Champagne Bubbles Quotes

He had never heard anything quite as amazing as that voice. She talked as if she was continuously on the verge of breaking into giggles. And when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter.

You’ve got a lot of responsibility now,” Jace said to Julian. “You’ll have to make sure Emma winds up with a guy who deserves her.” Julian was strangely white-faced. Maybe he was feeling the effects of the ceremony, Emma thought. It had been strong magic; she still felt it sizzling through her blood like champagne bubbles. But Jules looked as if he’d been slapped. “What about me?” Emma said, quickly. “Don’t I have to make sure Jules winds up with someone who deserves him?” “Absolutely. I did it for Alec, Alec did it for me — well, actually, he hated Clary at first, but he came around.” “I BET you didn’t like Magnus much, either,” said Julian, still with the same odd, stiff look on his face. “Maybe not,” said Jace, “but I never would have said so.” “Because it would have hurt Alec’s feelings?” Emma asked. “No,” said Jace, “because Magnus would have turned me into a hat rack.

The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine’s Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine’s Day on February’s shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.

Her smile was like laughter to me— it bubbled in like champagne.

February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine’s Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine’s Day on February’s shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.

Fun, like champagne bubbles, can't completely fill you up.

mum's dress. mum loved big parties. she loved dressing up and champagne bubbles tickling her nose, and dancing with her arms above her head, shoes thrown to the edges of the dance floor, and shouting inane happy things at people.

And when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter.

She loved attention. It was like a glass of the best champagne—bubbly and intoxicating—and as with champagne, she always wanted more of it. Still, she didn’t want to seem like an easy mark. “If you must know, I’ve come to join a convent,” Evie said, testing him.

So. Yes. We're all dying. We're all crumbling into the void, one cell at a time. We are disintegrating like sugar cubes in champagne. But only women have to pretend it isn't happening. Fifty-something men wander around with their guts flopped over their waistbands and their faces looking like a busted tramp's mattress in an underpass. They sprout nasal hair and chasm-like wrinkles, and go 'Ooof!' whenever they stand up or sit down. men visibly age, every day -- but women are supposed to stop the decline at around 37, 38, and live out the next 30 or 40 years in some magical bubble where their hair is still shiny and chestnut, their face unlined, their lips puffy, and their tits up on the top third of the ribcage.

She gave me a dirty look. Then she broke into the bubbly champagne laugh. She turned and ran, limping but steady. She laughed over her shoulder, letting out the line as I held the kite above my head. "Run with me, Rose," she cried.

She had always thought that exquisitely happy time at the beginning of her relationship with Nick was the ultimate, the feeling they'd always be trying to replicate, to get back, but now she realized that was wrong. That was like comparing sparkling mineral water to French champagne. Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It's light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But love after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you've hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you've seen the worst and the best--well, that sort of a love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.

It was wondrous. Almost unbelievable. Like champagne bubbles, but in her soul. She felt effervescent. And so in love.

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

The part libraries play in education is the part bubbles play in champagne. They may seem at first to be merely a shimmery addition, but they are the central feature of the entire enterprise and the reason, joyous and astonishing, to keep imbibing.

We were secret sisters with a plan for world domination, potential bubbling around us like champagne.

The painting seems to have a bubbly effect on both of them, aesthetic champagne.

Stories don’t change much across continents and centuries. Hearts are broken. Pride is wounded. Souls wander too far from home and become lost. The wrong roads are taken. The incorrect choice is made. Stories echo with loneliness. Grief. Longing. Redemption. Forgiveness. Hope. And love.” Now it was her turn to point at the bookstore. “That building is stuffed with books that, once opened, reveal our communal story. And, if you’re lucky, the words in those books will force you to grapple with the hardest truths of your life. After reducing you to a puddle of tears, they’ll raise you to your feet again. The words will pull you up, higher and higher, until you feel the sun on your face again. Until you’re suddenly humming on the way to the mailbox. Or you’re buying bouquets of gerbera daisies because you crave bright colors. And you’ll laugh again—as freely as champagne bubbling in a tall, glass flute. When’s the last time you laughed like that?

The champagne is already flat.  The sparkle and bubble has gone out and it is a tasteless drink.

She put her feet down gently. The whole world was made of glass, and the glass was full of champagne, and Bunnatine was a bubble, just flicking up and up and up.

watching the tiny bubbles flea-jump out the top of her glass

It was raining when Amarelle Parathis went out just after sunset to find a drink, and there was strange magic in the rain. It came down in pale lavenders and coppers and reds, soft lines like liquid dusk that turned luminescent mist on the warm pavement. The air itself felt like champagne bubbles breaking against the skin. Over the dark shapes of distant rooftops, blue-white lightning blazed, and stuttering thunder chased it.

Blake lifted a plastic champagne flute filled with bubbling apple cider. “To Beckett—we wouldn’t be here without him.” “To Beckett,” the others agreed.

After so long keeping to herself and tending her secret quietly, all these words just bubbled up out of her her like cool golden champagne.

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted notto debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.

I got to go! Bye!” “You’re ammmmmmmmmmmaaaaaaaazing—” Click. This time when she put her cell phone back down, she felt as light and frothy as the bubbles in a champagne flute. And a little drunk, too.

She talked as if she were continuously on the verge of breaking into giggles. And when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter.

The advertise their products in such a fashion as to make it seem wonderful to drink their ethanol products. It does not matter if they give their products fancy name like Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir, or if they put bubbles in an ethanol product and call it champagne or beer- everyone is selling ethanol.

flutes of champagne bubbled, champagne with raw strawberries, champagne with whipped cream." This evocative description highlights the luxurious and decadent atmosphere of the party, showcasing whipped cream as part of a lavish culinary experience.

The noise of drinking was exhilarating. Champagne corks popped and the pale, chrysanthemum-coloured liquid, whispering gleefully with bubbles, hissed into the glasses; heavy red wine glupped into the goblets, thick and crimson as the blood of some mythical monster, and a swirling wreath of pink bubbles formed on the surface; the frosty white wine tiptoed into the glasses, shrilling, gleaming, now like diamonds, now like topaz; the ouzo lay transparent and innocent as the edge of a mountain pool until the water splashed in and the whole glass curdled like a conjuring trick, coiling and blurring into a summer cloud of moonstone white.

