“
Do we have any chlorine? It seems to be kind of explosive when mixed with other stuff."
"Like what, your socks? No, we don't have chlorine. No swimming pool.
”
”
James Patterson (The Angel Experiment (Maximum Ride, #1))
“
It’s funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool. Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine.
”
”
Sarah Dessen (That Summer)
“
Let's face it, the gene pool needs a little chlorine.
”
”
Jimmy Carr
“
Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog
of non-definitive acts,
something other than the desperation.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party
and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?
A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.
Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.
What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.
Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly
flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,
that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.
I’m not the princess either.
Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
glass, but that comes later.
Let me do it right for once,
for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
you know the story, simply heaven.
Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
and when you open your eyes
only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
Inside your head the sound of glass,
a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
Hello darling, sorry about that.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
Especially that, but I should have known.
Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up
in a stranger’s bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
smiling in a way
that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,
up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
I looked out the window and said
This doesn’t look that much different from home,
because it didn’t,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
just couldn’t say it out loud.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—
here’s the pencil, make it work …
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
river water.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
we have had our difficulties and there are many things
I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,
years later, in the chlorinated pool.
I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have
these luxuries.
I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.
I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
Quit milling around the yard and come inside.
”
”
Richard Siken
“
Cleansed, chlorinated to the point of chemical peel, sore muscles relieved, I felt almost human again. Tiptoe to my room, up a darkened hall, past closed doors, I wondered if I'd ever feel completely human again.
”
”
Ellen Hopkins (Crank (Crank, #1))
“
Everything was heightened the way it always is when summer is slipping away to fall, and you're younger than eighteen, and all you can do is suck your cherry Icee and let the chlorine sting your nose, all the way up into the pockets behind your eyes, and snap your towel at the pretty girl with the sunburn, and hope to do it all again come June.
”
”
Emily M. Danforth (The Miseducation of Cameron Post)
“
Years from now this will be what I remember when I remember my spring break senior year. It will be this moment right here. The smell of chlorine on his skin. The way the sun dips slow into the water before it disappears. The first time I ever told a boy I loved him.
”
”
Jenny Han (Ashes to Ashes (Burn for Burn, #3))
“
A classic trait of girlhood - forever confusing your desires with that of an older man's.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
Nearly every human memory is corrupted by the fact that it is a memory of being human
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
An incomplete list:
No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.
No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.
No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.
No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.
No more countries, all borders unmanned.
No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.
No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.
”
”
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
“
Blood may be thicker than chlorine, but hormones seem to scramble the equation.
”
”
Huntley Fitzpatrick (What I Thought Was True)
“
I guess hearts are slippery because they’re covered in blood. I wish I could bleed mine dry. Then I’d miss you less.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
Everybody wants to be a hero
But most of us are just misunderstood villains
”
”
Mahogany L. Browne (Chlorine Sky)
“
As suburban children we floated at night in swimming pools the temperature of blood; pools the color of Earth as seen from outer space. We would float and be naked—pretending to be embryos, pretending to be fetuses—all of us silent save for the hum of the pool filter. Our minds would be blank and our eyes closed as we floated in warm waters, the distinction between our bodies and our brains reduced to nothing—bathed in chlorine and lit by pure blue lights installed underneath diving boards. Sometimes we would join hands and form a ring like astronauts in space; sometimes when we felt more isolated in our fetal stupor we would bump into each other in the deep end, like twins with whom we didn’t even know we shared a womb.
”
”
Douglas Coupland (Life After God)
“
Humans and monsters both understand stories about magic and marvel and myth are made interesting by their stemming from trauma and violence and blood. How can one grow without pain?
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
When banking stops, credit stops, and when credit stops, trade stops, and when trade stops—well, the city of Chicago had only eight days of chlorine on hand for its water supply. Hospitals ran out of medicine. The entire modern world was premised on the ability to buy now and pay later.
”
”
Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
“
I make out a schoolbus...glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Liger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of day-glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it.
”
”
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
“
His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others—Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.
”
”
Libba Bray (The Diviners (The Diviners, #1))
“
The sun is beautiful, long and low on the horizon like it’s stretching itself, like it’s shaking off a nap, and I know underneath this weak winter light is the promise of days that last until eight P.M. and pool parties and the smell of chlorine and burgers on the grill; and underneath that is the promise of trees lit up in red and orange like flames and spiced cider, and frost that melts away by noon – layers upon layers of life, always something more, new, deeper.
”
”
Lauren Oliver (Before I Fall)
“
Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria.
Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, "ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.
”
”
Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)
“
On the day of my first period, I was more dead doe than human woman. Was womanhood always so violent, raw?
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
Humans are the downfall to myths. Whether the human razed the home, broke the heart, or betrayed the trust, the mythical is always in a worse state after the introduction.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
A dose of chlorine won’t hurt them” Lady Satan opines, quite incorrectly, as she fills an entire room of baddies with the deadly stuff.
”
”
Jon Morris (The League of Regrettable Superheroes: Half-Baked Heroes from Comic Book History)
“
Mermaids were beautiful, and was I not also beautiful? Alluring? A creature of the water? Not of salt like the mermaids in the book, but of chlorine.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
When sodium, an unstable metal that can suddenly burst into flame, reacts with a deadly poisonous gas known as chlorine, it becomes the staple food sodium chloride, NaCl, from the only family of rocks eaten by humans.
”
”
Mark Kurlansky (Salt: A World History)
“
They had to evacuate the grade school on Tuesday. Kids were getting headaches and eye irritations, tasting metal in their mouths. A teacher rolled on the floor and spoke foreign languages. No one knew what was wrong. Investigators said it could be the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers, the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers, the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer-grained, more closely woven into the basic state of things.
