Drawer Dream Quotes

I'm going to search for my star until I find it. It's hidden in the drawer of innocence, wrapped in a scarf of wonder.

There are many different kinds of bravery. There's the bravery of thinking of others before one's self. Now, your father has never brandished a sword nor fired a pistol, thank heavens. But he has made many sacrifices for his family, and put away many dreams. Michael: Where did he put them? Mrs. Darling: He put them in a drawer. And sometimes, late at night, we take them out and admire them. But it gets harder and harder to close the drawer... He does. And that is why he is brave.

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

I am clumsy, drop glasses and get drunk on Monday afternoons. I read Seneca and can recite Shakespeare by heart, but I mess up the laundry, don’t answer my phone and blame the world when something goes wrong. I think I have a dream, but most of the days I’m still sleeping. The grass is cut. It smells like strawberries. Today I finished four books and cleaned my drawers. Do you believe in a God? Can I tell you about Icarus? How he flew too close to the sun? I want to make coming home your favourite part of the day. I want to leave tiny little words lingering in your mind, on nights when you’re far away and can’t sleep. I want to make everything around us beautiful; make small things mean a little more. Make you feel a little more. A little better, a little lighter. The coffee is warm, this cup is yours. I want to be someone you can’t live without. I want to be someone you can’t live without.

Mother and daughter like spoons in a drawer.

All of a sudden I became aware of a little star in one of those patches and I began looking at it intently. That was because the little star gave me an idea: I made up my mind to kill myself that night. I had made up my mind to kill myself already two months before and, poor as I am, I bought myself an excellent revolver and loaded it the same day. But two months had elapsed and it was still lying in the drawer. I was so utterly indifferent to everything that I was anxious to wait for the moment when I would not be so indifferent and then kill myself. Why -- I don't know.

Whenever he required a small burst of fireworks to his heart, he would remove the folder from the bedside drawer and look at the contents while enjoying a beer or seven.

YOU You are that song that plays rarely on the radio, But when it does I have to sing it out loud… You are the water that formed a puddle on a rainy day,that I played in, When I was only eight years old. You are the first snowfall of the season, And the reason I like the morning... You’re a single seashell that washed up onto the shore. You are my set of old medals Hidden deep in a drawer… You are the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the planets. You are the first breath of a baby just born. Eres una dandelion que encuentro, I pull, make a wish, then blow. You are the sunrise that I tried to paint after I woke up in Eilat. You give the nights its meaning… to dream, while others just sleep. You are my 3rd grade valentine, Read, frayed and loved a thousand times. Eres perfección envuelto en humildad… Eres oro, plata, y diamantes… Eres mi querido viejito Pooh, que nunca lo abandonare. You are my first time driving my brother’s Impala, When I was just fourteen. You are the name hidden deep inside my name… And I’m the fingers interlaced with yours. Eres el PS: I love you at the end la carta, Y yo soy el PS: I love you too. Somos el principio, el medio y la ultima palabra De mi libro final. Eternamente nosotros, nosotros, nosotros… Porque nosotros siempre es mejor Que solamente… yo… YOU

Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours.

Oh, to awake from dreaming! Look, there is the chest of drawers. Let me pull myself out of this waters. But they heap themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing.

Here it is undeveloped, a roll of film with all its mysteries locked up. I never took it anyplace, just left it waiting in a drawer dreaming of stars. That was our time, to see if Lottie Carson was who we thought she was, all those shots we took, cracking up, kissing with our mouths open, laughing, but we never finished it. We thought we had time, running after her, jumping on the bus and trying to glimpse her dimple through the tired nurses arguing in scrubs and the moms on the phone with the groceries in the laps of the kids in the strollers. We hid behind the mailboxes and lampposts half a block away as she kept moving through her neighborhood, where I've never been, the sky getting dark on only the first date, thinking all the while we'd develop it later.

By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, Throw me out! But instead of throwing her out, he seized her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain. Anyone who has failed to benefit from the Devil’s gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was Tomas’s fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina’s letter. He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more.

Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall... Here is something definite, something real. thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours.

Father Brendan Flynn: "A woman was gossiping with her friend about a man whom they hardly knew - I know none of you have ever done this. That night, she had a dream: a great hand appeared over her and pointed down on her. She was immediately seized with an overwhelming sense of guilt. The next day she went to confession. She got the old parish priest, Father O' Rourke, and she told him the whole thing. 'Is gossiping a sin?' she asked the old man. 'Was that God All Mighty's hand pointing down at me? Should I ask for your absolution? Father, have I done something wrong?' 'Yes,' Father O' Rourke answered her. 'Yes, you ignorant, badly-brought-up female. You have blamed false witness on your neighbor. You played fast and loose with his reputation, and you should be heartily ashamed.' So, the woman said she was sorry, and asked for forgiveness. 'Not so fast,' says O' Rourke. 'I want you to go home, take a pillow upon your roof, cut it open with a knife, and return here to me.' So, the woman went home: took a pillow off her bed, a knife from the drawer, went up the fire escape to her roof, and stabbed the pillow. Then she went back to the old parish priest as instructed. 'Did you gut the pillow with a knife?' he says. 'Yes, Father.' 'And what were the results?' 'Feathers,' she said. 'Feathers?' he repeated. 'Feathers; everywhere, Father.' 'Now I want you to go back and gather up every last feather that flew out onto the wind,' 'Well,' she said, 'it can't be done. I don't know where they went. The wind took them all over.' 'And that,' said Father O' Rourke, 'is gossip!

Rapture I can feel she has got out of bed. That means it is seven a.m. I have been lying with eyes shut, thinking, or possibly dreaming, of how she might look if, at breakfast, I spoke about the hidden place in her which, to me, is like a soprano’s tremolo, and right then, over toast and bramble jelly, if such things are possible, she came. I imagine she would show it while trying to conceal it. I imagine her hair would fall about her face and she would become apparently downcast, as she does at a concert when she is moved. The hypnopompic play passes, and I open my eyes and there she is, next to the bed, bending to a low drawer, picking over various small smooth black, white, and pink items of underwear. She bends so low her back runs parallel to the earth, but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly begun. The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking, lift toward the east—what can I say? Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth. Her breasts fall full; the nipples are deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron bars of the gate under the earth where those who could not love press, wanting to be born again. I reach out and take her wrist and she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas. Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again, rummaging in the same low drawer. The clock shows eight. Hmmm. With huge, silent effort of great, mounded muscles the earth has been turning. She takes a piece of silken cloth from the drawer and stands up. Under the falls of hair her face has become quiet and downcast, as if she will be, all day among strangers, looking down inside herself at our rapture.

Because...” he used to cradle his daughter in his arms every morning and often they would exchange soft nuances “...if you can dream it, if you can see it in your visions at night, if you can feel it in your soul, it’s yours! And it never really belonged to anyone else, in the first place! It was always yours!” Viera returned her scroll to the drawer and closed it, she kissed the compass around her neck and climbed into her bed under the warm quilts, the candle flame crackled and the memories of her father’s arms around her embraced her there in bed and his deep, hoarse voice resounded in her ears; “... and if you chance upon a treasure that is yours and it happens to be in the possession of someone else, it’s not very wrong to take what is yours, to take what you dreamed, what you saw in your visions at night, what you felt visit you in your spirit! Sure, it’s not lawful, but aye aye my little one, listen to me when I tell you that the best things in life are not under the laws of any sort! For which law created love? Which law created courage? The best things, the real things, are the things that are not measured by any man’s laws! Fear is the only thing that any law has ever created! And what kind of pirates would we all be if we were afraid of any of our fears, even a little!

The citizens rise and wash, shave and brush. They don stockings and dresses, pants, shirts, and suspenders. They button up their need. Affix their aspirations. Tuck histories neatly inside drawers, creating themselves as they go, a rhapsody of reinvention.

He sat back, his head against the door of the building. Meche, in turn, rested her head against his shoulder. For others, it might have been an intimate gesture. Maybe it was, but not in the way most people might think. Meche and Sebastian were used to each other, comfortable in their proximity. They folded and kept their dreams in the same drawer, spun fantasies side by side, lived in the easy harmony of youth which did not know the need for tall walls and sturdy defenses.

Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of…

All languages that derive fromLatin form the word 'compassion' by combining the prefix meaning 'with' (com-) and the root meaning 'suffering' (Late Latin, passio). In other languages- Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance- this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefixcombined with the word that means 'feeling' (Czech, sou-cit; Polish, wsspół-czucie; German, Mit-gefühl; Swedish, medkänsla). In languages that derive from Latin, 'compassion' means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, 'pity' (French, pitié; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. 'To take pity on a woman' means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves. That is why the word 'compassion' generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love. In languages that form the word 'compassion' not from the root 'suffering' but from the root 'feeling', the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion- joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, współczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme. By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, 'Throw me out!' But instead of throwing her out, he seized her and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain. Anyone who has failed to benefit from the the Devil's gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was Tomas's fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina's letter. He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more.

Then Jip went up to the front of the ship and smelt the wind; and he started muttering to himself, "Tar; Spanish onions; kerosene oil; wet raincoats; crushed laurel-leaves; rubber burning; lace-curtains being washed--No, my mistake, lace-curtains hanging out to dry; and foxes--hundreds of 'em--cubs; and--" "Can you really smell all those different things in this one wind?" asked the Doctor. "Why, of course!" said Jip. "And those are only a few of the easy smells--the strong ones. Any mongrel could smell those with a cold in the head. Wait now, and I'll tell you some of the harder scents that are coming on this wind--a few of the dainty ones." Then the dog shut his eyes tight, poked his nose straight up in the air and sniffed hard with his mouth half-open. For a long time he said nothing. He kept as still as a stone. He hardly seemed to be breathing at all. When at last he began to speak, it sounded almost as though he were singing, sadly, in a dream. "Bricks," he whispered, very low--"old yellow bricks, crumbling with age in a garden-wall; the sweet breath of young cows standing in a mountain-stream; the lead roof of a dove-cote--or perhaps a granary--with the mid-day sun on it; black kid gloves lying in a bureau-drawer of walnut-wood; a dusty road with a horses' drinking-trough beneath the sycamores; little mushrooms bursting through the rotting leaves; and--and--and--" "Any parsnips?" asked Gub-Gub. "No," said Jip. "You always think of things to eat. No parsnips whatever.

Why don’t you and Ali set the table? The forks and knives and spoons are in that drawer.” She pointed to the cabinet by the sink, and Emma began counting out the utensils—four of each. “There’s only three of us,” I said. “You forgot Mr. Bear.” Emma sat the teddy in the extra chair and laid a fork, knife, and spoon in front of him. I laughed a little louder than I’d meant to, in relief, I guess, that Mr. Bear was joining us . . . not the ghost from Emma’s dream.

Noah held his hand out. She accepted it - it was bone-cold, as always - and together they turned to face the huge room. Noah took a deep breath as if they were preparing to explore the jungle instead of stepping deeper into Monmouth Manufacturing. It seemed bigger with just the two of them there. The cobwebbed ceiling soared, dust motes making mobiles overhead. They turned their heads sideways and read the titles of the books aloud. Blue peered at Henrietta through the telescope. Noah daringly reattached one of the broken miniature roofs on Gansey's scale town. They went through the fridge tucked in the bathroom. Blue selected a soda. Noah took a plastic spoon. He chewed on it as Blue fed Chainsaw a leftover hamburger. They closed Ronan's door - if Gansey still managed to inhabit the rest of the apartment, Ronan's presence was still decidedly pervasive in his room. Noah showed Blue his room. They jumped on his perfectly made bed and then they played a bad game of pool. Noah lounged on the new sofa while Blue persuaded the old record player to play an LP too clever to interest either of them. They opened all the drawers on the desk in the main room. One of Gansey's EpiPens bounced against the interior of the topmost drawer as Blue withdrew a fancy pen. She copied Gansey's blocky handwriting onto a Nino's receipt as Noah put on a preppy sweater he'd found balled under the desk. She ate a mint leaf and breathed on Noah's face. Crouching, they crab-walked along the aerial printout Gansey had spread the length of the room. He'd jotted enigmatic notes to himself all along the margin of it. Some of them were coordinates. Some of them were explanations of topography. Some of them were Beatles lyrics.

I’d dreamed once of a forest of gold, and Jesse had done what he could to give it to me. His bedroom had been transformed into a wonderland of leaves and flowers, pinecones and branches of birch and oak, all of it glimmering, all of it singing. The bed was covered, his chest of drawers, the sill. Much of it was jumbled together, beautiful for what it was if not its presentation. Jesse had last left this room on the night of his death, right after he’d called to me, right before he’d gone to the castle. So he would have been scattering his final gift in haste, knowing he worked against the clock. Knowing, somehow, what was to come. Which meant he’d been making gold for weeks. When I’d seen him so tired, when he’d told me all those nights that we should rest apart…he had been doing this. For me. A folded note had been set upon the bed. My name had been scrawled upon it. I love you was all it said inside. I sank to the floor. I looked up and all around as the sun danced through the window and turned Jesse’s room into an ambered heaven of song and shimmer and sparks. That was how Armand found me, hours later. That was what he saw, as well, what he heard, as he walked slowly into the chamber and eased down beside me to rest his back against the bed. We sat there together, listening, marveling. In time, his hand reached out and took firm hold of mine.

waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of….

waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of. . .

When I said I’ve always wanted you, I meant all of you: your body, your ideas, your memories, your whole heart. I want your dreams, your spare drawer, your mornings, your worries. Your triumphs, your laughter, your bad nights and your quiet days. I want your future, Ren.... just so we’re clear." Cole

Oh, to awake from dreaming! Look, there is the chest of drawers. Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing.

—so much more opportunity now." Her voice trails off. "Hurrah for women's lib, eh?" "The lib?" Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. "Oh, that's doomed." The apocalyptic word jars my attention. "What do you mean, doomed?" She glances at me as if I weren't hanging straight either and says vaguely, "Oh …" "Come on, why doomed? Didn't they get that equal rights bill?" Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different. "Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see." Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons. "Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch." No answering smile. "That's fantasy." Her voice is still quiet. "Women don't work that way. We're a—a toothless world." She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine." "Sounds like a guerrilla operation." I'm not really joking, here in the 'gator den. In fact, I'm wondering if I spent too much thought on mahogany logs. "Guerrillas have something to hope for." Suddenly she switches on a jolly smile. "Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City." I smile back with my neck prickling. I thought I was the paranoid one. "Men and women aren't different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do." "Do they?" Our eyes meet, but she seems to be seeing ghosts between us in the rain. She mutters something that could be "My Lai" and looks away. "All the endless wars …" Her voice is a whisper. "All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we're just part of the battlefield. It'll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—" She checks and abruptly changes voice. "Forgive me, Don, it's so stupid saying all this." "Men hate wars too, Ruth," I say as gently as I can. "I know." She shrugs and climbs to her feet. "But that's your problem, isn't it?" End of communication. Mrs. Ruth Parsons isn't even living in the same world with me.

She says you should never wake dreaming people suddenly,' Rahel said. 'She says they could easily have a Heart Attack.' Between them they decided it would be best to disturb her discreetly rather than wake her suddenly. So they opened drawers, they cleared their throats, they whispered loudly, they hummed a little tune. They moved shoes. And found a cupboard door that creaked. Ammu, resting under the skin of her dream, observed them and ached with her love for them.... ...'If you're happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count' Estha asked, 'Does what count?' 'The happiness--does it count?' She knew exactly what he meant... ...Because the truth is, that only what counts counts. The simple, unswerving wisdom of children.

Sara is still a little in her dream--something about her mother, the idea of her, anyway. She is wearing the green cardigan from the picture of her that Sara has in her drawer. And the kitchen. They were sitting together in the kitchen. But matching the words to the dream only dissolves what is left of it, the way certain stars vanish from the sky if you look directly at them.