This champagne is terribly good—the bubbles go straight to your head. Don’t worry,” he added with a wink, “I’ll be sure to join you dancing on the table after you’ve had a few glasses.” “My partner in crime and debauchery,” I said, clinking our glasses together. “I am a lucky woman, indeed.

The CO2 has to come out, which it does by forming bubbles. Now, champagne is pressurized to six times the atmospheric pressure on earth at sea level, enough to propel a popped champagne cork faster than 30 miles an hour. Lesson: letting the cork shoot out of a bottle when you open it is both tacky and dangerous.

They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong. Compared, calendar page against calendar page, it looks to be the shortest, all right. Spread between January and March like lard on bread, it fails to reach the crust on either slice. In its galoshes it's a full head shorter than December, although in leap years, when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April's nose. However more abbreviated than it's cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old. February is pitiless, and it's boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed. Except to the extent that it "tints the buds and swells the leaves within" February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui holding both progress and contentment at bay. If February is the color of lard on rye, its aroma is that of wet wool trousers. As for sound, it is an abstract melody played on a squeaky violin, the petty whine of a shrew with cabin fever. O February, you may be little but you're small! Where you twice your tiresome length, few of us would survive to greet the merry month of May.

He did it for that bubbling, champagne-in-the-veins high, that desire to be part of someone else’s new life, someone else’s realised potential. Vampires must feel like that.

Daisy: Some of my best nights back then were the nights I hit the dope just right. Perfect amount of coke, perfect timing on the pills, with just enough champagne to keep me bubbly.

Instead of expensive fish eggs and stinky cheeses, Jay had packed Doritos and chicken soft tacos—Violet’s favorites. And instead of grapes, he brought Oreos. He knew her way too well. Violet grinned as he pulled out two clear plastic cups and a bottle of sparkling cider. She giggled. “What? No champagne?” He shrugged, pouring a little of the bubbling apple juice into each of the flimsy cups. “I sorta thought that a DUI might ruin the mood.” He lifted his cup and clinked—or rather tapped—it against hers. “Cheers.” He watched her closely as she took a sip.

Take it easy,” I carefully suggested to a pale Jo. She was chugging a glass of Champagne so quickly I half expected the bubble to shoot right down to her arse and release tiny Champagne sparkle farts.

She deserves candles and rose petals. She deserves a down comforter, a jetted tub filled with bubbles, and a glass of champagne. Carrie Pennington deserves the best, and all I can give her is a dusty library.

Just for a moment it reminded not-Triss of drawings she had seen in magazines and on book jackets, of pastel-colored parties where languid, fashionable women slunk and posed, slim and elegant as fish, and gentlemen passed them flutes of fat-bubbled champagne. The impression did not last long, however. The scene around her was too jarringly and robustly real. The accents were all too Ellchester, and some of the girls had knobbly ankles.

Kate had thought hula was something for tourists, girls in plastic skirts dancing to will songs about tiny bubbles in the champagne. Mehana's hula was different-a way of telling stories without words, a kimd of body poetry.

That evening I glanced back at the TV as Bella poured half a bottle of the finest brandy into her bowl of cake batter, I waited for tinselly anticipation to land like snowflakes all around me, but I felt nothing. Even when she produced what she described as 'a winter landscape for European cheeses', sprigged with holly and a frosty snow scene, I failed to get my fix. 'Ooh, this is a juicy one,' she said, biting seductively at a maraschino cherry she'd earlier described as 'divinely kitsch'. She swallowed the cherry whole, giggled girlishly and raised a flute of champagne. 'Why have cava when Champagne is sooo much more bubbly? Cheers!' she said, taking a large sip of vintage Krug.

champagne, n. You appear at the foot of the bed with a bottle of champagne, and I have no idea why. I search my mind desperately for an occasion I've forgotten - is this some obscure anniversary or, even worse, a not-so-obscure one? Then I think you have something to tell me, some good news to share, but your smile is silent, cryptic. I sit up in bed, ask you what's going on, and you shake your head, as if to say that nothing's going on, as if to pretend that we usually start our Wednesday mornings with champagne. You touch the bottle to my leg - I feel the cool condensation and the glass, the fact that the bottle must have been sleeping all night in the refrigerator without me noticing. You have long-stemmed glasses in you other hand, and you place them on the nightstand, beside the uncommenting clock, the box of kleenex, the tumbler of water. "The thing about champagne," you say, unfailing the cork, unwinding its wire restraint, "is that it is the ultimate associative object. Every time you open a bottle of champagne, it's a celebration, so there's no better way of starting a celebration than opening a bottle of champagne. Every time you sip it, you're sipping from all those other celebrations. The joy accumulates over time." You pop the cork. The bubbles rise. I feel some of the spray on my skin. You pour. "But why?" I ask as you hand me my glass. You raise yours and ask, "Why not? What better way to start the day?" We drink a toast to that.

I will be thirty years old again in thirty seconds. I will take the best room in the Grand Central or the Orndorff Hotel. I will dine on oysters and palomitas and wash them down with white wine. Then I will go to the Acme or Keating's or the Big Gold Bar and sit down and draw my cards and fill an inside straight and win myself a thousand dollars. Then I will go to the Red Light or the Monte Carlo and dance the floor afire. Then I will go to a parlor house and have them top up a bathtub with French champagne and I will strip and dive into it with a bare-assed blonde and a redhead and an octoroon and the four of us will get completely presoginated and laugh and let long bubbly farts at hell and baptize each other in the name of the Trick, the Prick, and the Piper-Heidsick.

I was trying to contain a surprise bubble of exultation bobbing in the anger I have always tried to keep bottled up. Fury lived inside me under pressure. Now it all started going off inside my body like popped corks; the rage-champagne and feral glee were foaming out.