”
”
Don DeLillo (White Noise)
“
I never said yes, but I never said no, and the indefinite limbo of maybe is where regret and doubt and confusion reside as neighbors, forever reduced to the monotony of a clouded memory, the mind traveling in never-ending cul-de-sac circles.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
Scheele independently discovered eight elements—chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen—but received credit for none of them in his lifetime. He had an unfortunate habit of tasting every substance he worked with, as a way of familiarizing himself with its properties, and eventually the practice caught up with him.
”
”
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
“
i just want to swim
in the teal green sorta blue bubble
& forget all the things that make me different
for a little while.
”
”
Mahogany L. Browne (Chlorine Sky)
“
Beautiful things demand touch. Hence the taped floors at art museums and the roped boundaries between paparazzi and celebrities on red carpets.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
You don't have to wait for others to claim you / You don't have to wait for others to pick you / You pick yourself, I mean / Really choose yourself every day
”
”
Mahogany L. Browne (Chlorine Sky)
“
A friend is someone seeing you
And hearing you
Without you having to say
Everything
Every time
”
”
Mahogany L. Browne (Chlorine Sky)
“
Do you understand the world I lived in? How my mutilations were a gift?
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
No one told me holy water had chlorine in it.
”
”
Melanie Fair (Wolves Among Sheep)
“
[Professor] Bragg [asserts that] In sodium chloride there appear to be no molecules represented by NaCl. The equality in number of sodium and chlorine atoms is arrived at by a chess-board pattern of these atoms; it is a result of geometry and not of a pairing-off of the atoms.
”
”
Henry Edward Armstrong
“
Ironically, the very advances that represent all that is modern in the world—hand sanitizers, treated water, factory farming—have created their own set of diseases. For example, triclosan—an antibacterial chemical used in many soaps and hand sanitizers—has been shown to kill human cells,26 and even the FDA admits it acts as an endocrine disruptor in animals.27 When combined with chlorinated water, it produces chloroform28—a probable carcinogen according to the EPA.29
”
”
Joseph Mercola (Effortless Healing: 9 Simple Ways to Sidestep Illness, Shed Excess Weight, and Help Your Body Fix Itself)
“
When I was younger
I thought I had superpowers
Thought if I sat real still and stared at a book
No one would be able to see me
I got so good at it
I forgot that I’m the only one playing the game
Sit still with a book or my head down
And you can go missing
”
”
Mahogany L. Browne (Chlorine Sky)
“
Like one that had a Star Wars Storm Trooper face on it and next to that “I had friends on that Death Star.” And another one that said, “The gene pool could use a little chlorine.” And another that said, “Contrary to belief, no one owes you anything.” Then there were the random quotes, like Walt Whitman’s “Resist much. Obey little.
”
”
Kristen Ashley (Bounty (Colorado Mountain, #7))
“
I have never seen a food writer mention this, but all shrimp imported into the United States must first be washed in chlorine bleach to kill bugs. What this does for the taste, I do not know, but I think we should be told.
”
”
Charles Clover (The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat)
“
She reaches down into her bulging tote bag and pulls out a small plastic box with a hinged lid. It contains a round pill box with a threaded lid from which she tips out a vitamin pill, a fish-oil pill, and the enzyme tablet that lets her stomach digest milk. Inside the hinged plastic box she also carries packets of salt, pepper, horseradish, and hand-wipes, a doll size bottle of Tabasco sauce, chlorine pills for treating drinking water, Pepto-Bismol chews, and God knows what else. If you go to a concert, Bina has opera glasses. If you need to sit on the grass, she whips out a towel. Ant traps, a corkscrew, candles and matches, a dog muzzle, a penknife, a tiny aerosol can of freon, a magnifying glass - Landsman has seen everything come out of that overstuffed cowhide at one time or another.
”
”
Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen's Union)
“
Even the suggestion of swimming be stirring. Watch a swimmer pass a building with a pool: the whiff of chlorine produces a wistful smile. Sit with swimmers when a TV commercial shows someone in the water: they actually stop and watch.
”
”
Lynn Sherr (Swim: Why We Love the Water)
“
When you live where we live
You say what it is & if you can't say what it is
Or if it hurt too much,
Or maybe it's too confusing
You just say "whatever"
That way you ain't no lie
”
”
Mahogany L. Browne (Chlorine Sky)
“
For lunches he rode the elevator to the fourth-floor food court and ate Thai Town or Subway at a table tucked among potted tropicals, gazing past milling teenagers to the little penny-choked fountain where a copper salmon spat water into a chlorinated pool.
”
”
Anthony Doerr (About Grace)
“
Jim watched them eat, his eyes fixed on every morsel that entered their mouth. When the oldest of the four soldiers had finished he scraped some burnt rice and fish scales from the side of the cooking pot. A first-class private of some forty years, with slow, careful hands, he beckoned Jim forward and handed him his mess tin. As they smoked their cigarettes the Japanese smiled to themselves, watching Jim devour the shreds of fatty rice. It was his first hot food since he had left he hospital, and the heat and greasy flavour stung his gums. Tears swam in his eyes. The Japanese soldier who had taken pity on Jim, recognising that this small boy was starving, began to laugh good-naturedly, and pulled the rubber plug from his metal water-bottle. Jim drank the clear, chlorine-flavoured liquid, so unlike the stagnant water in the taps of the Columbia Road. He choked, carefully swallowed his vomit, and tittered into his hands, grinning at the Japanese. Soon they were all laughing together, sitting back in the deep grass beside the drained swimming-pool.
”
”
J.G. Ballard (Empire of the Sun)
“
even a scientist can’t help thinking of the Periodic Table as a zoo of one-of-a-kind animals conceived by Dr. Seuss. How else could we believe that sodium is a poisonous, reactive metal that you can cut with a butter-knife, while pure chlorine is a smelly, deadly gas, yet when added together make sodium chloride, a harmless, biologically essential compound better known as table salt? Or how about hydrogen and oxygen? One is an explosive gas, and the other promotes violent combustion, yet the two combined make liquid water, which puts out fires.