Martin got up and brushed off the seat of his pants with his hat. He put his hat on his head and started back toward the path. For when you woke from a long dream, into the new morning, then try as you might you couldn't not hear, beyond your door, the sounds of the new day, the drawer opening in your father's bureau, the bang of a pot, you couldn't not see, through your trembling lashes, the stripe of light on the bedroom wall. Boys shouted in the park, on a sunny tree-root he saw a cigar band, red and gold. One of these days he might find something to do in a cigar store, after all he still knew his tobacco, you never forgot a thing like that. But not just yet. Boats moved on the river, somewhere a car horn sounded, on the path a piece of broken glass glowed in a patch of sun as if at any second it would burst into flame. Everything stood out sharply: the red stem of a green leaf, horse clops and the distant clatter of a pneumatic drill, a smell of riverwater and asphalt. Martin felt hungry: chops and beer in a little he remembered on Columbus Avenue. But not yet. For the time being he would just walk along, keeping a little out of the way of things, admiring the view. It was a warm day. He was in no hurry.

Kate stashed her camera gear in the foyer corner, and rested her back against the locked door, her bad leg throbbing. The smell of last night’s lasagna still lingered in small pools of spicy scent around her. She scanned her home. Too bad she’d fallen for this apartment. High ceilings with ornate moldings. Something out of her dreams. She should have known better. She pushed off. Enough memories. First she dug for an envelope from the box she kept stashed in a kitchen drawer. A final

Don’t you see?’ said Connie, hurling cutlery at the drawer. ‘Even if it’s hard, he has to try! If he loves it, we have to let him try. Why must you always have to stomp on his dreams?’ ‘I’ve got nothing against his dreams as long as they’re attainable.’ ‘But if they’re attainable then they’re not dreams!’ ‘And that’s why it’s a waste of time!’ I said. ‘The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.’ ‘He doesn’t want

night.” “Sometimes, yes,” Meggie had said. “But it only works for children.” Which made Mo tweak her nose. Mo. Meggie had never called her father anything else. That night—when so much began and so many things changed forever—Meggie had one of her favorite books under her pillow, and since the rain wouldn’t let her sleep she sat up, rubbed the drowsiness from her eyes, and took it out. Its pages rustled promisingly when she opened it. Meggie thought this first whisper sounded a little different from one book to another, depending on whether or not she already knew the story it was going to tell her. But she needed light. She had a box of matches hidden in the drawer of her bedside table. Mo had forbidden her to light candles at night. He didn’t like fire. “Fire devours books,” he always said, but she was twelve years old, she surely could be trusted to keep an eye on a couple of candle flames. Meggie loved to read by candlelight. She had five candlesticks on the windowsill, and she was just holding the lighted match to one of the black wicks when she heard footsteps outside. She blew out the match in alarm—oh, how well she remembered it, even many years later—and knelt to look out of the window, which was wet with rain. Then she saw him. The rain cast a kind of pallor on the darkness, and the stranger was little more than a shadow. Only his face gleamed white as he looked up at Meggie. His hair clung to his wet forehead. The rain was falling on him, but he ignored it. He stood there motionless, arms crossed over his chest as if that might at least warm him a little. And he kept on staring at the house. I must go and wake Mo, thought Meggie. But she stayed put, her heart thudding, and went on gazing out into the night as if the stranger’s stillness had infected her. Suddenly, he turned his head, and Meggie felt as if he were looking straight into her eyes. She shot off the bed so fast the open book fell to the floor, and she ran barefoot out into the dark corridor. This was the end of May, but it was chilly in the old house. There was still a light on in Mo’s room. He often stayed up reading late into the night. Meggie had inherited her love of books from her father. When she took refuge from a bad dream with him, nothing could lull her to sleep better than Mo’s calm breathing beside her and the sound of the pages turning. Nothing chased nightmares away faster than

My mother has followed us into the house. My mother is the name I’ve given his grief. She was gone long before I knew what death was so, for me, she is an abstract loss, a game of guessing at the life I might have lived. My mother is a collection of stories and inanimate objects. She is a wedding ring in my father’s bedside drawer, a rosehips-flavored tea bag in the back of our kitchen cupboard that we both refuse to use or throw out. She is a picture of someone standing on the rims too far away to see. She is a book underlined only to page seven. She is a pair of burnt rosebushes in the yard that Pop won’t dig up. She is the line between his eyebrows, the groove where his smile would be. She is a feeling in the gut I can’t name or move.

Noboru started awake as something ferociously strong hauled him out of the dresser by the seat of his pants. For a minute, he didn’t realize what had happened. His mother’s slender, supple hands were falling on his nose and lips and mouth and he couldn’t hold his eyes open. It was the first time she had ever laid a hand on him. He lay almost prostrate on the floor, one of his legs thrust into a tangle of shirts and underwear scattered when they had stumbled over the drawer. He hadn’t imagined his mother could muster such terrific strength. Finally he managed to look up at the panting figure glaring down at him. The skirts of her dark-blue robe were wide open, the fleshy swells of her lower body looked grotesquely massive and threatening. Soaring high above the gradually tapering trunk was her face, gasping, grieved, turned horribly old in an instant and drenched in tears. The bulb on the distant ceiling wreathed her bedraggled hair with a lunatic halo. All this Noboru took in at a glance and at the back of his icy brain a memory stirred: it was as if he had participated in this same moment a long time ago. This, beyond a doubt, was the punishment scene he had watched so often in his dreams.

In a dream I sometimes have, I am frantically trying to save as much as I can from my childhood home before I am forced to leave forever because of some disaster. In this dream, from which I awake with my jaw clenched like a fist, I grab whatever I can reach, take whatever I can carry. Always my childhood books and our family photo albums, but sometimes also the silver candlesticks, the things on my father's desk, the paintings on the walls. Maybe it comes from the speed with which my family changed shape one day, maybe it comes from moving, maybe it comes from my grandmother's hinted horror of losing everything in the Holocaust, but I cannot part with a dented pot that I remember my mother putting on the stove each week. Or the sofa my father bought with his first pay cheque, which was never comfortable when I was growing up and is not comfortable now. I cannot part with the lipstick I found softly rolling in an empty drawer months after my mother left. Or a shopping list on an envelope in her handwriting. In a world that changes so quickly, and where everyone eventually leaves, our stuff is the one thing we can trust. It testifies, through the mute medium of Things, that we were part of something greater than ourselves.

Ballad" Oh dream, why do you do me this way? Again, with the digging, again with the digging up. Once more with the shovels. Once more, the shovels full of dirt. The vault lid. The prying. The damp boards. Mother beside me. Like she’s an old hat at this. Like all she’s got left is curiosity. Like curiosity didn’t kill the red cat. Such a sweet, gentle cat it was. Here we go again, dream. Mother, wearing her take-out-the-garbage coat. I haven’t seen that coat in years. The coat she wore to pick me up from school early. She appeared at the back of the classroom, early. Go with your mother, teacher said. Diane, you are excused. I was a little girl. Already a famous actress. I looked at the other kids. I acted lucky. Though everyone knows what an early pick-up means. An early pick-up, dream. What’s wrong, I asked my mother. It is early spring. Bright sunlight. The usual birds. Air, teetering between bearable and unbearable. Cold, but not cold enough to shiver. Still, dream, I shiver. You know, my mother said. Her long garbage coat flying. There was a wind, that day. A wind like a scurrying grandmother, dusting. Look inside yourself, my mother said. You know why I have come for you. And still I acted lucky. Lucky to be out. Lucky to be out in the cold world with my mother. I’m innocent, I wanted to say. A little white girl, trying out her innocence. A white lamb, born into a cold field. Frozen almost solid. Brought into the house. Warmed all night with hair dryers. Death? I said. Smiling. Lucky. We’re barely to the parking lot. Barely to the car ride home. But the classroom already feels like the distant past. Long ago, my classmates pitying me. Arriving at this car full of uncles. Were they wearing suits? Death such a formal occasion. My sister, angry-crying next to me. Me, encountering a fragment of evil in myself. Evilly wanting my mother to say it. What? I asked, smiling. My lamb on full display at the fair. He’s dead! my sister said. Hit me in the gut with her flute. Her flute case. Her rental flute. He’s dead! Our father. Our father, who we were not supposed to know had been dying. He’s dead! The flute gleaming in its red case. Here, my mother said at home. She’d poured us each a small glass of Pepsi We normally couldn’t afford Pepsi. Lucky, I acted. He’s no longer suffering, my mother said. Here, she said. Drink this. The little bubbles flew. They bit my tongue. My evil persisted. What is death? I asked. And now, dream, once more you bring me my answer. Dig, my mother says. Pry, she says. I don’t want to see, dream. The lid so damp it crumbles under my hands. The casket just a drawerful of bones. A drawerful. Just bones and teeth. That one tooth he had. Crooked like mine.