IN AMERICA the central message is that each of us is free to write our own story. A polyglot nation of prodigious energy, we are held together by dreams of material progress. Seventy-eight percent of Americans still believe that anybody in America can become rich and live the good life. All it takes is desire, hard work, a little luck, and the right timing. The fable of wealth for the 1990s was telecommunications and the “new economy” of the Internet. But throughout the nation’s history there have been similar stories of riches won and lost—in the westward migration of the nineteenth century, in the excesses of the Gilded Age that closed it, in the champagne bubble of the 1920s before the Great Depression, and during the deficit spending spree of the 1980s—stories that reflect the hopeful striving of a daring people. It is because of this bounding optimism that America is an amazing and seductive place to live, something that continues to be affirmed each day by the battalions of migrants that scramble ashore in the risky pursuit of happiness. Thus the dream endures. But

She had always thought that exquisitely happy time at the beginning of her relationship with Nick was the ultimate, the feeling they’d always be trying to replicate, to get back, but now she realized that was wrong. That was like comparing sparkling mineral water to French champagne. Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It’s light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But love after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you’ve hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you’ve seen the worst and the best – well, that sort of love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.

O shoe, leather ship that sails our cement rivers and woven seas, steering by the star of fashion, circumnavigating hostile reefs of tar and bubble gum; one hour, a tanker ferrying champagne to a playboy’s sip; the next, a raft in the slime; bon voyage, bright barge! May you dock in calm closets, safe from the rape of shoe trees.

Then he said something about how L.A. is dust and exhaust and the hot, dry wind that sets your nerves on edge and pushes fire up the hillsides in ragged lines like tears in the paper that separates us from hell, and it’s towering clouds of smoke, and it’s sunshine that won’t let up and cool ocean fog that gets unrolled at night over the whole basin like a clean white hospital sheet and peeled back again in the morning. It’s a crescent moon in a sky bruised green after the sunset has beaten the shit out of it. It’s a lazy hammock moon rising over power lines, over the skeletal silhouettes of pylons, over shaggy cypress trees and the spiky black lionfish shapes of palm-tree crowns on too-skinny trunks. It’s the Big One that’s coming to turn the city to rubble and set the rubble on fire but not today, hopefully not today. It’s the obviousness of pointing out that the freeway looks like a ruby bracelet stretched alongside a diamond one, looks like a river of lava flowing counter to a river of champagne bubbles. People talk about the sprawl, and, yeah, the city is a drunk, laughing bitch sprawled across the flats in a spangled dress, legs kicked up the canyons, skirt spread over the hills, and she’s shimmering, vibrating, ticklish with light. Don’t buy a star map. Don’t go driving around gawking because you’re already there, man. You’re in it. It’s all one big map of the stars.

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted notto debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.

At her feet, a luminous path lit the way through the grassy field. It was made entirely from glow sticks; each of the radiant lights had been painstakingly set into the ground at perfect intervals, tracing a curved trail that shone through the darkness. Apparently, Jay had been busy. Near the water’s edge, at the end of the iridescent pathway and beneath a stand of trees, Jay had set up more than just a picnic. He had created a retreat, an oasis for the two of them. Violet shook her head, unable to find the words to speak. He led her closer, and Violet followed, amazed. Jay had hung more of the luminous glow sticks from the low-hanging branches, so they dangled overhead. They drifted and swayed in the breeze that blew up from the lake. Beneath the natural canopy of limbs, he had set up two folding lounge chairs and covered them with pillows and blankets. “I’d planned to use candles, but the wind would’ve blown ‘em out, so I had to improvise.” “Seriously, Jay? This is amazing.” Violet felt awed. She couldn’t imagine how long it must have taken him. “I’m glad you like it.” He led her to one of the chairs and drew her down until she was sitting before he started unpacking the cooler. She half-expected him to pull out a jar of Beluga caviar, some fancy French cheeses, and Dom Perignon champagne. Maybe even a cluster of grapes to feed to her…one at a time. So when he started laying out their picnic, Violet laughed. Instead of expensive fish eggs and stinky cheeses, Jay had packed Daritos and chicken soft tacos-Violet’s favorites. And instead of grapes, he brought Oreos. He knew her way too well. Violet grinned as he pulled out two clear plastic cups and a bottle of sparkling cider. She giggled. “What? No champagne?” He shrugged, pouring a little of the bubbling apple juice into each of the flimsy cups. “I sorta thought that a DUI might ruin the mood.” He lifted his cup and clinked-or rather, tapped-it against hers. “Cheers.” He watched her closely as she took a sip. For several moments, they were silent. The lights swayed above them, creating shadows that danced over them. The park was peaceful, asleep, as the lake’s waters lapped the shore. Across from them, lights from the houses along the water’s edge cast rippling reflections on the shuddering surface. All of these things transformed the ordinary park into a romantic winter rendezvous.

Sometimes it was exhilaratingly easy to be happy again. Other times they found that they did have to “try,” and the trying seemed stupid and pointless and Alice would wake up in the middle of the night thinking of all the times Nick had hurt her and wondering why she hadn’t stayed with Dominick. But then there were the other times, unexpected quiet moments, where they’d catch each other’s eyes, and all the years of hurt and joy, bad times and good times, seemed to fuse into a feeling that she knew was so much stronger, more complex and real, than any of those fledgling feelings for Dominick, or even the love she’d first felt for Nick in those early years. She had always thought that exquisitely happy time at the beginning of her relationship with Nick was the ultimate, the feeling they’d always be trying to replicate, to get back, but now she realized that was wrong. That was like comparing sparkling mineral water to French champagne. Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It’s light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But love after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you’ve hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you’ve seen the worst and the best—well, that sort of a love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.

Via Negativa Sometimes it's too hard with words or dark or silence. Tonight I want a prayer of high-rouged cheekbones and light: a litany of back-lit figures, lithe and slim, draped in fabrics soft and wrinkleless and pale as onion slivers. Figures that won't stumble or cough: sleek kid-gloved Astaires who'll lift ladies with glamorous sweeps in their hair— They'll bubble and glitter like champagne. They'll whisper and lean and waltz and wink effortlessly as figurines twirling in music boxes, as skaters in their dreams. And the prayer will not be crowded. You'll hear each click of staccato heel echo through the glassy ballrooms—too few shimmering skirts; the prayer will seem to ache for more. But the prayer will not ache. When we enter, its chandeliers and skies will blush with pleasure. Inside we will be weightless, and our goodness will not matter in a prayer so light, so empty it will float.