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry)
“
How was I supposed to differentiate between the pain due to the concussion and the pain due to the agony of everyday human life?
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
If truth prevails, the contributions of a courageous physician and a brilliant engineer to the conquest of waterborne disease will still be remembered in another hundred years.
”
”
Michael J. McGuire (The Chlorine Revolution: Water Disinfection and the Fight to Save Lives)
“
I judged her days as remarkable for their mediocrity.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
Grudges are for humans too small for forgiveness.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
He was a winner who did not understand how to lose, the most dangerous kind.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
Sammy felt, that morning, with his ribs bruised and a wan flavor of chlorine at the back of his mouth, that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving.
”
”
Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)
“
You're certain about that?"
"I'm quite competent with the chlorinated hydrocarbons, thank you.
”
”
Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1))
“
Handwashing, midwifery, mosquito control, and especially the protection of drinking water by public sewerage and chlorinated tap water would come to save billions of lives.
”
”
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
Chlorine, or Allene,
”
”
Lydia Kang (Opium and Absinthe)
“
The sky was a thrilling chlorine-blue, stretched taut and featureless like silk.
”
”
Sally Rooney (Normal People)
“
All morning he organized the silver polishers and cake decorators, the oilers of trolley wheels and lift gates, the lint and vomit removers, the replacers of soap at each sink, the replacers of chlorine medallions in the urinals, and the men hosing the pavement outside the entrance, as well as immigrants who squeezed out English names they had never spelled before onto birthday cakes, diced up onions, slashed open pigs with terrible knives, or prepared whatever else would be desired twelve hours later in the Ivor Novello Room or the Miguel Invernio Room.
”
”
Michael Ondaatje (Warlight)
“
What to call it - the spark of God? Survival instinct? The souped-up computer of an apex brain evolved from eons in the R&D of natural selection? You could practically see the neurons firing in the kid’s skull. His body was all spring and torque, a bundle of fast-twitch muscles that exuded faint floral whiffs of ripe pear. So much perfection in such a compact little person - Billy had to tackle him from time to time, wrestle him squealing to the ground just to get that little rascal in his hands, just your basic adorable thirty-month-old with big blue eyes clear as chlorine pools and Huggies poking out of his stretchy-waist jeans. So is this what they mean by the sanctity of life? A soft groan escaped Billy when he thought about that, the war revealed in this fresh and gruesome light. Oh. Ugh. Divine spark, image of God, suffer the little children and all that - there’s real power when words attach to actual things. Made him want to sit right down and weep, as powerful as that. He got it, yes he did, and when he came home for good he’d have to meditate on this, but for now it was best to compartmentalize, as they said, or even better not to mentalize at all.
”
”
Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk)
“
Then she would be that hostess in Houston and I would be that tanned one from Florida, a small memory of chlorinated pool water, fruit juice and gin, steak raw in the middle, and hearty rhythms in the draperied twilight of the tomb-cool motel cubicle, riding the grounded flesh of the jet-stream Valkyrie. A harmless pleasure. For harmless plastic people, scruff-proof, who can create the delusion of romance.
”
”
John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
“
I was actually drowning in a pool full of people and I knew how to swim. I wondered how long it would take someone to realize there was a dead body in the pool. Would I sink or bounce on the surface like a floating chlorinator?
”
”
Ashlan Thomas (To Fall (The To Fall Trilogy #1))
“
Dr. Ashley King, planetary scientist and stardust expert (an enviable job description), states: “It is totally 100 percent true: nearly all the elements in the human body were made in a star and many have come through several supernovas.” Oxygen + carbon + hydrogen + nitrogen + calcium + phosphorous + potassium + sulfur + sodium + chlorine + magnesium = star-human. The stuff of the cosmos is woven into our bone branches and wanders in our blood rivers.
”
”
Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit)
“
The invigorating energy in fresh-cut grass and cool, crisp chlorine filled Wendell’s nostrils as they lounged by the pool in Evan’s back yard. Looking past the back fence the wild grass bowed to the playful persuasion of the warm summer breeze and the corn lilies and columbines bounced their jeweled heads, laughing and teasing butterflies. Even the Cooper’s hawk atop a nearby fence post, content with feasting on a woodpecker knew, it was a perfect day.
”
”
Jaime Buckley (Prelude to a Hero (Chronicles of a Hero, #0.5))
“
The sun is beautiful, long and low on the horizon like it’s stretching itself, like it’s shaking off a nap, and I know underneath this weak winter light is the promise of days that last until eight P.M. and pool parties and the smell of chlorine and burgers on the grill; and underneath that is the promise of trees lit up in red and orange like flames and spiced cider, and frost that melts away by noon—layers upon layers of life, always something more, new, deeper. It makes me feel like crying,
”
”
Lauren Oliver (Before I Fall)
“
You could practically see the neurons firing in the kid’s skull. His body was all spring and torque, a bundle of fast-twitch muscles that exuded faint floral whiffs of ripe pear. So much perfection in such a compact little person — Billy had to tackle him from time to time, wrestle him squealing to the ground just to get that little rascal in his hands, just your basic adorable thirty-month old with big blue eyes clear as chlorine pools and Huggies poking out of his stretchy-waist jeans. So is this what they meant by the sanctity of life?
”
”
Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk)
“
Anti-Chlorine/Anti-Fluoride Tea For a powerful detox of chlorine and fluoride from your organs and the rest of your body, blend equal parts of blackberry leaf, raspberry leaf, hibiscus flower, and rose hips. Steep one tablespoon of this herb mixture per cup of hot water for tea.
