Flooring Business Quotes

Though Alec had never seen the occupants of the first floor loft, they seemed to be engaged in a tempestuous romance. Once there had been a bunch of someone's belongings strewn all over the landing with a note attached to a jacket lapel addressed to "A lying liar who lies." Right now there was a bouquet of flowers taped to the door with a card tucked among the blooms that read I'M SORRY. That was the thing about New York: you always knew more about your neighbors' business than you wanted to.

Despite the business and auto-rickshaws and bantering Bengalis just beyond his brown front door, Sanjit cultivates a distinct learning environment and energy, one created and galvanized above the tile floors, within the thin walls, below the imperative ceiling fans, and embraced by books.

These days, however, I am much calmer - since I realised that it’s technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism, you wouldn’t be allowed to have a debate on women’s place in society. You’d be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor - biting down on a wooden spoon, so as not to disturb the men’s card game - before going back to quick-liming the dunny. This is why those female columnists in the Daily Mail - giving daily wail against feminism - amuse me. They paid you £1,600 for that, dear, I think. And I bet it’s going in your bank account, and not your husband’s. The more women argue loudly, against feminism, the more they both prove it exists and that they enjoy its hard-won privileges.

I closed my eyes instead. And Puck kissed me. “If you are going to do that, would you mind not jostling the bed so much?” came a sarcastic voice near the headboard. “Perhaps you could roll around on the floor.” Blushing furiously, I looked up. Grimalkin lay on the pillow, watching us with a bemused, half-lidded stare. Puck followed my gaze and let out an explosive sigh. “Did I ever mention how much I hate cats?” “Do not blame me, Goodfellow.” Grimalkin blinked, managing to sound bored and indignant at the same time. “I was minding my own business long before you and the princess started humping like rabbits.

There will never be peace between us. Ever. You shattered any hope of it when you watched your brother kill me and refused to speak up on my behalf. (Acheron) I was afraid. (Artemis) And I was butchered and gutted on the floor like an animal sacrifice. Excuse me if I don’t feel your pain. I’m too busy with my own. (Acheron)

Give me a cat over a kid any day.   You can open up a bag of Meow Mix, plop it down on the floor next to a bucket of water, go on vacation for a week, and come home to an animal that is so busy licking it’s own ass that it has no idea you were even gone.   You can’t do that with a kid.   Well, I guess you could, but I’m sure it’s frowned upon in most circles.   And if my kid could lick his own ass, I’d have saved a shit load of money on diapers, I can tell you that.

It’s important to keep up appearances with books,” I explained. “Image goes a long way in this business.” He dared a look over at me, still nervous but steadily recovering his composure. “I go more for content.” "Really?” I repositioned slightly so that we were touching again, the soft flannel of his shirt brushing my bare skin. “Because I could have sworn a moment ago you were pretty caught up in outside appearance.” His eyes shifted down again, but I could see a smile curving his lips. “Well. Some things are so striking, they can’t help but draw attention to themselves.” "And doesn’t that make you curious about what’s inside?” "Mostly it makes me want to get you some advanced copies.” Advanced copies? What did he—? "Seth? Seth, where—ah, there you are.” Paige turned down our aisle, Doug following behind. She brightened when she saw me, and I felt my stomach sink out of me and hit the floor with a thud as I put two and two together. No. No. It couldn’t be— "Ah, Georgina. I see you’ve already met Seth Mortensen.

I’m going to tell you something once and then whether you die is strictly up to you," Westley said, lying pleasantly on the bed. "What I’m going to tell you is this: drop your sword, and if you do, then I will leave with this baggage here"—he glanced at Buttercup—"and you will be tied up but not fatally, and will be free to go about your business. And if you choose to fight, well, then, we will not both leave alive." You are only alive now because you said 'to the pain.' I want that phrase explained." My pleasure. To the pain means this: if we duel and you win, death for me. If we duel and I win, life for you. But life on my terms. The first thing you lose will be your feet. Below the ankle. You will have stumps available to use within six months. Then your hands, at the wrists. They heal somewhat quicker. Five months is a fair average. Next your nose. No smell of dawn for you. Followed by your tongue. Deeply cut away. Not even a stump left. And then your left eye—" And then my right eye, and then my ears, and shall we get on with it?" the Prince said. Wrong!" Westley’s voice rang across the room. "Your ears you keep, so that every shriek of every child shall be yours to cherish—every babe that weeps in fear at your approach, every woman that cries 'Dear God, what is that thing?' will reverberate forever with your perfect ears. That is what 'to the pain' means. It means that I leave you in anguish, in humiliation, in freakish misery until you can stand it no more; so there you have it, pig, there you know, you miserable vomitous mass, and I say this now, and live or die, it’s up to you: Drop your sword!" The sword crashed to the floor.

Much were bent over in laughter. I pushed him, and he rolled to the floor without my intended insult. “Come off it!” I stamped my foot. “What’s so funny?” John asked, coming over in the middle of eating an apple. He tossed me an apple and I threw it at Much. He only laughed harder. “K-k-kissed Scar!” he hooted. “Someone kissed you?” John asked, turning to me. He didn’t look like it were too funny. “Who is he?” This made Much laugh more. “None of your business, John Little,” I told him. He stepped closer to me with a flat face that, if I could ape it, I’d never be kissed by a stupid girl when I didn’t want to be. “Who, Scar?” “Jenny Percy!” Much roared. John’s face broke open, like a smile could split a black mood. “Wait till Rob hears this.

Peeta smiles and douses Haymitch's knife in white liquor from a bottle on the floor. He wipes the blade clean on his shirt tail and slices the bread. Peeta keeps all of us in fresh baked goods. I hunt. He bakes. Haymitch drinks. We have our own ways to stay busy, to keep thought of our time as contestants in the Hunger Games at bay.

Cookie had taken her daughter amber to school then walked the thirty-something feet to work earlier. Our business was on the second floor of Calamity's, my dad's bar, which sat right in front of our apartment building. The short commute was nice and rarely invloved rabid raccoons.

I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed...and as it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one's own.

She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor. The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground. One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.

Despair busies one, and my weekend was spoken for. I was going to lie down on the floor of my apartment in the draft of the air conditioner and spend two days and nights traveling a circuit of regret, self-pity, and jealousy.

Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower. The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the minimum wage—which sets a floor for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today, it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15.

Didn’t you see what it was standing on?” “The floor?” Harry suggested. “I wasn’t looking at its feet, I was too busy with its heads.

...it's technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism you wouldn't be allowed to have a debate on a woman's place in society. You'd be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor -- biting down on a wooden spoon, so as not to disturb the men's card game -- before going back to hoeing the rutabaga field.

You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar ,but the door is now metal instead of wood,the walls have been painted a garish pink ,the easy chair you loved so much is gone .Your office is now the family room and your beloved bookcases have been replaced by a brand-new television set . This is your house,and it is not. And you are no longer relevant to this house , to its walls and doors and floors ; you are not seen .

Even in the weak morning light trickling through the bakery’s window, Wylan could see how weary Colm looked. “I made some big mistakes.” Wylan drew a line on the floor with his finger. “You gave him someone to run to. No matter what he did or what went wrong. I think that’s bigger than the big mistakes.” “See now? That’s why he likes you. I know, I know—it’s none of my business, and I have no idea if he’d be good for you. Probably bring you ten kinds of headache. But I think you’d be good for him.” Wylan’s face heated. He knew how much Colm loved Jesper, had seen it in every gesture he’d made. It meant something that he thought Wylan was good enough for his son.

Nothing was left to chance; every smell, every piece of furniture, and certainly the design of the floor plans made these model homes world-class.

Dear Angry Older People, over 21-ish, anyone who considers themselves an adult, still bitter: Next time you're wondering what wrong with kids today, you might wanna check the examples you've been giving us to work with. Because if you ever want to make sense of us, you’ve got to make sense to us, without telling us you’re too old to walk that far. You’ve got to try to understand why we like looking like rag dolls, why we like looking like the way we feel, and why we keep our senses floored when it’s you behind the wheel. And if you ever really do want to understand why we seem so angry, well for one, you told us we could be anything we wanted to be, but right now, we’re a little busy dodging bombs.

...I require a vacation from all of you, but I’m not leaving Camorr. You five will be making a journey to Espara. I’ve arranged work there to keep you busy for several months.” “Espara?” said Locke. “Yes. Isn’t it exciting?” The room was quiet. “I thought that might be your response. Look, I tucked a pin into my jacket for this very moment.” Chains drew a silver pin from one of his lapels and tossed it into the air. It hit the floor with the faintest chiming clatter. “One of those expressions I’ve always wanted to put to the test,” said Chains.

The sun had already set behind the mountains, and the sky had been drained of color. The trellises of sauvignon blanc flowed down the hill in even rows toward the valley floor. Whatever I was looking for, it wasn’t outside. As far as I could tell, the grapes were minding their own business.

Somehow: Molly. He heard her in the entryway. Mol, Molly, oh boy. When they were first married they used to fight. Say the most insane things. Afterward, sometimes there would be tears. Tears in bed? And then they would - Molly pressing her hot wet face against his hot wet face. They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone's affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he'd ever - She came in flustered and apologetic, a touch of anger in her face. He'd embarrassed her. He saw that. He'd embarrassed her by doing something that showed she hadn't sufficiently noticed him needing her. She'd been too busy nursing him to notice how scared he was. She was angry at him for pulling this stunt and ashamed of herself for feeling angry at him in his hour of need, and was trying to put the shame and anger behind her now so she could do what might be needed. All of this was in her face. He knew her so well. Also concern. Overriding everything else in that lovely face was concern. She came to him now, stumbling a bit on a swell in the floor of this stranger's house.