While glass had been used by the rich to drink wine for hundreds of years, most beers until the nineteenth century were drunk from opaque vessels such as ceramic, pewter, or wooden mugs. Since most people couldn’t see the color of the liquid they were drinking, it presumably didn’t matter much what these beers looked like, only what they tasted like. Mostly, they were dark brown and murky brews. Then in 1840 in Bohemia, a region in what is now the Czech Republic, a method to mass-produce glass was developed, and it became cheap enough to serve beer to everyone in glasses. As a result people could see for the first time what their beer looked like, and they often did not like what they saw: the so-called top-fermented brews were variable not just in their taste, but in their color and clarity too. Not ten years later, a new beer was developed in Pilsen using bottom-fermenting yeast. It was lighter in color, it was clear and golden, it had bubbles like champagne—it was lager.

Your brother is the most ridiculous, hardheaded, stupid man I know!” Rose half expected Archer to chastise her. Instead, he took a second glass of champagne from the footman passing with the tray and offered it to her. “And you are surprised by this?” “Astonishingly, yes.” She took a long, unladylike swallow of the crisp, bubbly liquid. “I’m astounded. Ah, here are two scoundrels you should know to avoid.” His grin told her he considered them quite the opposite. They were good-looking men, one tall and dark, the other almost as tall with brown hair and blue eyes and enough of the Kane countenance that she picked him for Grey's relation instantly. They met Archer enthusiastically, and then turned polite curiosity in her direction. "Lady Rose Danvers," Archer said jovially. "May I present the Earl of Autley." The dark man bowed over her offered hand. "And my cousin, Mr. Aiden Kane?" The man who looked a bit like Grey smiled and took her hand next. "It's lovely to meet you, Lady Rose," the earl said smoothly. "I hope you are enjoying your time in London?" "Oh, yes," she replied. "Lord Archer has been a very entertaining companion." "I don't doubt it," Aiden said with a grin as he clapped Archer on the shoulder.

She had always thought that exquisitely happy time at the beginning of her relationship with Nick was the ultimate, the feeling they’d always be trying to replicate, to get back, but now she realized that was wrong. That was like comparing sparkling mineral water to French champagne. Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It’s light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But love after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you’ve hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you’ve seen the worst and the best—well, that sort of a love is ineffable. It deserves its own word. And quite possibly she could have achieved that feeling with Dominick one day. It was never so much that Dominick was wrong for her and that Nick was right. She may have had a perfectly happy life with Dominick. But Nick was Nick. He knew what she meant when she said, “Oh my dosh.” They could look at an old photo together and travel back in time to the same place; they could begin a million conversations with “Do you remember when . . .”; they could hear the first chords of an old song on the radio and exchange glances that said everything without words. Each memory, good and bad, was another invisible thread that bound them together, even when they were foolishly thinking they could lead separate lives. It was as simple and complicated as that.

The party spills over with guests, from the ballroom to the front lawn. It’s nighttime, but the house is lit up, bright as the sun. All around me diamonds glitter. We’ve reached that tipping point where everyone is sloshed enough to smile, but not so much they start to slur. There’s almost too many people, almost too much alcohol. Almost too much wealth in one room. It reminds me of Icarus, with his wings of feather and wax. If Icarus had a five-hundred-person guest list for his graduation party. It reminds me of flying too close to the sun. I snag a flute of champagne from one of the servers, who pretends not to see. The bubbles tickle my nose as I take a detour through the kitchen. Rosita stands at the stove, stirring her world-famous jambalaya in a large cast iron pot. The spices pull me close. I reach for a spoon. “Is it ready yet?” She slaps my hand away. “You’ll ruin your pretty dress. It’ll be ready when it’s ready.” We have caterers who make food for all our events, but since this is my graduation party, Rosita agreed to make my favorite dish. She’s going to spoon some onto little puff pastry cups and call it a canape. I try to pout, but everything is too perfect for that. Only one thing is missing from this picture. I give her a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks, Rosita. Have you seen Daddy?” “Where he always is, most likely.” That’s what I’m afraid of. Then I’m through the swinging door that leads into the private side of the house. I pass Gerty, our event planner, who’s muttering about guests who aren’t on the invite list. I head up the familiar oak staircase, breathing in the scent of our house. There’s something so comforting about it. I’m going to miss everything when I leave for college. At the top of the stairs, I hear men’s voices. That isn’t unusual. I’m around the corner from Daddy’s offic

What we have here is a war—the war of matter and spirit. In the classical era, spirit was in harmony with matter. Matter used to condense spirit. What was unseen—the ghost of Hamlet’s father—was seen—in the conscience of the king. The spirit was trapped in the matter of theater. The theater made the unseen, seen. In the Romantic era, spirit overwhelms matter. The glass of champagne can’t contain the bubbles. But never in the history of humanity has spirit been at war with matter. And that is what we have today. The war of banks and religion. It’s what I wrote in Prayers of the Dawn, that in New York City, banks tower over cathedrals. Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion. When I came back to midtown a week after the attack—I mourned—but not in a personal way—it was a cosmic mourning—something that I could not specify because I didn’t know any of the dead. I felt grief without knowing its origin. Maybe it was the grief of being an immigrant and of not having roots. Not being able to participate in the whole affair as a family member but as a foreigner, as a stranger—estranged in myself and confused—I saw the windows of Bergdorf and Saks—what a theater of the unexpected—my mother would have cried—there were only black curtains, black drapes—showing the mourning of the stores—no mannequins, just veils—black veils. When the mannequins appeared again weeks later—none of them had blond hair. I don’t know if it was because of the mourning rituals or whether the mannequins were afraid to be blond—targets of terrorists. Even they didn’t want to look American. They were out of fashion after the Twin Towers fell. To the point, that even though I had just dyed my hair blond because I was writing Hamlet and Hamlet is blond, I went back to my coiffeur immediately and told him—dye my hair black. It was a matter of life and death, why look like an American. When naturally I look like an Arab and walk like an Egyptian.