”
”
Anthony William (Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal)
“
They were both heavier than I remembered, as if their sadness had materialized into solid weights onto their shoulders, but it is true that what humans call intergenerational trauma has always been heavy, sinking to the gloomy abyss of repressed memory to be mined for so-called wisdom later. I was newly aware my parents were people who carried their burdens on their bodies rather than within themselves—this was my doomed inheritance.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
I was tossed into a pool beside the Suwannee River. Out behind an old motel. Sink or swim. Arms flailing in the deep end. Chlorine and Fear. I hurt my shoulder. Tweaked my ankle. Had to be pulled out. They laughed about it all summer. Now pools are reminders. That your friends watched you sink.
”
”
Damon Thomas (Some Books Are Not For Sale)
“
No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities.
”
”
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
“
My father had always been in charge of pool maintenance—skimming the surface with a net, heaping wet leaves into a pile. The colored vials he used to test chlorine levels. He’d never been that assiduous with upkeep, but the pool had gotten bad since he’d left. Salamanders idling around the filter.
”
”
Emma Cline (The Girls)
“
As a mermaid, I now recognize how winning places the self within a construct of hierarchy over other bodies—a false construct. There’s no victory when someone else loses.
But back then, oh, how I adored winning. The rush of it all! You poor humans. You’ll never learn to be better, not when winning is so addictive.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
wasn’t carrying a restricted nerve agent, and the driver didn’t fall asleep at the wheel. He was transporting chlorine (none of which actually spilled) and he was stung to death. Then partially eaten. None of the deaths in town were caused by this fictitious, ‘highly experimental’ nerve agent. Pretty clever though….to
”
”
John Conroe (Black Frost (Demon Accords, #3.5))
“
Her mother had smelled of cold and scales, her father of stone dust and dog. She imagined her husband's mother, whom she had never met, had a whiff of rotting apples, though her stationary had stunk of baby powder and rose perfume. Sally was starch, cedar, her dead grandmother sandalwood, her uncle, swiss cheese. People told her she smelled like garlic, like chalk, like nothing at all. Lotto, clean as camphor at his neck and belly, like electrified pennies at the armpit, like chlorine at the groin. She swallowed. Such things, details noticed only on the edges of thought would not return.
'Land,' Mathilde said, 'odd name for a guy like you.'
'Short for Roland,' the boy said.
Where the August sun had been steaming over the river, a green cloud was forming. It was still terrifically hot, but the birds had stopped singing. A feral cat scooted up the road on swift paws. It would rain soon.
'Alright Roland,' Mathilde said, suppressing as sigh, 'sing your song.
”
”
Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies)
“
There can be no doubt that the development of a practical method of water disinfection during the last two years marks an epoch in the art of water purification.
”
”
Charles-Edward Amory Winslow
“
My heart screamed in capital letters.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
What is it called when immigrants reverse, when they wake up from the nightmare masked as a dream?
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
And like blue eyes and whiteness, eventually I learned the Blue Eyes White Dragon was simply a construct too. A piece of flimsy card stock, its value ascribed by a mysterious higher power. I could go online and buy a million Blue Eyes White Dragon cards, and similarly, I could walk down the street of our suburb and see blue-eyed white girls everywhere, available a dime a dozen.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
That minute, that tiny second when you hit the water flat on, you lose your breath. All the air flattens out of you - like going flat out on concrete. Then the next second you're sliding through, sliding and sinking slowly to the bottom of the pool. You touch the bottom, you bounce once there gently like an astronaut. And you feel the bottom of the pool against the soles of your feet and that's queer-but not queer, because you're the same person, aren't you? Just in another place that's all, you've still got the same body there. You look around, in that blue time, in that deep place. You look around with the same eyes, at the milky chlorine blue, and you have so much time there. Deep in the water with your same body, but everything's different, everything's better.
”
”
Kirsty Gunn (This Place You Return To Is Home)
“
My period continued, an inevitable cycle, yet every month I was somehow surprised by the violent pain. It was as if I refused to believe my body, something I’d trusted for years, would repeatedly betray me. My stomach ate itself from the inside, a revelry I had been dragged to, a feast I was forced to join though I was not hungry. The meal lasted four to six days, gorging on cramps, the spilled crumbs falling out of me stained with raspberry jam. My stomach was never a clean eater, gnawing on my uterus and fallopian tubes, leaving bite marks. I counted each rotation of the sun with heightening anxiety until it passed and I reset the clock. The knife carved my insides into pot roasts; the fork jabbed my sides into holey cheese. I could distinguish each fork prong—the pain was profound. My guts twisted around the spoon like spaghetti, tangled noodles slathered in scarlet marinara. Menstruation was more smashed acidic tomatoes than sweet fruit compote. I wiped my fingers on white jeans made of napkins and left streaks dried to rust. The stains came out with bleach and detergent. I died and regenerated every month. How else could I define the experience? The reasonable explanation was death. I decided when my body was wheeled into the morgue, the coroner would declare I died of being a woman. Which was far better than dying of being a man.
”
”
Jade Song (Chlorine)
“
Play smarter
You can't beat everyone
Sure
You may outrun someone but they always catch up.
You can outthink but they always catch on.
If they box you out.
You make a new box. You make them play your game.
”
”
Mahogany L. Browne (Chlorine Sky)
“
People come to me and say, ‘My wine stinks. What happened?’” Langstaff can read the stink. Off-flavors—or “defects,” in the professional’s parlance—are clues to what went wrong. An olive oil with a flavor of straw or hay suggests a problem with desiccated olives. A beer with a “hospital” smell is an indication that the brewer may have used chlorinated water, even just to rinse the equipment. The wine flavors “leather” and “horse sweat” are tells for the spoilage yeast Brettanomyces
”
”
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
“
Also, she didn’t see swimming as a social activity. Here she’d given so much thought to her clothes—slim silk pants, peach-colored tunic, Mexican huaraches—and now she was supposed to struggle into a swimsuit in somebody’s cramped cabana and dunk her carefully straightened pageboy in liquid chlorine. More to the point, though, they were having a little crisis at home and she really felt she should be there. Ian, their sixteen-year-old, was insisting that he needed a year off from high school.