You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him--the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints--is a fool and a Don Quixote. Good. And it has been just the same for me, my friend. I was a gifted girl. I was meant to live up to a high standard, to expect much of myself and do great things. I could have played a great part. I could have been the wife of a king, the beloved of a revolutionary, the sister of a genius, the mother of a martyr. And life has allowed me just this, to be a courtesan of fairly good taste, and even that has been hard enough. That is how things have gone with me. For a while I was inconsolable and for a long time I put the blame on myself. Life, thought I, must in the end be in the right, and if life scorned my beautiful dreams, so I argued, it was my dreams that were stupid and wrong headed. But that did not help me at all. And as I had good eyes and ears and was a little inquisitive too, I took a good look at this so-called life and at my neighbors and acquaintances, fifty or so of them and their destinies, and then I saw you. And I knew that my dreams had been right a thousand times over, just as yours had been. It was life and reality that were wrong. It was as little right that a woman like me should have no other choice than to grow old in poverty and in a senseless way at a typewriter in the pay of a money-maker, or to marry such a man for his money's sake, or to become some kind of drudge, as for a man like you to be forced in his loneliness and despair to have recourse to a razor. Perhaps the trouble with me was more material and moral and with you more spiritual--but it was the same road. Do you think I can't understand your horror of the fox trot, your dislike of bars and dancing floors, your loathing of jazz and the rest of it? I understand it only too well, and your dislike of politics as well, your despondence over the chatter and irresponsible antics of the parties and the press, your despair over the war, the one that has been and the one that is to be, over all that people nowadays think, read and build, over the music they play, the celebrations they hold, the education they carry on. You are right, Steppenwolf, right a thousand times over, and yet you must go to the wall. You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easygoing and easily contented world of today. You have a dimension too many. Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life today must not be like you and me. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours--

Give me a cat over a kid any day.  You can open up a bag of Meow Mix, plop it down on the floor next to a bucket of water, go on vacation for a week, and come home to an animal that is so busy licking it’s own ass that it has no idea you were even gone. 

We went down the stairs to the café on the ground floor. I had discovered that was the best way to get rid of friends. Once you had a drink all you had to say was: “Well, I’ve got to get back and get off some cables,” and it was done. It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working.

Imagine standing by a window at night, on the sixth or seventeenth or forty-third floor of a building. The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can't reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.

A doorman opened the door for me and I went in. The lobby was not quite as big as the Yankee Stadium. It was floored with a pale blue carpet with sponge rubber underneath. It was so soft it made me want to lie down and roll.

She perks up and smiles. “Are you asking me out on a real, live date?” I nod my head. “Well, you suck at it, you know. You always have. Sometimes girls like to be asked and not told.” She’s trying to play hard to get, which is pointless. I’ve already got her…but I play her game anyway. I kneel down on the floor in front of her and look into her eyes. “Lake, will you do me the honor of accompanying me on a date tomorrow night? ” She leans back into the couch and looks away. “I don’t know, I’m sort of busy,” she says. “I’ll check my schedule and let you know.” She tries to look put out, but a smile breaks out on her face. She leans forward and hugs me, but I lose my balance and we end up in the floor. I roll her onto her back and she stares up at me and laughs. “Fine. Pick me up at seven.

We should take pictures!" Elise said. "Anyone got a camera?" Celeste asked. "I;m a pro at this." "Mason does!" Kross shouted. "Come here for a minute," she said to a maid, waving her over encouragingly. "Hold on," I said, grabbing some paper. "Okay, okay. 'Your Highest of Highnesses, the ladies of the Elite require, immediately, the least fancy of your cameras for. . .'" Kriss giggled, and Celeste shook her head. "Oh! A study in feminine diplomacy," Elise added. "Is that a real thing?" Kross asked. Celeste tossed her hair. "Who cares?" Maybe twenty minutes later, Maxon knocked on the door and pushed it open an inch. "Can I come in?" Kross ran over. "No. We just want the camera." And she snatched it from his hand and closed the door in his face. Celeste fell on the floor, laughing. "What are you doing in there?" he called. But we were all too busy doubling over to answer.

Matthias always slept with his back to a wall, a habit from his days in Hellgate. She’d let her hands wander, seeking his pockets, trying to feel along the linings of his trousers. “Nina?” he’d asked sleepily. “I’m cold,” she said, her hands continuing their search. She pressed a kiss to his neck, then below his ear. She’d never let herself kiss him this way before. She’d never had the chance. They’d been too busy untangling the skein of suspicion and lust and loyalty that bound them together, and once she’d taken the parem … It was all she could think of, even now. The desire she felt was for the drug, not for the body she felt shift beneath her hands. She didn’t kiss his lips, though. She wouldn’t let parem take that from her too. He’d groaned slightly. “The others—” “Everyone is asleep.” Then he’d seized her hands. “Stop.” “Matthias—” “I don’t have it.” She yanked herself free, shame crawling over her skin like fire over a forest floor. “Then who does?” she hissed. “Kaz.” She stilled. “Are you going to creep into his bed?

How did everyone else know how to do yoga? The one advantage to all of this was that it cleared Stevie's mind of everything. She heard exercise did that. Was this what they meant? You were so busy being confused and trying to stop your sweaty hands from slipping on a mat that you couldn't think anymore? Stevie did approve of the fact that yoga ended by lying on the floor in a corpse pose.

And so, because business leadership is still so dominated by men, modern workplaces are riddled with these kind of gaps, from doors that are too heavy for the average woman to open with ease, to glass stairs and lobby floors that mean anyone below can see up your skirt, to paving that’s exactly the right size to catch your heels. Small, niggling issues that aren’t the end of the world, granted, but that nevertheless irritate. Then there’s the standard office temperature. The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70 kg man.1 But a recent study found that ‘the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower’ than the standard values for men doing the same type of activity. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. Which leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped up in blankets in the New York summer while their male colleagues wander around in summer clothes.

She was in a probing mood, and I wasn’t in the business of denying my mother anything, especially when she’d spent the past week throwing up mucus, retching all night. Dad had put pillows all around their bathroom floor, and they sat there all night, every night. I heard them talk and laugh and whisper. Whenever she felt good enough, anyway.

I just sit. Or I walk and walk. Or I stand somewhere looking at one spot. And it seems to me as I stand here that I am totally disconnected from the rest of the world around me. Nothing, absolutely nothing connects me with it. The world around me goes on being busy, conducts its wars, enslaves countries, kills people, tortures. The real world... My life till now seems to have slipped through this real world without participating in it, without caring about it, without any connection to it. Even when I was in the very middle of it, I wasn't really there. My only life connection is in these scribbles. Here I stand, this moment, now, with my arms hanging down, the shoulders fallen, eyes on the floor, beginning my life from point zero. I don't want to connect myself to this world. I am searching for another world to which it would be worth connecting myself.

When kids come on the dance floor it’s time for elders to go to the bed.

The wine and the blood from a cut on his head mix into a new red that drips onto the hard, grey floor.

A group therapist created a terrific visual example of what a healthy relationship looks like. She put three pillows on the floor and asked a couple of us to stand on the pillows. She told us to leave the middle pillow open. She pointed at my pillow and said, "Don, that's your pillow, that's your life. The only person who gets to step on that pillow is you. Nobody else. That's your territory, your soul." Then she pointed at my friend's pillow and told her that was her pillow, that she owned it and it was her soul. Then, the therapist said, the middle pillow symbolized the relationship. She said that both of us could step into the middle pillow any time we wanted because we'd agreed to be in a relationship. However, she said, at no point is it appropriate to step on the other person's pillow. What goes on in the other person's soul is none of your business. All you're responsible for is your soul, nobody else's. Regarding the middle pillow, the question to ask is, "What do I want in a relationship?" If the pillow you two step on together works, that's great. If not, move on or simply explain what you'd like life to feel like in the middle pillow and see if the other person wants that kind of relationship too. But never, she said, ever try to change each other. Know who you are and know what you want in a relationship, and give people the freedom to be themselves.

Under NAFTA, businesses, their property and their money can travel back and forth across national borders with relative ease, while workers who try to do the same are dubbed illegal, and are snatched off the streets and off factory floors, and are carted back over the borders they crossed. In the "free market" of NAFTA, the freedom is for the wealth and personnel of the capitalists- the thieves- there is no corresponding freedom for the refugees of land theft and conquest whose only capital is their daily toil. Capitalism is the immense and widely celebrated ideological package used to rewrap theft as freedom, to recast imperialism as democracy. (273) Mexico Unconquered

Too Busy I've folded all my laundry and put it in the drawer. I've changed my linen, made my bed, and swept my bedroom floor. I've emptied out the garbage and fixed tomorrow's lunch. I've baked some cookies for dessert and given dad a munch. I've searched the house for pencils and sharpened every one. There are so many things to do when homework must be done.

He was now suddenly hot, as hot as if he’d been in a kitchen baking cinnamon rolls in August. I already knew vampires could sweat, under certain conditions, like being chained to a wall of a house with sunlight coming in through the windows. He was sweating again now. Some of his sweat fell on me. I’ve always rather liked sweat. On other occasions when I’ve had a naked, sweating male body up against mine, I’ve tended to feel that it meant he was getting into what was going on. This usually produces a similar enthusiasm in me. Not that there was anything going on…exactly. Yet. Remember how fast and suddenly this was all happening. And if he was in shock so was I. Maybe my brain hadn’t fully come with me in that zap through the void, like my clothes manifestly hadn’t. With a truly masterful erection now pressed against me I turned my head again and licked his sweating shoulder. What happened next probably lasted about ten seconds. Maybe less. I don’t think I heard the sound he made; I think I only felt it. He moved his hands again, to tip my face toward him, and kissed me. I can’t say I noticed any fangs. I had the lingering vestige of sense not to try anything clever with my teeth, which with a human lover I would have. But I was nonetheless busy with tongue and hands. I wriggled a little under him. I kissed him back as he tangled his fingers in my hair. I arched up off the floor a trifle to press myself more thoroughly against him. I was undoubtedly making some noises of my own…

Ms. Lane.”Barrons’ voice is deep, touched with that strange Old World accent and mildly pissed off. Jericho Barrons is often mildly pissed off. I think he crawled from the swamp that way, chafed either by some condition in it, out of it, or maybe just the general mass incompetence he encountered in both places. He’s the most controlled, capable man I’ve ever known. After all we’ve been through together, he still calls me Ms. Lane, with one exception: When I’m in his bed. Or on the floor, or some other place where I’ve temporarily lost my mind and become convinced I can’t breathe without him inside me this very instant. Then the things he calls me are varied and nobody’s business but mine. I reply: “Barrons,” without inflection. I’ve learned a few things in our time together. Distance is frequently the only intimacy he’ll tolerate. Suits me. I’ve got my own demons. Besides I don’t believe good relationships come from living inside each other’s pockets. I believe divorce comes from that. I admire the animal grace with which he enters the room and moves toward me. He prefers dark colors, the better to slide in and out of the night, or a room, unnoticed except for whatever he’s left behind that you may or may not discover for some time, like, say a tattoo on the back of one’s skull. “What are you doing?” “Reading,” I say nonchalantly, rubbing the tattoo on the back of my skull. I angle the volume so he can’t see the cover. If he sees what I’m reading, he’ll know I’m looking for something. If he realizes how bad it’s gotten, and what I’m thinking about doing, he’ll try to stop me. He circles behind me, looks over my shoulder at the thick vellum of the ancient manuscript. “In the first tongue?” “Is that what it is?” I feign innocence. He knows precisely which cells in my body are innocent and which are thoroughly corrupted. He’s responsible for most of the corrupted ones. One corner of his mouth ticks up and I see the glint of beast behind his eyes, a feral crimson backlight, bloodstaining the whites. It turns me on. Barrons makes me feel violently, electrically sexual and alive. I’d march into hell beside him. But I will not let him march into hell beside me. And there’s no doubt that’s where I’m going. I thought I was strong, a heroine. I thought I was the victor. The enemy got inside my head and tried to seduce me with lies. It’s easy to walk away from lies. Power is another thing. Temptation isn’t a sin that you triumph over once, completely and then you’re free. Temptation slips into bed with you each night and helps you say your prayers. It wakes you in the morning with a friendly cup of coffee, and knows exactly how you take it. He skirts the Chesterfield sofa and stands over me. “Looking for something, Ms. Lane?” I’m eye level with his belt but that’s not where my gaze gets stuck and suddenly my mouth is so dry I can hardly swallow and I know I’m going to want to. I’m Pri-ya for this man. I hate it. I love it. I can’t escape it. I reach for his belt buckle. The manuscript slides from my lap, forgotten. Along with everything else but this moment, this man. “I just found it,” I tell him.