The first boozy concoction to come from apples was cider. Americans refer to unfiltered apple juice as apple cider and usually drink it hot with a cinnamon stick. But ask for cider in other parts of the world and you’ll get something far better: a drink as dry and bubbly as Champagne and as cold and refreshing as beer. When we drink it at all in North America, we call it hard cider to distinguish it from the nonalcoholic version, but such a distinction isn’t necessary elsewhere.

you’ve done a bit of chemistry, you might recall that sodium carbonate reacts with CO2 to create sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). Well, in Klaus’s machines there is a hanging gallery of strands of a ‘sorbent’ resin – impregnated sodium carbonate – which react with the CO2 in the air flowing over them, the captured CO2 helping to create baking soda. Capturing CO2, though, is only one half of the job. Somehow you’ve got to get the CO2 off the sorbent if you want the apparatus to be reusable and therefore cost-effective. Restocking the whole shebang with a new supply of sorbent resin makes things prohibitively expensive and energy hungry. This is where Lackner’s resin comes into its own, by doing something that even Klaus admits is counterintuitive. In the presence of water the resin changes its affinity for CO2, shedding its recently collected bounty. The ‘collection’ reaction takes a reverse step. Sodium bicarbonate becomes sodium carbonate. What this means is that if Klaus pumps water vapour into his machines, CO2 from the sorbent will ‘fall off’ the resin, allowing the whole apparatus to be reused. Condensing that vapour allows the captured CO2 to bubble out the top, in the same way CO2 bubbles rise to the top of champagne. There’s a kind of sweet poetry to one greenhouse gas (water vapour) collecting another (CO2). After all, one of the problems with CO2 in the atmosphere is that it encourages more water vapour into the air, thereby amplifying the warming effect. Here, thanks to the chemistry of Lackner’s sorbent, the opposite is happening. Water vapour is being used as part of a process to take CO2 out of the air.

The raindrops were champagne bubbles bursting on her skin. The iridescent spills of fuel oil on the wet tarmac of road were tiny proofs of the covenant. She supposed she must be in love.

Three square tiers of hazelnut cake filled with caramel mousse and sliced poached pears, sealed with vanilla buttercream scented with pear eau-de-vie. It's covered in a smooth expanse of ivory fondant decorated with what appear to be natural branches of pale green dogwood but are actually gum paste and chocolate, and with almost-haphazard sheer spheres of silvery blown sugar, as if a child came by with a bottle of bubbles and they landed on the cake. On the top, in lieu of the traditional bride and groom, is a bottle of Dexter's favorite Riesling in a bow tie and a small three-tier traditional wedding cake sporting a veil, both made out of marzipan. It took me the better part of the last three weeks to make this cake. Not to mention the loaves of banana bread, the cellophane bags of pine nut shortbread cookies, and the little silver boxes of champagne truffles in the gift bags. And the vanilla buttermilk panna cottas we're serving with balsamic-macerated berries as the pre-dessert before the cake. And the hand-wrapped caramels and shards of toffee and dark-chocolate-covered candied ginger slices that will be served with the coffee.

Nick implied the job pays crap, so they can’t expect me to be some sort of art professor, right?” She paused when the bartender appeared with a bottle of beer and a slender fluted glass of champagne. The bubbles streaming upward through the pale liquid reminded him of Emma’s personality: round and fizzy, rising as high as they could go. He felt like shit. “Of course, I still need to find a place to live,” Emma said after taking a sip of her drink. “But as long as I have a place to work, I’m good. I can always buy a tent.” “You don’t have to buy a tent,” he said curtly. “Just joking.” She reached across the table and gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “But at least now I don’t have to worry about finding a place to live where I can also work.” He drank some beer straight from the bottle, relishing its sour flavor. Closing his eyes, he pictured that small, windowless room in the community center, its linoleum floor, its cinderblock walls, its sheer ugliness. She was thrilled because she thought it was her only option. But it wasn’t. “Look, Emma—if you want, I’ll take my house off the market. I don’t have to get rid of it. If you want to continue to live there…” She’d raised her champagne flute to her lips, but his words clearly startled her enough to make her lower the glass and gape at him. “But you came to Brogan’s Point to sell the house.” “It can wait.” “And I can’t keep teaching there. You said so yourself. There are those nasty zoning laws. And insurance issues, and liability. All that legal stuff.” She pressed her lips together, effectively smothering her radiant smile. “Taking the room at the community center means I’ll be able to teach there this summer in Nick’s program. So I’ll earn a little more money and maybe make contact with more people who might want to commission Dream Portraits.” She shook her head. “I can make it work.” “You could make it work in my house, too. Stay. Stay as long as you want. We’re not a landlord and tenant anymore. We’ve gone beyond that, haven’t we?” She stared at him, suddenly wary. “What do you mean?” He wasn’t sure what was troubling her. “Emma. We’ve made love. Several times.” Several spectacular times, he wanted to add. “You can stay on in the house. Forget about the rent. That’s the least I owe you.” Her expression went from wary to deflated, from deflated to suspicious. Her voice was cool, barely an inch from icy. “You don’t owe me anything, Max—unless you want to pay me for your portrait. I can’t calculate the cost until I figure out what the painting will…entail.” She seemed to trip over that last word, for some reason. “But as far as the house… I don’t need you to do that.” “Do what? Take it off sale? It isn’t even on sale yet.” “You don’t have to let me stay on in the house because we had sex. I didn’t make love with you because I wanted something in return. You don’t owe me anything.” She sighed again. The fireworks vanished from her eyes, extinguished

The noise of drinking was exhilarating. Champagne corks popped and the pale, chrysanthemum-coloured liquid, whispering gleefully with bubbles, hissed into the glasses; heavy red wine glupped into the goblets, thick and crimson as the blood of some mythical monster, and a swirling wreath of pink bubbles formed on the surface; the frosty white wine tiptoed into the glasses, shrilling, gleaming, now like diamonds, now like topaz; the ouzo lay transparent and innocent as the edge of a mountain pool until the water splashed in and the whole glass curdled like a conjuring trick, coiling and blurring into a summer cloud of moonstone white. Presently

Her kitchen was full of memories. This was where she demonstrated the god-given talent and craft that had made Sugar a success when she’d founded it at the age of twenty. This was where she had perfected her techniques and recipes---the dense Detroit pound cake, the light-as-air pastries, her signature champagne torte, and the bestselling kolaches had all been developed here in the homey old-fashioned kitchen. Biscuits, she often said, were the purest test of a baker’s skill. The ingredients were simple and technique was everything. Use flour from winter wheat and sift it twice. Keep a cube of butter in the freezer and shred it with the box grater. Wet your fingertips with buttermilk and handle the dough as if it were as fragile as a soap bubble.