”
”
Anne Tyler (Clock Dance)
“
When the Down Days first came swinging, the government hired workers in plastic suits to spray the streets each week. Everyone was told to wash their hands with chlorine, disinfect with bleach. Within six months the shelves at your local shop were filled with new brands, plastic bottle after plastic bottle promising all sorts of miracle properties. Some people took the ads to heart, started cleaning like their salvation depended on it. A few suckers even started drinking diluted bleach, thinking it would cure them from the inside out.
”
”
Ilze Hugo (The Down Days)
“
No chemist who studied only the properties of chlorine, a poison, and sodium, an element that reacts explosively when it meets water, could have possibly guessed the properties that would be exhibited when the two combine as sodium chloride - table salt. [...] This "larger reality" could not have been inferred from a mere study of the nature of its components. Similarly, if the over-arching consciousness constitutes a kind of meta-universe, it too might well be expected to have properties unpredictable from any study of its components.
”
”
Robert Lanza (Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe)
“
Were the world just and Swedish-speaking, Scheele would have enjoyed universal acclaim. Instead credit has tended to lodge with more celebrated chemists, mostly from the English-speaking world. Scheele discovered oxygen in 1772, but for various heartbreakingly complicated reasons could not get his paper published in a timely manner. Instead credit went to Joseph Priestley, who discovered the same element independently, but latterly, in the summer of 1774. Even more remarkable was Scheele’s failure to receive credit for the discovery of chlorine. Nearly all textbooks still attribute chlorine’s discovery to Humphry Davy, who did indeed find it, but thirty-six years after Scheele had.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
More than 100,000 mostly urban Red Army troops were deployed, along with special Cheka detachments. After public executions, hostage taking, and conspicuous deportations of entire villages to concentration camps, by the third week of June 1920 only small numbers of rebel stragglers had survived.317 Tukhachevsky was flushing rebel remnants out of the forests with artillery, machine guns, and chlorine gas “to kill all who hide within.”318 At least 11,000 peasants were killed between May and July; the Reds lost 2,000. Many tens of thousands were deported or interred. “The bandits themselves have come to recognize . . . what Soviet power means,” the camp chief noted of his reeducation program.
”
”
Stephen Kotkin (Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928)
“
We didn’t talk any more about Boris’s love interest, at least not that day, but then a few days later when I came out of math I saw him looming over this girl by the lockers. While Boris wasn’t especially tall for his age, the girl was tiny, despite how much older than us she seemed: flat-chested, scrawny-hipped, with high cheekbones and a shiny forehead and a sharp, shiny, triangle-shaped face. Pierced nose. Black tank top. Chipped black fingernail polish; streaked orange-and-black hair; flat, bright, chlorine-blue eyes, outlined hard, in black pencil. Definitely she was cute – hot, even; but the glance she slid over me was anxiety-provoking, something about her of a bitchy fast-food clerk or maybe a mean babysitter.
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.
”
”
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
“
Mrs. Indianapolis was in town again. She looked like a can of Sprite in her green and yellow outfit. She always likes to come down to the front desk just to chat. It was 4:04 am and thankfully I was awake and at the front desk when she got off the elevator and walked towards me.
“Good morning, Jacob,” she said.
“My name is Jarod,” I replied.
“When did you change your name?”
“I was born Jarod, and I’ll probably die. Maybe.”
“You must be new here. You look like a guy named Jacob that used to work at the front desk.”
“Nope, I’m not new. And there’s no Jacob that’s worked the front desk, nor anybody who looks or looked like me. How can I assist you, Mrs. Indianapolis?”
“I’d like to inform you that the pool is emitting a certain odor.”
“What sort of odor?”
“Bleach.”
“Ah, that’s what we like to call chlorine. It’s the latest craze in the sanitation of public pools. Between you and me, though, I think it’s just a fad.”
“Don’t get sassy with me, young man. I know what chlorine is. I expect a clean pool when I go swimming. But what I don’t expect is enough bleach to get the grass stain out of a shirt the size of Kentucky.”
“That’s not our policy, ma’am. We only use about as much chlorine as it would take to remove a coffee stain the size of Seattle from a light gray shirt the size of Washington.”
“Jerry, I don’t usually give advice to underlings, but I’m feeling charitable tonight. So I’ll tell you that if you want to get ahead in life, you have to know when to talk and when not to talk. And for a guy like you, it’d be a good idea if you decided not to talk all the time. Or even better, not to talk at all.”
“Some people say some people talk too much, and some people, the second some people, say the first some people talk to much and think too little. Who is first and who is second in this case? Well, the customer—that’s you, lady—always comes first.”
“There you go again with the talking. I’d rather talk to a robot than to you.”
“If you’d rather talk to a robot, why don’t you just find your husband? He’s got all the personality and charm of a circuit board. Forgive me, I didn’t mean that.”
“I should hope not!”
“What I meant to say was fried circuit board. It’d be quite absurd to equate your husband’s banter to a functioning circuit board.”
“I’m going to have a talk to your manager about your poor guest service.”
“Go ahead. Tell him that Jerry was rude and see what he says. And by the way, the laundry room is off limits when no lifeguard is on duty.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (Gosh, I probably shouldn't publish this.)
“
Cousin Inga says never trust a person
that can't look me in the eyes
& I want to believe it's that easy.