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators. Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.

I miss talking to you, Fallen.” “That’s too bad. I don’t ever miss anything about you.” “You’re fun.” His eyes sparkled like sunlit gems. “You’re never afraid to go tit for tat with me.” “I don’t want anything to do with your tits or tats.” He laughed again, his eyes darkening back to brown. “Did we really just get beat up by that little Junior Guardian?” “If anyone asks we’ll say that there were fifty of them.” I touched my cheek and hissed. “Goddamn ninja punk.” “I feel terrible and I don’t mean my wounded ego. I feel really bad.” He groaned and rolled to his side, not moving from the floor. “I can’t believe we just got our asses handed to us by a goddamn Jonas-brother wannabe.” “He had the hilt piece. Did you see it?” “No, I was too busy crying like a girl.

Having shaved, washed, and dexterously arranged several artificial teeth, standing in front of the mirror, he moistened his silver-mounted brushes and plastered the remains of his thick pearly hair on his swarthy yellow skull. He drew on to his strong old body, with its abdomen protuberant from excessive good living, his cream-colored silk underwear, put black silk socks and patent-leather slippers on his flat-footed feet. He put sleeve-links in the shining cuffs of his snow-white shirt, and bending forward so that his shirt front bulged out, he arranged his trousers that were pulled up high by his silk braces, and began to torture himself, putting his collar-stud through the stiff collar. The floor was still rocking beneath him, the tips of his fingers hurt, the stud at moments pinched the flabby skin in the recess under his Adam's apple, but he persisted, and at last, with eyes all strained and face dove-blue from the over-tight collar that enclosed his throat, he finished the business and sat down exhausted in front of the pier glass, which reflected the whole of him, and repeated him in all the other mirrors. " It is awful ! " he muttered, dropping his strong, bald head, but without trying to understand or to know what was awful. Then, with habitual careful attention examining his gouty-jointed short fingers and large, convex, almond-shaped finger-nails, he repeated : " It is awful. . . .

We are all skyscrapers, continually adding rooms and floors to who we are. Once one floor is done, the next begins and the result is a constant work in progress. The best business leaders treat their companies like projects never to be completed, only improved and refined, so why shouldn’t we also treat ourselves as such?

I put the issue from my mind. My mother had taken up the cause. She was strong. She had built that business, with all those people working for her, and it dwarfed my father’s business, and all the other businesses in the whole town; she, that docile woman, had a power in her the rest of us couldn’t contemplate. And Dad. He had changed. He was softer, more prone to laugh. The future could be different from the past. Even the past could be different from the past, because my memories could change: I no longer remembered Mother listening in the kitchen while Shawn pinned me to the floor, pressing my windpipe. I no longer remembered her looking away.

I don't believe in love at first sight but maybe this is as close as it gets: seeing someone, a person you have no business loving, on a football field one night and thinking, I want you to be mine and I want to be yours. Lying on a closet floor with someone and thinking, I shouldn't know you but I do. Recognizing someone as a part of you before they've even become that person in your life, and knowing, without a doubt, that neither of you will ever be who you are in this exact moment ever again and believing, against all odds, you will continue to belong to one another despite that.

What people had had shed and left--a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes--those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.

Jobs described Mike Markkula's maxim that a good company must "impute"- it must convey its values and importance in everything it does, from packaging to marketing. Johnson loved it. It definitely applied to a company's stores. " The store will become the most powerful physical expression of the brand," he predicted. He said that when he was young he had gone to the wood-paneled, art-filled mansion-like store that Ralph Lauren had created at Seventy-second and Madison in Manhattan. " Whenever I buy a polo shirt, I think of that mansion, which was a physical expression of Ralph's ideals," Johnson said. " Mickey Drexler did that with the Gap. You couldn't think of a Gap product without thinking of the Great Gap store with the clean space and wood floors and white walls and folded merchandise.

I'd rather any kind of business on the ground floor than the utter lack of respect for pedestrians with which buildings are put up in this city today. . . . Nobody cares any more about pedestrian identity.

Some of the higher-ups in the organization don’t know anything about the company—including which floor they are on (the top one). It makes me angry enough to go out and start my own elevator repair business.

Grandma just said ‘sex’.” Jake commented behind Char. “I think this is my favorite night ever.” “And you!” Grandma pointed the gun at Kacey. “Stop tempting him! He’s a boy! He can’t help his urges.” “Just kidding,” Jake said. “ ‘Urges’, ‘urges’ trumps ‘sex’.” “Now! The both of you, back into your rooms so you can put this fornicating business behind you!” “There it is,” Char whispered. “The winner of the night.” “Fornication.” Jake held out his hand from behind Char. She gave him a high five before they slowly closed their door. Grandma called out their names. “Quick!” Char yelled. “Get on the floor! This is not a drill!

Then headed for the kitchen. Fuck. I headed through the lounge… …just as two indistinct pitch-black masses, Kevlar laden, shotguns raised, crept ninja-like through the front door. This time, I didn't even get a bellowed warning. The lead ninja, upon seeing me, sprang forward… and crushed me face flat to the floor. That hurt. It was five long hard seconds before he eased up an iota so I could take a breath, "Hello again, Dennis. Busy night?" I managed from somewhere under his arm or knee or gun-butt. "Bean-bags or bullets?" "Bullets," said Harry. "Easy up, lads. He's scarpered…" Dennis got off of me, locked his shotgun and helped me up, "Sorry," he said. "No worries…

Brian asked, “How did you learn to think so big at CAA?” I reminded him that Airbnb had consistently thought big: it hadn’t been at all content with its original business of renting out air mattresses on floors. Then I added that one way to conceptualize how to think in business is a martial-arts precept: “If you aim at the target, you lose all your power. You have to hit through the target to really smash it.” To get where you want to go, you have to set out to go even further.

Becomingly dressed in a tan cotton suit, Nancy set off in her convertible for the shopping district. She drove down the boulevard, and upon reaching the more congested streets, made her way skillfully through heavy traffic, then pulled into a parking lot. “I think I’ll try Taylor’s Department Store first for a dress,” she decided. Taylor’s was one of River Heights’ finest stores. Nancy purchased several items for Hannah on the main floor, then went directly to the misses’ wearing apparel section on the second floor. Usually Nancy had no trouble finding a sales-clerk. But this particular morning seemed to be an especially busy one in the department, and an extra rush of customers had temporarily overwhelmed the sales force.

Disgusted with herself, she’d slipped beneath his blankets. Matthias always slept with his back to a wall, a habit from his days in Hellgate. She’d let her hands wander, seeking his pockets, trying to feel along the linings of his trousers. “Nina?” he’d asked sleepily. “I’m cold,” she said, her hands continuing their search. She pressed a kiss to his neck, then below his ear. She’d never let herself kiss him this way before. She’d never had the chance. They’d been too busy untangling the skein of suspicion and lust and loyalty that bound them together, and once she’d taken the parem … It was all she could think of, even now. The desire she felt was for the drug, not for the body she felt shift beneath her hands. She didn’t kiss his lips, though. She wouldn’t let parem take that from her too. He’d groaned slightly. “The others—” “Everyone is asleep.” Then he’d seized her hands. “Stop.” “Matthias—” “I don’t have it.” She yanked herself free, shame crawling over her skin like fire over a forest floor. “Then who does?” she hissed. “Kaz.” She stilled. “Are you going to creep into his bed?” Nina released a huff of disbelief. “He’d slit my throat.” She wanted to scream her helplessness. There would be no bargaining with Kaz. She couldn’t bully him the way she might have bullied Wylan or plead with him the way she mighthave managed Jesper. Fatigue came on suddenly, a yoke at her neck, the exhaustion at least tempering her frantic need. She rested her forehead against Matthias’ chest. “I hate this,” she said. “I hate you a little, drüskelle.” “I’m used to it. Come here.” He’d wrapped his arms around her and gotten her talking about Ravka, about Inej. He’d distracted her with stories, named the winds that blew across Fjerda, told her of his first meal in the drüskelle hall.

Within, the offices were newly plastered, newly painted, newly papered, newly countered, newly floor-clothed, newly tabled, newly chaired, newly fitted up in every way, with goods that were substantial and expensive, and designed (like the company) to last. Business! Look

I don't know for sure what ever became of Hatsumomo. A few years after the war, I heard she was making a living as a prostitute in the Miyagawa-cho district. She couldn't have been there long, because on the night I heard it, a man at the same party swore that if Hatsumomo was a prostitute, he would find her and give her some business of his own. He did go looking for her, but she was nowhere to be found. Over the years, she probably succeeded in drinking herself to death. She certainly wouldn't have been the first geisha to do it. In just the way that a man can grow accustomed to a bad leg, we'd all grown accustomed to having Hatsumomo in our okiya. I don't think we quite understood all the ways her presence had afflicted us until long after she'd left, when things that we hadn't realized were ailing slowly began to heal. Even when Hatsumomo had been doing nothing more than sleeping in her room, the maids had known she was there, and that during the course of the day she would abuse them. They'd lived with the kind of tension you feel if you walk across a frozen pond whose ice might break at any moment. And as for Pumpkin, I think she'd grown to be dependent on her older sister and felt strangely lost without her. I'd already become the okiya's principal asset, but even I took some time to weed out all the peculiar habits that had taken root because of Hatsumomo. Every time a man looked at me strangely, I found myself wondering if he'd heard something unkind about me from her, even long after she was gone. Whenever I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the okiya, I still kept my eyes lowered for fear that Hatsumomo would be waiting there on the landing, eager for someone to abuse. I can't tell you how many times I reached that last step and looked up suddenly with the realization that there was no Hatsumomo, and there never would be again. I knew she was gone, and yet the very emptiness of the hall seemed to suggest something of her presence. Even now, as an older woman, I sometimes lift the brocade cover on the mirror of my makeup stand, and have the briefest flicker of a thought that I may find her there in the glass, smirking at me.

