Comb Back Quotes

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Let me tell you what you feel like when you know you are ready to die. You sleep a lot, and when you wake up the very first thought in your head is that you wish you could go back to bed. You go entire days without eating, because food is a commodity that keeps you here. You read the same page a hundred times. You rewind your life like a videocassette and see the things that make you weep, things that make you pause, but nothing that makes you want to play it forward. You forget to comb your hair, to shower, to dress. And then one day, when you make the decision that you have enough energy left in you to do this one, last, monumental thing, there comes a peace. Suddenly you are counting moments as you haven’t for months. Suddenly you have a secret that makes you smile, that makes people say you look wonderful, although you feel like a shell-brittle and capable of cracking into a thousand pieces.

You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves. After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. That’s what I believe. The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens. These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.

I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Her hands comb through the back of my hair gently. “When did you know?” I smile. “The first time you let me come inside you without a rubber.

He stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, the picture of nonchalance, and even as a human, he was too gorgeous for words. His dark hair had been combed back, falling softly around his face, and his mercury eyes, though they should've seemed pale against all the white, glimmered more brightly than anything. And they were fixed solely on me.

She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was all there. She took careful stock of herself, then combed her hair and tied it back up again.

There was Kir, red hair combed back and That Expression on his sharp face. Even his freckles looked serious. I'd given up wondering how a freckle-faced teenager could look so much like a disapproving granny.

Connor combs my hair back and leans close to whisper, “So long as I may be living, I live with you.

I wanted you, nameless Woman of the South, No wraith, but utterly—as still more alone The Southern Cross takes night And lifts her girdles from her, one by one— High, cool, wide from the slowly smoldering fire Of lower heavens,— vaporous scars! Eve! Magdalene! or Mary, you? Whatever call—falls vainly on the wave. O simian Venus, homeless Eve, Unwedded, stumbling gardenless to grieve Windswept guitars on lonely decks forever; Finally to answer all within one grave! And this long wake of phosphor, iridescent Furrow of all our travel—trailed derision! Eyes crumble at its kiss. Its long-drawn spell Incites a yell. Slid on that backward vision The mind is churned to spittle, whispering hell. I wanted you . . . The embers of the Cross Climbed by aslant and huddling aromatically. It is blood to remember; it is fire To stammer back . . . It is God—your namelessness. And the wash— All night the water combed you with black Insolence. You crept out simmering, accomplished. Water rattled that stinging coil, your Rehearsed hair—docile, alas, from many arms. Yes, Eve—wraith of my unloved seed! The Cross, a phantom, buckled—dropped below the dawn. Light drowned the lithic trillions of your spawn.

Beside Ruby, the Darkling lay in his black kefta. Who had tended him? I wondered, feeling an ache rise in my throat. Who had combed his dark hair back so neatly from his forehead? Who had folded his graceful hands on his chest?

The slightly porky man on the other side of the Plexiglas has back-combed hair and arms covered in tattoos. As if it isn't enough to look like someone has slapped a pack of margarine over his head, he has to cover himself in doodles as well. There's not even a proper motif, as far as Ove can see, just a lot of patterns. Is that something an adult person in a healthy state of mind would consent to? Going about with his arms looking like a pair of pajamas?

You ever feel like home is the one place you can’t go back to? It’s like you promise yourself when you got out of bed and combed your hair that this evening, when I get back I’ll be a different woman in a new place. And now you can’t go back because the house expects something from you.

No I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be Am an attendant lord one that will do To swell a progress start a scene or two Advise the prince no doubt an easy tool Deferential glad to be of use Politic cautious and meticulous Full of high sentence but a bit obtuse At times indeed almost ridiculous— Almost at times the Fool. I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind Do I dare to eat a peach I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us and we drown.

We couldn't bear to be apart. So if Kizuki had lived, I'm sure we would have been together, loving each other, and gradually growing unhappy." Unhappy? Why's that?" With her fingers, Naoko combed her hair back several times. She had taken her barrette off, which made the hair fall over her face when she dropped her head forward. Because we would have had to pay the world back what we owed it," she said, raising her eyes to mine. "The pain of growing up. We didn't pay when we should have, so now the bills are due. Which is why Kizuki did what he did, and why I'm here. We were like kids who grew up naked on a desert island. If we got hungry, we'd just pick a banana; if we got lonely, we'd go to sleep in each other's arms. But that kind of thing doesn't last forever. We grew up fast and had to enter society. Which is why you were so important to us. You were the link connecting us with the outside world. We were struggling through you to fit in with the outside world as best we could. In the end, it didn't work, of course." I nodded. I wouldn't want you to think that we were using you, though. Kizuki really loved you. It just so happened that our connection with you was our first connection with anyone else. And it still is. Kizuki may be dead, but you are still my only link with the outside world. And just as Kizuki loved you, I love you. We never meant to hurt you, but we probably did; we probably ended up making a deep wound in your heart. It never occurred to us that anything like that might happen.

The year is done. I spread the past three hundred sixty-five days before me on the living room carpet. Here is the month I decided to shed everything not deeply committed to my dreams. The day I refused to be a victim to the self-pity. Here is the week I slept in the garden. The spring I wrung the self-doubt by its neck. Hung your kindness up. Took down the calendar. The week I danced so hard my heart learned to float above water again. The summer I unscrewed all the mirrors from their walls. No longer needed to see myself to feel seen. Combed the weight out of my hair. I fold the good days up and place them in my back pocket for safekeeping. Draw the match. Cremate the unnecessary. The light of the fire warms my toes. I pour myself a glass of warm water to cleanse myself for january. Here I go. Stronger and wiser into the new.

I think about cutting my hair. How nice it would be to wash it, run a quick comb through it, and presto! all set, ready to rock and roll. I sigh. Henry loves my hair almost as though it were a creature unto itself, as though it has a soul to call its own, as though it could love him back. I know he loves it as a part of me, but I also know he would be deeply upset if I cut it off. And I would miss it, too… it's just so much effort, sometimes I want to take it off like a wig and set it aside while I go out and play.

You run away for freedom. You run away because you can’t be trapped by the people who love you but don’t understand you. You run away because you want to be missed, you want them to start a worried search party combing far and wide for any scrap of evidence that you’re going to be back, safe and sound. Running away is a way to play a dirty trick on the perfect fate that will suffocate you if you’re not careful.

just got back from a beautiful eve of winter solstice snowshoeing. my heart was lost and enlivened by both the hush of the mountainous snow world and a very fun irreverence with friends. i shared a solstice quote but did not share this one. so in the spirit of the year--happy solistice! may there be ever present and growing light in your life as nature unfolds the same in the upcoming months. "sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive leap off the rim of earth across the dome. it is a night to make the heavens our home. more than the nest whereto apace we strive. lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive, in swarms outrushing from the golden comb. they waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam: you throb in me, the dead revive. yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath, life glistens on the river of death. it folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt, or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs of radiance, the radiance enrings: and this is the soul's haven to have felt." --from _winter heavens_

Ms. Wrack's mother, Mrs. Wrack, had been a mermaid: a proper one who lived on a rock and combed her hair and sang. But sailors had never been lured to their doom by her, partly because she looked like the back of a bus and partly because modern ships are so high out of the water that they never even saw her

She could not avoid a profound feeling of rancor toward her husband for having left her alone in the middle of the ocean. Everything of his made her cry: his pajamas under the pillow, his slippers that had always looked to her like an invalid’s, the memory of his image in the back of the mirror as he undressed while she combed her hair before bed, the odor of his skin, which was to linger on hers for a long time after his death. She would stop in the middle of whatever she was doing and slap herself on the forehead because she suddenly remembered something she had forgotten to tell him. At every moment countless ordinary questions would come to mind that he alone could answer for her. Once he had told her something that she could not imagine: that amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches, in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.

I first tasted under Apollo’s lips, love and love sweetness, I, Evadne; my hair is made of crisp violets or hyacinth which the wind combs back across some rock shelf; I, Evadne, was made of the god of light. His hair was crisp to my mouth, as the flower of the crocus, across my cheek, cool as the silver-cress on Erotos bank; between my chin and throat, his mouth slipped over and over. Still between my arm and shoulder, I feel the brush of his hair, and my hands keep the gold they took, as they wandered over and over, that great arm-full of yellow flowers.

I touched her comb and took it out; her hair came flooding down like a wave, and her long black tresses quivered as they fell to her hips. I immediately ran my hand over it, and in it, and beneath it; I plunged my arm into it, and bathed my face in it, filled with sadness. Sometimes I would enjoy separating it into two, from behind, and then bringing it over her shoulder so as to hide her breasts; then I would bring all her hair together in a mesh, and pull it so that her head came back and her neck was thrown forward; she let me do what I wanted, like a dead woman.

Beehive" Within this black hive to-night There swarm a million bees; Bees passing in and out the moon, Bees escaping out the moon, Bees returning through the moon, Silver bees intently buzzing, Silver honey dripping from the swarm of bees. Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb, And I, a drone, Lying on my back, Lipping honey, Getting drunk with silver honey, Wish that I might fly out past the moon And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower.

When animals make a stupid mistake, you laugh at them. A cat misjudges a leap. A dog looks overly quizzical about a simple object. These are funny things. But when a person doesn’t understand something, if they miscalculate and hit the brakes too late, blame is assigned. They are stupid. They are wrong. Teachers and cops are there to sort it out, with a trail of paperwork to illustrate the stupidity. The faults. The evidence and incidents of these things. We have entire systems in place to help decide who is what. Sometimes the systems don’t work. Families spend their weekend afternoons at animal shelters, even when they’re not looking for a pet. They come to see the unwanted and unloved. The cats and dogs who don’t understand why they are these things. They are petted and combed, walked and fed, cooed over and kissed. Then they go back in their cages and sometimes tears are shed. Fuzzy faces peering through bars can be unbearable for many. Change the face to a human one and the reaction changes. The reason why is because people should know better. But our logic is skewed in this respect. A dog that bites is a dead dog. First day at the shelter and I already saw one put to sleep, which in itself is a misleading phrase. Sleep implies that you have the option of waking up. Once their bodies pass unconsciousness to something deeper where systems start to fail, they revolt a little bit, put up a fight on a molecular level. They kick. They cry. They don’t want to go. And this happens because their jaws closed over a human hand, ever so briefly. Maybe even just the once. But people, they get chances. They get the benefit of the doubt. Even though they have the higher logic functioning and they knew when they did it THEY KNEW it was a bad thing.