Stopping just short of her mouth, he rasped, “Are you still engaged to Blakeborough?” Her gorgeous eyes narrowed. “My engagement didn’t stop you last night.” “It would now.” A coy smile broke over her lips, and she tightened her grip on his neck. “Then I suppose it’s a good thing I am not.” With a growl of triumph, he kissed her once more. She was here. She was his. Nothing else mattered. Still kissing her, he jerked both sets of curtains closed. Then he tugged her onto his lap and began to tear at the fastenings of her pelisse-dress. He wanted to touch her, taste her…be inside her. He could think of naught else. “I take it that you mean to seduce me,” she murmured between kisses. “Yes.” Seduce her and marry her. And then seduce her again, as often as he could. “Well then, carry on.” So he did. He unfastened her clothes just enough to bare her breasts, then seized one in his mouth. God, she was perfect. His perfect jewel. She buried her hands in his hair to pull her into him, sighing and moaning as if she would die if he didn’t make love to her. Which was exactly how he felt. Working his hand up beneath her skirts and into the slit in her drawers, he found her so wet and hot that he nearly came right there. He slipped a finger inside her silky sweetness, and she gasped, then began to tug at his trouser buttons. “You’re all I want, Jane.” As he stroked her, he used his other hand to brush hers away so he could unfasten his own trouser buttons. “The only woman I ever cared about.” “You’re the only man Iever cared about.” She undulated against his fingers, begging for him with her body. “Why do you think…I waited for you so long?” “Not long enough, apparently,” he muttered, “or you wouldn’t have gotten yourself engaged to Blakeborough.” He tugged at her nipple with his teeth, then relished her cry of pleasure. “I only…did it because I was…tired of waiting.” She arched against his mouth. “Because you clearly weren’t…coming back for me.” “I was sure you hated me.” At last he got his trousers open. “You acted like you hated me still.” “I did.” Her breath was unsteady. “But only because…you tore us apart.” He shifted her to sit astride him. “And now?” Flashing him a provocative smile he would never have dreamed she had in her repertoire, she unbuttoned his drawers. “Do I look like I hate you?” His cock, so hard he thought it might erupt right there and embarrass him, sprang free. “You look like…like…” He paused to take in her lovely face with its flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes, and lush lips. Then he swept his gaze down to her breasts with their brazen tips, displayed so enticingly above the boned corset and her undone shift. He then dropped his eyes to the smooth thighs emerging from beneath her bunched-up skirts. Shoving the fabric higher, he exposed her dewy thatch of curls, and a shudder of anticipation shook him. “You look like an angel.” She uttered a breathy laugh. “A wanton, more like.” Taking his cock in her hand, she stroked it so wonderfully that he groaned. “Would an angel do this?

Live to start. Start to live. Don’t Wait. Start Stuff. People are innately passionate about certain unique aspects of life. You are innately passionate about certain unique aspects of life. And people are blessed with bouts of clear and concise intuition that drive them toward distinct goals and aspirations within their jobs and their lives as a whole.(You are not excluded from this group.) But people disregard these inspired thoughts, these high-potential opportunities, as “just another stupid idea.” Why? Perhaps they are concerned about a lack of support (perceived or otherwise) from others, or maybe they are afraid of what others will think of them if they fail. Whatever the reason, they convince themselves: “This would be a great idea for someone who has more free time.” “This would be a great idea for someone with a higher level of education.” “This would be a great idea for someone who has more money.” “Everybody thinks this idea is crazy. They must be right.” No matter the justification, the response is the same. These inspired thoughts, these high-potential ideas, are stuffed deep into the drawer labeled “stupid,” and they’re never heard from again . . . or the waiting game begins. People wait. They wait for that elusive day when they’ll finally have enough time (guess what? — you never will), enough education (there is always more to know), enough money (no matter how much you make, someone will always have more). They wait until the children are grown (news flash: just because they’re grown, it doesn’t mean you’re rid of them) or until things settle down at work (they never will). People wait until . . . until . . . until . . . They wait, and they wait, and they wait, until that fateful day when they wake up and realize that while they were sitting around, paying dues, earning their keep, waiting for that elusive “perfect time,” their entire life has passed them by.

That the life of Man is but a dream has been sensed by many a one, and I too am never free of the feeling. When I consider the restrictions that are placed on the active, inquiring energies of Man; when I see that all our efforts have no other result than to satisfy needs which in turn serve no purpose but to prolong our wretched existence, and then see that all our reassurance concerning the particular questions we probe is no more than dreamy resignation, since all we are doing is to paint our prison walls with colourful figures and bright views – all of this, Wilhelm, leaves me silent. I withdraw into myself, and discover a world, albeit a notional world of dark desire rather than one of actuality and vital strength. And everything swims before my senses, and I go my way in the world wearing the smile of the dreamer. All our learned teachers and educators are agreed that children do not know why they want what they want; but no one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod. And yet it seems palpably clear to me. I gladly confess, since I know the reply you would want to make, that they are the happiest who, like children, live for the present moment, drag their dolls around and dress and undress them, and watchfully steal by the drawer where Mama has locked away the cake, and, when at last they get their hands on what they want, devour it with their cheeks crammed full and cry, ‘More!’ – They are happy creatures. And those others, who give pompous titles to their beggarly pursuits and even to their passions, and chalk them up as vast enterprises for the good and well-being of mankind, they too are happy. – It is all very well for those who can be like that! But he who humbly perceives where it is all leading, who sees how prettily the happy man makes an Eden of his garden, and how even the unhappy man goes willingly on his weary way, panting beneath his burden, and that all are equally interested in seeing the light of the sun for one minute more – he indeed will be silent, and will create a world from within for himself, and be happy because he is a man. And then, confined as he may be, he none the less still preserves in his heart the sweet sensation of freedom, and the knowledge he can quit this prison whenever he wishes.

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.

