, as it turned out, was Loni’s cousin. But at the time, all he knew was his new wife was in full-on jealous mode and determined to scalp a wedding guest. As omega, Leo should have jumped in to calm the hot tempers— and stop the hair pulling. At the very least, he should have definitely pried Meena off the lioness before she got blood on her white dress. But… Well… He kind of liked it. While Leo had dated his fair share of women, he’d never had one show such a possessive side before. Definitely never had one go after a girl for daring to flirt with him. He didn’t know what it said about him, the fact that he enjoyed her jealous outburst. Feeling kind of smug about it, he took a moment to bask. Hers. Yes, he was hers, and she was his, at least on paper. Perhaps it was time to complete the bond and truly mate so that everyone would know they belonged to each other. Time to claim each other. First, though, he needed to pry her off the other woman before she literally spilled blood. Winding an arm around her middle, he lifted Meena, even as she continued to snarl at the woman on the ground. “Touch my man again and I will rip that hand from you and slap you with it!” Ah, the romantic words of a woman in lust. Tossing Meena over his shoulder, he ignored the amused glances of the crowd as he carted her away from the party. “I wasn’t done, Pookie,” she grumbled. “I’ve got better plans for that energy,” was his reply. And yes, she announced to all that, “Leo’s finally going to debauch me.” She wasn’t the only one fist pumping. The other ladies in the pride were cheering too while Leo fought not to blush, and poor Peter, he made a beeline for the bar. However, embarrassment wasn’t enough to stop him.

If it were any of the other Sharpes, he wouldn’t balk. But the idea of spending serveral hours in her company was both intoxicating and terrifying. “If you don’t let me go along,” she continued, “I’ll just follow you. He scowled at her. She probably would; the woman was as stubborn as she was beautiful. “And don’t think you can outride me, either,” she added. “Halstead Hall has a very good stable, and lady Bell is one of our swiftest mounts.” “Lady Bell?” he said sarcastically. “Not Crack Shot or Pistol?” She glared over at him. “Lady Bell was my favorite doll when I was a girl, the last one Mama gave me before she died. I used to play with it whenever I wanted to remember her. The doll got so ragged that I threw her away when I outgrew her.” Her voice lowered. “I regretted that later, but by then it was too late.” The idea of her playing with a doll to remember her late mother made his throat tighten and his heart falter. “Fine,” he bit out. “You can go with me to High Wycombe.” Surprise turned her cheeks rosy. “Oh, thank you, Jackson! You won’t regret it, I promise you!” “I already regret it,” he grumbled. “And you must do as I say. None of your going off half-cocked, do you hear?” “I never go off half-cocked!” “No, you just walk around with a pistol packed full of powder, thinking you can hold men at bay with it.” She tossed her head. “You’ll never let me forget that, will you?” “Not as long as we both shall live.” The minute the words left his lips, he could have kicked himself. They sounded too much like a vow, one he’d give anything for the right to make. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to have noticed. Instead, she was squirming and shimmying about on her saddle. “Are you all right?” he asked. “I’ve got a burr caught in my stocking that keeps rubbing against my leg. I’m just trying to work it out. Don’t mind me.” His mouth went dry at her mention of stockings. It brought yesterday’s encounter vividly into his mind, how he’d lifted her skirts to reach the smooth expanse of calf encased in silk. How he’d run his hands up her thighs as his mouth had tasted- God save him. He couldn’t be thinking about such things while riding. He shifted uncomfortably in the saddle as they reached the road and settled into a comfortable pace. The road was busy at this early hour. The local farmers were driving their carts to market or town, and laborers were headed for the fields. To Jackson’s relief, that made it easy not to talk. Conversaing with her was bound to be difficult, especially if she started consulting him about her suitors.