I slammed the water off hard enough to make it clack, got out of the shower, dried, and started getting dressed in a fresh set of secondhand clothes. “Why do you wear those?” asked Lacuna. I jumped, stumbled, and shouted half of a word to a spell, but since I was only halfway done putting on my underwear, I mostly just fell on my naked ass. “Gah!” I said. “Don’t do that!” My miniature captive came to the edge of the dresser and peered down at me. “Don’t ask questions?” “Don’t come in here all quiet and spooky and scare me like that!” “You’re six times my height, and fifty times my weight,” Lacuna said gravely. “And I’ve agreed to be your captive. You don’t have any reason to be afraid.” “Not afraid,” I snapped back. “Startled. It isn’t wise to startle a wizard!” “Why not?” “Because of what could happen!” “Because they might fall down on the floor?” “No!” I snarled. Lacuna frowned and said, “You aren’t very good at answering questions.” I started shoving myself into my clothes. “I’m starting to agree with you.” “So why do you wear those?” I blinked. “Clothes?” “Yes. You don’t need them unless it’s cold or raining.” “You’re wearing clothes.” “I am wearing armor. For when it is raining arrows. Your T-shirt will not stop arrows.” “No, it won’t.” I sighed. Lacuna peered at my shirt. “Aer-O-Smith. Arrowsmith. Does the shirt belong to your weapon dealer?” “No.” “Then why do you wear the shirt of someone else’s weapon dealer?” That was frustrating in so many ways that I could avoid a stroke only by refusing to engage. “Lacuna,” I said, “humans wear clothes. It’s one of the things we do. And as long as you are in my service, I expect you to do it as well.” “Why?” “Because if you don’t, I  .  .  . I  .  .  . might pull your arms out of your sockets.” At that, she frowned. “Why?” “Because I have to maintain discipline, don’t I?” “True,” she said gravely. “But I have no clothes.” I counted to ten mentally. “I’ll  .  .  . find something for you. Until then, no desocketing. Just wear the armor. Fair enough?” Lacuna bowed slightly at the waist. “I understand, my lord.” “Good.” I sighed. I flicked a comb through my wet hair, for all the good it would do, and said, “How do I look?” “Mostly human,” she said. “That’s what I was going for.” “You have a visitor, my lord.” I frowned. “What?” “That is why I came in here. You have a visitor waiting for you.” I stood up, exasperated. “Why didn’t you say so?” Lacuna looked confused. “I did. Just now. You were there.” She frowned thoughtfully. “Perhaps you have brain damage.” “It would not shock me in the least,” I said. “Would you like me to cut open your skull and check, my lord?” she asked. Someone that short should not be that disturbing. “I  .  .  . No. No, but thank you for the offer.” “It is my duty to serve,” Lacuna intoned. My life, Hell’s bells.

I was born by the sea," I said. "I'd go to the beach the morning after a typhoon and find all sorts of things that the waves had tossed up. There'd be bottles and wooden geta and hats and cases for glasses, tables and chairs, things from nowhere near the water. I liked combing through the stuff, so I was always waiting for the next typhoon. I put out my cigarette. The strange thing is, everything washed up from the sea was purified. Useless junk, but absolutely clean. There wasn't a dirty thing. The sea is special in that way. When I look back over my life so far, I see all that junk on the beach. It's how my life has always been. Gathering up the junk, sorting through it, and then casting it off somewhere else. All for no purpose, leaving it to wash away again. This was in your hometown? This is all my life. I merely go from one beach to another. Sure I remember the things that happen in between, but that's all. I never tie them together. They're so many things, clean but useless.

Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub.” Sethe put her hand on his knee and rubbed. Paul D had only begun, what he was telling her was only the beginning when her fingers on his knee, soft and reassuring, stopped him. Just as well. Just as well. Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb beating in him.

Rip. “Son of a motherfuck!” I screech. After that, she plucks my eyebrows, moisturizes my face, and then spends a long time combing the tangles from my hair, looking unbothered by the verbal abuse I hurl at her along the way.  “How much do men pay for this?” I sneer, head snapping back forth with each pass of the comb. “Am I getting the sadistic whore premium?

Ian stared until she disappeared inside the elevator. Then he glanced back at me. "Don't fret, poppet. I'll get her." "We need to do this discreetly. If I wanted to make a colossal scene, I'd just drag her off kicking and screaming now," I said, not adding, "dumb ass" only because he was family. "She'll come without a fuss," Ian said with confidence. "You can't green-eye her in the elevator, it'll have video surveillance. So will the garage," I retorted. "I don't need these," Ian said, flashing emerald in his turquoise gaze for a split second, "when I have this." With a casual swipe of his hand, he ripped his shirt open, causing buttons to fly everywhere. Another swipe took his sleep mask all the way off. Finally, he finger-combed his shoulder-lenght hair and smiled at his reflection in the rearview mirror. "I am after all, irresistible.

I know that one day, I will look to my son—who was my baby five minutes ago, yes, he was—to carry me up the stairs, to drive me to doctor’s appointments, to help me when I spill something or can’t operate the sleeves of a sweater. He is already taller than me. He will be a man before I can blink. I feel this ahead of me on the timeline and I need to get in the time machine and go back. Please, I say to the universe. I can accept all this if you just let me go back sometimes. Let me nudge the edge of a sippy cup between his lips. Let me comb his matted little fluff of hair. Let me hold his wriggling torso between my knees and button his overalls at his shoulder before he bolts away. If I could just go back and forth. If it weren’t all or nothing.

So I got my stuff and the girl at the register puts these other things in my bag, too. Little free samples: gum and a comb and a marker pen. So I says to her, 'Look, girlie, I got false teeth and I wear a wig.' So she fishes back in my bag and takes out the comb and the gum. Left the pen in there. Anyways, I went back to the van, even though I knew it was locked. Figured I'd just wait and have a smoke. You can't smoke in the van, see? So while I'm waiting there, minding my own business, this car pulls into the handicapped space right next to us--brand-new car, white and clean, and it's got this bumper sticker on it that says, 'Life Is a Shit Sandwich.' Isn't that stupid? So this guy gets out--good-lookin' fella, in his twenties. I say to him, 'Hey, handsome, tell me something.' He takes a look at my walker and gets all panicky. 'I'm just running in for two seconds,' he says. See, he thinks I'm going to yell at him for parking in a handicapped space, but I ain't. I don't give a rat's ass about that, you see. I'd rather walk the extra ten feet than be called handicapped. Where was I?' She amazed me. 'Life's a shit sandwich,' I said. 'Oh, yeah. Right. So that guy goes runnin' into the store and here's what I did. I fished that free pen out of the bag and marched right over there to that bumper of his. Got myself right down on the ground--and I wrote--just after the 'Life's a shit sandwich' part--I wrote, 'But only if you're a shithead.' 'Course, then I couldn't get myself back up again--had to yell over to a couple of kids at the phone booth to come pick me back up.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. T.S. Eliot The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock

Connor combs my hair back and leans close to whisper, “So long as I may be living, I live with you.” I reply what I replied nearly three years ago, “In spirit and in mind, I live with you.” He brushes my tears with his thumb, one kiss away from my lips, he breathes, “I live with you.

You ever feel like home is the one place you can't go back to? It's like you promise yourself when you got out of bed and combed your hair that this evening, when I get back I'll be a different woman in a new place. And now you can't go back because the house expects something from you.

Amiriska continued to gently comb her brother’s hair back from his face as she met Seth’s gaze. A muscle twitched in her cheek. “I want to kill the bastards who did this.” “We already did,” Seth said. “Then bring them back so I can kill them again.” “Would that I could,” he muttered.

You’re still young and healthy. Maybe that’s why you don’t understand what I am saying. Let me give you an example. Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations. Your physical strength, your hopes, your dreams, your ideals, your convictions, all meaning, or, then again, the people you love: one by one, they fade away. Some announce their departure before they leave, while others just disappear all of a sudden without warning one day. And once you lose them you can never get them back. Your search for replacements never goes well. It’s all very painful—as painful as actually being cut with a knife. You will be turning thirty soon, Mr. Kawana, which means that, from now on, you will gradually enter that twilight portion of life—you will be getting older. You are probably beginning to grasp that painful sense that you are losing something, are you not?

West took a step back, dropped the combs to the floor, and reached out to grasp a handful of shining red hair. He brought a few of the ruddy locks to his face, stroking them over his cheeks and mouth, and kissed them. His face was grave, almost severe, as he stared at her with absolute concentration. "How can you be so beautiful?

Before she knew it the afternoon was done, and the trainees were taking their new mounts to the stables for grooming. Daine, Onua, Buri, and Sarge helped then too, though Daine couldn't see how she could ever be comfortable telling a twenty-year-old man he was missing spots on the pony he was grooming. She did try it: "Excuse me, trainee what did you say your name was?" Blue gray eyes twinkled at her over his cream-colored mare's back. "I didn't. It's Farant. " His blond hair curled thickly over his head, almost matching the pony's in color. "Thank you. Trainee Farant, you're missing spots. " "Not at all, sweetheart. I'm just combing too fast for you to see. " "Trainee Farant, you're missing spots!" Sarge boomed just behind Daine. She thought later she actually might have levitated at that moment certainly Farant had. Next time the assistant horsemistress tells you something, don't flirt correct it!" He moved on, and Daine pressed her hands against her burning cheeks. Farant leaned on his mare and sighed. "Yes, Assistant Horsemistress. Right away. " He winked at her and went back to work. Daine went to Sarge as the trainees were finishing up. "Sarge, I-" He shook his head. Daine thought if he leaned against the stable wall any harder, it would collapse. How did a human, without bear blood in him, get to be so large? "Not your fault. These city boys see you, you're young, sweet-lookin'",he winked at her,"they're gonna try to take advantage. If they can't keep their minds on the job after I've had them two weeks already in my patty-paws, then I ain't been doing my job right. " His grin was wolfish. "But that can be fixed. " Seeing her open mouthed stare, he asked, "Something the matter, my lamb?" She closed her jaw. "No, sir. I just never met nobody like you. " "And if you're lucky, you won't again, " muttered Buri, passing by.