All right, then. While it might be beyond her power to stop desiring him entirely, she didn’t have to let him control the attraction. In her years of dreaming of him--the admittedly chaste dreams of a virgin--she had been in control, making him burn and yearn, making him regret that he’d ever put her aside. Perhaps it was time to fulfill those dreams. She opened her eyes to find him watching her with a heavy-lidded gaze that promised all manner of sensual pleasures if she would just give herself over to him. She would make him keep that promise…but without giving up herself. Edwin would undoubtedly disapprove of this dalliance, but just now she didn’t care. Dom was about to learn that she wouldn’t be ruled by him or any other man. Looping her arms about his neck, she rose up on tiptoe to kiss his mouth. This time she was the one to instigate the duel of tongues and lips that sent her senses reeling. This time she was the one in control. Until Dom pulled down her bodice and corset and shift to bare her breasts. Oh, sweet Lord in heaven. He was more wicked--and more wonderful at this--than even she could have imagined. But she could be wicked, too. Remembering what Nancy had told her about men, she reached down between them to cup the hard length of him through his trousers. He jerked back. “What are you doing?” How wonderful to be the one to shock him! Though she noticed he didn’t step away or pull her hand off him. And his flesh seemed to grow beneath her very fingers. “Don’t you like it?” she said in what she hoped was a sultry-sounding voice. “Good God, yes.” He practically groaned the words. “But where the blazes did you learn to do it?” “Nancy said men like to be touched…down there.” “Wonderful. Now the sinner is instructing the saint,” he muttered before he took her mouth again, giving her no chance to protest that she wasn’t as saintly as he assumed. But clearly he’d guessed because he leaned into her hand, letting her fully explore the male appendage that Nancy had only described in furtive whispers. To Jane’s delight, the more she rubbed him through his trousers, the more his kiss changed, grew bolder, hotter, fiercer. How delicious! They had certainly never done anything like this in their youth. Perhaps if they had, he wouldn’t have been so content to toss her aside. It was definitely making her ignite. Or perhaps it was his hands roaming her body doing that. Whichever the case, an unfamiliar ache began between her legs that made her want to squirm. So she focused on caressing him with renewed vigor, hoping to regain control over this…insanity. He grabbed her hand to still it. She tore her mouth from his. “What? Am I doing it wrong?” “If you do it any more right, I will embarrass myself.” He fixed her with a dark stare. “Or perhaps that’s what you want. Another way to torture me.” “I don’t know what you mean. Am I doing it right or am I torturing you? Which is it?” He searched her face, then, apparently satisfied with what he saw there, smiled faintly. “Both.” Taking her by surprise, he dripped onto the pianoforte bench and tugged her across his lap. “Here, I’ll show you.” As he drew her skirts up to her knees, she froze. “I don’t know if this is…such a good idea, Dom.” “Oh, trust me, it’s a fine idea.” He smoothed his hands up her stockings and past her garters until he came to her drawers. “Before you go running off to seal your ‘arrangement’ with Blakeborough, you should at least have a taste of passion. Just so you’ll know how important it really is.” Pressing his mouth to her ear, he added, “Men aren’t the only ones who like to be touched there, sweeting.

You’re all I want, Jane.” As he stroked her, he used his other hand to brush hers away so he could unfasten his own trouser buttons. “The only woman I ever cared about.” “You’re the only man Iever cared about.” She undulated against his fingers, begging for him with her body. “Why do you think…I waited for you so long?” “Not long enough, apparently,” he muttered, “or you wouldn’t have gotten yourself engaged to Blakeborough.” He tugged at her nipple with his teeth, then relished her cry of pleasure. “I only…did it because I was…tired of waiting.” She arched against his mouth. “Because you clearly weren’t…coming back for me.” “I was sure you hated me.” At last he got his trousers open. “You acted like you hated me still.” “I did.” Her breath was unsteady. “But only because…you tore us apart.” He shifted her to sit astride him. “And now?” Flashing him a provocative smile he would never have dreamed she had in her repertoire, she unbuttoned his drawers. “Do I look like I hate you?” His cock, so hard he thought it might erupt right there and embarrass him, sprang free. “You look like…like…” He paused to take in her lovely face with its flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes, and lush lips. Then he swept his gaze down to her breasts with their brazen tips, displayed so enticingly above the boned corset and her undone shift. He then dropped his eyes to the smooth thighs emerging from beneath her bunched-up skirts. Shoving the fabric higher, he exposed her dewy thatch of curls, and a shudder of anticipation shook him. “You look like an angel.” She uttered a breathy laugh. “A wanton, more like.” Taking his cock in her hand, she stroked it so wonderfully that he groaned. “Would an angel do this?” His cock was a rod of iron. “Jane…” He covered her hand to stay it, but she ignored his attempt. “I love it when you can’t control yourself,” she whispered. “I love having you at my mercy. You have no idea…how much I enjoy seeing Dom the Almighty brought low.” He barely registered her words. What she was doing felt so good. So bloody damned good. If she stroked him much more… “I want to be inside you.” He gripped her wrist. “Please, Jane…” Her sensuous smile faltered. “You’ve never said ‘please’ to me before. Not in your whole life.” “Really?” Had he only ever issued orders? If so, no wonder she’d refused him last night. Perhaps it was time to show her she didn’t have to seduce him to gain control. That he could give up his control freely…to her, at least. “Then let me say it now. Please, Jane, make love to me. If you don’t mind.” She stared at him. “I…I don’t know what you mean.” He nodded to his cock, which looked downright ecstatic over the idea. “Get up on your knees and fit me inside you.” Realizing he’d just issued yet another order, he added, “Please. If you want.” Jane got that sultry look on her face again. Like the little seductress she was rapidly showing herself to be, she rose up and then came down on him. By degrees. Very slow degrees. He had trouble breathing. “Am I hurting you?” Her smile broadened as she shimmied down another inch. “Not really.” Stifling a curse, he clutched her arms. “You just…enjoy torturing me.” “Absolutely,” she said and moved his hands to cover her breasts. He was more than happy to oblige her unspoken request, happy to thumb her nipples and watch as her lovely mouth fell open and a moan of pure pleasure escaped her. His cock swelled, and he thrust up involuntarily. “Please…” he said hoarsely. “Please, Jane…” With a choked laugh, she sheathed herself on him. Then her eyes went wide. “Oh, that feels amazing.” “It would feel more amazing if you…would move,” he rasped, though the mere sensation of being buried inside her was making him insane. When she arched an eyebrow, he added, “Please.” “I could get to like this,” she said teasingly. “The begging.

She says you should never wake dreaming people suddenly,' Rahel said. 'She says they could easily have a Heart Attack.' Between them they decided it would be best to disturb her discreetly rather than wake her suddenly. So they opened drawers, they cleared their throats, they whispered loudly, they hummed a little tune. They moved shoes. And found a cupboard door that creaked. Ammu, resting under the skin of her dream, observed them and ached with her love for them.... ...'If you're happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count' Estha asked, 'Does what count?' 'The happiness--does it count?' She knew exactly what he meant...because the truth is, that only what counts counts. The simple, unswerving wisdom of children.

She says you should never wake dreaming people suddenly,' Rahel said. 'She says they could easily have a Heart Attack.' Between them they decided it would be best to disturb her discreetly rather than wake her suddenly. So they opened drawers, they cleared their throats, they whispered loudly, they hummed a little tune. They moved shoes. And found a cupboard door that creaked. Ammu, resting under the skin of her dream, observed them and ached with her love for them.... ...'If you're happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count' Estha asked, 'Does what count?' 'The happiness--does it count?' She knew exactly what he meant... ...Because the truth is, that only what counts counts. The simple, unswerving wisdom of children.

The role of the body was thus to reproduce in action the life of the mind, to emphasize its motor articulations as the orchestra conductor does for a musical score; the brain did not have thinking as its function but that of hindering the thought from becoming lost in dream; it was the organ of attention to life. Such was the conclusion to which I was led by the specially detailed study of normal and pathological facts, more generally through external observation. But only then did I become aware of the fact that inward experience in the pure state, in giving us a “substance” whose very essence is to endure and consequently continually to prolong into the present an indestructible past, would have relieved me from seeking, and would even have forbidden me to seek, where memories are preserved. They preserve themselves, as we admit, for example, when we pronounce a word. In order to pronounce it we have to remember the first half of it while we are articulating the second. But no one will think that the first has been immediately deposited in a drawer, cerebral or otherwise, so that consciousness may come for it a moment later. But if that is the case for the first half of the word, it will be the same for the preceding word, which is an integral part of it as far as sound and meaning are concerned; it will be the same from the beginning of the sentence, and the preceding sentence, and the whole discourse that we could have made very long, indefinitely long had we wished. Now, our whole life, from the time of our first awakening to consciousness, is something like this indefinitely prolonged discourse. Its duration is substantial, indivisible insofar as it is pure duration.