One day, because I was bored in our usual spot, next to the merry-go-round, Françoise had taken me on an excursion – beyond the frontier guarded at equal intervals by the little bastions of the barley-sugar sellers – into those neighbouring but foreign regions where the faces are unfamiliar, where the goat cart passes; then she had gone back to get her things from her chair, which stood with its back to a clump of laurels; as I waited for her, I was trampling the broad lawn, sparse and shorn, yellowed by the sun, at the far end of which a statue stands above the pool, when, from the path, addressing a little girl with red hair playing with a shuttlecock in front of the basin, another girl, while putting on her cloak and stowing her racket, shouted to her, in a sharp voice: ‘Good-bye, Gilberte, I’m going home, don’t forget we’re coming to your house tonight after dinner.’ That name, Gilberte, passed by close to me, evoking all the more forcefully the existence of the girl it designated in that it did not merely name her as an absent person to whom one is referring, but hailed her directly; thus it passed close by me, in action so to speak, with a power that increased with the curve of its trajectory and the approach of its goal; – transporting along with it, I felt, the knowledge, the notions about the girl to whom it was addressed, that belonged not to me, but to the friend who was calling her, everything that, as she uttered it, she could see again or at least held in her memory, of their daily companionship, of the visits they paid to each other, and all that unknown experience which was even more inaccessible and painful to me because conversely it was so familiar and so tractable to that happy girl who grazed me with it without my being able to penetrate it and hurled it up in the air in a shout; – letting float in the air the delicious emanation it had already, by touching them precisely, released from several invisible points in the life of Mlle Swann, from the evening to come, such as it might be, after dinner, at her house; – forming, in its celestial passage among the children and maids, a little cloud of precious colour, like that which, curling over a lovely garden by Poussin,15 reflects minutely like a cloud in an opera, full of horses and chariots, some manifestation of the life of the gods; – casting finally, on that bald grass, at the spot where it was at once a patch of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the blonde shuttlecock player (who did not stop launching the shuttlecock and catching it again until a governess wearing a blue ostrich feather called her), a marvellous little band the colour of heliotrope as impalpable as a reflection and laid down like a carpet over which I did not tire of walking back and forth with lingering, nostalgic and desecrating steps, while Françoise cried out to me: ‘Come on now, button up your coat and let’s make ourselves scarce’, and I noticed for the first time with irritation that she had a vulgar way of speaking, and alas, no blue feather in her hat.

He was a professional athlete and coach, a Ferrari who lived his life in the fast lane. She was a girl-next-door kind of girl, closer to a golf cart than a sports car.

girls’ night. I’m pretty sure there was flirting and dancing. But with whom? All I can remember is the heat of bodies pressing in on me, and that I liked the feeling. Does Doug need to know how I acted? If I don’t tell him, will one of the neighbors? I wouldn’t blame him for feeling hurt. He hasn’t seen that side of me in a long time. “I have another surprise for you,” he says. “I’m going to build the kitchen cart tonight.” “Thank you. That means a lot to me.” I take Sadie, and he starts in on his maki. He doesn’t look up as he says, “What do you think about my going out to a sports bar on Main tonight to watch the game with all the guys? After I’ve finished the cart.” So the cart is just a ploy so he can go watch the game. Not that I would have stopped him from going, even without the cart. Doesn’t he know me better than that? “Which guys?” I ask.

My first monster, Iola, was bald and had exceptionally rotten teeth. I came across him on the highway where, with some fellow monsters, deserters, he’d stopped a peasant’s cart and pulled out a little girl, maybe thirteen years old. His companions held her father while the bald man tore off her dress, yelling it was time for her to meet a real man. I rode up and said the time had come for him, too—I thought I was very witty. The bald monster released the girl and threw himself at me with an axe. He was slow but tough. I hit him twice—not clean cuts, but spectacular, and only then did he fall. His gang ran away when they saw what a witcher’s sword could do to a man ….

A leaf grows by enlarging the string of cells located along a central vein; single cells on the perimeter eventually decide independently when to stop dividing. From this tip, smaller veins develop, eventually completing the network at the stem; thus the overall maturation proceeds from tip to base. Once the most daring portion of the leaf is complete, the plant puts horse before cart and begins to slide sugar back down and in, down to where it will be used to make more root, which will be used to bring up more water, which will be used to expand new leaves, which will pull back more sugar, and in this manner four hundred million years have passed.

An Yi’s grandma lay on a cart, silent under the white sheet. Her face was covered. It had been smashed in her fall, and of course they would not make a wax replacement for a suicide. Suicide was a crime. It was “alienating oneself from the people,” according to what Chairman Mao said. So we were not in one of the private rooms. We wore no mourning bands. We could not play funeral music for Grandma.

Intelligence is the decisive factor in planning guerrilla operations. Where is the enemy? In what strength? What does he propose to do? What is the state of his equipment, his supply, his morale? Are his leaders intelligent, bold, and imaginative or stupid and impetuous? Are his troops tough, efficient, and well disciplined, or poorly trained and soft? Guerrillas expect the members of their intelligence service to provide the answers to these and dozens more detailed questions. “Guerrilla intelligence nets are tightly organized and pervasive. In a guerrilla area, every person without exception must be considered an agent — old men and women, boys driving ox carts, girls tending goats, farm laborers, storekeepers, schoolteachers, priests, boatmen, scavengers. The local cadres “put the heat” on everyone, without regard to age or sex, to produce all conceivable information. And produce it they do.

how am I supposed to live in the meantime? Rally a few girls, buy a cart and organize a traveling house of ill-repute?” Nenneke

She’s staring at me, which, yeah. Of course she is, because I’m babbling like a fucking fourteen-year-old girl swooning over fucking Prince Manning. But this is Fireball, and you never know what she might be thinking. So I cut a glance at her to see if it’s an I’m considering it stare or if it’s an I’m letting a loony bin drive me around on a golf cart stare, and—“Fuck!

Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree. Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star. Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not. During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra. Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry. Around

Before the 1940’s, if one woman in an audience stood up and shrieked at the top of her lungs throughout an entire show she’d have been carted off to an asylum. By the mid-forties, however, entire audiences behaved like that, screaming, tearing at their clothes and hair, leaving their seats to board the stage. On December 30th, 1942, while Frank Sinatra sang at the Paramount Theater in New York, the behavior of the audience changed, and a part of our relationship to well-known people changed forever. Psychiatrists and psychologists of the day struggled to explain the phenomenon. They recalled medieval dance crazes, spoke of “mass frustrated love” and “mass hypnosis.” The media age did bring a type of mass hypnosis into American life. It affects all of us to some degree, and some of us to a great degree. Before the advent of mass-media, a young girl might have admired a performer from afar, and it would have been acceptable to have a passing crush. It would not have been acceptable if she pursued the performer to his home, or if she had to be restrained by police. It would not have been acceptable to skip school in order to wait for hours outside a hotel and then try to tear pieces of clothing from the passing star. Yet that unhealthy behavior became “normal” in the Sinatra days. In fact, audience behavior that surprised everyone in 1942 was expected two years later when Sinatra appeared again at the Paramount Theater. This time, the 30,000 screaming, bobby-soxed fans were joined by a troop of reporters. The media were learning to manipulate this new behavior to their advantage. Having predicted a commotion, 450 police officers were assigned to that one theater, and it appeared that society had learned to deal with this phenomenon. It had not. During the engagement, an 18-year old named Alexander Ivanovich Dorogokupetz stood up in the theater and threw an egg that hit Sinatra in the face. The show stopped, and for a moment, a brief moment, Sinatra was not the star. Now it was Dorogokupetz mobbed by audience members and Dorogokupetz who had to be escorted out by police. Society had not learned to deal with this, and still hasn’t. Dorogokupetz told police: “I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. It felt good.” Saddled with the least American of names, he had tried to make one for himself in the most American way, and but for his choice of a weapon, he would probably be as famous today as Frank Sinatra. Elements in society were pioneering the skills of manipulating emotion and behavior in ways that had never been possible before: electronic ways. The media were institutionalizing idolatry.

I’d done it for myself, and for my parents, and for these people: for my grandfather, for Basia, for my second cousin Ilena coming down the stairs and kissing us on our cheeks before she climbed into the waiting cart to set off for her own home in another narrow village where she lived with seven other houses around hers and every village around them hating them all. I’d done it for the men and women going by in the street in front of my grandfather’s house. Lithvas didn’t mean home to me; it was just the water we lived beside, my people huddled together on the riverbanks, and sometimes the wave came rolling up the slope and dragged some of us down into the depths for the fish to devour. I didn’t have a country to do it for. I only had people, so what about those people: what about Flek, and Tsop, and Shofer, whose lives I’d bound to mine, and a little girl I’d given a Jewish name like a gift, before I’d gone away to destroy her home?

I dropped out of the shopping cart to the ground. I laughed, and looked down. My shoe was untied, so I knelt over to tie it. At the same time, Shannon kicked a rock out of her flip flop. The flip flop flew off of her foot and bounced off the seat of my pants. I fell forward, hitting my face on the concrete. “What the fuck? Did you just slap my ass, girl?” I said. “No, but I kicked it,” she smiled. And thus goes the story of a love from first sight.

Gone the glitter and glamour; gone the pompous wealth beside naked starvation; gone the strange excitement of a polyglot and many-sided city; gone the island of Western civilization flourishing in the vast slum that was Shanghai. Good-by to all that: the well-dressed Chinese in their chauffeured cars behind bullet-proof glass; the gangsters, the shakedowns, the kid­napers; the exclusive foreign clubs, the men in white dinner jackets, their women beautifully gowned; the white-coated Chinese “boys” ob­sequiously waiting to be tipped; Jimmy’s Kitchen with its good Amer­ican coffee, hamburgers, chili and sirloin steaks. Good-by to all the night life: the gilded singing girl in her enameled hair-do, her stage make-up, her tight-fitting gown with its slit skirt breaking at the silk­ clad hip, and her polished ebony and silver-trimmed rickshaw with its crown of lights; the hundred dance halls and the thousands of taxi dolls; the opium dens and gambling halls; the flashing lights of the great restaurants, the clatter of mah-jongg pieces, the yells of Chinese feasting and playing the finger game for bottoms-up drinking; the sailors in their smelly bars and friendly brothels on Szechuan Road; the myriad short-time whores and pimps busily darting in and out of the alleyways; the display signs of foreign business, the innumerable shops spilling with silks, jades, embroideries, porcelains and all the wares of the East; the generations of foreign families who called Shanghai home and lived quiet conservative lives in their tiny vacuum untouched by China; the beggars on every downtown block and the scabby infants urinating or defecating on the curb while mendicant mothers absently scratched for lice; the “honey carts” hauling the night soil through the streets; the blocks-long funerals, the white-clad professional mourners weeping false tears, the tiers of paper palaces and paper money burned on the rich man’s tomb; the jungle free-for- all struggle for gold or survival and the day’s toll of unwanted infants and suicides floating in the canals; the knotted rickshaws with their owners fighting each other for customers and arguing fares; the peddlers and their plaintive cries; the armored white ships on the Whangpoo, “protecting foreign lives and property”; the Japanese conquerors and their American and Kuomintang successors; gone the wickedest and most colorful city of the old Orient: good-by to all that.