...If you're lucky, the words in those books will force you to grapple with the hardest truths of your life. After reducing you to a puddle of tears, they'll raise you to your feet again. The words will pull you up, higher and higher, until you feel the sun on your face again. Until you're suddenly humming on the way to the mailbox. Or you're button bouquets of gerbera daisies because you crave bright colors. Ask me you'll laugh again–as freely as champagne bubbling in a tall, glass flute.

bubbles rose over the Champagne Orchestra and Lawrence Welk came onstage salaaming in every direction, crying out declarations of humility in his unctuous, brain-scalding Swedish kazoo of a voice.

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

a bottle of champagne after establishing that she does indeed want bubbles. I’ll let her enjoy a glass before I bring up the topic I know will raise a flush to the surface of that slim, golden neck. But she beats me to it, in a roundabout way, when she asks me what I actually do for a living. ‘I know about one bit, obviously.’ She looks down at her glass. ‘But I’m sure Mummy told me you were in finance.’ ‘Yeah. I definitely didn’t tell your mum I owned a sex club,’ I deadpan, and she giggles. ‘So what else do you do?’ ‘I started out in M&A. Worked my arse off. Learnt how to model a company from scratch. Then I went to a hedge fund for a while. Ran some long-short funds.’ I take a sip of champagne. ‘A few years ago, I left with some mates and we struck out on our own. Now we run our own money and we provide leverage for other people who want to do the same.’ She scrunches up her nose. ‘You mean you lend them money?’ ‘Exactly. So they can take riskier positions. We also provide their infrastructure. Trading systems. Compliance. That sort of thing.’ ‘And what do you trade?’ ‘A bit of everything. The way my mates and I have organised things, everyone has their own expertise. Mine’s equity and corporate debt. That’s what I learnt in M&A. Some of the others

Kismet raised the skinny glass to her lips and the gentle bubbles grazed her nose. She took her first-ever sip of champagne. The ghost of a taste, an emotion in her mouth, unreadable. She drank again to try and understand. But it was too fleeting. Then she got it and smiled. An ephemeral blip.

That’s easy,” Mabel said. “Why don’t you have a Champagne?” “I can barely sell wine,” Michael said. But he thought, you know, why don’t we? “What would I call it, anyway?” Mabel barely paused. “Well, I’d call it Barefoot Bubbly,” she said. It took a few years. Barefoot’s sparkling wine didn’t hit the market until 1997. A year later, Michael and Bonnie toasted Mabel for her 80th birthday with a wine named Barefoot Bubbly.

Alexander said as soon as it got cold, they would leave. September came and it was still warm; he liked that. Better still, not only was Tatiana making them a little money, she was drinking some sparkling wine, some Bisol Brut, for which she developed a bit of a taste. After work, she would sit with Anthony, have bread and cheese, and a glass of sparkler. She closed the winery, counted the money, played with the boy, waited for Alexander to finish work, and sipped her drink. By the time they drove to the B&B, had dinner, chocolate cake, more wine, a bath, put Anthony to bed, and she fell down onto the goose down covers, arms flung above her head, Tatiana was so bubbled up, so pliant, so agreeable to all his relentless frenzies, and so ceaselessly and supernally orgasmic that Alexander would not have been a mortal man if he allowed anything to come between his wife and her Bisol Brut. Who would do a crazy thing like quit to go into dry country? This country was flowing with foaming wine, and that is just how they both liked it. He started whispering to her again, night by night, little by little. Tania . . . you want to know what drives me insane? Yes, darling, please tell me. Please whisper to me. When you sit up straight like this with your hands on your lap, and your breasts are pushed together, and your pink nipples are nice and soft. I lose my breath when your nipples are like that. The trouble is, as soon as I see you looking at me, the nipples stop being nice and soft. Yes, they are quite shameful, he whispers, his breath lost, his mouth on them. But your hard nipples also drive me completely insane, so it’s all good, Tatia. It’s all very very good. Anthony was segregated from them by an accordion room partition. A certain privacy was achieved, and after a few nights of the boy not being woken up, they got bolder; Alexander did unbelievable things to Tatiana that made her sparkler-fueled moaning so extravagant that he had to invent and devise whole new ways of sustaining his usually impeccable command over his own release. Tell me what you want. I’ll do anything you want, Tania. Tell me. What can I do—for you? Anything, darling . . . anything you want, you do . . . There was nothing Gulag about their consuming love in that enchanted bed by the window, the bed that was a quilted down island with four posters and a canopy, with pillows so big and covers so thick . . . and afterward he lay drenched and she lay breathless, and she murmured into his chest that she should like a soft big bed like this forever, so comforted was she and so very pleased with him. Once she asked in a breath, Isn’t this better than being on top of the hard stove in Lazarevo? Alexander knew she wanted him to say yes, and he did, but he didn’t mean it, and though she wanted him to say it, he knew she didn’t want him to mean it either. Could anything come close to crimson Lazarevo where, having been nearly dead, without champagne or wine or bread or a bed, without work or food or Anthony or any future other than the wall and the blindfold, they somehow managed for one brief moon to live in thrall sublime? They had been so isolated, and in their memories they still remained near the Ural Mountains, in frozen Leningrad, in the woods of Luga when they had been fused and fevered, utterly doomed, utterly alone. And yet!—look at her tremulous light— as if in a dream—in America—in fragrant wine country, flute full of champagne, in a white quilted bed, her breath, her breasts on him, her lips on his face, her arms in rhapsody around him are so comforting, so true—and so real.