Why aren’t you betrothed to anyone?” he asked with startling directness. “You’ve been out in society for two, three years?” “Three,” Poppy said, feeling more than a little defensive. “Your family is one of means—one would assume you have a generous dowry on the table. Your brother is a viscount—another advantage. Why haven’t you married?” “Do you always ask such personal questions of people you’ve just met?” Poppy asked in amazement. “Not always. But I find you . . . interesting.” She considered the question he had put to her, and shrugged. “I wouldn’t want any of the gentlemen I’ve met during the past three years. None of them are remotely appealing.” “What kind of man appeals to you?” “Someone with whom I could share a quiet, ordinary life.” “Most young women dream of excitement and romance.” She smiled wryly. “I suppose I have a great appreciation for the mundane.” “Has it occurred to you that London is the wrong place to seek a quiet, ordinary life?” “Of course. But I’m not in a position to look in the right places.” She should have stopped there. There was no need to explain more. But it was one of Poppy’s failings that she loved conversation, and like Dodger facing a drawer full of garters, she couldn’t resist indulging. “The problem began when my brother, Lord Ramsay, inherited the title.” The stranger’s brows lifted. “That was a problem?” “Oh, yes,” Poppy said earnestly. “You see, none of the Hathaways were prepared for it. We were distant cousins of the previous Lord Ramsay. The title only came to Leo because of a series of untimely deaths. The Hathaways had no knowledge of etiquette—we knew nothing of the ways of the upper classes. We were happy in Primrose Place.” She paused to sort through the comforting memories of her childhood: the cheerful cottage with its thatched roof, the flower garden where her father had tended his prized Apothecary’s Roses, the pair of lop-eared Belgian rabbits who had lived in a hutch near the back doorstep, the piles of books in every corner. Now the abandoned cottage was in ruins and the garden lay fallow. “But there’s never any going back, is there,” she said rather than asked.

Before I met Rosie, I’d believed that a snake’s personality was rather like that of a goldfish. But Rosie enjoyed exploring. She stretched her head out and flicked her tongue at anything I showed her. Soon she was meeting visitors at the zoo. Children derived the most delight from this. Some adults had their barriers and their suspicions about wildlife, but most children were very receptive. They would laugh as Rosie’s forked tongue tickled their cheeks or touched their hair. Rosie soon became my best friend and my favorite snake. I could always use her as a therapist, to help people with a snake phobia get over their fear. She had excellent camera presence and was a director’s dream: She’d park herself on a tree limb and just stay there. Most important for the zoo, Rosie was absolutely bulletproof with children. During the course of a busy day, she often had kids lying in her coils, each one without worry or fear. Rosie became a great snake ambassador at the zoo, and I became a convert to the wonderful world of snakes. It would not have mattered what herpetological books I read or what lectures I attended. I would never have developed a relationship with Rosie if Steve hadn’t encouraged me to sit down and have dinner with her one night. I grew to love her so much, it was all the more difficult for me when one day I let her down. I had set her on the floor while I cleaned out her enclosure, but then I got distracted by a phone call. When I turned back around, Rosie had vanished. I looked everywhere. She was not in the living room, not in the kitchen, not down the hall. I felt panic well up within me. There’s a boa constrictor on the loose and I can’t find her! As I turned the corner and looked in the bathroom, I saw the dark maroon tip of her tail poking out from the vanity unit. I couldn’t believe what she had done. Rosie had managed to weave her body through all the drawers of the bathroom’s vanity unit, wedging herself completely tight inside of it. I could not budge her. She had jammed herself in. I screwed up all my courage, found Steve, and explained what had happened. “What?” he exclaimed, upset. “You can’t take your eyes off a snake for a second!” He examined the situation in the bathroom. His first concern was for the safety of the snake. He tried to work the drawers out of the vanity unit, but to no avail. Finally he simply tore the unit apart bare-handed. The smaller the pieces of the unit became, the smaller I felt. Snakes have no ears, so they pick up vibrations instead. Tearing apart the vanity must have scared Rosie to death. We finally eased her out of the completely smashed unit, and I got her back in her enclosure. Steve headed back out to work. I sat down with my pile of rubble, where the sink once stood.

Due to the progressing sickness that the doctors appeared not to understand, I could only hold a job for months before I would be laid off. My manager would slowly become aware that I had health issues. Chronic fatigue and mental confusion are hard to hide on a daily basis! I was working for older electrical engineering managers and they also appeared to have health issues. One was constantly taking vitamin energy drinks, another had a brain tumor removed in the past, another would open his desk drawer and there would be several bottles of prescription medications in there, and another had been wondering the streets in confused state a year earlier! Engineering staff I was supervising had unusual personalities and issues with progressing their work. Some appeared to have health issues comparable to my own. This was the reality of my “American Dream”.

She pulls a notebook from her desk drawer. It’s cheaply made—the black dye fading to a murky mauve, the pages coming unglued—but it’s her most beloved possession. (It was her very first possession, the very first thing she purchased with her own money after she left St. Hale’s.) The notebook is filled with witch-tales and nursery rhymes, stolen scraps and idle dreams and anything that catches Beatrice’s eye. If she were a scholar she might refer to her notes as research, might imagine it typed and bound on a library shelf, discussed in university halls, but she isn’t and it won’t be. Now she copies the verse about the wayward sisters into the little black book, besides all the other stories she’ll never tell and spells she’ll never work.

Oh, he’d taken plenty. Some things he’d taken in great handfuls. Giant pieces. My dreams of being a teacher. My education. My autonomy. And some I’d simply handed him, learning quickly that my dignity meant more to him than it did to me. And now I owned this house. Everything that had been his. Everything he’d taken from me, I had a chance to get back. How? How does someone do that? Like, in what drawer would I find my ambition? My confidence? Was my faith on a bookshelf in his office? I imagined finding those things, putting them on like jewelry. Too-big rings that would fall off my fingers. Who the fuck am I anymore?

I don’t know what’s stronger—the humiliation or the death of the dream. He was the one, wasn’t he? The jewelry, the flowers, the late nights, the box in the drawer. I’ve been hurt so many times, but it was worth it because it led me to him.

Her momma finds her stray hair still left in the bathroom sink. Where she combed out her ratty do for what seemed like forever. Staring at herself in the mirror and pulling and teasing and shaping all that her stingy god would give her and nothing ever more. She’d contemplate her face there. Her flat wide nose and dark eyes and the combinations. She’d test her looks to see how she looked when she kissed. She'd extend her tongue as far out of her mouth as she could to check out how long it was and if she had anything extra special to offer. And what she'd have to do to serve it up. Momma grabs a kleenex and cleans around the deep rust stains in the sink. Does she throw away the old dry hairs crumbled in her hand under the tissue or keep such sad memories. Does she store them in a drawer or is she just being silly. Should she cherish this precious angel manna or try and just fucking get over it. Not give into it. Could she even possibly throw them away into the garbage without bawling uncontrollably. Can she possibly change the urge over from utter despair. When she sees her child getting brutally raped and hammered into, her baby's baby fingers digging into the rocks and dirt she can pass by daily. A dilapidated pit that crumbles in the middle of all their continuing lives and remains standing out of sheer old bull-headed promise and well organized planning. The forefathers of this neighborhood didn't count on the incredibly heavy weight of the public’s filthy laziness. My poor baby. My poor baby. She has to seek help. This nameless faceless mother. She can’t deal with this all alone. She can’t quit these imaginings from her old yellowed eyes and ears and off her cleaning washing working fingertips and the very constant edges of her smaller brain. The sickness that slipped thick repetitive blobs of useless male sperm and thin streams of rust washed metal stripping toxins bleeding down her daughter’s black throat may or may not be only one in a great number of difficult dreams and attempts but she just can’t find a polite perspective anymore. She can’t live like this any longer. She should have offered her child more than a dirty smudged mirror in a peeling and running bathroom when she got home from a dirty hot school every damn day. Where were the cops? And the doctors who were supposed to save her? And the fucking psychiatrists who could have done some trepanning into that evil dog's motherfucking bursting crack head before he was let out on the streets with his glass dick and his screaming pussy hunting cock. Dogs don't need help. They need to be put down.

And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep. Rolling over, fumbling through a bedside drawer, finding a Porsche pen, a present from an assistant grip, she inscribed her treasure on the glossy back of an Italian fashion magazine:

If you want to mimic spoons in a drawer, I promise I won't think anythin' of it." She realized that curling the same way they'd fit much better. She sighed. "Okay, but I get to be the big spoon. I don't want to accidentally bump into your..." "Knife?" he supplied.