The really unfailing sign of a belle is that she exhausts people. In the old days, a girl could faint, which meant that some man had to pick her up and carry her while two or three others ran hither and yon fetching smelling salrs, water, or a litter on which to cart her away. This simply doesn't happen any more. Passing out from too much straight bourbon is just not as bellelike as fainting from unknown causes, nor is it as fastidious.

As Gernsback became wealthy, he cultivated the air of a bon vivant, packaging himself as adroitly as he packaged his crystal sets by dressing in bespoke suits and silk ties. But he inevitably struck people as odd, rude, self-centered, and even callous. On train trips to Chicago to pick up parts for his company, he would stop off in Cleveland to visit his seven-year-old cousin, Hildegarde. The entrepreneur would terrify the girl by launching into windy soliloquies about a society in which domed cities in orbit, robot doctors, and retirement colonies on Mars were commonplace. (Meanwhile, horse-drawn carts were still plying the streets outside.) If a ringing telephone interrupted him in midreverie, he would raise an admonishing finger and say to his cousin in his bristling Germanic accent, “Hildegarde, fix your hair. It won’t be long before the caller can see your face over the wires.

The tumult of soldiers marching and barging into homes at random broke the quiet. They held fathers and sons at spear point while companions dragged the females of the households and chained them by the neck to the backs of carts drawn by oxen. Screams cracked the darkness throughout the city, awakening families with fright. They could do nothing to protect themselves, only wait and hope they might be overlooked. They could not even pray to the gods, since it was the gods who were kidnapping their women and girls.

carts and made their way to the two rooms kept for them. Tired from their travels, the children

They came to a tall juniper hedge beyond which extended a flagstoned walkway that bordered the side of the manor. As they made their way to an opening of the hedge, they heard a pair of masculine voices engaged in conversation. The voices were not loud. In fact, the strictly moderated volume of the conversation betrayed that something secret— and therefore intriguing— was being discussed. Pausing behind the hedge, Daisy motioned for Evie to be still and quiet. “… doesn’t promise to be much of a breeder…” one of them was saying. The comment was met with a low but indignant objection. “Timid? Holy hell, the woman has enough spirit to climb Mont-Blanc with a pen-knife and a ball of twine. Her children will be perfect hellions.” Daisy and Evie stared at each other with mutual astonishment. Both voices were easily recognizable as those belonging to Lord Llandrindon and Matthew Swift. “Really,” Llandrindon said skeptically. “My impression is that she is a literary-minded girl. Rather a bluestocking.” “Yes, she loves books. She also happens to love adventure. She has a remarkable imagination accompanied by a passionate enthusiasm for life and an iron constitution. You’re not going to find a girl her equal on your side of the Atlantic or mine.” “I had no intention of looking on your side,” Llandrindon said dryly. “English girls possess all the traits I would desire in a wife.” They were talking about her, Daisy realized, her mouth dropping open. She was torn between delight at Matthew Swift’s description of her, and indignation that he was trying to sell her to Llandrindon as if she were a bottle of patent medicine from a street vendor’s cart. “I require a wife who is poised,” Llandrindon continued, “sheltered, restful…” “Restful? What about natural and intelligent? What about a girl with the confidence to be herself rather than trying to imitate some pallid ideal of subservient womanhood?” “I have a question,” Llandrindon said. “Yes?” “If she’s so bloody remarkable, why don’t you marry her?” Daisy held her breath, straining to hear Swift’s reply. To her supreme frustration his voice was muffled by the filter of the hedges. “Drat,” she muttered and made to follow them. Evie yanked her back behind the hedge. “No,” she whispered sharply. “Don’t test our luck, Daisy. It was a miracle they didn’t realize we were here.” “But I wanted to hear the rest of it!” “So did I.” They stared at each other with round eyes. “Daisy…” Evie said in wonder, “… I think Matthew Swift is in love with you.