I am now the mother of a four-year-old daughter. Memories of my own childhood flash for a second as I’m combing my daughter’s hair or when I bathe her at night. What’s odder is that memories don’t come when I expect them summoned. Because my parents never read to me, I first felt a deficit of weight instead of being flooded with nostalgic memories when I began reading to my daughter at bedtime. There should be a word for this neurological sensation, this uncanny weightlessness, where a universally beloved ritual tricks your synapses to fire back to the past, but finding no reserve of memories, your mind gropes dumbly, like the feelers of a mollusk groping the empty ocean floor.

Once his hair was smooth and free of mats, Martise ran the comb through it for sheer pleasure. He had beautiful hair, straight and black and falling to his waist. It spread across a strong back and wide shoulders, dampening his shirt to a transparent thinness. She slid her hand under its weight and caressed his nape with light strokes of the comb. His shoulders slumped, and he lowered his head in mute invitation for her to continue. He breathed deep, relaxing under her touch. Martise was anything but relaxed. She was on fire, recalling those moments in the library when he’d given her a taste of the passion burning within him. He was her dreams manifested, a bright and volatile star in a winter sky.

The Red Keep was full of cats: lazy old cats dozing in the sun, cold-eyed mousers twitching their tails, quick little kittens with claws like needles, ladies’ cats all combed and trusting, ragged shadows prowling the midden heaps. One by one Arya had chased them down and snatched them up and brought them proudly to Syrio Forel … all but this one, this one-eared black devil of a tomcat. “That’s the real king of this castle right there,” one of the gold cloaks had told her. “Older than sin and twice as mean. One time, the king was feasting the queen’s father, and that black bastard hopped up on the table and snatched a roast quail right out of Lord Tywin’s fingers. Robert laughed so hard he like to burst. You stay away from that one, child.” He had run her halfway across the castle; twice around the Tower of the Hand, across the inner bailey, through the stables, down the serpentine steps, past the small kitchen and the pig yard and the barracks of the gold cloaks, along the base of the river wall and up more steps and back and forth over Traitor’s Walk, and then down again and through a gate and around a well and in and out of strange buildings until Arya didn’t know where she was. Now at last she had him. High walls pressed close on either side, and ahead was a blank windowless mass of stone. Quiet as a shadow, she repeated, sliding forward, light as a feather. When she was three steps away from him, the tomcat bolted. Left, then right, he went; and right, then left, went Arya, cutting off his escape. He hissed again and tried to dart between her legs. Quick as a snake, she thought.

Meredith Combs, the social worker responsible for selecting the stream of adoptive families that gave me back, wanted to talk to me about blame.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black.

EARLY IN THE MORNING While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced for breakfast, before the birds, my mother glides an ivory comb through her hair, heavy and black as calligrapher’s ink. She sits at the foot of the bed. My father watches, listens for the music of comb against hair. My mother combs, pulls her hair back tight, rolls it around two fingers, pins it in a bun to the back of her head. For half a hundred years she has done this. My father likes to see it like this. He says it is kempt. But I know it is because of the way my mother’s hair falls when he pulls the pins out. Easily, like the curtains when they untie them in the evening.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Roy Johnson is a thin, dark, handsome kid with a pin-sharp face and combed hair that he keeps shoving back from the sides of his head. He had an extremely earnest approach and a big smile.

Then his lungs seemed to open up again, each breath going deeper than the one before. His sneakers (not blinding white Adidas, just ratty old Pumas) seemed to shed the lead coating they had gained. His previous lightness of body came rushing back. It was what Milly had called the following wind, and what pros like McComb no doubt called the runner's high. Scott preferred that. He remembered that day in his yard, flexing his knees, leaping, and catching the branch of the tree. He remembered running up and down the bandstand steps. He remembered dancing across the kitchen floor as Stevie Wonder sang "Superstition." This was the same. Not a wind, not even a high, exactly, but an elevation. A sense that you had gone beyond yourself and could go farther still.

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

I walked into the kitchen and found Mad Rogan in it. He sat at the table, dressed in a blue Henley shirt and jeans, sipping coffee out of a mug with a little grey kitten on it. His dark hair was combed back from his face. His jaw was once again clean shaven. I am a polite, nonthreatening kind of dragon with excellent manners. Horns are hidden, tail is tucked away, fangs covered. I would never do anything cruel, like stab a man with a knife about ten times to get him to answer a question. Somehow this new, on-his-best-behavior version was scarier than witnessing him calmly breaking a man with his bare hands. After what we’d been through, I would’ve expected him to hole up somewhere dark, eating raw meat, chain-smoking, guzzling some sort of ridiculously tough drink, like whiskey or kerosene or something, and thinking grim thoughts about life and death. But no, here he was, charming and untroubled, sipping coffee. Mad Rogan saw me and smiled. And my mind went right into the gutter.

Men combing their hair in cars Men watching their hair in rear-view mirrors Men carrying big black combs in their back pockets Men worried about how Women see them Men turning themselves into advertisements of Men Women wearing boots that make them limp Women watching their eyes don't wander on to the eyes of Men Women worried how Men will see them Women turning themselves into advertisements of Women

A few months ago on a school morning, as I attempted to etch a straight midline part on the back of my wiggling daughter's soon-to-be-ponytailed blond head, I reminded her that it was chilly outside and she needed to grab a sweater. "No, mama." "Excuse me?" "No, I don't want to wear that sweater, it makes me look fat." "What?!" My comb clattered to the bathroom floor. "Fat?! What do you know about fat? You're 5 years old! You are definitely not fat. God made you just right. Now get your sweater." She scampered off, and I wearily leaned against the counter and let out a long, sad sigh. It has begun. I thought I had a few more years before my twin daughters picked up the modern day f-word. I have admittedly had my own seasons of unwarranted, psychotic Slim-Fasting and have looked erroneously to the scale to give me a measurement of myself. But these departures from my character were in my 20s, before the balancing hand of motherhood met the grounding grip of running. Once I learned what it meant to push myself, I lost all taste for depriving myself. I want to grow into more of a woman, not find ways to whittle myself down to less. The way I see it, the only way to run counter to our toxic image-centric society is to literally run by example. I can't tell my daughters that beauty is an incidental side effect of living your passion rather than an adherence to socially prescribed standards. I can't tell my son how to recognize and appreciate this kind of beauty in a woman. I have to show them, over and over again, mile after mile, until they feel the power of their own legs beneath them and catch the rhythm of their own strides. Which is why my parents wake my kids early on race-day mornings. It matters to me that my children see me out there, slogging through difficult miles. I want my girls to grow up recognizing the beauty of strength, the exuberance of endurance, and the core confidence residing in a well-tended body and spirit. I want them to be more interested in what they are doing than how they look doing it. I want them to enjoy food that is delicious, feed their bodies with wisdom and intent, and give themselves the freedom to indulge. I want them to compete in healthy ways that honor the cultivation of skill, the expenditure of effort, and the courage of the attempt. Grace and Bella, will you have any idea how lovely you are when you try? Recently we ran the Chuy's Hot to Trot Kids K together as a family in Austin, and I ran the 5-K immediately afterward. Post?race, my kids asked me where my medal was. I explained that not everyone gets a medal, so they must have run really well (all kids got a medal, shhh!). As I picked up Grace, she said, "You are so sweaty Mommy, all wet." Luke smiled and said, "Mommy's sweaty 'cause she's fast. And she looks pretty. All clean." My PRs will never garner attention or generate awards. But when I run, I am 100 percent me--my strengths and weaknesses play out like a cracked-open diary, my emotions often as raw as the chafing from my jog bra. In my ultimate moments of vulnerability, I am twice the woman I was when I thought I was meant to look pretty on the sidelines. Sweaty and smiling, breathless and beautiful: Running helps us all shine. A lesson worth passing along.

Promise me you won't cut your hair." Sara couldn't believe he was being so ridiculous. "If I did, it would grow back." She advanced on him and made a quick grab. His arm shot up in the air, holding the turban well out of her reach. "Promise," he insisted. "If you knew the price that had been paid for that turban, you wouldn't treat it so cavalierly!" "I'll pay it a hundred times over, for your promise." An incredulous smile flitted across her lips. "Why?" she asked, combing a hand through the wild ripples of her hair. "Does my appearance mean so much to you?" "It's not that. It's..." Derek dropped the turban to the floor and circled her slowly. "I like to watch you braid it... and the way you let a few curls on your neck after you've pinned it up... and when you brush it out at night I know I'm the only man who sees it loose and long over your back. It's a part of you that only I can have.

The girl had hair the deep aqua of the sea, drawn back with combs of coral. Her dress was grey sharkskin, and her brief curtsy was that of someone who had never questioned her own value. Her gaze swept the room with undisguised contempt.