But what if someone can't look at you
because they heart is broken too?
Or what if someone can't look at you
because they can't face the truth?
Or what if someone can't look at you
because it's hard to stand up for the right thing?
Everybody wants to be a hero, but most of us
are just misunderstood villains.
”
”
Mahogany L. Browne (Chlorine Sky)
“
How many of us are dead because of their potential unleashed? Your calorie masters showed us what happens. People die."
"Everyone dies." The doctor waves a dismissal. "But you die now because you cling to the past. We should all be windups by now. It's easier to build a person impervious to blister rust than to protect an earlier version of the human creature. A generation from now, we could be well-suited for our new environment. Your children could be the beneficiaries. Yet you people refuse to adapt. You cling to some idea of a humanity that evolved in concert with your environment over millennia, and which you now, perversely, refuse to remain in lockstep with.
"Blister rust is our environment. Cibiscosis. Genehack weevil. Cheshires. They have adapted. Quibble as you like about whether they evolved naturally or not. Our environment has changed. If we wish to remain at the top of our food chain, we will evolve. Or we will refuse, and go the way of the dinosaurs and Felis domesticus. Evolve or die. It has always been nature's guiding principle, and yet you white shirts seek to stand in the way of inevitable change." He leans forward. "I want to shake you sometimes. If you would just let me, I could be your god and shape you to the Eden that beckons us."
"I'm Buddhist."
"And we all know windups have no souls." Gibbons grins. "No rebirth for them. They will have to find their own gods to protect them. Their own gods to pray for their dead." His grin widens. "Perhaps I will be that one, and your windup children will pray to me for salvation." His eyes twinkle. "I would like a few more worshippers, I must admit. Jaidee was like you. Always such a doubter. Not as bad as Grahamites, but still, not particularly satisfactory for a god."
Kanya makes a face. "When you die, we will burn you to ash and bury you in chlorine and lye and no one will remember you."
The doctor shrugs, unconcerned. "All gods must suffer.
”
”
Paolo Bacigalupi (The Windup Girl)
“
In one department of his [Joseph Black's] lecture he exceeded any I have ever known, the neatness and unvarying success with which all the manipulations of his experiments were performed. His correct eye and steady hand contributed to the one; his admirable precautions, foreseeing and providing for every emergency, secured the other. I have seen him pour boiling water or boiling acid from a vessel that had no spout into a tube, holding it at such a distance as made the stream's diameter small, and so vertical that not a drop was spilt. While he poured he would mention this adaptation of the height to the diameter as a necessary condition of success. I have seen him mix two substances in a receiver into which a gas, as chlorine, had been introduced, the effect of the combustion being perhaps to produce a compound inflammable in its nascent state, and the mixture being effected by drawing some string or wire working through the receiver's sides in an air-tight socket. The long table on which the different processes had been carried on was as clean at the end of the lecture as it had been before the apparatus was planted upon it. Not a drop of liquid, not a grain of dust remained.
”
”
Henry Peter Brougham (Lives of men of letters and science who flourished in the time of George III. Volume 2 of 2)
“
It can’t be over, not when I finally found my courage. I can’t let it be. My heart is pounding like a million trillion beats a minute as I scoot closer to him. I bend my head down and press my lips against his, and I feel his jolt of surprise. And then he’s kissing me back, open-mouthed, soft-lipped kissing-me-back, and at first I’m nervous, but then he puts his hand on the back of my head, and he strokes my hair in a reassuring way, and I’m not so nervous anymore. It’s a good thing I’m sitting down on this ledge, because I am weak in the knees.
He pulls me into the water so I’m sitting in the hot tub too, and my nightgown is soaked now but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything. I never knew kissing could be this good.
My arms are at my sides so the jets won’t make my skirt fly up. Peter’s holding my face in his hands, kissing me. “Are you okay?” he whispers. His voice is different: it’s ragged and urgent and vulnerable somehow. He doesn’t sound like the Peter I know; he is not smooth or bored or amused. The way he’s looking at me right now, I know he would do anything I asked, and that’s a strange and powerful feeling.
I wind my arms around his neck. I like the smell of chlorine on his skin. He smells like pool, and summer, and vacations. It’s not like in the movies. It’s better, because it’s real.
“Touch my hair again,” I tell him, and the corners of his mouth turn up.
I lean into him and kiss him. He starts to run his fingers through my hair, and it feels so nice I can’t think straight. It’s better than getting my hair washed at the salon. I move my hands down his back and along his spine, and he shivers and pulls me closer. A boy’s back feels so different than a girl’s back--more muscular, more solid somehow.
In between kisses he says, “It’s past curfew. We should go back inside.”
“I don’t want to,” I say. All I want is to stay and be here, with Peter, in this moment.
“Me either, but I don’t want you to get in trouble,” Peter says. He looks worried, which is so sweet.
Softly, I touch his cheek with the back of my hand. It’s smooth. I could look at his fce for hours, it’s so beautiful.
Then I stand up, and immediately I’m shivering. I start wringing the water out of my nightgown, and Peter jumps out of the hot tub and gets his towel, which he wraps around my shoulders. The he gives me his hand and I step out, teeth chattering. He starts drying me off with the towel, my arms and legs. I sit down to put on my socks and boots. He puts my coat on me last. He zips me right in.
Then we run back inside the lodge. Before he goes to the boys’ side and I go to the girls’ side, I kiss him one more time and I feel like I’m flying.