…she felt, more and more strongly, outside that eddy; or as if a shade had fallen, and robbed of colour, she saw things truly…Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested…and so, giving herself the little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking—one, two, three, one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a newspaper…life being now strong enough to bear her on again, she began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the ship sunk, he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea.

Bill.' If you don't, I'll do this," and with that he gave me a twitch that I thought would have made me faint. Between this and that, I was so utterly terrified of the blind beggar that I forgot my terror of the captain, and as I opened the parlour door, cried out the words he had ordered in a trembling voice. The poor captain raised his eyes, and at one look the rum went out of him and left him staring sober. The expression of his face was not so much of terror as of mortal sickness. He made a movement to rise, but I do not believe he had enough force left in his body. "Now, Bill, sit where you are," said the beggar. "If I can't see, I can hear a finger stirring. Business is business. Hold out your left hand. Boy, take his left hand by the wrist and bring it near to my right." We both obeyed him to the letter, and I saw him pass something from the hollow of the hand that held his stick into the palm of the captain's, which closed upon it instantly. "And now that's done," said the blind man; and at the words he suddenly left hold of me, and with incredible accuracy and nimbleness, skipped out of the parlour and into the road, where, as I still stood motionless, I could hear his stick go tap-tap-tapping into the distance. It was some time before either I or the captain seemed to gather our senses, but at length, and about at the same moment, I released his wrist, which I was still holding, and he drew in his hand and looked sharply into the palm. "Ten o'clock!" he cried. "Six hours. We'll do them yet," and he sprang to his feet. Even as he did so, he reeled, put his hand to his throat, stood swaying for a moment, and then, with a peculiar sound, fell from his whole height face foremost to the floor. I ran to him at once, calling to my mother. But haste was all in vain. The captain had been struck dead by thundering apoplexy. It is a curious thing to understand, for I had certainly never liked the man, though of late I had begun to pity him, but as soon as I saw that he was dead, I burst into a flood of tears. It was the second death I had known, and the sorrow of the first was still fresh in my heart. 4 The Sea-chest I LOST no time, of course, in telling my mother all that I knew, and perhaps should have told her long before, and we saw ourselves at once in a difficult and dangerous position. Some of the man's money—if he had any—was certainly due to us, but it was not likely that our captain's shipmates, above all the two specimens seen by me, Black Dog and the blind beggar, would be inclined to give up their booty in payment of the dead man's debts. The captain's order to mount at once and ride for Doctor Livesey would have left my mother alone and unprotected, which was not to be thought of. Indeed, it seemed impossible for either of us to remain much longer in the house; the fall of coals in the kitchen grate, the very ticking of the clock, filled us with alarms. The neighbourhood, to our ears, seemed haunted by approaching footsteps; and what between the dead body of the captain on the parlour floor and the thought of that detestable blind beggar hovering near at hand and ready to return, there were moments when, as the saying goes, I jumped in my skin for terror. Something must speedily be resolved upon, and it occurred to us at last to go forth together and seek help in the neighbouring hamlet. No sooner said than done. Bare-headed as we were, we ran out at once in the gathering evening and the frosty fog. The hamlet lay not many hundred yards away, though out of view, on the other side of the next cove; and what greatly encouraged me, it was in an opposite direction from that whence the blind man had made his appearance and whither he had presumably returned. We were not many minutes on the road, though we sometimes stopped to lay hold of each other and hearken. But there was no unusual sound—nothing but the low wash of the ripple and the croaking of the inmates of the wood.

What do they think they’re doing, keeping a thing like that locked up in a school?” said Ron finally. “If any dog needs exercise, that one does.” Hermione had got both her breath and her bad temper back again. “You don’t use your eyes, any of you, do you?” she snapped. “Didn’t you see what it was standing on?” “The floor?” Harry suggested. “I wasn’t looking at its feet, I was too busy with its heads.” “No, not the floor. It was standing on a trapdoor. It’s obviously guarding something.” She stood up, glaring at them. “I hope you’re pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed or worse, expelled. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to bed.

Behind those doors was, in a stunning anticlimax, another set of doors, which slid open. A lift. They descended for many floors, until it was clear that they were several stories beneath the ground. Neither of them said anything, but Myfanwy took the opportunity to eye her secretary in the mirrored walls. Ingrid was tall, in her late forties, and her auburn hair was immaculately coiffed. She was slim and fit-looking, as if she spent every afternoon playing tennis. She wore a few pieces of discreet gold jewelry, including a wedding ring. Myfanwy breathed in gently through her nose and smelled Ingrid’s good perfume. The business suit she wore was of a light purple, and exquisitely cut.

Carl was an immediate and intuitive foil and partner, feeding off my energy and adding to it. I once took Scotch tape and attached my nose to my cheek, my lower lip to my chin, and an eyebrow to my forehead. I looked cruelly disfigured. I burst into the writers’ room, and Carl immediately nurtured the bit: Carl: How did it happen? Who did that to you? Mel: The Nazis! They did it to me. Threw me in a ditch and did it! Carl: You mean they beat you? Disfigured you? Mel: Oh no. They took Scotch tape and stuck it all over my face. Carl broke up and hit the floor, clutching his belly and laughing like crazy. For me that was a home run. Anytime I could make Carl laugh, I knew I had a winner.

And when the ocean starts rising to the level of whatever building they're in and whatever floor they're on as they write their editorials, yeah, then they'll agree that there's a greenhouse effect and we'd better do something about it. Sure, no matter how lunatic people are, at some point or other they're going to realize that these problems exist, and they are approaching fast. It's just that the next thing they'll ask is, "So how can we make some money off it?" In fact, anybody in business who didn't ask that question would find themselves out of business—just because that's the way that capitalist institutions work. I mean, if some executive came along and said," I'm not going to look at it that way, I'm going to do things differently," well, they'd get replaced by someone who would try to make more money off it―because these are simply institutional facts, these are facts about the structure of the institutions. And if you don't like them, and I don't, then you're going to have to change the institutions. There really is no other way.

I did not mean to be so long away from you. I had clan business to take care of, which took longer than I anticipated.” She nodded. “I understand.” He blew out a breath. “I’m not sure you do. I was eager to get through that business precisely because I wanted it out of the way so that I could return to your side.” Now it was her turn to feel her body flush with heat. “Oh yeah?” “Aye.” He looked down at his hands and then slowly reached and clasped her hand resting against her thigh. The rough feel of his calloused hands on her skin, and the tentative vulnerability in the movement, about made her slide forward off the bench and melt in a puddle on the stone floor. He really was just a big—quiet—teddy bear.

When I sit up I am greeted by the world. Level with the treetops I look down on sparrows swooping in and out of the branches. The tide, the new rising moon, the clouds, the wind - these greet me. These are my allies. The whole planet is laid out before me and available for whatever adventure the day will take me on. By comparison, living in society seems to require an alarm clock. Primarily assembled from angst and fish anuses, these contraptions, regardless of your soul's whereabouts, will slap and assault you into a pitiful state of what passes for consciousness. Your first sight is the Time, an arragement of molecules on the clock's face to whom you will be enslaved for the rest of the day. You may as well call him "master." Next, a pile of dirty clothes on the floor, a knocked-over glass of water, and so forth, until you are so overwhelmed with despair that to prevent hurling yourself through the window, you must ignore your personal bill of rights, put on an acceptable frown, and go about your business, disregarding the pleas from you increasingly timid soul.

Any animal can fuck. But only humans can experience sexual passion, something wholly different from the biological urge to mate. And sexual passion’s endured for millennia as a vital psychic force in human life — not despite impediments but because of them. Plain old coitus becomes erotically charged and spiritually potent at just those points where impediments, conflicts, taboos, and consequences lend it a double-edged character — meaningful sex is both an overcoming and a succumbing, a transcendence and a transgression, triumphant and terrible and ecstatic and sad. Turtles and gnats can mate, but only the human will can defy, transgress, overcome, love: choose. History-wise, both nature and culture have been ingenious at erecting impediments that give the choice of passion its price and value: religious proscriptions; penalties for adultery and divorce; chivalric chastity and courtly decorum; the stigma of illegitimate birth; chaperonage; madonna/whore complexes; syphilis; back-alley abortions; a set of “moral” codes that put sensuality on a taboo-level with defecation and apostasy… from the Victorians’ dread of the body to early TV’s one-foot-on-the-floor-at-all-times rule; from the automatic ruin of “fallen” women to back-seat tussles in which girlfriends struggled to deny boyfriends what they begged for in order to preserve their respect. Granted, from 1996’s perspective, most of the old sexual dragons look stupid and cruel. But we need to realize that they had something big in their favor: as long as the dragons reigned, sex wasn’t casual, not ever. Historically, human sexuality has been a deadly serious business — and the fiercer its dragons, the seriouser sex got; and the higher the price of choice, the higher the erotic voltage surrounding what people chose." -from "Back in New Fire

Poppy was busy with needlework, stitching a pair of men’s slippers with bright wool threads, while Beatrix played solitaire on the floor near the hearth. Noticing the way her youngest sister was riffling through the cards, Amelia laughed. “Beatrix,” she said after Win had finished a chapter, “why in heaven’s name would you cheat at solitaire? You’re playing against yourself.” “Then there’s no one to object when I cheat.” “It’s not whether you win but how you win that’s important,” Amelia said. “I’ve heard that before, and I don’t agree at all. It’s much nicer to win.” Poppy shook her head over her embroidery. “Beatrix, you are positively shameless.” “And a winner,” Beatrix said with satisfaction, laying down the exact card she wanted.