I went to my room and put some water on my hair, but you can't really comb a crew cut or anything. Then I tested to see if my breath stank from so many cigarettes and the Scotch and sodas I drank at Ernie's. All you do is hold your hand under your mouth and blow your breath up toward the old nostrils. It didn't seem to stink much, but I brushed my teeth anyway. Then I put on another clean shirt. I knew I didn't have to get all dolled up for a prostitute or anything, but it sort of gave me something to do. I was a little nervous. I was starting to feel pretty sexy and all, but I was a little nervous anyway. If you want to know the truth, I'm a virgin. I really am. I've had quite a few opportunities to lose my virginity and all, but I've never got around to it yet. Something always happens. For instance, if you're at a girl's house, her parents always come home at the wrong time – or you're afraid they will. Or if you're in the back seat of somebody's car, there's always somebody's date in the front seat – some girl, I mean – that always wants to know what's going on all over the whole goddam car. I mean some girl in front keeps turning around to see what the hell's going on. Anyway, something always happens. I came quite close to doing it a couple of times, though. One time in particular, I remember. Something went wrong, though – I don't even remember what any more. The thing is, most of the time when you're coming pretty close to doing it with a girl – a girl that isn't a prostitute or anything, I mean – she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don't. I can't help it. You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they're just scared as hell, or whether they're just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame'll be on you not them. Anyway, I keep stopping. The trouble is, I get to feeling sorry for them. I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains. I don't know. They tell me to stop, so I stop. I always wish I hadn't, after I take them home, but I keep doing it anyway.

Susan was haunted by the gap between the sensation of three boys climbing her torso like a tree, combing sticky fingers through her hair, muttering into her ears—and the constraint of adulthood: How are you, honey? You look a little tired. Is there anything I can do? How about a hug for your old mom? If she’d had an inkling, back then, of the ache this constraint would cause her, she would never—not once!—have said, “Let go of me, boys, I just need a minute,” and shaken them off. She would have held still and let them pick her clean, understanding that there would be nothing better to save herself for.

For my part, I’d come for the textbook and was glad to have it. Betta’s tortellini are now in my head and my hands. I follow her formula for the dough—an egg for every etto of flour, sneaking in an extra yolk if the mix doesn’t look wet enough. I’ve learned to roll out a sheet until I see the grain of the wood underneath. I let it dry if I’m making tagliatelle; I keep it damp if I’m making tortellini. I make a small batch, roll out a sheet, then another, the rhythm of pasta, each movement like the last one. My mind empties. I think only of the task. Is the dough too sticky? Will it tear? Does the sheet, held between my fingers, feel right? But often I wonder what Betta would think, and, like that, I’m back in that valley with its broken-combed mountain tops and the wolves at night and the ever-present feeling that the world is so much bigger than you, and my mind becomes a jumble of associations, of aunts and a round table and laughter you can’t hear anymore, and I am overcome by a feeling of loss. It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that’s handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality.

He reached up to gently pull the elastic from my hair, combing his fingers through the waves as they splayed over my shoulders. Even that massage on my scalp felt good, and I closed my eyes, swaying into him. "You're so beautiful," he murmured against my mouth, his hands still in my hair as he kissed me. This kiss was different from the ones in the pool, somehow--- slower, more exploratory, as though he had all the time in the world and he wanted to spend it with me. Meanwhile, I felt restless and pent-up and like if I didn't have him inside me right then I would explode. My insistent hands on his towel and underwear must've given him the hint, because within five seconds we were both naked and twined together on the bed, kissing and touching everywhere we could. I took the hard length of him in my hand, and he shuddered against me as I rubbed my thumb along the silky head of his cock. "Ah," he said, his voice sounding strangled. "I won't last long if you keep doing that." "What, this?" I said, and did it again. I liked seeing him this way, out of control, his eyes glittering and wild in the low light of the room. But then he turned the tables on me, flipping me over so I was pinned on my back, and he kissed his way down my throat, stopping to suck one aching nipple in his mouth, roll his tongue along the swell of my stomach before he found my clit. I bucked involuntarily, my hips grinding into him as if my body knew it needed more even before my mind did. He licked and sucked, his tongue doing wicked things inside me, until there was no way I could hold myself back even if I wanted to. I clenched at the sheets, gasping as I felt my orgasm shockwave through me.

hawing, let us ask of the starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on the brink of the dustbin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of scullion’s hair. What’s life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life, Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard, and knew precisely, what we meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and out and peeping and picking at daisies as the way is of writers when they don’t know what to say next. Then they come here, says the bird, and ask me what life is; Life, Life, Life! We trudge on then by the moor path, to the high brow of the wine-blue purple-dark hill, and fling ourselves down there, and dream there and see there a grasshopper, carting back to his home in the hollow, a straw. And he says (if sawings like his can be given a name so sacred and tender) Life’s labour, or so we interpret the whirr of his dust-choked gullet. And the ant agrees and the bees, but if we lie here long enough to ask the moths, when they come at evening, stealing among the paler heather bells, they will breathe in our ears such wild nonsense as one hears from telegraph wires in snow storms; tee hee, haw haw. Laughter, Laughter! the moths say. Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for fish, men tell us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is — having asked them all and grown no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it was life’s meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is — alas, we don’t know.

Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man.” Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue. “Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see, it’s a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!” “Lower away!”—cried Ahab, tossing the mate’s arm from him. “Stand by the crew!” In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern. “The sharks! the sharks!” cried a voice from the low cabin-window there; “O master, my master, come back!” But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the boat leaped on.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

My mother, who hated what she called his Americanisms, ended up calling him Il cauboi—the cowboy. It started as a putdown and soon enough became an endearment, to go along with her other nickname for him, conferred during his first week, when he came down to the dinner table after showering, his glistening hair combed back. La star, she had said, short for la muvi star.

We complained but without overindulging, speaking bluntly, then brushing our troubles aside, concentrated on doing the things we enjoyed. She loved collecting shells to make tables decorated with shell tops, so together we would comb the beach, then take them back to the house to clean, lining them up out in the sun. It is surprising how such activities can have a calming effect and divert attention from any difficulties.

THE MEETING" "Scant rain had fallen and the summer sun Had scorched with waves of heat the ripening corn, That August nightfall, as I crossed the down Work-weary, half in dream. Beside a fence Skirting a penning’s edge, an old man waited Motionless in the mist, with downcast head And clothing weather-worn. I asked his name And why he lingered at so lonely a place. “I was a shepherd here. Two hundred seasons I roamed these windswept downlands with my flock. No fences barred our progress and we’d travel Wherever the bite grew deep. In summer drought I’d climb from flower-banked combe to barrow’d hill-top To find a missing straggler or set snares By wood or turmon-patch. In gales of March I’d crouch nightlong tending my suckling lambs. “I was a ploughman, too. Year upon year I trudged half-doubled, hands clenched to my shafts, Guiding my turning furrow. Overhead, Cloud-patterns built and faded, many a song Of lark and pewit melodied my toil. I durst not pause to heed them, rising at dawn To groom and dress my team: by daylight’s end My boots hung heavy, clodded with chalk and flint. “And then I was a carter. With my skill I built the reeded dew-pond, sliced out hay From the dense-matted rick. At harvest time, My wain piled high with sheaves, I urged the horses Back to the master’s barn with shouts and curses Before the scurrying storm. Through sunlit days On this same slope where you now stand, my friend, I stood till dusk scything the poppied fields. “My cob-built home has crumbled. Hereabouts Few folk remember me: and though you stare Till time’s conclusion you’ll not glimpse me striding The broad, bare down with flock or toiling team. Yet in this landscape still my spirit lingers: Down the long bottom where the tractors rumble, On the steep hanging where wild grasses murmur, In the sparse covert where the dog-fox patters.” My comrade turned aside. From the damp sward Drifted a scent of melilot and thyme; From far across the down a barn owl shouted, Circling the silence of that summer evening: But in an instant, as I stepped towards him Striving to view his face, his contour altered. Before me, in the vaporous gloaming, stood Nothing of flesh, only a post of wood.

I took a step toward her, but she turned from me and stomped back to her car. I watched her drive off. After a moment, I walked up the limestone steps and through the phantom oak-and-glass front doors of the house where I grew up. I paced the hall, entered the long rectangle of dining room, rested a hand on the carved cherrywood mantel, then passed into the kitchen. The house was so real around me that I could smell the musty linen in the cedar closet, the gas from the leaky burner on the stove, the sharp tang of geraniums that I had planted in clay pots. I lay down on the exact place where the living room couch had been pushed tight under the leaded-glass windows. I closed my eyes and it was all around me again. The stuffed bookshelves, the paneling, the soft slap of my mother's cards on the table. I could see from the house of my dark mind the alley, from the alley the street leading to the end of town, its farthest boundary the lucid silence of the dead. Between the graves my path, and along that path her back door, her face, her timeless bed, and the lost architecture of her bones. I turned over and made myself comfortable in the crush of wild burdock. A bee or two hummed in the drowsy air. The swarm had left the rubble and built their houses beneath the earth. They were busy in the graveyard right now, filling the skulls with white combs and the coffins with sweet black honey.

This is nice,' Melody said, picking up a red leather box with a vintage watch inside. 'Yes, it is nice. It's the watch I gave Walker as a wedding gift.' 'He gave it back?' 'Actually, he sold it back to the person I bought it from who alerted me and I reacquired it.' 'I'm sorry. That sounds upsetting.' 'It was. Very. Especially since he sold the watch to buy combs for my long hair and without knowing what he had done I sold my hair to buy a leather case for this watch.

This is nice,' Melody said, picking up a red leather box with a vintage watch inside. 'Yes, it is nice. It's the watch I gave Walker as a wedding gift.' 'He gave it back?' 'Actually, he sold it back to the person I bought it from who alerted me and I reacquired it.' 'I'm sorry. That sounds upsetting.' 'It was. Very. Especially since he sold the watch to buy combs for my long hair and without knowing what he had done I sold my hair to buy a leather case for this watch.

I would prefer that you not touch me," I said when her hand moved as if she intended to comb her long nails through my hair. "I’m afraid it can’t be helped," she replied. Her fingers passed close to my ear as they divided my straight lengths into sections and lifted the whole away from my face. There was a brazenness to her smile for a moment. She then released my hair, letting it fall onto my shoulders. I swallowed back a rise of anxiety, wondering if Thaddeus was right to fear her.