”
”
Jenny Han (To All the Boys I've Loved Before (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #1))
“
All matter is made of atoms. There are more than 100 types of atoms, corresponding to the same number of elements. Examples of elements are iron, oxygen, calcium, chlorine, carbon, sodium and hydrogen. Most matter consists not of pure elements but of compounds: two or more atoms of various elements bonded together, as in calcium carbonate, sodium chloride, carbon monoxide. The binding of atoms into compounds is mediated by electrons, which are tiny particles orbiting (a metaphor to help us understand their real behaviour, which is much stranger) the central nucleus of each atom. A nucleus is huge compared to an electron but tiny compared to an electron’s orbit. Your hand, consisting mostly of empty space, meets hard resistance when it strikes a block of iron, also consisting mostly of empty space, because forces associated with the atoms in the two solids interact in such a way as to prevent them passing through each other. Consequently iron and stone seem solid to us because our brains most usefully serve us by constructing an illusion of solidity. It has long been understood that a compound can be separated into its component parts, and recombined to make the same or a different compound with the emission or consumption of energy. Such easy-come easy-go interactions between atoms constitute chemistry. But, until the
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution)
“
I have to ask you something.” Stumbling over words, I described my encounter with Edward. “I have to meet him at the railroad trestle next week. I’m supposed to do something when I get there, but he didn’t say what…” My voice trailed away. The expression on Andrew’s face told me he knew exactly what I was talking about.
“Drat,” he muttered. “That low-down skunk. I was hoping he’d forgotten.”
Andrew hesitated. Without looking at me, he picked up a piece of chalk and started drawing a little train on the floor. Concentrating on his sketch, he said, “Before I got sick, Edward dared me to jump off the trestle.”
My heart beat faster. “Is that what I’m supposed to do? Jump off?”
“Now, now, don’t get all het up, Drew. It’s not as bad as you think.” Carefully, Andrew added a curlicue of smoke to his drawing. “You walk out on the trestle and jump in the river. Then you swim to shore. It’s a simple as one two three.” He tapped the chalk three times for emphasis.
My mouth was so dry I could hardly speak. Lying down between the rails or dynamiting the train might be better than this. “How high is the trestle?”
Instead of answering my question, Andrew said, “It’s a test of manhood. Lots of boys have done it.”
I wasn’t interested in testing my manhood or hearing about other boys. I just wanted to know what was going to happen to me. Me--a boy who was scared to jump off a diving board into eight feet of crystal-clear chlorinated water.
”
”
Mary Downing Hahn (Time for Andrew: A Ghost Story)
“
With a sigh of resignation, I dial Ryder’s number.
Exactly seven minutes later, he knocks on the door. Ryder to the rescue. I resist the urge to look around for his white horse.
“Okay, where is he?” he asks with a frown. His hair is wet, his T-shirt clinging damply to his skin. I’d either caught him in the shower or in the pool. Probably the pool, since he smells vaguely of chlorine.
I hook a thumb toward the living room. “In there. Passed out on the couch.”
He looks at me sharply. “You haven’t been drinking, have you?”
He’s lucky I don’t slap him. “I was sitting upstairs in my room, minding my own business, when he showed up at the door. What do you think? Asshat,” I add under my breath.
His brow furrows. “What was that?”
“Nothing. C’mon. Get him out of there before he makes a mess.”
“What about his car?”
I shrug. “I’ll drive it school tomorrow and get a ride home from Lucy or something.”
“I’ll drive you home,” he offers. Correction: he asserts--arrogantly, as if he’s used to giving orders. “We need to go get those tarps and sandbags anyway.”
“How did you…?” I trail off as the answer dawns on me. “My dad e-mailed you, didn’t he?”
“Called me, actually. We’ll go after school tomorrow. After practice,” he amends.
“Yeah. Fine, whatever.” Truthfully, I wasn’t looking forward to lugging sandbags by myself. I wasn’t even sure how I was going to fit them in my little Fiat. Problem solved.
Now to solve my other problem--the one lying on my couch.
”
”
Kristi Cook (Magnolia (Magnolia Branch, #1))
“
Few grown humans can normally survive a fall of much more than twenty-five or thirty feet, though there have been some notable exceptions—none more memorable perhaps than that of a British airman in World War II named Nicholas Alkemade. In the late winter of 1944, while on a bombing run over Germany, Flight Sergeant Alkemade, the tail gunner on a British Lancaster bomber, found himself in a literally tight spot when his plane was hit by enemy flak and quickly filled with smoke and flames. Tail gunners on Lancasters couldn’t wear parachutes because the space in which they operated was too confined, and by the time Alkemade managed to haul himself out of his turret and reach for his parachute, he found it was on fire and beyond salvation. He decided to leap from the plane anyway rather than perish horribly in flames, so he hauled open a hatch and tumbled out into the night. He was three miles above the ground and falling at 120 miles per hour. “It was very quiet,” Alkemade recalled years later, “the only sound being the drumming of aircraft engines in the distance, and no sensation of falling at all. I felt suspended in space.” Rather to his surprise, he found himself to be strangely composed and at peace. He was sorry to die, of course, but accepted it philosophically, as something that happened to airmen sometimes. The experience was so surreal and dreamy that Alkemade was never certain afterward whether he lost consciousness, but he was certainly jerked back to reality when he crashed through the branches of some lofty pine trees and landed with a resounding thud in a snowbank, in a sitting position. He had somehow lost both his boots, and had a sore knee and some minor abrasions, but otherwise was quite unharmed. Alkemade’s survival adventures did not quite end there. After the war, he took a job in a chemical plant in Loughborough, in the English Midlands. While he was working with chlorine gas, his gas mask came loose, and he was instantly exposed to dangerously high levels of the gas. He lay unconscious for fifteen minutes before co-workers noticed his unconscious form and dragged him to safety. Miraculously, he survived. Some time after that, he was adjusting a pipe when it ruptured and sprayed him from head to foot with sulfuric acid. He suffered extensive burns but again survived. Shortly after he returned to work from that setback, a nine-foot-long metal pole fell on him from a height and very nearly killed him, but once again he recovered. This time, however, he decided to tempt fate no longer. He took a safer job as a furniture salesman and lived out the rest of his life without incident. He died peacefully, in bed, aged sixty-four in 1987. —
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
Sean was watching me, though. And Sean wiped the bryozoa residue from his hand across my stomach. This was the third time a boy had ever touched my bare tummy, and I’d had enough.