Instead, as the crystal splinters entered Hornwrack's brain, he experienced two curious dreams of the Low City, coming so quickly one after the other that they seemed simultaneous. In the first, long shadows moved across the ceiling frescoes of the Bistro Californium, beneath which Lord Mooncarrot's clique awaited his return to make a fourth at dice. Footsteps sounded on the threshold. The women hooded their eyes and smiled, or else stifled a yawn, raising dove-grey gloves to their blue, phthisic lips. Viriconium, with all her narcissistic intimacies and equivocal invitations welcomed him again. He had hated that city, yet now it was his past and it was he had to regret...The second of these visions was of the Rue Sepile. It was dawn, in summer. Horse-chestnut flowers bobbed like white wax candles above the deserted pavements. An oblique light struck into the street - so that its long and normally profitless perspective seemed to lead straight into the heart of a younger, more ingenuous city - and fell across the fronts of the houses where he had once lived, warming up the rotten brick and imparting to it a not unpleasant pinkish colour. Up at the second-floor casement window a boy was busy with the bright red geraniums arranged along the outer still in lumpen terra-cotta pots. He looked down at Hornwrack and smiled. Before Hornwrack could speak he drew down the lower casement and turned away. The glass which no separated them reflected the morning sunlight in a silent explosion; and Hornwrack, dazzled mistaking the light for the smile, suddenly imagined an incandescence which would melt all those old streets! Rue Sepile; the Avenue of Children; Margery Fry Court: all melted down! All the shabby dependencies of the Plaza of Unrealized Time! All slumped, sank into themselves, eroded away until nothing was left in his field of vision but an unbearable white sky above and the bright clustered points of the chestnut leaves below - and then only a depthless opacity, behind which he could detect the beat of his own blood, the vitreous humour of the eye. He imagined the old encrusted brick flowing, the glass cracking and melting from its frames even as they shrivelled awake, the sheds of paints flaring green and gold, the geraniums toppling in flames to nothing, not even white ash, under this weight of light! All had winked away like reflections in a jar of water glass, and only the medium remained, bright, viscid, vacant. He had a sense of the intolerable briefness of matter, its desperate signalling and touching, its fall; and simultaneously one of its unendurable durability He thought, Something lies behind all the realities of the universe and is replacing them here, something less solid and more permanent. Then the world stopped haunting him forever.

WALTER (Gathering him up in his arms) You know what, Travis? In seven years you going to be seventeen years old. And things is going to be very different with us in seven years, Travis. … One day when you are seventeen I’ll come home—home from my office downtown somewhere— TRAVIS You don’t work in no office, Daddy. WALTER No—but after tonight. After what your daddy gonna do tonight, there’s going to be offices—a whole lot of offices.… TRAVIS What you gonna do tonight, Daddy? WALTER You wouldn’t understand yet, son, but your daddy’s gonna make a transaction … a business transaction that’s going to change our lives. … That’s how come one day when you ’bout seventeen years old I’ll come home and I’ll be pretty tired, you know what I mean, after a day of conferences and secretaries getting things wrong the way they do … ’cause an executive’s life is hell, man—(The more he talks the farther away he gets) And I’ll pull the car up on the driveway … just a plain black Chrysler, I think, with white walls—no—black tires. More elegant. Rich people don’t have to be flashy … though I’ll have to get something a little sportier for Ruth—maybe a Cadillac convertible to do her shopping in. … And I’ll come up the steps to the house and the gardener will be clipping away at the hedges and he’ll say, “Good evening, Mr. Younger.” And I’ll say, “Hello, Jefferson, how are you this evening?” And I’ll go inside and Ruth will come downstairs and meet me at the door and we’ll kiss each other and she’ll take my arm and we’ll go up to your room to see you sitting on the floor with the catalogues of all the great schools in America around you. … All the great schools in the world! And—and I’ll say, all right son—it’s your seventeenth birthday, what is it you’ve decided? … Just tell me where you want to go to school and you’ll go. Just tell me, what it is you want to be—and you’ll be it. … Whatever you want to be—Yessir! (He holds his arms open for TRAVIS) YOU just name it, son … (TRAVIS leaps into them) and I hand you the world!

Depression goes through stages, but if left unchecked and not treated, this elevator ride will eventually go all the way to the bottom floor. And finally you find yourself bereft of choices, unable to figure out a way up or out, and pretty soon one overarching impulse begins winning the battle for your mind: “Kill yourself.” And once you get over the shock of those words in your head, the horror of it, it begins to start sounding appealing, even possessing a strange resolve, logic. In fact, it’s the only thing you have left that is logical. It becomes the only road to relief. As if just the planning of it provides the first solace you’ve felt that you can remember. And you become comfortable with it. You begin to plan it and contemplate the details of how best to do it, as if you were planning travel arrangements for a vacation. You just have to get out. O-U-T. You see the white space behind the letter O? You just want to crawl through that O and be out of this inescapable hurt that is this thing they call clinical depression. “How am I going to do this?” becomes the only tape playing. And if you are really, really, really depressed and you’re really there, you’re gonna find a way. I found a way. I had a way. And I did it. I made sure Opal was out of the house and on a business trip. My planning took a few weeks. I knew exactly how I was going to do it: I didn’t want to make too much of a mess. There was gonna be no blood, no drama. There was just going to be, “Now you see me, now you don’t.” That’s what it was going to be. So I did it. And it was over. Or so I thought. About twenty-four hours later I woke up. I was groggy; zoned out to the point at which I couldn’t put a sentence together for the next couple of days. But I was semifunctional, and as these drugs and shit that I took began to wear off slowly but surely, I realized, “Okay, I fucked up. I didn’t make it.” I thought I did all the right stuff, left no room for error, but something happened. And this perfect, flawless plan was thwarted. As if some force rebuked me and said, “Not yet. You’re not going anywhere.” The only reason I could have made it, after the amount of pills and alcohol and shit I took, was that somebody or something decided it wasn’t my time. It certainly wasn’t me making that call. It was something external. And when you’re infused with the presence of this positive external force, which is so much greater than all of your efforts to the contrary, that’s about as empowering a moment as you can have in your life. These days we have a plethora of drugs one can take to ameliorate the intensity of this lack of hope, lack of direction, lack of choice. So fuck it and don’t be embarrassed or feel like you can handle it yourself, because lemme tell ya something: you can’t. Get fuckin’ help. The negative demon is strong, and you may not be as fortunate as I was. My brother wasn’t. For me, despair eventually gave way to resolve, and resolve gave way to hope, and hope gave way to “Holy shit. I feel better than I’ve ever felt right now.” Having actually gone right up to the white light, looked right at it, and some force in the universe turned me around, I found, with apologies to Mr. Dylan, my direction home. I felt more alive than I’ve ever felt. I’m not exaggerating when I say for the next six months I felt like Superman. Like I’m gonna fucking go through walls. That’s how strong I felt. I had this positive force in me. I was saved. I was protected. I was like the only guy who survived and walked away from a major plane crash. I was here to do something big. What started as the darkest moment in my life became this surge of focus, direction, energy, and empowerment.

I always imagined rape as this violent scene of a woman walking alone down a dark alley and getting mugged and beaten by some masked criminal. Rape was an angry man forcing himself inside a damsel in distress. I would not carry the trauma of a cliché rape victim. I would not shriek in the midst of my slumber with night terrors. I would not tremble at the sight of every dark haired man or the mention of Number 1’s name. I would not even harbor ill will towards him. My damage was like a cigarette addiction- subtle, seemingly innocent, but everlasting and inevitably detrimental. Number 1 never opened his screen door to furious crowds waving torches and baseball bats. Nobody punched him out in my honor. The Nightfall crowd never socially ostracized him. Even the ex-boyfriend who’d second handedly fused the entire fiasco continued to mingle with him in drug circles. Everybody continued with business as usual. And when I told my parents I lost my virginity against my will, unconscious on a bathroom floor, Carl did not erupt in fury and demand I give him all I knew about his whereabouts so he could greet him with a rifle. Mom blankly shrugged and mumbled, “Oh, that’s too bad,” and drifted into the kitchen as if I’d received a stubbed toe rather than a shredded hymen. Everyone in my life took my rape as lightly as a brief thunderstorm that might have been frightening when it happened, but was easy to forget about. I adopted that mentality as the foundation of my sex life. I would, time and time again, treat sex as flimsily as it started. I would give it away as if it was cheap, second hand junk, rather than a prize that deserved to be earned.

It all got too busy, suddenly. Troops were getting into battles at the Moro Bridge and then into Urbino. Maybe in Urbino I stopped. You felt you could be shot any time there, not just if you were a soldier, but a priest or a nurse. It was a rabbit warren, those narrow tilted streets. Soldiers were coming in with just bits of their bodies, falling in love with me for an hour and then dying. It was important to remember their names. But I kept seeing the child whenever they died. Being washed away. Some would sit up and rip all their dressings off trying to breathe better. Some would be worried about tiny scratches on their arms when they died. Then the bubble in the mouth. That little pop. I leaned forward to close a dead soldier’s eyes, and he open them and sniggered, “Can’t wait to have me dead? You bitch!” He sat up and swept everything on my tray to the floor. So furious. Who would want to die like that? To die with that kind of anger. You bitch! After that I always waited for the bubble in their mouths. I know death now, David. I know all the smells, I know how to divert them from agony. When to give the quick jolt of morphine in a major vein. The saline solution. To make them empty their bowels before they die. Every damn general should have had my job. Every damn general. It should have been a pre-requisite for any river crossing. Who the hell were we to be given this responsibility, expected to be wise as old priests, to know how to lead people towards something no one wanted and somehow make them feel comfortable. I could never believe in all those services they gave for the dead. Their vulgar rhetoric. How dare they! How dare they talk like that about a human being dying.