Between the carnival barker nature of our society—in which the winner, winner, winners are pronounced and paraded about with great fanfare so as to perpetuate the dream—and our overt obsession with wealth as a society, it appears as though more than half the people in our lives are rich. And yes, clearly, we can consciously separate the reality of those that we interact with personally from those whom we merely watch from a distance. But make no mistake, the American Dream appears alive and well when half of the people that you can name are millionaires, and it doesn’t matter whether you know any of them personally. Really, this illusion is probably worse now than ever, because we live in a world in which Facebook allows us to hoard past acquaintances like trinkets in the junk drawer. These people have about as much direct interaction with us as the millionaires who are trotted before us on the newsstands, on the radio, on the television, at the stadium, in the movies, in the bookstore, and of course, in Congress. The fact of the matter is, you can almost certainly name more winners of the American Dream than you can personal friends, even if you include all of your acquaintances. This means, every time we see yet another famous person on TV, we are likely watching someone who is the beneficiary of the American Dream. And some of those Dreamers may even have a good story about how they rose from poverty to achieve their accomplishments, which is often held up as evidence that you, no matter who you are, or from whence you came, with hard work, can become a bona fide multimillionaire. No, you really can’t. It’s a mirage. A charade. A farce. An illusion, in which a long shot is presented as if it’s even odds.

Twelve years ago you decided what I deserved, and I ended up alone. So this time I will decide what I deserve.” Ignoring a twinge of self-consciousness, she faced him and began to undo the front fastenings of her pelisse-robe. “And I deserve this. I deserve you.” His breathing grew labored as he stared at her hands with a searing intensity. “What are you doing, Jane?” “What does it look like?” She slid out of her gown and let it fall to the floor, leaving her standing before him in only her petticoats, corset, and shift. “I’m seducing you.” Dom’s eyes narrowed on her, and she panicked. Was she being too bold? Too shameless? Too daft? She was daft, to be standing half-dressed like this in a stable, when all it would take was a groom coming down from his room above to turn this into the most mortifying night of her life. But she’d die before she let Dom see her squirm. With forced bravado, she planted her hands on her hips. “Well? Are you going to leave me here like this?” Even as the words left her lips, she spotted the rather pronounced bulge in his trousers. That’s all she had time to notice before he was striding up to grab her head in both hands and seize her mouth with his once more. This time their kiss was a war of tongues and teeth, both striving for mastery. Their hands darted everywhere in a thrilling flurry of unfastening and untying, a rush to see who could get the other one naked first. His boots ended in one corner, her half boots in another. Their clothes soon pooled around them on the floor of the harness room. He got her shirt off, then stepped back before she could divest him of his drawers, and for one heart-stopping moment she feared he was having more second thoughts. “Dom?” she asked, her cheeks flaming as she stood naked before him. She’d never stood naked before anyone, even a maid. But the way Dom was scouring her with his rough gaze felt like a caress. A very carnal caress, which loosed a bevy of butterflies in her belly. “I’ve spent years dreaming of you like this, sweeting,” he rasped. “Give me a moment to take it all in.” “If you wish,” she whispered. And that would give her a moment to take him in.

Dom?” she asked, her cheeks flaming as she stood naked before him. She’d never stood naked before anyone, even a maid. But the way Dom was scouring her with his rough gaze felt like a caress. A very carnal caress, which loosed a bevy of butterflies in her belly. “I’ve spent years dreaming of you like this, sweeting,” he rasped. “Give me a moment to take it all in.” “If you wish,” she whispered. And that would give her a moment to take him in. Although, sweet Lord in heaven, it might require more than a moment. She’d seen men half-dressed in paintings and even less-dressed in sculptures. But those smooth-skinned bodies were insipid compared to Dom’s hard contours and scarred male beauty. How could she have guessed that such sheer virility lay beneath his subdued clothes? His deliciously muscular chest gleamed with sweat in the warm stable, and his powerful arms lay tense at his sides. Then there was his lean waist, which gave way to rangy hips sporting quite a bulge beneath his drawers. Lord help her. She couldn’t take her eyes from that impressive thickness. And the more she stared, the more it seemed to grow. “This is what you do to me, Jane,” he said in a voice raw with hunger. He grabbed her hand to press it against him there. “I’ve desired you from the day we first met.” As his flesh moved beneath the stockinette, she swallowed. “I don’t recall ever seeing you like this back then--all…big and thrusting. I think I would have noticed.” He choked back a laugh. “It’s the sort of thing a gentleman generally takes great pains to keep his lady from seeing. But tonight you’re making it difficult for me to behave.” “Good! I don’t want you to behave. I want you to be wicked.” She fondled him shamelessly. “With me.” A harsh breath escaped him. “You have no idea what being wicked entails.” “Then perhaps you should show me.” His eyes glinted in the lantern light and he growled, “Perhaps I should.

She awakened with a start to find Macon standing at the foot of the bed, watching her with a grin stretched across his face. His finger and thumb still lingered on her big toe. Stunned, she scooted toward the headboard, as if it could lend her some protection, her eyes wide. Steven’s .45 was in the drawer of the nightstand on his side of the bed. She inched in that direction. “What are you doing here?” she croaked. Macon dragged his eyes over her lush figure, her sleep-rumpled underthings made of the thinnest lawn, and smiled. “You might say I’ve come to admire the spoils. It won’t be long now, Emma, dear. Things are going very badly for Steven. Soon you’ll be giving me fine, redheaded sons. Of course, I won’t be able to keep you here at Fairhaven—that would be indiscreet. We’ll have to get you a place in town.” Emma tried to shield her breasts with one arm as she moved nearer and nearer the side of the bed. “You’re vile, Macon Fairfax, and I’d sooner die than let you touch me. Now, get out of here before I scream!” “You can scream all you want,” he chuckled, spreading his hands wide of his lithe body. “There’s nobody here but the servants, and they wouldn’t dream of interfering, believe me.” Emma swallowed hard. She couldn’t be sure whether he was bluffing; after all, this was Macon’s house as well as Cyrus’s. If he gave instructions, they were probably obeyed. “Get out,” she said again. Her hand was on the knob of the nightstand drawer, but she knew she wasn’t going to have time to get the pistol out and aim it before Macon was on her. He was too close, and his eyes showed that he knew exactly what she meant to do. “It won’t be so bad, Emma,” he coaxed, his voice a syrupy croon by then. “I know how to make you happy, and you’re in just the right place for me to prove it.” “Don’t touch me,” Emma breathed, shrinking back against the headboard, her eyes wide with horror. “Steven will kill you if you touch me!” “You wouldn’t tell him.” Macon was standing over her by then, looking down into her face. She could see a vein pulsing at his right temple as he set his jaw for a moment. “You’d keep it to yourself because he wouldn’t have a chance in hell of winning this case if he assaulted me in a fit of rage—would he?” Emma’s heart was thundering against her ribs and she was sure she was going to throw up. She tried to move away from Macon, but he reached out and grasped her hard by the hair. “Please,” she whispered. He indulged in a small, tight smile. “Don’t humiliate yourself by begging, darling. It won’t save you. Keep your pleas for those last delicious moments before pleasure overtakes you.” Bile rushed into the back of Emma’s throat. “Let me go.” He pressed her flat against the mattress, his hand still entangled in her hair. She gazed up at him in terror, unable to speak at all. The crash of the door against the inside wall startled them both. Emma’s eyes swung to the doorway, and so did Macon’s. Nathaniel was standing there, still dressed in the suit he’d worn to Steven’s trial, his tie loose, his Fairfax eyes riveted on his cousin’s face. In his shaking hand was a derringer, aimed directly at Macon’s middle. “Let her go,” he said furiously. Macon released Emma, but only to shrug out of his coat and hang it casually over the bedpost. “Get out of here, Nathaniel,” he said, sounding as unconcerned as if he were about to open a book or pour himself a drink. “This is business for a man, not a boy.” Emma was breathing hard, her eyes fixed on Nathaniel, pleading with him. With everything in her, she longed to dive for the other side of the bed and run for her life, but she knew she wouldn’t escape Macon. Not without Nathaniel’s help. “I won’t let you hurt her,” the boy said with quiet determination. The derringer, wavering before, was steady now. Macon