Through gritted teeth, like any extra movement might spread the bryozoa further across my skin, I told him, “I like you less than I did.” I bailed over the side of the boat-the side opposite where the bryozoa returned to its native habitat. Deep in the warm water, I scrubbed at my tummy with both hands. A combination of bryozoa waste and Sean germs: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Leaning toward worst, because now I had slime on my hands. Or maybe this was psychosomatic. Holding my hands open in front of me in the water, I didn’t see any slime. I rubbed my hands together anyway.
Something dove into the water beside me in a rush of bubbles. I came up for air. Sean surfaced, too, tossing sparkling drops of water from his hair. “You still like me a lot, though, right?”
“No prob. Green is the new black.” Giving up on getting clean, I swam a few strokes back toward the platform to get out again. What I needed was a shower with chlorinated water and disinfectant soap. I might need to bubble out my belly button with hydrogen peroxide.
“What if I made it up to you?” He splashed close behind me. “What if I helped you get clean? We don’t want you dirty.” He moved both hands around me under the water, up and down across my tummy.
It was the fourth time a boy had touched my tummy! And it was very awkward. He bobbed so close behind me that I had a hard time treading water without kicking him. I needed to choose between flirting and breathing.
Cameron and my brother leaned over the side of the boat and gaped at us, which didn’t help matters. I’d been afraid of this. Flirting with Sean was no fun if the other boys acted like we were lepers. Well, okay, it was fun, but not as fun as it was supposed to be.
Obviously I would need to give McGullicuddy the little dolphin talk. I wasn’t sure I could do this with Cameron-Cameron and I didn’t have heart-to-heart convos-but I might need to make an exception, if he continued to watch us like we were a dirty movie on Pay-Per-View (which I’d also seen a lot of. Life with boys).
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-
Sean and I started and turned toward the boat. Still behind the steering wheel, Adam had his chin in his hand and his elbow on the horn.
-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Damn it! I turned around to face Sean and gave him a wry smile, but he’d already taken his hands away from my tummy. The horn really ruined the mood.
-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Sean hauled himself up onto the platform. I followed close behind him, and (glee!) he put out a hand to help me. Cameron and my brother yelled at Adam.
-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. “Oh!” Adam said as if he’d had no idea he’d been laying on the horn. He looked at his elbow like it belonged to someone else.
I was in the boat with Sean now, and he was still holding my hand. Or, maybe I was still clinging to his hand, but this is a question of semantics. In any case, I pulled him by the hand past the other boys to the bow. We didn’t have privacy. There was no privacy on a wakeboarding boat. At least we had the boat’s windshield between us and the others.
As I turned to sit down on the bench, I stuck out my tongue at Adam behind the windshield. He crossed his eyes at me.
”
”
Jennifer Echols (Endless Summer (The Boys Next Door, #1-2))
“
Chickens are soaked in baths of chlorine to remove slime and odor. Mixtures of excrement, blood, oil, grease, rust, paint, insecticides, and rodent droppings accumulate in processing plants. Maggots and other larvae breed in storage and transportation containers, on the floor, and in processing equipment and packaging, and they drop onto the conveyor belt from infested meat splattered on the ceiling.
”
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Steve Striffler (Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food)
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Maybe you can change the proportions, but a hospital still smells the same. Blood—oxygenated by contact with the air—is the first thing the body’s warning system perceives. A smell of old iron, a smell you can almost taste. Thick and repugnant.
The smell of danger.
In a biological animal reaction that has allowed the human race to survive, the oldest parts of our brain, the limbic system and the hypothalamus, associate the smell of blood with an emergency. Either we’re wounded, or we’ve wounded the prey we came to hunt. The message says to hide or attack. To treat the wound, or kill.
That’s why a hospital puts us on alert, because it smells like blood. Or so we think. In truth, the hospital smell is a mix of blood, alcohol, disinfectant, and chlorine, alongside the ketones given off by certain sick bodies—very volatile and thus very expansive—and gases like oxygen and nitrogen, and of course the medications used to treat the patients. However you alter the proportions in that mix, strangely enough, all hospitals smell the same.
Of blood, fear, anxiety, and despair".
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Carme Chaparro (author)
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If the wall of an artery gets injured—a common occurrence when arteries are stretched because of stress and high blood pressure, or scratched by toxic and irritating molecules such as nicotine, trans fats, chlorine, additives, and oxidants—your body patches up fissures with cholesterol plaque, a kind of plaster, in an attempt to prevent the artery from further damage and bleeding. The cholesterol plaque also buys time for the cells in the arterial wall to divide and repair the injured area, covering it with new cells under the plaque. Eventually, once the irritating conditions subside, as happens in nature, the cholesterol plaque will be reabsorbed and the artery will look like new again. This is similar to what happens to an injury in your skin under a scab. New cells are growing and covering the area, so when the scab falls, your skin is as intact as it was before the injury.
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Alejandro Junger (Clean Gut: The Breakthrough Plan for Eliminating the Root Cause of Disease and Revolutionizing Your Health)
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proctors would nod their heads and mark the sheets as it fed out the results. Everyone wanted to know the truth, yet they asked the wrong questions over and over. “Are you okay?” “Do you need a break?” “What can I do?” No one would want to hear the real answers. My hand closed around the organic chemistry note cards in my pocket. How do hydrogen and chlorine react in the presence
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K.L. Randis (Spilled Milk)