Pallas forced his eyes to the floor. ‘My apologies, Exalted. I came to seek your orders for the morning.’ ‘We’re busy currently. Have a servant prepare the baths and bring us food at mid-morning.’ Laurent spoke like an administrator glancing up from his desk. ‘Yes, Exalted.’ Pallas turned blindly, and made for the door. ‘What is it?’ Laurent looked at Damen, who had detached himself and was sitting with the sheet pulled up to where he had clutched it to cover himself. And then, with the burgeoning delight of discovery, ‘Are you shy?’ ‘In Akielos we don’t,’ said Damen, ‘in front of other people.’ ‘Not even the King?’ ‘Especially not the King,’ said Damen, for whom the King still partly meant his father. ‘But how does the court know if the royal marriage has been consummated?’ ‘The King knows whether or not it has been consummated!’ Horrified. Laurent

Is that...the Looney Tunes theme?" Mer and St. Clair cock their ears. "Why,yes.I believe it is," St. Clair says. "I heard 'Love Shack' a few minutes ago," Mer says. "It's official," I say. "America has finally ruined France." "So can we go now?" St. Clair holds up a small bag. "I'm done." "Ooo,what'd you get?" Mer asks. She takes his bag and pulls out a delicate, shimmery scarf. "Is it for Ellie?" "Shite." Mer pauses. "You didn't get anything for Ellie?" "No,it's for Mum.Arrrgh." He rakes a hand through his hair. "Would you mind if we pop over to Sennelier before we go home?" Sennelier is a gorgeous little art supply sore,the kind that makes me wish I had an excuse to buy oil paints and pastels. Mer and I went with Rashmi last weekend. She bought Josh a new sketchbook for Hanukkah. "Wow.Congratulations,St. Clair," I say. "Winner of today's Sucky Boyfriend award.And I thought Steve was bad-did you see what happened in calc?" "You mean when Amanda caught him dirty-texting Nicole?" Mer asks. "I thought she was gonna stab him in the neck with her pencil." "I've been busy," St. Clair says. I glance at him. "I was just teasing." "Well,you don't have to be such a bloody git about it." "I wasn't being a git. I wasnt even being a twat, or a wanker, or any of your other bleeding Briticisms-" "Piss off." He snatches his bag back from Mer and scowls at me. "HEY!" Mer says. "It's Christmas. Ho-ho-ho. Deck the halls. Stop fighting." "We weren't fighting," he and I say together. She shakes her head. "Come on,St. Clair's right. Let's get out of here. This place gives me the creeps." "I think it's pretty," I say. "Besides, I'd rather look at ribbons than dead rabbits." "Not the hares again," St. Clair says. "You're as bad as Rashmi." We wrestle through the Christmas crowds. "I can see why she was upset! The way they're hung up,like they'd died of nosebleeds. It's horrible. Poor Isis." All of the shops in Paris have outdone themselves with elaborate window displays,and the butcher is no exception. I pass the dead bunnies every time I go to the movies. "In case you hadn't noticed," he says. "Isis is perfectly alive and well on the sixth floor.

The train station—busy, swarming with people, luggage, porters, taxi drivers and limousine chauffeurs—a giant honeycomb, with worker bees flying in and out, carrying the trash, which covers the entire floor, in and out of the building. Only the honey has been consumed by the selected few, and nothing but the mucus remains. The line—a monstrous larva—the line stretches from the information window and extends almost out of the door. A human worm—hundreds of legs and hands, twisting and breathing disease. What was I thinking? This is just a city like any other, a city with its inhabitants, always busy, from the morning until the nighttime, always itching for a fight, always ready to chew me up and spit me out. A stripped and ragged bone, tossed aside when I can no longer feed its hungry belly. The belly of a beast—a human beast—merciless, yet placatory on the surface. I light a cigarette, spit on the floor, and walk towards the daylight.

Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboard. She knew how passionate he had become about his 'weakness.' She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship. But she said not a word. And although she might have her 'dainty' shoes tossed to the floor, have her bare toes quite visible through her stockings, have a draught of sherry in her hand, in short appear quite radical, she was too timid, she thought, too much a mouse, to reveal her gambler's heart to him. She did not like this mouselike quality. As usual, she found herself too careful, too held in. Once she said: 'I wish I had ten sisters and a big kitchen to laugh in.' Her lodger frowned and dusted his knees. She thought: He is as near to a sister as I am likely to get, but he does not understand. She would have had a woman friend so they could brush each other's hair, and just, please God, put aside this great clanking suit of ugly armor. She kept her glass dreams from him, even whilst she appeared to talk about them. He was an admiring listener, but she only showed him the opaque skin of her dreams--window glass, the price of transporting it, the difficulties with builders who would not pay their bills inside six months. He imagined this was her business, and of course it was, but all the things she spoke of were a fog across its landscape which was filled with such soaring mountains she would be embarrassed to lay claim to them. Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast iron. A conservatory, but not a conservatory. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web--the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear. When she attempted to make a sketch, it became diminished, wooden, inelegant. Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt she had discovered its form, but if she had, it was like an improperly fixed photograph which fades when exposed to daylight. She was wise enough, or foolish enough, to believe this did not matter, that the form would present itself to her in the end.

I reach around his body and cup his ass. When my hand finds the toy lodged there, I groan into his mouth. “Do it,” he pants. Everything begins to happen very fast. With a firm grasp, I remove the toy, while Wes slicks up my dick. He yanks me off the sofa’s back and braces himself against it. “Go,” he orders. I come up behind him and grip his hips, the head of my cock sliding between his taut ass cheeks. Just like the other night, I’m floored by the sensation of being skin to skin. There’s no barrier between my throbbing dick and his tight ass, and when I drive deep on the first stroke, we both groan with abandon. “Fuck me,” he demands when I go still. But I’m too busy savoring the incredible feeling of being inside him without a condom. I roll my hips and he growls like a grumpy bear. “I swear to God, Canning, if you don’t move, I’m gonna—” I pull out, then slam right back in. He makes a choked sound, his entire body trembling. “You’re gonna what?” I ask mockingly.

As a person, Janice is of course more than her house; but it is also true that her house is an indicator of what it feels like to be Janice. And what it feels like to be Janice is to be asphyxiating, slowly and helplessly, under the crushing and ever-multiplying weight of the past and the present. I picture her here on this couch, curled into herself like a fern at 4 a.m. And though it must feel like a catacomb in that dark hour, and though every hour behind these blinds has been dark, the house is spinning with movement: mould is travelling up and down the walls, food is rotting, cans are rusting, water is dripping, insects are being born and they are living and dying, Janice's hair is growing, her heart is beating, she is breathing. Which is to say that this, too, is life. Like the creatures that swim in the perfect blackness of the ocean floor, the ecosystem here would be unrecognisable to most people but this, too, is our world. The Order of Things includes those who are excluded.

You’re a werewolf,” said Nemane. “Samuel Cornick.” There was a pause. “The Marrok is Bran Cornick.” I kept my gaze on Samuel. “I was just explaining to Dr. Altman why it would be inadvisable for them to eliminate me even though I’m sticking my nose in their business.” Comprehension lit his eyes, which he narrowed at the fae. “Killing Mercy would be a mistake,” he growled. “My da had Mercy raised in our pack and he couldn’t love Mercy more if she were his daughter. For her he would declare open war with the fae and damned be the consequences. You can call him and ask, if you doubt my word.” I’d expected Samuel to defend me—and the fae could not afford to hurt the son of the Marrok, not unless the stakes were a lot higher. I’d counted on that to keep Samuel safe or I’d have found some way to keep him out of it. But the Marrok… I’d always thought I was an annoyance, the only one Bran couldn’t count on for instant obedience. He’d been protective, still was—but his protective instinct was one of the things that made him dominant. I’d thought I was just one more person he had to take care of. But it was as impossible to doubt the truth in Samuel’s voice as it was to believe that he’d be mistaken about Bran. I was glad that Samuel was focused on Nemane, who had risen to her feet when Samuel began speaking. While I blinked back stupid tears, she leaned on the walking stick and said, “Is that so?” “Adam Hauptman, the Columbia Basin Pack’s Alpha, has named Mercy his mate,” continued Samuel grimly. Nemane smiled suddenly, the expression flowing across her face, giving it a delicate beauty I hadn’t noticed before. “I like you,” she said to me. “You play an underhanded and subtle game—and like Coyote, you shake up the order of the world.” She laughed. “Coyote indeed. Good for you. Good for you. I don’t know what else you’ll run into—but I’ll let the Others know what they are dealing with.” She tapped the walking stick on the floor twice. Then, almost to herself, she murmured, “Perhaps…perhaps this won’t be a disaster after all.

For example, suppose you intend to clean your home. You normally need five hours to make it appear spotless. This allows for vacuuming and mopping the floors, cleaning the countertops, washing the dishes, dusting and polishing the furniture, cleaning the appliances, washing the windows, sweeping the patio, and more. Now, impose a challenging time limit upon yourself. For instance, rather than allowing yourself five hours, give yourself two hours. Then, get as much cleaning done as possible in those two hours.

If you want to work in a business, get a job in somebody else’s business! But don’t go to work in your own. Because while you’re working, while you’re answering the telephone, while you’re baking pies, while you’re cleaning the windows and the floors, while you’re doing it, doing it, doing it, there’s something much more important that isn’t getting done. And it’s the work you’re not doing, the strategic work, the entrepreneurial work, that will lead your business forward, that will give you the life you’ve not yet known.

It was approaching night, the conversation having taken up the better part of a day. Out of the fragile light a fourth perezoso spoke, the olders and wisest of them, who had to descend to the forest floor on business no more than once every two or three weeks, but then required many hours to accomplish what was necessary. He said, "The truth is this. Dropped casually from the safety of our beloved branches, our shit would be merely shit. Hard and shapely as our patient nature makes it, it is still shit. But when we plant it in the ground where the jaguar walks, it becomes precious as jewels.

Asked me what?” Just the sound of his voice twists my stomach into a knot of unpleasant emotions like guilt, sadness, and fear. And longing. I might as well admit there’s some of that, too. Only it has too much competition to ever win out. I watch as Peeta crosses to the table, the sunlight from the window picking up the glint of fresh snow in his blond hair. He looks strong and healthy, so different from the sick, starving boy I knew in the arena, and you can barely even notice his limp now. He sets a loaf of fresh-baked bread on the table and holds out his hand to Haymitch. “Asked you to wake me without giving me pneumonia,” says Haymitch, passing over his knife. He pulls off his filthy shirt, revealing an equally soiled undershirt, and rubs himself down with the dry part. Peeta smiles and douses Haymitch’s knife in white liquor from a bottle on the floor. He wipes the blade clean on his shirttail and slices the bread. Peeta keeps all of us in fresh baked goods. I hunt. He bakes. Haymitch drinks. We have our own ways to stay busy, to keep thoughts of our time as contestants in the Hunger Games at bay. It’s not until he’s handed Haymitch the heel that he even looks at me for the first time. “Would you like a piece?” “No, I ate at the Hob,” I say. “But thank you.” My voice doesn’t sound like my own, it’s so formal. Just as it’s been every time I’ve spoken to Peeta since the cameras finished filming our happy homecoming and we returned to our real lives. “You’re welcome,” he says back stiffly. Haymitch tosses his shirt somewhere into the mess. “Brrr. You two have got a lot of warming up to do before showtime.” He’s right, of course. The audience will be expecting the pair of lovebirds who won the Hunger Games. Not two people who can barely look each other in the eye. But all I

Sorry about this,” Kelly said as Ox and Joe looked on. I said nothing. Kelly closed the line of silver, trapping me in the basement once again. Ox nodded at me before heading toward the stairs. Joe said, “Your tether.” Ox stopped, but he didn’t turn around. Joe said, “Who is it?” I scowled at him. “Fuck you.” “Simple question.” “None of your business.” “Joe,” Ox said. Joe ignored him. “Is it still your mother?” Little wolf, little wolf, can’t you see? I snarled at him. And Kelly said, “Enough.” Joe left then, followed by Ox. Kelly glared after them before slamming the door shut. I paced back and forth, prowling the edges of the silver line. Kelly hung his head, hands pressed against the door. He took a deep breath before turning around. He picked up his blanket and pulled it around his shoulders. He sat on the floor again, back against the wall. He picked up his book but didn’t open it. I said, “This is all shit,” and “You all act like you know me,” and “You’re fucking with my head, this could all be a lie, everything could be a lie. Please let me go. Please just let me go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.” He didn’t respond, at least not verbally. His chest hitched. I could smell the sting of salt. He blinked rapidly as he looked down at his book. He didn’t turn the page for the longest time.