The now-famous yearly Candlebrow Conferences, like the institution itself, were subsidized out of the vast fortune of Mr. Gideon Candlebrow of Grossdale, Illinois, who had made his bundle back during the great Lard Scandal of the '80s, in which, before Congress put an end to the practice, countless adulterated tons of that comestible were exported to Great Britain, compromising further an already debased national cuisine, giving rise throughout the island, for example, to a Christmas-pudding controversy over which to this day families remain divided, often violently so. In the consequent scramble to develop more legal sources of profit, one of Mr. Candlebrow's laboratory hands happened to invent "Smegmo," an artificial substitute for everything in the edible-fat category, including margarine, which many felt wasn't that real to begin with. An eminent Rabbi of world hog capital Cincinnati, Ohio, was moved to declare the product kosher, adding that "the Hebrew people have been waiting four thousand years for this. Smegmo is the Messiah of kitchen fats." [...] Miles, locating the patriotically colored Smegmo crock among the salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, steak sauce, sugar and molasses, opened and sniffed quizzically at the contents. "Say, what is this stuff?" "Goes with everything!" advised a student at a nearby table. "Stir it in your soup, spread it on your bread, mash it into your turnips! My doormates comb their hair with it! There's a million uses for Smegmo!

I love you." He combed her fingers through her hair,drawing her head back so that their eyes met. "I don't like it, I may never get used to it, but I love you." With a sigh,he brought her close again. "You make my head swim." With her cheek against his chest, Gennie closed her eyes. "You can take time to get used to it," she murmured. "Just promise you won't ever be sorry it happened." "Not sorry," he agreed on a long breath. "A little crazed, but not sorry." As he ran a hand down her hair, Grant felt a fresh need for her, softer, calmer than before and no less vibrant. He nuzzled into her neck because he seemed to belong there. "Are you really in love with me, or did you say that because I made you mad?" "Both.I decided this morning I'd have to bend to your ego and let you tell me first." "Is that so?" With his brows drawn together, he tilted her head back again. "My ego." "It tends to get in the way because it's rather oversized." She smiled, sweetly.In retaliation, he crushed his mouth to hers. "You know," he managed after a moment. "I've lost my appetite for breakfsat." Smiling again, she tilted her face back to his. "Have you reall?" "Mmm. And I don't like to mention it..." He took his fingertips to the lapel of the robe,toying with it before he slid them down to the belt. "But I didn't say you could use my robe." "Oh, that was rude of me." The smile became saucy. "Would you like it back now?" "No hurry." He slipped his hand into hers and started toward the steps. "You can wait until we get upstairs.

No, of course not. You’re still young and healthy. Maybe that’s why you don’t understand what I am saying. Let me give you an example. Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations. Your physical strength, your hopes, your dreams, your ideals, your convictions, all meaning, or, then again, the people you love: one by one, they fade away. Some announce their departure before they leave, while others just disappear all of a sudden without warning one day. And once you lose them you can never get them back. Your search for replacements never goes well. It’s all very painful—as painful as actually being cut with a knife. You will be turning thirty soon, Mr. Kawana, which means that, from now on, you will gradually enter that twilight portion of life—you will be getting older. You are probably beginning to grasp that painful sense that you are losing something, are you not?

I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. 125 I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 130 Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

There was some that they called crayons, which one of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before—blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said “Shall I Never See Thee More Alas.” Another one was a young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said “I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas.” There was one where a young lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing wax showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain to it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said “And Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas.” These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn’t somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard.

She treated her father with some lightness, even irony, and in at least one television interview she made fun of his comb-over. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp reduction surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men—the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.

When you change houses you always lose something. Every move betrays you, it always cheats you somehow. I’m still looking for certain things. That brooch that belonged to my mother, nothing valuable, but it meant something to me. Then there’s my old address book. Even though I don’t need it anymore, I liked thumbing through it now and then. I’d saved ticket stubs, certain receipts, a small photograph of your father when he was young, before we’d met, what a handsome fellow he was. I look and look but I can’t find it. There are days I comb through the whole house hoping to find those things in some drawer I’ve already opened countless times, or maybe at the bottom of a box in my closet. They’re somewhere, of course. Just like the jewels that were stolen from me. Remember that ring, the gold one, a little flashy, that I liked to wear in winter? It had green stones. I’d left it lying in plain sight when I was younger, when there was always so much to do in the course of any given day. Back then it tormented me, I couldn’t stand the fact of having lost that ring. But now I think, oh well. Someone else is probably wearing it, or maybe it’s for sale somewhere, in some far-off place, maybe the place you’re going to. It’s not mine anymore, but it’s still somewhere, that’s what I’m trying to say.

Nixon was finding enemies everywhere: among liberals, the bureaucracy, on Capitol Hill, and in the press. “We can have peace. We can have prosperity. We can have all the blacks screwing the whites,” and still not get credit from the liberal establishment, he complained. His orders sometimes sounded like the mutterings of a paranoid. He had his staff comb through the microfilm at the D.C. public library and compile every Drew Pearson column dating back to 1946 that mentioned his name. “Agnew must be warned,” Nixon had told Haldeman and others, back during the campaign. “A candidate has no friends in the press—they are all enemies.” He underlined the word no four times.

The Sea-Child Into the world you sent her, mother, Fashioned her body of coral and foam, Combed a wave in her hair's warm smother, And drove her away from home In the dark of the night she crept to the town And under a doorway she laid her down, The little blue child in the foam-fringed gown. And never a sister and never a brother To hear her call, to answer her cry. Her face shone out from her hair's warm smother Like a moonkin up in the sky. She sold her corals; she sold her foam; Her rainbow heart like a singing shell Broke in her body: she crept back home. Peace, go back to the world, my daughter, Daughter, go back to the darkling land; There is nothing here but sad sea water, And a handful of sifting sand.

Miriam gave her hair a preliminary drying, gathered her dressing-gown together and went upstairs. From the schoolroom came unmistakable sounds. They were evidently at dinner. She hurried to her attic. What was she to do with her hair? She rubbed it desperately—fancy being landed with hair like that, in the middle of the day! She could not possibly go down.... She must. Fraulein Pfaff would expect her to—and would be disgusted if she were not quick—she towelled frantically at the short strands round her forehead, despairingly screwed them into Hinde's and towelled at the rest. What had the other girls done? If only she could look into the schoolroom before going down—it was awful—what should she do?... She caught sight of a sodden-looking brush on Mademoiselle's bed. Mademoiselle had put hers up—she had seen her... of course... easy enough for her little fluffy clouds—she could do nothing with her straight, wet lumps—she began to brush it out—it separated into thin tails which flipped tiny drops of moisture against her hands as she brushed. Her arms ached; her face flared with her exertions. She was ravenous—she must manage somehow and go down. She braided the long strands and fastened their cold mass with extra hairpins. Then she unfastened the Hinde's—two tendrils flopped limply against her forehead. She combed them out. They fell in a curtain of streaks to her nose. Feverishly she divided them, draped them somehow back into the rest of her hair and fastened them.

few years later, Demeter took a vacation to the beach. She was walking along, enjoying the solitude and the fresh sea air, when Poseidon happened to spot her. Being a sea god, he tended to notice pretty ladies walking along the beach. He appeared out of the waves in his best green robes, with his trident in his hand and a crown of seashells on his head. (He was sure that the crown made him look irresistible.) “Hey, girl,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows. “You must be the riptide, ’cause you sweep me off my feet.” He’d been practicing that pickup line for years. He was glad he finally got to use it. Demeter was not impressed. “Go away, Poseidon.” “Sometimes the sea goes away,” Poseidon agreed, “but it always comes back. What do you say you and me have a romantic dinner at my undersea palace?” Demeter made a mental note not to park her chariot so far away. She really could’ve used her two dragons for backup. She decided to change form and get away, but she knew better than to turn into a snake this time. I need something faster, she thought. Then she glanced down the beach and saw a herd of wild horses galloping through the surf. That’s perfect! Demeter thought. A horse! Instantly she became a white mare and raced down the beach. She joined the herd and blended in with the other horses. Her plan had serious flaws. First, Poseidon could also turn into a horse, and he did—a strong white stallion. He raced after her. Second, Poseidon had created horses. He knew all about them and could control them. Why would a sea god create a land animal like the horse? We’ll get to that later. Anyway, Poseidon reached the herd and started pushing his way through, looking for Demeter—or rather sniffing for her sweet, distinctive perfume. She was easy to find. Demeter’s seemingly perfect camouflage in the herd turned out to be a perfect trap. The other horses made way for Poseidon, but they hemmed in Demeter and wouldn’t let her move. She got so panicky, afraid of getting trampled, that she couldn’t even change shape into something else. Poseidon sidled up to her and whinnied something like Hey, beautiful. Galloping my way? Much to Demeter’s horror, Poseidon got a lot cuddlier than she wanted. These days, Poseidon would be arrested for that kind of behavior. I mean…assuming he wasn’t in horse form. I don’t think you can arrest a horse. Anyway, back in those days, the world was a rougher, ruder place. Demeter couldn’t exactly report Poseidon to King Zeus, because Zeus was just as bad. Months later, a very embarrassed and angry Demeter gave birth to twins. The weirdest thing? One of the babies was a goddess; the other one was a stallion. I’m not going to even try to figure that out. The baby girl was named Despoine, but you don’t hear much about her in the myths. When she grew up, her job was looking after Demeter’s temple, like the high priestess of corn magic or something. Her baby brother, the stallion, was named Arion. He grew up to be a super-fast immortal steed who helped out Hercules and some other heroes, too. He was a pretty awesome horse, though I’m not sure that Demeter was real proud of having a son who needed new horseshoes every few months and was constantly nuzzling her for apples. At this point, you’d think Demeter would have sworn off those gross, disgusting men forever and joined Hestia in the Permanently Single Club. Strangely, a couple of months later, she fell in love with a human prince named Iasion (pronounced EYE-son, I think). Just shows you how far humans had come since Prometheus gave them fire. Now they could speak and write. They could brush their teeth and comb their hair. They wore clothes and occasionally took baths. Some of them were even handsome enough to flirt with goddesses.