Over a century timescale, a kilogram of methane is about 30 times as powerful as a kilogram of carbon dioxide. Now get this. There are billions of tons of methane in molecular cages of water ice, called “clathrates,” held tight in the permafrost soil of Earth’s northern regions and at the cold bottom of the ocean. As Siberia warms, and as the water that circulates along the seafloor warms, the clathrates in the sediments both on land and deep in the sea will release the trapped methane molecules. Once liberated, they’ll come bubbling up. The methane gas will come out in the same fashion that bubbles are released by opening a bottle of soda, or when you pop the cork on a bottle of champagne. Scientists don’t know yet how much methane clathrates will add to the warming process. But intuitively, when one considers how much permafrost there is, or used to be, it seems likely that there’s a lot of methane and a lot of potential for a lot of trouble. More important, the recent research into the possible impact of clathrates makes a crucial point: Yes, there are uncertainties in the climate projections, but many of those uncertainties are things that would make the warming much worse than restrained scientists are forecasting.

The sun was warm on my face. I knew we were safe at last. The vast bottle of Champagne, that had sat like some Buddha at base camp for three months, was ceremoniously produced. It took four of us almost ten minutes, hacking away with ice axes, finally to get the cork out. The party had begun. I felt like drinking a gallon of this beautiful bubbly stuff, but my body just couldn’t. Sipping slowly was all I could manage without sneezing, and even like that I was soon feeling decidedly wobbly. I closed my eyes and flopped against the rock wall of the mess tent--a huge smile plastered across my face. Later on in my tent, I put on the fresh socks and thermal underwear that I had kept especially for this moment. First change in ninety days. Heaven. I sealed the underpants in a plastic Ziploc bag and reminded myself to be very cautious when it came to opening the bag again back home.

After bringing Beatrix to his room, Christopher sent for cans of hot water and a hip bath, and a bottle of champagne. And he insisted on washing her, despite her cringing and protesting. “I can’t just sit here,” she protested, straddling the metal tub and lowering herself carefully, “and let you do something I’m perfectly capable of doing myself.” Christopher went to the dresser, where a silver tray bearing champagne and two fluted crystal glasses had been set. He poured a glass for her, and brought it to Beatrix. “This will keep you occupied.” Taking a sip of the cool, bubbly vintage, Beatrix leaned back to look at him. “I’ve never had champagne in the afternoon,” she said. “And certainly never while bathing. You won’t let me drown, will you?” “You can’t drown in a hip bath, love.” Christopher knelt beside the tub, bare-chested and sleek. “And no, I won’t let anything happen to you. I have plans for you.” He applied soap to a sponge, and more to his hands, and began to bathe her.

More than one Moscow banker told me of the day when the Russians entered the Champagne Wars. The music was blaring, and the girls had begun to undress when one Russian diner ordered champagne, Dom Pérignon, at three hundred dollars a bottle. He didn’t drink it. He shook the bottle and sprayed it all over himself. The gauntlet was thrown. At a nearby table another Russian followed suit. The Champagne Wars were not new—the French had been wasting money for show for years—but the Russians took the battle to heart. Soon they were dueling, each trying to spray more bubbly than the other. By the end of the lunch, in a restaurant that accepted only cash, the bill for the champagne hit thirty thousand dollars.

BLOOD ORANGE MIMOSAS Hands-on: 10 min. Total: 12 min. We love the color blood oranges give this classic brunch cocktail. A dash of bitters adds depth. Look for orange bitters—such as Fee Brothers or Stirrings— at liquor stores or specialty grocers. The sugar cube dissolves as you sip, balancing the bitters and giving of bubbles for a festive touch. Juice the oranges and keep chilled up to a day ahead. 12 sugar cubes 1 ⁄ 2 teaspoon blood orange bitters or angostura bitters 1 7 1 ⁄ 2 cups sparkling wine, chilled 3 cups fresh blood orange juice (about 6 oranges) blood orange rind curls (optional) 1. Place 1 sugar cube in each of 12 Champagne futes or slender glasses; add 1 drop bitters to each fute. Combine wine and juice. Divide wine mixture evenly among futes. Garnish with rind, if desired. SErVES 12 (serving size: about 3 ⁄ 4 cup) CalOriES 143; FaT 0g; prOTEiN 0g; CarB 11g; FiBEr 0g; CHOl 0mg; irON 0mg; SODiUM 0mg; CalC 5mg

Take it easy,” I carefully suggested to a pale Jo. She was chugging a glass of Champagne so quickly I half expected the bubble to shoot right down to her arse and release tiny Champagne sparkle farts.

Ragtime plinking, glasses clinking, choruses getting sung with only half the lyrics right, giggles bubbling over like a tower of champagne. It's a party, shaking down the dawn.

His mouth was on hers, the champagne flavoring his tongue and lips, his sexy scent reaching her over the warm, bubbling water. She stroked his arms, loving the feel of his mouth against hers, hot and hungry. Just like hers was, unable to get enough, not wanting to give this up, wanting to kiss him until the sun rose in the morning.

At one point Morgan’s eyes reddened, and it wasn’t from the champagne shower. “Basically, it’s just everything I’ve had to overcome,” he said, “just the stuff that people go out there and perceive about me. All my haters, I just want to show them that I can play this game. Even though I’ve got a fun, bubbly personality and everything like that, I still come to win and I’m a winner.

Suddenly, despite all the fun she'd had, Azzah felt down. Watching the champagne bubbles sparkle and fizz in her glass, she realized by tomorrow all the bubbles would be gone, and she'd have to go back to her flat, dull, fizz-less life.

She had always thought that exquisitely happy time at the beginning of her relationship with Nick was the ultimate, the feeling they’d always be trying to replicate, to get back, but now she realized that was wrong. That was like comparing sparkling mineral water to French champagne. Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It’s light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But love after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you’ve hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you’ve seen the worst and the best—well, that sort of a love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.

Something strange happens inside of me, this odd bubbling sensation that feels like a champagne bottle about to burst. Like fireflies dancing. Like the feel of hot fingers on your skin after you come inside from the rain. Happiness.

Aaron stands up from where he’s sitting as my chest tightens with that overflowing feeling, the one made up of beautiful things and happy dreams and hope. It feels like fireflies drifting through a sweet summer night or bubbles in a champagne bottle waiting to be opened in celebration.

No wine in the world brings to mind so many immediate associations as champagne. The pop of a cork and the bright sparkle of bubbles mean celebration and glamour and, more often than not, the distinct possibility of romance. It is the wine of weddings and New Year’s kisses. It is beautiful and delicate, and above all, it is a wine associated with women.