Shockers take six months of training and still occasionally kill their users. Why did you implant them in the first place?” “Because you kidnapped me.” “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” “Mr. Rogan.” My voice frosted over. “What I put into my body is my business.” Okay, that didn’t sound right. I gave up and marched out the doors into the sunlight. That was so dumb. Sure, try your magic sex touch on me, what could happen? My whole body was still keyed up, wrapped up in want and anticipation. I had completely embarrassed myself. If I could fall through the floor, I would. “Nevada,” he said behind me. His voice rolled over me, tinted with command and enticing, promising things I really wanted. You’re a professional. Act like one. I gathered all of my will and made myself sound calm. “Yes?” He caught up with me. “We need to talk about this.” “There is nothing to discuss,” I told him. “My body had an involuntary response to your magic.” I nodded at the poster for Crash and Burn II on the wall of the mall, with Leif Magnusson flexing with two guns while wrapped in flames. “If Leif showed up in the middle of this parking lot, my body would have an involuntary response to his presence as well. It doesn’t mean I would act on it.” Mad Rogan gave Leif a dismissive glance and turned back to me. “They say admitting that you have a problem is the first step toward recovery.” He was changing his tactics. Not going to work. “You know what my problem is? My problem is a homicidal pyrokinetic Prime whom I have to bring back to his narcissistic family.” We crossed the road to the long parking lot. Grassy dividers punctuated by small trees sectioned the lot into lanes, and Mad Rogan had parked toward the end of the lane, by the exit ramp. “One school of thought says the best way to handle an issue like this is exposure therapy,” Mad Rogan said. “For example, if you’re terrified of snakes, repeated handling of them will cure it.” Aha. “I’m not handling your snake.” He grinned. “Baby, you couldn’t handle my snake.” It finally sank in. Mad Rogan, the Huracan, had just made a pass at me. After he casually almost strangled a woman in public. I texted to Bern, “Need pickup at Galeria IV.” Getting into Rogan’s car was out of the question.

Get a move on, Perico, and go ask him for the battery charger," and the apprentice hurried out, but everything was like a dream and what was the point of any of it: battery chargers, wrenches, mechanics, and he felt sorry for the terrified little boy because, he thought, all of us are dreaming and why punish kids and why fix cars and have crushes on nice boys and then get married and have children who also dream that they're alive, who have to suffer, go off to war or fight or give up hope all on account of mere dreams. He was simply drifting along now, like a boat without a crew swept along by shifting currents, and moving mechanically like those invalids who have lost almost all will and consciousness and yet allow themselves to be moved by the nurses and obey the instructions they are given with the obscure remains of that will and that consciousness without knowing why. The 493, he thought, I go as far as Chacarita and then I take the subway to Florida and then I walk from there to the hotel. So he got on the 493 and mechanically asked for a ticket, and for half an hour continued to see ghosts dreaming of things that kept them very busy; at the Florida stop he went out the exit on the Calle San Martin, walked along the Corrientes to Reconquista and from there headed for the Warszawa rooming house, Accommodations for Gentlemen, went up dirty, dilapidated stairs to the fourth floor, and threw himself on the wretched bed as though he had been wandering through labyrinths for centuries.

I sprinkle some flour on the dough and roll it out with the heavy, wooden rolling pin. Once it’s the perfect size and thickness, I flip the rolling pin around and sing into the handle—American Idol style. “Calling Gloriaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa . . .” And then I turn around. “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” Without thinking, I bend my arm and throw the rolling pin like a tomahawk . . . straight at the head of the guy who’s standing just inside the kitchen door. The guy I didn’t hear come in. The guy who catches the hurling rolling pin without flinching—one-handed and cool as a gorgeous cucumber—just an inch from his perfect face. He tilts his head to the left, looking around the rolling pin to meet my eyes with his soulful brown ones. “Nice toss.” Logan St. James. Bodyguard. Totally badass. Sexiest guy I have ever seen—and that includes books, movies and TV, foreign and domestic. He’s the perfect combo of boyishly could-go-to-my-school kind of handsome, mixed with dangerously hot and tantalizingly mysterious. If comic-book Superman, James Dean, Jason Bourne and some guy with the smoothest, most perfectly pitched, British-Scottish-esque, Wessconian-accented voice all melded together into one person, they would make Logan fucking St. James. And I just tried to clock him with a baking tool—while wearing my Rick and Morty pajama short-shorts, a Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt I’ve had since I was eight and my SpongeBob SquarePants slippers. And no bra. Not that I have a whole lot going on upstairs, but still . . . “Christ on a saltine!” I grasp at my chest like an old woman with a pacemaker. Logan’s brow wrinkles. “Haven’t heard that one before.” Oh fuck—did he see me dancing? Did he see me leap? God, let me die now. I yank on my earbuds’ cord, popping them from my ears. “What the hell, dude?! Make some noise when you walk in—let a girl know she’s not alone. You could’ve given me a heart attack. And I could’ve killed you with my awesome ninja skills.” The corner of his mouth quirks. “No, you couldn’t.” He sets the rolling pin down on the counter. “I knocked on the kitchen door so I wouldn’t frighten you, but you were busy with your . . . performance.” Blood and heat rush to my face. And I want to melt into the floor and then all the way down to the Earth’s core.

On the next floor below are the abdominal and spine cases, head wounds and double amputations. On the right side of the wing are the jaw wounds, wounds in the joints, wounds in the kidneys, wounds in the testicles, wounds in the intestines. Here a man realizes for the first time in how many places a man can get hit. Two fellows die of tetanus. Their skin turns pale, their limbs stiffen, at last only their eyes live—stubbornly. Many of the wounded have their shattered limbs hanging free in the air from a gallows; underneath the wound a basin is placed into which drips the pus. Every two or three hours the vessel is emptied. Other men lie in stretching bandages with heavy weights hanging from the end of the bed. I see intestine wounds that are constantly full of excreta. The surgeon’s clerk shows me X-ray photographs of completely smashed hipbones, knees and shoulders. A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;—it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?

Make out a schedule for yourself, on paper if necessary, that requires you to be busy with housework or anything else while your baby is awake. Go at it with a great bustle—to impress your baby and to impress yourself. Say you are the mother of a baby boy who has become accustomed to being carried all the time. When he frets and raises his arms, explain to him in a friendly but very firm tone that this job and that job must get done this afternoon. Though he doesn’t understand the words, he does understand the tone of voice. Stick to your busywork. The first hour of the first day is the hardest. One baby accepts the change better if his mother stays out of sight a good part of the time at first and talks little. This helps him to become absorbed in something else. Another adjusts more quickly if he can at least see his mother and hear her talking to him, even if she won’t pick him up. When you bring him a plaything or show him how to use it, or when you decide it’s time to play with him, sit down beside him on the floor. Let him climb into your arms if he wants, but don’t get back into the habit of walking him around. If you’re on the floor with him, he can crawl away when he eventually realizes you won’t walk. If you pick him up and walk him, he’ll surely object noisily just as soon as you start to put him down again. If he keeps on fretting indefinitely when you sit with him on the floor, remember another job and get busy again. What you are trying to do is to help your baby begin to build frustration tolerance—a little at a time. If she does not begin to learn this gradually between six and twelve months, it is a much harder lesson to learn later on.

We had been out for one of our evening rambles, Holmes and I, and had returned about six o’clock on a cold, frosty winter’s evening. As Holmes turned up the lamp the light fell upon a card on the table. He glanced at it, and then, with an ejaculation of disgust, threw it on the floor. I picked it up and read: CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTON, Appledore Towers, Hampstead. Agent. “Who is he?” I asked. “The worst man in London,” Holmes answered, as he sat down and stretched his legs before the fire. “Is anything on the back of the card?” I turned it over. “Will call at 6:30--C.A.M.,” I read. “Hum! He’s about due. Do you feel a creeping, shrinking sensation, Watson, when you stand before the serpents in the Zoo, and see the slithery, gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened faces? Well, that’s how Milverton impresses me. I’ve had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow. And yet I can’t get out of doing business with him--indeed, he is here at my invitation.” “But who is he?” “I’ll tell you, Watson. He is the king of all the blackmailers. Heaven help the man, and still more the woman, whose secret and reputation come into the power of Milverton! With a smiling face and a heart of marble, he will squeeze and squeeze until he has drained them dry. The fellow is a genius in his way, and would have made his mark in some more savoury trade. His method is as follows: He allows it to be known that he is prepared to pay very high sums for letters which compromise people of wealth and position. He receives these wares not only from treacherous valets or maids, but frequently from genteel ruffians, who have gained the confidence and affection of trusting women. He deals with no niggard hand. I happen to know that he paid seven hundred pounds to a footman for a note two lines in length, and that the ruin of a noble family was the result. Everything which is in the market goes to Milverton, and there are hundreds in this great city who turn white at his name. No one knows where his grip may fall, for he is far too rich and far too cunning to work from hand to mouth. He will hold a card back for years in order to play it at the moment when the stake is best worth winning. I have said that he is the worst man in London, and I would ask you how could one compare the ruffian, who in hot blood bludgeons his mate, with this man, who methodically and at his leisure tortures the soul and wrings the nerves in order to add to his already swollen money-bags?” I had seldom heard my friend speak with such intensity of feeling.

THE Andersons lived in a lovely clapboard house at the corner of Washington and Main, a few blocks past the hubbub of stores and businesses, where the town settled into private residences for the well-to-do. Beyond the wide front porch, where Mr. and Mrs. Anderson liked to sit in the evenings, the man scooping into his silk tobacco pouch and the woman squinting at her needlework, were the parlor, dining room, and kitchen. Bessie spent most of her time on that first floor, chasing after the children, preparing meals, and tidying up. At the top of the staircase were the bedrooms—Maisie and little Raymond shared theirs—and the second washroom. Raymond took a long nap in the afternoon and Bessie liked to sit in the window seat as he settled into his dreams. She could just make out the top two floors of the Griffin Building, with its white cornices that blazed in the sunlight.