I would have never taken you for a coward, Mr. Mulberry, but honestly, do you really believe carting out your wards is going to convince me to agree to whatever madness has you seeking me out so late at night?” Everett smiled almost as brightly as the children. “Now, now, Miss Longfellow, there’s no cause to call me a coward. Smart like a fox, perhaps, but—” “You shouldn’t antagonize her, Everett,” Lucetta suddenly said, interrupting Everett’s speech before she turned to Millie. “And you shouldn’t be surprised he brought the children with him, considering everyone knows you have a distinct weakness for the wee ones. However, before the conversation moves forward, I really am going to have to insist that the two of you drop all of this Miss and Mister nonsense. We have a common friend in Oliver Addleshaw. Which means, like it or not, we’re now friends of a sort. And because of that, there’s really no reason for such formality.” “There is if he’s here to ask me to work for him.” “Of course he’s here to ask you to work for him,” Lucetta said. “But that has absolutely nothing to do with calling him by his given name.” Millie opened her mouth, but before she could respond, something that looked remarkably like mud began seeping through the paper wrapped around the flowers she was holding. Moving to the closest table, she unwrapped the paper before setting her sights on Everett again. “Did you pull these flowers right out of the ground, Mr. Mulberry?” Everett smiled. “Please, call me Everett since Lucetta was kind enough to point out we’re friends, and of course I didn’t pull those right out of the ground.” Millie held up the flowers, exposing the roots still clinging to dirt. “You would have me believe you purchased these from a flower shop?” “It’s after ten. There are no flower shops open, but if you must know, I had Rosetta pluck those out of the ground for you.” A little girl of about five raised an incredibly dirty hand and waved at her right as Everett cleared his throat, drawing Millie’s attention. “I think you should view it as a mark in my favor that I remembered the flowers, especially since, again, I’m a little sensitive to them, but . . . you were quite vocal about what it would take to get you to work for me.” He sent her a far-too-charming smile. Ignoring the charm, Millie lifted her chin. “You might as well tell me what disaster struck your household now.” Everett shot a glance to the children and seemed to shudder. “Why would you assume something disastrous happened?” Setting the flowers, roots and all, aside, Millie crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t insult my intelligence, Everett. You wouldn’t be bringing me flowers or children if something of a disastrous nature hadn’t occurred.” “The children are adorable, aren’t they?” “Of course they’re adorable, dear, which I’m sure you were hoping to use to your advantage,” Abigail said as she arrived in the drawing room, pushing a cart that seemed to be heavy with treats.

Ours was the last vehicle in the caravan that night, except for a heavy, guarded ox-pulled provisions wagon that was even slower. Slow enough to have fallen far behind and out of sight. Which meant that there was nothing to stop me from trying to shove the Varini girl’s ugly insinuations back down her throat. I only had to reach her first. I wedged my left hand beneath the metal ring that circled my neck so I wouldn’t choke, and then I hauled on the slave chain with all my strength. I managed to gather just enough slack to connect to the side of the Varini girl’s head with the full force of my right fist. Her head snapped back. She fell heavily against her side of the cage with enough force to send the whole cart careening sideways.

People were selling pyramids of oranges from wooden carts. Powdered milk and sacks of grain sat on the shelves of the little stores we passed, the very food that little girl had needed to eat. It didn’t seem to make any sense, but famines are caused by shocks to the food distribution system, not necessarily by poverty per se. There was still plenty of food in Somalia; it was just relatively expensive because of the drought and the rise in global food prices.

Family?" I asked. "In a sense. And I exhausted all other avenues. Joining this fucking barbaric spectacle was not high up on my list of things I wanted to do with my pathetic never-ending life." His mouth twisted into a wry smile. "I wouldn't even be here if Mische didn't force me into it." My eyebrows leapt. He chuckled and took another drink. "Look at that face. You thought I was the—what was your word?—brute who Turned Mische, carted her around Obitraes for a few hundred years, then dragged that poor, innocent little sunshine sprite halfway across the world to the bloodthirsty Kejari tournament, is that it?" "Yes," I said, without hesitation. "Absolutely." "That fucking girl." He shook his head. "No, this was all her idea. And she knew I'd never let her do it alone.