Paris It's that time to transform To come around, I'm changin' Oh, there's an angel knockin' on my window Tryin' to tell me where to go next It's a small town without you It feels cold, it's creepin' Moving on I look ahead instead Spirit divide Drift alone I waved her goodbye I carried on Dreams pass My black dress Folded on a big mess I'm changing my next flight to Paris The hour glass, a tick tock too fast for a destiny I've got a full drawer of letters Remember it was Paris you said we were gonna meet Why your answer machine's still on? It's the oddest feeling since you're gone A part of me drift away with you And will never return Spirit divide Drift alone I waved her goodbye I carried on Dreams pass My black dress Folded on a big mess I'm changing my next flight to Paris Spirit divide I waved her goodbye Dreams pass My black dress Folded on a big mess I'm changing my next flight

The night wind whispered, rattling the bark on the roof. She strained her ears. A footstep? A rustle of leather? She set her rosary aside and crawled to the window. Silver light shifted in the swaying trees along the river, and she felt a cool breeze. Oh, Lordy, her pantalets were gone! She clutched the sill and eased her head through the square. What she saw didn’t surprise her. Hunter sat astride his horse, right out in the open, bold and challenging. The wind caught his hair, whipping it about his carved features. He lifted a powerfully muscled arm to her in silent salute, his fist clutching her wet drawers. For several endless seconds they stared at one another, then he wheeled his horse, his arm still held high, her ruffled underwear fluttering like a flag of glory behind him. Loretta watched long after he rode from sight. I’m dreaming. He wasn’t really there. I’ve just been dreaming. She had nearly convinced herself when her gaze fell to the edge of the roof. Where was her bowl? Had the heathen lowlife swiped that as well? Then she spotted it sitting under the window. She knew then that the Comanche had been there and had stared at her while she dreamed of him. She couldn’t make herself touch the bowl. He had touched it. Oh, mercy. And now he had her drawers. Had he spied on her while she bathed? The thought made her feel naked as sin.

Maybe I’m not being forceful enough. The Darling in my dream hit the trunk with more of a thump than a knock. I try again and— A drawer pops open. And nestled inside, aged by decades of waiting, is a box.

Then he had a vision. He saw his body laid out before him, his bare, thin chest in the foreground, his long legs and feet receding to the horizon, and his heart burst out of his flesh like a bladder full of black paint, splashing warmth across his face. He lay supine and watched his body for days, his blood congealing as the sun rose and fell in the world outside. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he saw his toes pressed against the cold steel of a morgue drawer, and when he blinked, cold silver gave way to the hot brick walls of a crematorium. He burned. He felt hot and cold but he could not move and could not cry out. He dreamed of no others, no witnesses, no mourners, no morticians or undertakers. No one touched his body. It propelled itself through the stages of death as it had through life, of its own accord, alone.

In New York I’d had a perennially sawdust-encrusted sculpture professor, who told my class, ‘You’ll know you’re a New Yorker when you have a dream where you discover another room in your apartment, through a closet, or behind a chest of drawers – if your subconscious is carving out legroom, you’re one of us.

I had the piece hanging on my fridge—removed when friends came over—and six more copies stuffed into my desk drawer. The seventh I’d mailed to my mother in Virginia.

A withered woman sits in a chair hardly moving, her face red and swollen, her eyesight almost gone, her hearing gone, her breathing scratchy like the rustle of dead leaves on stones. Years pass. There are few visitors. Gradually, the woman gains strength, eats more, loses the heavy lines in her face. She hears voices, music. Vague shadows gather themselves into light and lines and images of tables, chairs, people’s faces. The woman makes excursions from her small house, goes to the market, occasionally visits a friend, drinks tea at cafés in good weather. She takes needles and yarn from the bottom drawer of her dresser and crochets. She smiles when she likes her work. One day her husband, with whitened face, is carried into her house. In hours, his cheeks become pink, he stands stooped over, straightens out, speaks to her. Her house becomes their house. They eat meals together, tell jokes, laugh. They travel through the country, visit friends. Her white hair darkens with brown streaks, her voice resonates with new tones. She goes to a retirement party at the gymnasium, begins teaching history. She loves her students, argues with them after class. She reads during her lunch hour and at night. She meets friends and discusses history and current events. She helps her husband with the accounts at his chemist’s store, walks with him at the foot of the mountains, makes love to him. Her skin becomes soft, her hair long and brown, her breasts firm. She sees her husband for the first time in the library of the university, returns his glances. She attends classes. She graduates from the gymnasium, with her parents and sister crying tears of happiness. She lives at home with her parents, spends hours with her mother walking through the woods by their house, helps with the dishes. She tells stories to her younger sister, is read to at night before bed, grows smaller. She crawls. She nurses.

This should’ve been the best, most exciting time of my life. It was my senior year, and my dream program had accepted me. Instead of celebrating, I was moping like a…well, a heartbroken teenager. And even though that was half correct, I was sick of it. Sick of letting men who didn’t give two shits about me have this hold over me. Sick of being the object of pitying looks and worried whispers. Maybe I was that person in the past, but not anymore. Anger and indignation rushed through my veins, compelling me to get out of bed and rifle through my drawers until I found what I was looking for. I put it on, covered it up with a hoodie and jeans, and shoved my feet into boots. I walked down the stairs and found my friends huddled in the living room.

You think you know me me, my daughter-in-law, but you don't. For instance, I bet you don't know I'm a space traveler. But I am. And I do. In my mind, I travel through time and space in ways you cannot even dream of - from Ohio to Bombay to Ohio again; from the land of the living to the land of the dead, where my Rustom resides; from my wallpapered bedroom in this house, to my painted bedroom in Bombay, of which I know every inch - where the embroidered handkerchiefs are kept in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers, what books are on the bedside table; the color of the frame that holds the painted picture of Lord Zoroaster that Rustom got me for my fiftieth birthday. Yes, I may be older than you, Susan, and my knees my creak when I got up in the morning, but I can run faster and fly higher than you will ever know.

Home is our school of intimacy, where we first learn to be human. Its corners and nooks conceal the sweetness of solitude; its rooms frame our experience of relationship. Its shelter, stability, and security work to concentrate our unique inner sense of self, an identity that imbues our day dreams and night dreams forever. Its hiding places—closets, chests, drawers, locks, and keys—satisfy our need for mystery and independence. Doors—locked, closed, half shut, wide open—trigger our sense of wonder, safety, possibility, and adventure.

The wall decorations were dusty metal lobsters and faded pictures of ships. The bedspread had cigarette burns. Inside the nightstand drawer were a complimentary pen and three postcards. “Vacation Dreams Begin at the Coastal Dreams Motel.” I went out to the machine and got a soda. The sun was going down; the sky was orange and pink.

The Gray Man set the pistol back in its drawer and pushed it closed. He checked his watch. He had twenty minutes to pick up his rental car. He might upgrade to a midsize. He hated compact cars nearly as much as he hated public transportation.

To go back for a moment to that "paper-piled table" in Melville's room at Twenty-sixth Street: on it stood an inclined plane that for lack of more accurate designation one must call "desk"; for though it had a pebbled green-paper surface, it had no cavity for inkwell, no groove for pen and pencil, no drawer for papers, like the little portable desks that where cherished as heirlooms in the late nineteenth century. Rather, it was open underneath; and pasted on one side wall, well out of sight, it was a printed slip of paper that read simply, "Keep true to dreams of thy youth

(Those skyscrapers were like the wooden chests with hundreds of drawers that held ingredients in a Chinese medicine shop and reached all the way to the ceiling. Did people never get the wrong door?) The flocks of pretty women were enough to make you lose your head, but they were gone in a flash, as fleeting as beautiful clouds floating across the sky, ephemeral and forgettable.