And so, by means both active and passive, he sought to repair the damage to his self-esteem. He tried first of all to find ways to make his nose look shorter. When there was no one around, he would hold up his mirror and, with feverish intensity, examine his reflection from every angle. Sometimes it took more than simply changing the position of his face to comfort him, and he would try one pose after another—resting his cheek on his hand or stroking his chin with his fingertips. Never once, though, was he satisfied that his nose looked any shorter. In fact, he sometimes felt that the harder he tried, the longer it looked. Then, heaving fresh sighs of despair, he would put the mirror away in its box and drag himself back to the scripture stand to resume chanting the Kannon Sutra. The second way he dealt with his problem was to keep a vigilant eye out for other people’s noses. Many public events took place at the Ike-no-o temple—banquets to benefit the priests, lectures on the sutras, and so forth. Row upon row of monks’ cells filled the temple grounds, and each day the monks would heat up bath water for the temple’s many residents and lay visitors, all of whom the Naigu would study closely. He hoped to gain peace from discovering even one face with a nose like his. And so his eyes took in neither blue robes nor white; orange caps, skirts of gray: the priestly garb he knew so well hardly existed for him. The Naigu saw not people but noses. While a great hooked beak might come into his view now and then, never did he discover a nose like his own. And with each failure to find what he was looking for, the Naigu’s resentment would increase. It was entirely due to this feeling that often, while speaking to a person, he would unconsciously grasp the dangling end of his nose and blush like a youngster. And finally, the Naigu would comb the Buddhist scriptures and other classic texts, searching for a character with a nose like his own in the hope that it would provide him some measure of comfort. Nowhere, however, was it written that the nose of either Mokuren or Sharihotsu was long. And Ryūju and Memyoō, of course, were Bodhisattvas with normal human noses. Listening to a Chinese story once, he heard that Liu Bei, the Shu Han emperor, had long ears. “Oh, if only it had been his nose,” he thought, “how much better I would feel!

This is religion. Voodoo and spells. I want to believe in it, the creams, the rejuvenating lotions, the transparent unguents in vials that slick on like roll-top glue. “Don’t you know what that junk is made of?” Ben said once. “Ground-up cocks’ combs.” But this doesn’t deter me, I’d use anything if it worked – slug juice, toad spit, eye of newt, anything at all to mummify myself, stop the drip drip of time, stay more or less the way I am. But I own enough of this slop already to embalm all of the girls in my high school graduating class, who must need it by now as much as I do. I stop only long enough to allow myself to be sprayed by a girl giving away free squirts of some venomous new perfume. The femme fatale must be back, Veronica Lake slinks again. The stuff smells like grape Kool-Aid. I can’t imagine it seducing anything but a fruit fly.

I took my solo and beat hell out of the skins. Then Spoof swiped at his mouth and let go with a blast and moved it up into that squeal and stopped and started playing. It was all headwork. All new to us. New to anybody. I saw Sonny get a look on his face, and we sat still and listened while Spoof made love to that horn. Now like a scream, now like a laugh - now we're swinging in the trees, now the white men are coming, now we're in the boat and chains are hanging from our ankles and we're rowing, rowing - Spoof, what is it? - now we're sawing wood and picking cotton and serving up those cool cool drinks to the Colonel in his chair - Well, blow, man! - now we're free, and we're struttin' down Lenox Avenue and State & Madison and Pirate's Alley, laughing, crying - Who said free? - and we want to go back and we don't want to go back - Play it, Spoof! God, God, tell us all about it! Talk to us! - and we're sitting in a cellar with a comb wrapped up in paper, with a skin-barrel and a tinklebox - Don't stop, Spoof! Oh Lord, please don't stop! - and we're making something, something, what is it? Is it jazz? Why, yes, Lord, it's jazz. Thank you, sir, and thank you, sir, we finally got it, something that is ours, something great that belongs to us and to us alone, that we made, and that's why it's important and that's what it's all about and - Spoof! Spoof, you can;t stop now -- But it was over, middle of the trip. And there was Spoof standing there facing us and tears streaming out of those eyes and down over that coaldust face, and his body shaking and shaking. It's the first we ever saw that. It's the first we ever heard him cough, too - like a shotgun going off every two seconds, big raking sounds that tore up from the bottom of his belly and spilled out wet and loud. ("Black Country")

Freddy and his brother Tesoro have not seen each other in five years, and they sit at the kitchen table in Freddy's house and have a jalapeno contest. A large bowl of big green and orange jalapeno peppers sit between the two brothers. A saltshaker and two small glasses of beer accompany this feast. When Tesoro nods his head, the two men begin to eat the raw jalapenos. The contest is to see which man can eat more peppers. It is a ritual from their father, but the two brothers tried it only once, years ago. Both quit after two peppers and laughed it off. This time, things are different. They are older and have to prove a point. Freddy eats his first one more slowly than Tesoro, who takes to bites to finish his and is now on his second. Neither says anything, though a close study of each man's face would tell you the sudden burst of jalapeno energy does not waste time in changing the eater's perception of reality. Freddy works on his second as Tesoro rips into his fourth. Freddy is already sweating from his head and is surprised to see that Tesoro's fat face has not shanged its steady, consuming look. Tesoro's long, black hair is neatly combed, and not one bead of sweat has popped out. He is the first to sip from the beer before hitting his fifth jalapeno. Freddy leans back as the table begins to sway in his damp vision. He coughs, and a sharp pain rips through his chest. Tesoro attempts to laugh at his brother, but Freddy sees it is something else. As Freddy finishes his third jalapeno, Tesoro begins to breathe faster upon swallowing his sixth. The contest momentarily stops as both brothers shift in their seats and the sweat pours down their faces. Freddy clutches his stomach as he reaches for his fourth delight. Tesor has not taken his seventh, and it is clear to Freddy that his brother is suffering big-time. There is a bright blue bird sitting on Tesoro's head, and Tesoro is struggling to laugh because Freddy has a huge red spider crawling on top of his head. Freddy wipes the sweat from his eyes and finishes his fourth pepper. Tesoro sips more beer, sprinkles salt on the tip of his jalapeno, and bites it down to the stem. Freddy, who has not touched his beer, stares in amazement as two Tesoros sit in front of him. They both rise hastily, their beer guts pushing the table against Freddy, who leans back as the two Tesoros waver in the kitchen light. Freddy hears a tremendous fart erupt from his brother, who sits down again. Freddy holds his fifth jalapeno and can't breathe. Tesoro's face is purple, but the blue bird has been replaced by a burning flame of light that weaves over Tesoro's shiny head. Freddy is convinced that he is having a heart attack as he watches his brother fight for breath. Freddy bites into his fifth as Tesoro flips his eighth jalapeno into his mouth, stem and all. This is it. Freddy goes into convulsions and drops to the floor as he tries to reach for his glass of beer. He shakes on the dirty floor as the huge animal that is Tesoro pitches forward and throws up millions of jalapeno seeds all over the table. The last thing Freddy sees before he passes out is his brother's body levitating above the table as an angel, dressed in green jalapeno robes, floats into the room, extends a hand to Tesoro, and floats away with him. When Freddy wakes up minutes later, he gets up and makes it to the bathroom before his body lets go through his pants. As he reaches the bathroom door, he turns and gazes upon the jalapeno plants growing healthy and large on the kitchen table, thick peppers hanging under their leaves, their branches immersed in the largest pile of jalapeno seeds Freddy has ever seen.

A while back a young woman from another state came to live with some of her relatives in the Salt Lake City area for a few weeks. On her first Sunday she came to church dressed in a simple, nice blouse and knee-length skirt set off with a light, button-up sweater. She wore hose and dress shoes, and her hair was combed simply but with care. Her overall appearance created an impression of youthful grace. Unfortunately, she immediately felt out of place. It seemed like all the other young women her age or near her age were dressed in casual skirts, some rather distant from the knee; tight T-shirt-like tops that barely met the top of their skirts at the waist (some bare instead of barely); no socks or stockings; and clunky sneakers or flip-flops. One would have hoped that seeing the new girl, the other girls would have realized how inappropriate their manner of dress was for a chapel and for the Sabbath day and immediately changed for the better. Sad to say, however, they did not, and it was the visitor who, in order to fit in, adopted the fashion (if you can call it that) of her host ward. It is troubling to see this growing trend that is not limited to young women but extends to older women, to men, and to young men as well. . . . I was shocked to see what the people of this other congregation wore to church. There was not a suit or tie among the men. They appeared to have come from or to be on their way to the golf course. It was hard to spot a woman wearing a dress or anything other than very casual pants or even shorts. Had I not known that they were coming to the school for church meetings, I would have assumed that there was some kind of sporting event taking place. The dress of our ward members compared very favorably to this bad example, but I am beginning to think that we are no longer quite so different as more and more we seem to slide toward that lower standard. We used to use the phrase “Sunday best.” People understood that to mean the nicest clothes they had. The specific clothing would vary according to different cultures and economic circumstances, but it would be their best. It is an affront to God to come into His house, especially on His holy day, not groomed and dressed in the most careful and modest manner that our circumstances permit. Where a poor member from the hills of Peru must ford a river to get to church, the Lord surely will not be offended by the stain of muddy water on his white shirt. But how can God not be pained at the sight of one who, with all the clothes he needs and more and with easy access to the chapel, nevertheless appears in church in rumpled cargo pants and a T-shirt? Ironically, it has been my experience as I travel around the world that members of the Church with the least means somehow find a way to arrive at Sabbath meetings neatly dressed in clean, nice clothes, the best they have, while those who have more than enough are the ones who may appear in casual, even slovenly clothing. Some say dress and hair don’t matter—it’s what’s inside that counts. I believe that truly it is what’s inside a person that counts, but that’s what worries me. Casual dress at holy places and events is a message about what is inside a person. It may be pride or rebellion or something else, but at a minimum it says, “I don’t get it. I don’t understand the difference between the sacred and the profane.” In that condition they are easily drawn away from the Lord. They do not appreciate the value of what they have. I worry about them. Unless they can gain some understanding and capture some feeling for sacred things, they are at risk of eventually losing all that matters most. You are Saints of the great latter-day dispensation—look the part.

We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves. After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. That’s what I believe. The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.