The streets of downtown Shanghai likewise seemed a continuous freak circus at first, unbelievably alive with all manner of people performing almost every physical and social function in public: yelling, gesturing, always acting, crushing throngs spilling through every kind of traffic, precariously amidst old cars and new ones and between coolies racing wildly to compete for ricksha fares, gingerly past "honey-carts" filled with excrement dragged down Bubbling Well Road, sardonically past perfumed, exquisitely gowned, mid-thigh-exposed Chinese ladies, jestingly past the Herculean bare-backed coolie trundling his taxi-wheelbarrow load of six giggling servant girls en route to home or work, carefully before singing peddlers bearing portable kitchens ready with delicious noodles on the spot, lovingly under gold-lettered shops overflowing with fine silks and brocades, dead-panning past village women staring wide-eyed at frightening Indian policemen, gravely past gambling mah-jongg ivories clicking and jai alai and parimutuel betting, slyly through streets hung with the heavy-sweet acrid smell of opium, sniffingly past southern restaurants and bright-lighted sing-song houses, indifferently past scrubbed, aloof young Englishmen in their Austins popping off to cricket on the Race Course, snickeringly round elderly white gentlemen in carriages with their wives or Russian mistresses out for the cool air along the Bund, and hastily past sailors looking for beer and women—from noisy dawn to plangent night the endless hawking and spitting, the baby's urine stream on the curb, the amah's scolding, the high falsetto of opera at Wing On Gardens where a dozen plays went on at once and hotel rooms next door filled up with plump virgins procured for wealthy merchants in from the provinces for business and debauch, the wail of dance bands moaning for slender bejeweled Chinese taxi dancers, the whiteness of innumerable beggars and their naked unwashed infants, the glamour of the Whangpoo with its white fleets of foreign warships, its shaggy freighters, its fan-sailed junks, its thousand lantern-lit sampans darting fire-flies on the moon-silvered water filled with deadly pollution. Shanghai!

There was an infinite, empty place her mother’s love used to fill when she held her, tucked her into bed, packed her lunch, let her push the shopping cart, her mother squeezing her hand as they walked—bum-bum, bum-bum—like a heartbeat, a secret way to say, “I love you,” her mother saying, “My beautiful girl, how’d I get so lucky that you’re mine?” Even these little things had been turned immense in loss, memories that made her tuck her knees to her chest under the covers and fold around her newly hollowed center.

You're mine," he said hoarsely, lifting his head and staring deep into her eyes, willing her to believe. "If you leave, I will follow. Do you hear me? I will follow and find you and cart you home.

On good nights, Winnie managed to glean five nonconsecutive hours of a shallow and unsatisfying slumber. But those nights were rare. Usually, Winnie was wide awake between midnight and dawn and passed the time by staring at the street below the apartment. Her room did not have its own balcony, just one window outfitted with a cage-like lattice designed to keep out burglars. When the afternoon sun came through at the right angle it created shadowy tessellations on her bed, and Winnie would lie down and position herself so that the scales of light would be cast onto her own skin. After dark, she climbed up and perched motionless on the sill for hours with her legs poking out through the bars, until her lower half went numb. She liked the feeling of having nothing beneath her feet while she was three stories high. It allowed her to pretend for a moment that she was no longer a girl, just a hovering, discorporate displacement of night sky. Safely concealed by the treetops, she could clock the nocturnal comings and goings of the trash collectors and grilled-squid carts and irresponsible, drunk revelers driving home from bars, occasionally wobbling off the road and crashing into a utility pole.

Not even on the guy I watched once while I rounded up carts, outside in the parking lot, trying to stuff his huge armload of pink birthday balloons into his hatchback, damning them to goddamn hell as they kept bobbing back out in his face, finally pulling a coping blade out of his pocket and stabbing every balloon but one. He slammed the hatch and drove off with it, home to some sad, one-balloon birthday girl, and I confess to spending some juice on her. Rehab possibly in her future.

She pictures herself here in ten or fifteen years with a cart filled with sweets and toys for grandchildren not yet born. But she sees that woman as improbable, just as the girl of twenty-five saw the woman of forty, whom she has since become and already ceased to be.

golf cart

How about this?” said Val. “We’ll put him in a shopping cart, and we’ll leave him in front of the emergency room. Like they did with that girl in Animal House.” Oh, Lord. “Okay, first of all, I don’t think Animal House was supposed to be instructional. He might have really hurt himself. And where are we going to get a shopping cart?” Val thought it over. “Excellent points. Okay. We call a cab…