Even more shocking, champagne wasn’t discovered by the French. It was the British who first learned the secret of making wine sparkle and first launched the commercial trade in champagne wine with bubbles. The legend of Dom Pérignon was manufactured only in the late nineteenth

By the dawn of the twentieth century, even before the Jazz Age made champagne the symbol of an era, the world was already buying twenty million bottles of bubbly a year.

Botox has made her face tight and gleaming. Her voice is champagne bright and just as bubbly. She even has an elegant name—Leslie Evelyn.

Caviar is on the Table and they share bubbles of exclusive Champagne.

But he had to stop, because the butler entered, bringing the glittering ice bucket with the champagne ordered for celebration. They remained silent, letting the room be filled by the sounds which centuries of men and of struggle had established as the symbol of joyous attainment: the blast of the cork, the laughing tinkle of a pale gold liquid running into two broad cups filled with the weaving reflections of candles, the whisper of bubbles rising through two crystal stems, almost demanding that everything in sight rise, too, in the same aspiration.

You can tell a champagne’s quality by the size of the bubbles, did you know that? The smaller the bubbles, the more there are available to release the aroma and flavor. The carbon dioxide bubbles pick up and carry the flavor molecules; the more there are, the more refreshing and subtle the flavors will feel to your palate.

I was a woman strung together with glitter and wishes. A midnight apparition cast in the coldest winters. I would not be here tomorrow. But tonight I would drink champagne until my veins ran in golden, bubbling streams. I would dance until the ice in my heart melted. Kiss until my lips bruised. And I would live until it hurt.

Magnetic. Elle couldn’t look away because this was champagne bubbles on her tongue, the first plunge into a swimming pool on a scorcher of a day, that moment right before the bass drops in a killer song. Sparks, chemistry, whatever it was, this was the sort of it’s there or it’s not connection she’d been chasing.

But Isabel was like no one Nora had met before. She was beautiful, of course---the otherworldly clarity of her English skin!---and possessed of the sort of poise Nora could only dream about. Beyond that, she was magnetic. Try as Nora might, she couldn't resist her brother's new wife. First, there was her voice when she spoke, that crisp accent and authoritative diction that made Miss Perry (strictest in a long line of governesses) seem like a drover's wife by comparison; next, there was her laugh, which rose like bubbles in a glass of champagne. And then there were her stories. True tales of adventure and daring, rivaling anything Nora had read in her Girls' Crystal Annuals: during the Blitz, Isabel had handled secret papers in Whitehall and later worked in some sort of capacity that she wasn't able to speak of at length (at least not then and there). Even more excitingly, she was an orphan---a real one, just like a girl in a book, whose parents had died in tragic circumstances when she was only young, casting her out of the nest and into a childhood of boarding schools and midnight feasts and hockey sticks and daring japes. Nora couldn't think of anything more romantic.

You know why there’s so many bubbles in champagne?” “Why is that?” I ask, sorta genuinely curious. “To lift you up.

relationship with God and find joy in him, the more our evangelism will be enthusiastic and infectious. It will stop being an awkward exercise imposed on conversation as an act of duty. Instead, as an overflow of full hearts, we will speak enthusiastically of the One we love. Instead of being like nearly empty toothpaste tubes, we’ll become champagne bottles, waiting to explode, fizzing and bubbling over.

When I lived on Hollywood Boulevard, its heyday had long passed and a tired seediness had settled in—the tuxedos threadbare, the fur stoles gone to mange, and the champagne bubbles long since popped. Buses belched smoke where limousines once idled, and a tourist was more likely to have a personal encounter with a pickpocket than a movie star.

We each filled about a hundred bottles every fall, using mostly the unpasteurized juice of Russet, Golden Delicious, and New York Imperial apples from a nearby farm. After allowing the cider to ferment for a couple of weeks in five-gallon jugs, we drew it carefully into Champagne bottles salvaged from a friend’s restaurant in New York, corked the bottles, and secured each cork with a metal wire. The cider rested in my cellar over the winter—undergoing a second fermentation to produce a hard, sparkling beverage. Every bottle was different. Sometimes it came out just right: a golden color, with beautiful, sparkling bubbles; a clean, dry, slightly sweet taste of apple, honey, and apricot, with the scent of apple blossoms and honeysuckle. At other times it was hard and rough, with such a high carbon dioxide content that the corks, despite being secured with wire, burst out of the bottles during the peak of the second fermentation. Precious cider was lost on the floor and walls of the cellar. Opening a bottle became so unpredictable that after a few sticky showers in the kitchen and dining room, Gloria insisted that I perform that chore outside.

When we finally release from our first kiss of the day, as the sweet taste of Helena’s mouth lingers on my tongue, I am left inebriated from not only the soft touch of her lips but also the warmth of her tongue as it danced around mine. I feel as if I have been sipping on the finest of champagnes and the bubbles have gone straight to my head. I open my eyes and the vision beneath me is a true beauty to wake up to. I gaze down upon her and as she beams me the most beautiful smile a multitude of harmonious new sensations surge through my veins. At an alarming rate they flow freely and as they reach my heart and pierce my soul, without any warning, I find myself free-falling into her encompassing aura. She looks up at me and sweetly asks, “Are you alright, Darius? You seem to be somewhere else.” I roll onto my side, rest on my elbow and cradle my cheek in the palm of my hand. “I am, baby. Do you think you find me?” ... She creases a little worried frown and tells me that she’s confused and she’s not sure if she can. I smile at her, give a little chuckle and reassure, “Don’t worry, I’ll find me.” She manages a half-smile so I slowly start to trace the outline of her heart with my finger. I press lightly into the centre of the invisible template drawn and whisper to her that I am hiding somewhere inside the precious place that is nesting beneath her blood and bones. I am in fact dwelling in her heart and I always will be. ©JL Thomas 2017

He is tall, dark, and handsome in an understated way. Sports jacket and black jeans. Shiny belt buckle. I am a voyeur, he is my guilty pleasure. Twinkle, twinkle lots of stars when he catches me watching him, our eyes lock in unison, a blush climbs my cheeks. He looks right through me. I feel champagne bubbles in my stomach even though tequila is lacing my veins.