As a child, she was curious about the world beyond the sea, but in a vague, half-sketched way, as she was curious about a lot of things she read in books. London and Treasure Island and horses and dragons were all equally imagined to her. She thought she would probably see them one day, when she was old. In the meantime, the island was hers to explore, and it took up more time than she could ever imagine having. There were books to read, thousands of them in the castle library, and Rowan brought back more all the time. There were trees to climb, caves along the beach to get lost in, traces of the fair folk who had once lived on the island to find and bring home. There was work to be done: Food needed to be grown and harvested; the livable parts of the castle, the parts that weren't a crumbling ruin, needed to be combed for useful things when the tide went out. She was a half-wild thing of ink and grass and sea breezes, raised by books and rabbits and fairy lore, and that was all she cared to be.

My neck was slender and long and I could bend it nearly all the way about to take in my body: also slender, also shining. I was a dragon of gold, as if Jesse had touched me and transmuted me but not taken my life. I was sinuous and covered in lustrous golden scales, all the way almost to the tip of my tail, until they faded into purple. I had a mane, too, mapping a line down my back. It looked like a ruff of silk or cut velvet. I folded my neck around almost double so that I could rub my chin on it. Silken, yes, but also jagged. Combing my chin through it sent quivers of pleasure down my spine. Then I saw my wings. They were folded against my back, metallic. Without knowing how I did it, I opened them, using muscles I didn't even have as a person. ... I slashed my tail through the rain and realized that it was barbed when it hit an oak tree and I got stuck. No problem. I pulled it out and danced around, delighted at the fresh, gaping hole in the trunk. ... If the shark-hunters or lance-bearers came for me, I'd chew them to chum.

Why else would they come out here?” This statement was not as dour as it sounded; Beatriz was not the only one in Bicho Raro who could be strictly pragmatic. Pete gestured to the land around them. “Because it’s pretty.” The desert preened and Michael regarded Pete anew. One compliments a man when one compliments his chosen home, and Michael felt nearly as good as the desert about Pete’s words. Kindly, he said, “You better get into some dry clothes now.” Straightening up, Pete finger-combed his rain-flat hair into its usual style. “Soon. Got to pick some beetles first. See you later, sir!” He left Michael standing there by the side of the barn, sheering off hard left to avoid a shadow he thought might be Beatriz, and then threw himself back into beetle picking. Ordinarily, Michael would have also thrown himself directly back into work, but for the first time in a very long time, Michael stood there for a full five minutes before beginning his next job, just watching Pete start on his next project. Humans have always been fascinated by mirrors, after all. Michael had never seen from the outside how it looked to work constantly to avoid feeling, and he could not look away.

Claire fell asleep on the couch with her head in Shane's lap as he and Michael and Eve kept talking, and talking, and talking. It was three a.m. when she woke up; Shane hadn't moved, but she was covered with a blanket, and he was sound asleep, sitting straight up. Claire yawned, groaned at sore muscles, and rolled to her feet. "Shane. Up. You need to go to bed." He woke up cute, softened by sleep. "Come with?" He was only half joking. She remembered being curled up with him in her bed, the night she'd been so scared; he'd been careful then, but she wasn't sure she could count on that kind of self-restraint at three a.m., when he was half-asleep. "I can't," she said reluctantly. "Not that I don't want to ..." He smiled and stretched out on his side on the couch, leaving a narrow space between his warm, solid body and the cushions. "Stay," he said. "I promise, no clothes will come off. Well, maybe shoes. Do shoes count as clothes?" She kicked hers off and climbed over him to slip into that small pocket, and sighed in relief as his body pressed against hers. She didn't even need the blanket, but he put it over the two of them anyway, and then combed her hair back from her neck and kissed her on the soft, vulnerable skin.

The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it–straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent that tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him–goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did now know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor–its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with its blades–not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders–twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gear, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, and had no connection to the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not love or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

There was also a package wrapped in pale blue paper and tied with a matching ribbon. Picking up a small folded note that had been tucked under the ribbon, Beatrix read: A gift for your wedding night, darling Bea. This gown was made by the most fashionable modiste in London. It is rather different from the ones you usually wear, but it will be very pleasing to a bridegroom. Trust me about this. -Poppy Holding the nightgown up, Beatrix saw that it was made of black gossamer and fastened with tiny jet buttons. Since the only nightgowns she had ever worn had been of modest white cambric or muslin, this was rather shocking. However, if it was what husbands liked... After removing her corset and her other underpinnings, Beatrix drew the gown over her head and let a slither over her body in a cool, silky drift. The thin fabric draped closely over her shoulders and torso and buttoned at the waist before flowing to the ground in transparent panels. A side slit went up to her hip, exposing her leg when she moved. And her back was shockingly exposed, the gown dipping low against her spine. Pulling the pins and combs from her hair, she dropped them into the muslin bag in the trunk. Tentatively she emerged from behind the screen. Christopher had just finished pouring two glasses of champagne. He turned toward her and froze, except for his gaze, which traveled over her in a burning sweep. "My God," he muttered, and drained his champagne. Setting the empty glass aside, he gripped the other as if he were afraid it might slip through his fingers. "Do you like my nightgown?" Beatrix asked. Christopher nodded, not taking his gaze from her. "Where's the rest of it?" "This was all I could find." Unable to resist teasing him, Beatrix twisted and tried to see the back view. "I wonder if I put it on backward..." "Let me see." As she turned to reveal the naked line of her back, Christopher drew in a harsh breath. Although Beatrix heard him mumble a curse, she didn't take offense, deducing that Poppy had been right about the nightgown. And when he drained the second glass of champagne, forgetting that it was hers, Beatrix sternly repressed a grin. She went to the bed and climbed onto the mattress, relishing the billowy softness of its quilts and linens. Reclining on her side, she made no attempt to cover her exposed leg as the gossamer fabric fell open to her hip. Christopher came to her, stripping off his shirt along the way. The sight of him, all that flexing muscle and sun-glazed skin, was breathtaking. He was a beautiful man, a scarred Apollo, a dream lover. And he was hers.

The sea was a dull, monotonous green. Slowly, the tide was coming in. Tōru lowered the telescope to the waves of the beach. As they broke, a spray like the dregs of the sea slipped from their backs, and the pyramids of deep green changed, rose and swelled into an uneasy white. The sea lost its serenity. Even as it rose it broke at the skirts, and ragged spots of white from its high belly like a call of inexpressible sorrow became a sharply smooth yet infinitely cracked wall of glass, like a vast spray. As it rose and broke, the forelocks were combed a beautiful white, and as it fell it showed the neatly arrayed blue-white of its crown, and the lines of white became a solid field of white; and so it fell, like a severed head. The spray and the falling away of foam. Little patches of foam trailing off to sea like lines of water bugs. From trailing off over the sand like swear from the back of an athlete at the end of his exertions. What delicate changes passed over the white monolith of the sea as it came in upon the shore and broke. The myriad confusion of thin waves and the fine partings of the foam became in desperation an infinity of lines spewed out over the sea as from silkworms. What a subtle evil, overcoming by sheer force even as it took into itself this delicate white.

So now I was a beauty editor. In some ways, I looked the part of Condé Nast hotshot—or at least I tried to. I wore fab Dior slap bracelets and yellow plastic Marni dresses, and I carried a three-thousand-dollar black patent leather Lanvin tote that Jean had plunked down on my desk one afternoon. (“This is . . . too shiny for me,” she’d explained.) My highlights were by Marie Robinson at Sally Hershberger Salon in the Meatpacking District; I had a chic lavender pedicure—Versace Heat Nail Lacquer V2008—and I smelled obscure and expensive, like Susanne Lang Midnight Orchid and Colette Black Musk Oil. But look closer. I was five-four and ninety-seven pounds. The aforementioned Lanvin tote was full of orange plastic bottles from Rite Aid; if you looked at my hands digging for them, you’d see that my fingernails were dirty, and that the knuckle on my right hand was split from scraping against my front teeth. My chin was broken out from the vomiting. My self-tanner was uneven because I always applied it when I was strung out and exhausted—to conceal the exhaustion, you see—and my skin underneath the faux-glow was full-on Corpse Bride. A stylist had snipped out golf-ball-size knots that had formed at the back of my neck when I was blotto on tranquilizers for months and stopped combing my hair. My under-eye bags were big enough to send down the runway at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week: I hadn’t slept in days. I hadn’t slept for more than a few hours at a time in months. And I hadn’t slept without pills in years. So even though I wrote articles about how to take care of yourself—your hair, your skin, your nails—I was falling apart.

I run a comb through my hair to smooth it down and then tuck it behind my ears. “Here,” says Cara. She lifts a piece of hair from my face and pins it back with a silver hair clip, the way Erudite girls do. Christina takes out the guns we brought with us and looks at me. “Do you want one?” she says. “Or would you rather carry the stunner?” I stare at the gun in her hand. If I don’t take the stunner, I leave myself completely undefended against people who will gladly shoot me. If I do, I admit to weakness in front of Fernando, Cara, and Marcus. “You know what Will would say?” says Christina. “What?” I say, my voice breaking. “He would tell you to get over it,” she says. “To stop being so irrational and take the stupid gun.” Will had little patience for the irrational. Christina must be right; she knew him better than I did. And she--who lost someone dear to her that day, just as I did--was able to forgive me, an act that must have been nearly impossible. It would have been impossible for me, if the situation were reversed. So why is it so difficult for me to forgive myself? I close my hand around the gun Christina offered me. The metal is warm from where she touched it. I feel the memory of shooting him poking at the back of my mind, and try to stifle it. But it won’t be stifled. I let go of the gun. “The stunner is a perfectly good option,” Cara says as she plucks a hair from her shirtsleeve. “If you ask me, the Dauntless are too gun-happy anyway.” Fernando offers me the stunner. I wish I could communicate my gratitude to Cara, but she isn’t looking at me. “How am I going to conceal this thing?” I say. “Don’t bother,” Fernando says. “Right.