magical red cart. Both cats

You will come back to the castle with me." "I don't belong there. I don't belong anyplace." "You belong with me," he replied without the slightest hesitation. Her chin trembled as she held his gaze. "I-I'm not your responsibility." "Yes, you are. You are mine. They gave you to me, remember? And I want to keep you. Come here," he ordered softly. She lifted her arms and stepped into his embrace without another word. He hugged her close, his heart pounding. "Listen to me. I don't want you to worry for one instant what will become of you, all right? I'll look after you. Whatever you need. You have my word, Kate. You're not alone, do you understand?" he whispered as he held her. After a moment, he felt her nod against his chest. "There's my brave girl," he murmured, brushing a kiss to her forehead. It was at that moment that it dawned on him what he was going to do when they returned to the castle. The thought shocked him as it struck, igniting his heart, even as it filled him with an odd relief. Of course. She was already under his protection. By now, anyone outside the castle no doubt assumed she was already his mistress. They already wanted each other so badly. He saw no reason now not to offer her his carte blanche. Yes. She must become more securely his. It was not his way to keep any one particular mistress to service his needs. But if Kate were his, then he would not have to worry about her, even beyond all this business with O'Banyon. He would know exactly where she was, that she was fed, clothed, protected, and provided for. Admittedly, it might come across as utterly ruthless of him to make such an offer at a time like this---as though he were coldly taking advantage of her at the moment of her greatest vulnerability. But he was not motivated by lust. At least not entirely. Obviously, he could not marry her---not with his curse, and her Promethean blood. But if Kate was his mistress, then he could watch over her, and if anyone ever tried to hurt her again, they would have to deal with him first. Besides, he knew by now how her mind worked. If he were simply to make her a promise of financial help, she wouldn't take it. She was too proud. Hell, with her independent spirit, she would abhor any offer that she interpreted as charity. So, let her work for it. God, he had dreamed of making love to her since that first night when Caleb Doyle had brought her to the castle for that very purpose. Even now, she felt like heaven in his arms. If she was willing, he knew one sure way to comfort her when they got her back to the castle. He could make all her tears and sorrow melt away... Cradling her in his embrace, Rohan pressed another possessive kiss to her brow.

It is curious that the #MeToo movement is concerned only with gender representation in particular occupational categories. For instance, most HVAC and refrigeration installers and mechanics are men, yet there is little outcry about getting more girls into vocational training for these jobs. Similarly, virtually all workers in the carting, moving, trucking, and mining industries are males, but female underrepresentation in these high-injury and high-fatality occupations has not sparked celebrity outrage.

He guessed he had better face up to it and admit, watching the shabby rowboat approach the bank, that she was just too darn close to that picture he had been carting around in his head, of a girl he had never met, of a girl made up of bits and pieces of other girls known wisely and not too well.

Fundamentals of Esperanto The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj & the accusative, -on Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Ma amiko is my friend. A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about the purple martins. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; That’s how we finally learn who the hero was all along. Weary & old, he sits on a rock & watches his friends fly by one by one out of the song, then turns back to the journey they all began long ago, keeping the river to his right.

The only sounds at the late hour were the faint jingle of a phone ringing in the nurses’ station, the ping of an elevator, the faraway sound of the wheels of a cart, and the gentle beep of Brandon’s vital signs monitor. They wouldn’t allow any flowers or personal items in the ICU, but Sloan had snuck in an engagement photo. It sat on the table next to the bed. Her and Brandon on the beach, the surf crashing around their feet, her tattooed arm over his shoulder, them looking at each other. Both of them laughing. I looked back at him and sighed. “You’re going to have some gnarly scars, buddy.” They’d started the skin grafts for the road rash on his arm. “But you’ll get to do everything you planned to do with your life. One of us is going to get the girl. I’ll help you any way I can. Even if I have to wheel your ass to the altar.” I could picture his smile. With any luck I’d see it in a few hours. A knock on the door frame turned me around in my chair. “Hey, cutie.” Valerie came into the room for her vitals check. She turned the lights up, and I stood and stretched. As if sleeping in a chair wasn’t hard enough, the activity every two hours was the final kicker. I wouldn’t call anything I did on these overnight shifts sleeping. Maybe napping, but not sleeping. Every two hours Brandon was moved. They checked his airways, changed out bags, looked at his vitals. I don’t know how Sloan was handling doing this almost nightly for the last three weeks. Sloan was a good woman. I’d always liked her, but now she’d earned my respect, and I was grateful Brandon and Kristen had her. “Did you decide what day you want to bring the kids to the station?” I asked Valerie, yawning. She cycled the blood pressure cuff on Brandon’s arm and smiled. “I’m thinking Tuesday. You on shift Tuesday?” “Yup.” She wrote down some notes on Brandon’s chart and then gave me a raised eyebrow. “Any updates with your lady friend?” I laughed a little. “No.” The whole nursing staff knew about my depressing love life. I’d gotten hit on a few too many times by some of the younger nurses. I couldn’t claim to have a girlfriend, and I wasn’t married, so it was either “I’m gay” or “I’m in love with that girl over there.” I’d gone with the latter, and now I wished I’d said I was gay. They didn’t know why Kristen wouldn’t date me, just that she wouldn’t. It had turned into the favorite topic of the ICU. A real-life episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I rarely got through a Brandon visit without it coming up. The drama escalated when Kristen had been hit on by the nurses’ favorite single orthopedic surgeon. According to the nurses’ gossip circuit, Kristen told him to go fuck himself. And apparently she’d actually said, “Go fuck yourself.” After that everyone was sure she was holding out for me. Only I knew better.

Pooja had explained that, in North India at least, heavy marijuana ingestion plus transgression meant blitzed men thinking they had carte blanche to harass and grope women.

Come with me to this backroom of grey behind a fortress of blood and steel, where girls who would be mothers, are carted away, codeine eyed, to quest the Holy Grail on alien soil by women who should be mothers to them.