She told everything as quickly as she could, stringing sentences together the way she had when she was a little girl. By the end of the tale,she found herself defending her mother,angry at the world that made it necessary for her to explain.Impulsively, she grabbed a curry comb and began to brush Red Star's coat vigorously.She brushed for a long time,and tears began to blur her vision.She tried to resign herself to what seemed to be happening.Then a hand covered hers and squeezed affectionately. Mac took the curry comb away,and bent to kiss the back of her hand. "So,Miss King,will you do me the honor of accompanying me to the social next Friday evening at the Congregational Church?" Miss King embarrassed herself by saying yes! so loudly that the dozing horse in the stall next to Red Star jumped and kicked the side of his stall in fright.The two young people laughed, and MacKenzie lifted LisBeth into the air and swung her around in his arms. Sick with apprehension,Jesse had been unable to remain alone for long.She returned to the kitchen to help Augustus with meal preparations, praying earnestly for LisBeth and MacKenzie while she worked.When the two young people burst through the kitchen door together,their happy smiles told the older women all they needed to know. LisBeth was sobered when she saw her Mother. "Mother,I..." Jesse held up a hand to stop her. "It's all right,LisBeth. I'm glad everything turned out.I've been praying for you both." "Mother,all four of us know about Papa. Would you tell me a story about him while we make supper?" The culprit never came forward, but at some time that evening, the first book-burning in the State of Nebraska took place. Francis Day's Memoirs of the Savage West found its way into Augusta's cook stove.

Kato’s expression shifts into something I could almost call a smile for the first time since I found him. He plucks the chordsagain in the beginnings of a tune I recognize, a ballad popular in southern Sinta. His fingers move with skill and subtlety over the strings. I had no idea he was musical. “Maybe we’re not meant to kill it.” He keeps playing. “Doesn’t music soothe the beast? I’ll play, you sing.” “I sound like a strangled Satyr when I sing.” He smiles. “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.” “There’s no need for mudslinging,” I say with a huff. He chuckles softly. “I can carry a tune.” “Great!” I pat his arm. “That’ll be your job. I’ll stand back—waaaaay back—while you calm the beast. I’m confident you’ll sound as good as you look.” His chest puffs out. “How do I look?” “Terrible.” I grin. “You needed a bath, a shave, and a comb before we even set foot on the Ice Plains. Now, I can just barely make out your eyes and your nose. The rest is all”—I flap my hands around—“hair.” His chest deflates. He eyes me wryly. “I could say the same about you.” I gasp. “I grew a beard? Do you think Griffin will like it? I’ve been trying to keep it neat, but I may have picked up an eel.” Kato laughs outright, and he really is unbearably handsome. Some of the grimness evaporates from his eyes. “I was talking about this.” He gives one of my tousled waves a light tug. I once saw Griffin do that to Kaia. It’s brotherly. Affectionate. My heart squeezes in my chest. My love for Griffin is completely different, but Kato has a piece of me that no man ever had, not even Aetos. Kato sees me, and accepts. In that moment, I realize he’s slipped inside my soul right next to Eleni. They’re a blond-haired, blue-eyed, sunny pair—my light in the dark. Clearing my throat doesn’t drive away the thick lump in it, or dispel the sudden tightness, so I make a show of smoothing down my hair—a lost cause at this point. “Ah, that. It’s getting to the stage where it deserves a name. The Knotted Nest? The Twisted Tresses?” “What about the Terrible Tangle?” I nod. “That has serious possibilities.” “The Matted Mess?” he suggests. My jaw drops. “It’s not that bad!” Grinning, Kato pats my head. “Let’s get out of here.” Yes, please! “I have your clothes. They’re even dry, thanks to your Eternal Fires of the Underworld Cloak.” He quirks an eyebrow, taking the things I hand him. “That gets a name, too?” “I should think so,” I answer loftily.

I never dreamed it would be as amazing as that,” she whispered. “I did.” “Really?” Her soft voice was a caress. Everything about her was as smooth and silky and sweet as whipped cream. Well, except for her tart opinions. And her fierce determination to make him tell everything in his soul. Though he had to admit that after confessing his secret fears to her earlier, he felt freer, as if the boulder he’d been carrying for years had dropped from his back. “I knew it would be perfect.” He gave her a lingering kiss, then drew back to cup her pinkening cheek. “With you it could be nothing less.” Shyly avoiding his gaze, she finger-combed his short hair. “Nancy always said that sharing a man’s bed was something to ‘endure.’ That marriage was more pleasant without it, but it was required for having children so she’d had to put up with it.” He skimmed a hand down her lightly freckled arm. “And what do you think, now that you’ve experienced it for yourself?” “I think I could ‘endure’ it with great enthusiasm.” Jane flashed him a mischievous smile. “But I’m not really sure. Should we try it again so I can make certain?” Stifling a laugh, he tried to look stern. “We’re lucky none of the grooms have stumbled over us already.” He managed to sound even-toned, though the prospect of taking her again--here, now--was already making him hard. “Speaking of that, we’d better get dressed, before someone finds us here naked.” A sigh escaped her. “You do have a point. Though I don’t know how you can be so sensible and industrious when all I feel is lazy and content.” “I’m not being sensible and industrious at all.” Reluctantly he slipped from her arms to go hunt up his drawers. “I’m simply being selfish. The longer you stay naked, the more chance that I will attempt to ravish you again.” “That sounds perfectly…awful,” she said as she struck a seductive pose. God save him. He swept his gaze over her thrusting breasts, her slender belly with its delicate navel, and her auburn thatch of curls. The taste of her was still on his lips, the smell of her still in his nostrils. He wanted her again. And again and again… Muttering a curse under his breath, he tossed her shift at her. “Put some clothes on before I combust.” She laughed, a delicate tinkling sound that tightened his cock. Fortunately for his self-restraint, she did as he bade and donned her shift. Only then was he able to breathe, to concentrate on putting on his trousers rather than on the erotic sight of her drawing her stockings up those luscious legs. He turned and nearly stumbled over the carriage lamps. “These are a lost cause, now that I recklessly dashed them to the floor in my…er…enthusiasm, sweeting.” “Good,” she said cheerily. “Now you can’t run off to London without me tonight.

When he lifted his head, Savannah nearly pulled him back to her. He watched her face, her eyes cloudy with desire, her lips so beautiful, bereft of his. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are, Savannah? There is such beauty in your soul, I can see it shining in your eyes.” She touched his face, her palm molding his strong jaw. Why couldn’t she resist his hungry eyes? “I think you’re casting a spell over me. I can’t remember what we were talking about.” Gregori smiled. “Kissing.” His teeth nibbled gently at her chin. “Specifically, your wanting to kiss that orange-bearded imbecile.” “I wanted to kiss every one of them,” she lied indignantly. “No, you did not. You were hoping that silly fop would wipe my taste from your mouth for all eternity.” His hand stroked back the fall of hair around her face. He feathered kisses along the delicate line of her jaw. “It would not have worked, you know. As I recall, he seemed to have a problem getting close to you.” Her eyes smoldered dangerously. “Did you have anything to do with his allergies?” She had wanted someone, anyone, to wipe Gregori’s taste from her mouth, her soul. He raised his voice an octave. “Oh, Savannah, I just have to taste your lips,” he mimicked. Then he went into a sneezing fit. “You haven’t ridden until you’ve ridden on a Harley, baby.” He sneezed, coughed, and gagged in perfect imitation. Savannah punched his arm, forgetting for a moment her bruised fist. When it hurt, she yelped and glared accusingly at him. “It was you doing all that to him! The poor man— you damaged his ego for life. Each time he touched me, he had a sneezing fit.” Gregori raised an eyebrow, completely unrepentant. “Technically, he did not lay a hand on you. He sneezed before he could get that close.” She laid her head back on the pillow, her ebony hair curling around his arm, then her arm, weaving them together. His lips found her throat, then moved lower and found the spot over her breast that burned with need, with invitation. Savannah caught his head firmly in her hands and lifted him determinedly away from her before her treacherous body succumbed completely to his magic. “And the dog episode?” He tried for innocence, but his laughter was echoing in her mind. “What do you mean?” “You know very well what I mean,” she insisted. “When Dragon walked me home.” “Ah, yes, I seem to recall now. The big bad wolf decked out in chains and spikes, afraid of a little dog.” “Little? A hundred-and-twenty-pound Rottweiler mix? Foaming at the mouth. Roaring. Charging him!” “He ran like a rabbit.” Gregori’s soft, caressing voice echoed his satisfaction. He had taken great pleasure in running that particular jackass off. How dare the man try to lay a hand on Savannah? “No wonder I couldn’t touch the dog’s mind and call him off. You rotten scoundrel.” “After Dragon left you, I chased him for two blocks, and he went up a tree. I kept him there for several hours, just to make a point. He looked like a rooster with his orange comb.” She laughed in spite of her desire not to. “He never came near me again.” “Of course not. It was unacceptable,” he said complacently, with complete satisfaction, the warmth of his breath heating her blood.

The children crowded about the women in the houses. What we going to do Ma? Where we going to go? The women said, We don’t know, yet. Go out and play. But don’t go near your father. He might whale you if you go near him. And the women went on with the work, but all the time they watched the men squatting in the dust–perplexed and figuring. The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up. Diesel tractors, puttering while they stood idle; they thundered when they moved, and then settled down to a droning roar. Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses. The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it–straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent that tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him–goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did now know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor–its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with its blades–not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders–twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gear, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, and had no connection to the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not love or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

The children crowded about the women in the houses. What we going to do Ma? Where we going to go? The women said, We don’t know, yet. Go out and play. But don’t go near your father. He might whale you if you go near him. And the women went on with the work, but all the time they watched the men squatting in the dust–perplexed and figuring. ... The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up. Diesel tractors, puttering while they stood idle; they thundered when they moved, and then settled down to a droning roar. Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses. The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it–straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent that tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him–goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did now know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor–its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with its blades–not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders–twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gear, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, and had no connection to the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not love or hated, it had no prayers or curses.