You’ve put things back in order then? Matches the Polaroids?” “Yes, ma’am, this is pretty close to how we found it. We came in, saw the blood, backed out and started taking pictures. Then we took all the samples. It’s not as much as it looks, and the biologicals were desiccated. Been there for at least a day. Dusted the bed and side table for prints, came up with a few. We’ll get it all into the system, let you know. Soon as you’re ready we’ll finish bagging and cart it out.” Taylor

Ceres, the port city of the Belt and the outer planets, boasted two hundred fifty kilometers in diameter, tens of thousands of kilometers of tunnels in layer on layer on layer. Spinning it up to 0.3 g had taken the best minds at Tycho Manufacturing half a generation, and they were still pretty smug about it. Now Ceres had more than six million permanent residents, and as many as a thousand ships docking in any given day meant upping the population to as high as seven million. Platinum, iron, and titanium from the Belt. Water from Saturn, vegetables and beef from the big mirror-fed greenhouses on Ganymede and Europa, organics from Earth and Mars. Power cells from Io, Helium-3 from the refineries on Rhea and Iapetus. A river of wealth and power unrivaled in human history came through Ceres. Where there was commerce on that level, there was also crime. Where there was crime, there were security forces to keep it in check. Men like Miller and Havelock, whose business it was to track the electric carts up the wide ramps, feel the false gravity of spin fall away beneath them, and ask low-rent glitz whores about what happened the night Bomie Chatterjee stopped collecting protection money for the Golden Bough Society. The primary station house for Star Helix Security, police force and military garrison for the Ceres Station, was on the third level from the asteroid’s skin, two kilometers square and dug into the rock so high Miller could walk from his desk up five levels without ever leaving the offices. Havelock turned in the cart while Miller went to his cubicle, downloaded the recording of their interview with the girl, and reran it. He was halfway through when his partner lumbered up behind him.

Christmas Town is ruled by a terrible king. His arms are thick as tree trunks. His voice is deep as the mud at the bottom of the lake.” “Ooh,” Mummy Boy said with a shiver. Jack grinned as he strode into the audience. Now he had them. All it took was a little Pumpkin King flair, and at that he had no rival. As he poked the Melting Man in his gooey nose, Jack said, “The Christmas King flies through the night not on a broom but on a cart pulled by horned beasts, and casts a reign of terror upon boys and girls on December twenty-fifth!” He turned to Behemoth and pulled out his long tongue. “He dresses in bloodred garments!” “Who is he, Jack?” the smaller of the witch sisters cried. Both witches clutched their green hands together, enthralled by the idea of a dashingly wicked king who shared their love of flying. “His name,” Jack announced dramatically as he returned to the stage, “is Sandy Claws.

They're not arresting me. They are not carting me off in the night to be euthanised. But they are ridiculing me. Shaming me. Laughing at me. Even though I am the smartest girl in this year . . . they do not care, they cannot see it, they can only see my natural ugliness compared to the Pretties' synthetic attractiveness.

We match like fire and gasoline. We're explosive, dangerous, hypnotizing. And when a girl as strong and beautiful as Rose White gives you her body and her mind to play with. When she gives you carte blanche to feed her craving for pain. That's something no one would ever have the strength to refuse. When I watch her like this, in a space between pain and pleasure, in a place of passion, coiled up like a steel spring, waiting for any sort of release...it's majestic. She's a Goddess that allowed me into her temple and I'm here to worship at her altar.

I watched the green until it started to blur. I’d been up half the night, making sure we didn’t oversleep, and now my eyelids began to settle, lower and lower, until Jamie whispered, “Ada. Ada, look.” A girl on a pony was racing the train. She was actually on top of the pony, sitting on its back, her legs hanging one off each side. She held bits of string or something in her hands, and the strings were attached to the pony’s head. The girl was laughing, her face wide open with joy, and it was clear even to me that she meant to be on the pony. She was directing the pony, telling it what to do. Riding the pony. And the pony was running hard. I knew ponies from the lane but had only seen them pull carts. I hadn’t known you could ride them. I hadn’t known they could go so fast. The girl leaned forward against the pony’s flying mane. Her lips moved as though she was shouting something. Her legs thumped the pony’s sides, and the pony surged forward, faster, brown legs flying, eyes bright. They ran alongside the train as it curved around their field. I saw a stone wall ahead of them. I gasped. They were going to hit it. They were going to be hurt. Why didn’t she stop the pony? They jumped it. They jumped the stone wall, and kept running, while the train tracks turned away from their field. Suddenly I could feel it, the running, the jump. The smoothness, the flying—I recognized it with my whole body, as though it was something I’d done a hundred times before. Something I loved to do. I tapped the window. “I’m going to do that,” I said.