Winter was come indeed bringing with it those pleasures of which the summer dreamer knows nothing—the delight when the fine and glittering day shows in the window, though one knows how cold it is outside; the delight of getting as close as possible to the blazing range which in the shadowy kitchen throws reflections very different from the pale gleams of sunlight in the yard, the range we cannot take with us on our walk, busy with its own activity, growling and grumbling as it sets to work, for in three hours time luncheon must be ready; the delight of filling one's bowl with steaming café-au-lait—for it is only eight o'clock—and swallowing it in boiling gulps while servants at their tasks come in and out with a, 'Good morning: up early, aren't you?' and a kindly, 'It's snug enough in here, but cold outside,' accompanying the words with that smile which is to be seen only on the faces of those who for the moment are thinking of others and not of themselves, whose expressions, entirely freed from egotism, take on a quality of vacillating goodness, a smile which completes that earlier smile of the bright golden sky touching the window-panes, and crowns our every pleasure as we stand there with the lovely heat of the range at our backs, the hot and limpid flavour of the café-au-lait in our mouths; the delight of night-time when, having had to get up to go shiveringly to the icy lavatory in the tower, into which the air creeps through the ill-fitting window, we later return deliciously to our room, feeling a smile of happiness distend our lips, finding it hard not to jump for sheer joy at the thought of the big bed already warm with our warmth, of the still burning fire, the hot-water bottle, the coverlets and blankets which have imparted their heat to the bed into which we are about to slip, walled in, embattled, hiding ourselves to the chin as against enemies thundering at the gates, who will not (and the thought brings gaiety) get the better of us, since they do not even know where we have so snugly gone to earth, laughing at the wind which is roaring outside, climbing up all the chimneys to every floor of the great house, conducting a search on each landing, trying all the locks: the delight of rolling ourselves in the blankets when we feel its icy breath approaching, sliding a little farther down the bed, gripping the hot-water bottle between our feet, working it up too high, and when we push it down again feeling the place where it has been still hot, pulling up the bedclothes to our faces, rolling ourselves into a ball, turning over, thinking—'How good life is!' too gay even to feel melancholy at the thought of the triviality of all this pleasure.

On paper, at least, none of this would necessarily stop us from getting a stimulus bill passed. After all, Democrats enjoyed a seventy-seven-seat majority in the House and a seventeen-seat majority in the Senate. But even in the best of circumstances, trying to get the largest emergency spending bill in history through Congress in record time would be a little like getting a python to swallow a cow. I also had to contend with a bit of institutionalized procedural mischief—the Senate filibuster—which in the end would prove to be the most chronic political headache of my presidency. The filibuster isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Instead, it came into being by happenstance: In 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr urged the Senate to eliminate the “motion to proceed”—a standard parliamentary provision that allows a simple majority of any legislature to end debate on a piece of business and call for a vote. (Burr, who seems never to have developed the habit of thinking things through, reportedly considered the rule a waste of time.) It didn’t take long for senators to figure out that without a formal way to end debate, any one of them could bring Senate business to a halt—and thereby extract all sorts of concessions from frustrated colleagues—simply by talking endlessly and refusing to surrender the floor. In 1917, the Senate curbed the practice by adopting “cloture,” allowing a vote of two-thirds of senators present to end a filibuster. For the next fifty years the filibuster was used only sparingly—most notably by southern Democrats attempting to block anti-lynching and fair-employment bills or other legislation that threatened to shake up Jim Crow. Gradually, though, the filibuster became more routinized and easier to maintain, making it a more potent weapon, a means for the minority party to get its way. The mere threat of a filibuster was often enough to derail a piece of legislation. By the 1990s, as battle lines between Republicans and Democrats hardened, whichever party was in the minority could—and would—block any bill not to their liking, so long as they remained unified and had at least the 41 votes needed to keep a filibuster from being overridden.

We need to reclaim the word 'feminism'. We need the word 'feminism' back real bad. When statistics come in saying that only 29% of American women would describe themselves as feminist - and only 42% of British women - I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of 'liberation for women' is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? 'Vogue' by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF THE SURVEY? These days, however, I am much calmer-since I realized that it's technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism, you wouldn't be allowed to have a debate on a woman's place in society. You'd be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor-biting down on a wooden spoon so as not to disturb the men's card game-before going back to hoeing the rutabaga field. This is why those female columnists in the Daily Mail-giving daily wail against feminism-amuse me. They paid you 1,600 pounds for that, dear, I think. And I bet it' going into your bank account and not your husband's. The more women argue, loudly, against feminism, the more they both prove it exists and that they enjoy its hard-won privileges. Because for all that people have tried to abuse it and disown it, "feminism" is still the word we need...We need the only word we have ever had to describe "making the world equal for men and women". Women's reluctance to use it sends out a really bad signal. Imagine if, in the 1960's, it had become fashionable for black people to say they "weren't into" civil rights. "No, I'm not into Civil Rights! That Martin Luther King is too shouty. He just needs to chill out, to be honest." But then, I do understand why women started to reject the word feminism. It ended up being invoked in so many baffling inappropriate contexts that you'd presume it was some spectacularly unappealing combination of misandry, misery, and hypocrisy, which stood for ugly clothes, constant anger, and, let's face it, no fucking...Feminism has had exactly the same problem that "political correctness" has had: people keep using the phrase without really knowing what it means.

Is it Randall?” Oscar sounded out the name with care, as if testing dangerous waters. Camille closed her eyes and turned her face away from him, not wanting to have to see him when she said what she needed to say. “I have a duty, Oscar, just like my mother did. She failed at hers and look what happened; she destroyed so much. My father asked me not to say anything, but if I don’t marry Randall…I’m sorry, Oscar, I just have to.” Camille tried to edge by him, but Oscar held her back with his arm. “Do you think I’m a fool, Camille? Don’t try to blame marrying Randall on some duty you think you have.” She parted her lips to insist he was wrong. He cut her off. “If this is how you really feel, then you had no right to ask me to stay with you that night. You gave me a taste of what being with you might be like, and now you’re asking me to walk away. Who do you think you are?” Camille shook her head. He wasn’t listening. He had no idea how difficult it was for her, too, to have that one taste, that single moment of pure bliss to feed off of for the rest of her life. “I don’t have a choice-“ He slammed his fist against the pantry shelf behind her. “I don’t have a bank vault filled with money, or ten suits hanging in my closet to choose from each morning. I know I couldn’t give you all the things he could, but I can give you something he’ll never be able to. I love you, Camille,” he said, his mouth so close to hers his breath moistened her lips. “I love you. Not your last name or your pretty face or all the business opportunities you could bring me.” He laid his palm just beneath her neck, his thumb caressing the skin above where her heart lay. “Just you.” She stared at him, unblinking, unable to breathe, let alone speak. Oscar’s arm fell away. “You do have a choice, Camille. Or should I already be calling you Mrs. Jackson?” He stormed from the pantry, Camille on his heels. Promise or no promise to her father, she had to tell Oscar everything. “Please, Oscar, wait, if you’ll just listen-“ The companionway steps rattled, and Ira bounded into the galley. Oscar scooped up his shirt and shoved his arms inside the sleeves as Ira kicked out a bench at the table and sat down. “I’ve never been so friggin’ tried in my life,” Ira said, grabbing a mug for coffee. “And I once played a game of poker that lasted two days. Camille ignored him, Oscar’s anger still stinging. She’d created a massive mass. Ira peered at her, then at Oscar. “Why’re you two all red in the face?” he asked. Then his cheeks drew up and his teeth glistened. Oscar caught him before he could speak. “Save it, Ira,” he said, quickly glancing at Camille. She couldn’t plead with him to listen to her explain with Ira there. Oscar buttoned his shirt and left the galley. Ira directed his wily grin toward her. “Save it, Ira,” she echoed, and resumed scrubbing the floor.

more than anything.” He turned to Jean Louise. “Seven-thirty tonight and no Landing. We’ll go to the show.” “Okay. Where’re you all going?” “Courthouse. Meeting.” “On Sunday?” “Yep.” “That’s right, I keep forgetting all the politicking’s done on Sunday in these parts.” Atticus called for Henry to come on. “Bye, baby,” he said. Jean Louise followed him into the livingroom. When the front door slammed behind her father and Henry, she went to her father’s chair to tidy up the papers he had left on the floor beside it. She picked them up, arranged them in sectional order, and put them on the sofa in a neat pile. She crossed the room again to straighten the stack of books on his lamp table, and was doing so when a pamphlet the size of a business envelope caught her eye. On its cover was a drawing of an anthropophagous Negro; above the drawing was printed The Black Plague. Its author was somebody with several academic degrees after his name. She opened the pamphlet, sat down in her father’s chair, and began reading. When she had finished, she took the pamphlet by one of its corners, held it like she would hold a dead rat by the tail, and walked into the kitchen. She held the pamphlet in front of her aunt. “What is this thing?” she said. Alexandra looked over her glasses at it. “Something of your father’s.” Jean Louise stepped on the garbage can trigger and threw the pamphlet in. “Don’t do that,” said Alexandra. “They’re hard to come by these days.” Jean Louise opened her mouth, shut it, and opened it again. “Aunty, have you read that thing? Do you know what’s in it?” “Certainly.” If Alexandra had uttered an obscenity in her face, Jean Louise would have been less surprised. “You—Aunty, do you know the stuff in that thing makes Dr. Goebbels look like a naive little country boy?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jean Louise. There are a lot of truths in that book.” “Yes indeedy,” said Jean Louise wryly. “I especially liked the part where the Negroes, bless their hearts, couldn’t help being inferior to the white race because their skulls are thicker and their brain-pans shallower—whatever that means—so we must all be very kind to them and not let them do anything to hurt themselves and keep them in their places. Good God, Aunty—” Alexandra was ramrod straight. “Well?” she said. Jean Louise said, “It’s just that I never knew you went in for salacious reading material, Aunty.” Her aunt was silent, and Jean Louise continued: “I was real impressed with the parable where since the dawn of history the rulers of the world have always been white, except Genghis Khan or somebody—the author was real fair about that—and he made a killin’ point about even the Pharaohs were white and their subjects were either black or Jews—” “That’s true, isn’t it?” “Sure, but what’s that got to do with the case?” When Jean Louise felt apprehensive, expectant, or on edge, especially when confronting her aunt, her brain clicked to the meter of Gilbertian tomfoolery. Three sprightly figures

I didn’t think we were being quiet, particularly. High heels may have looked dainty, but they didn’t sound that way on a tile floor. Maybe it was just that my dad was so absorbed in the convo on his cell phone. For whatever reason, when we emerged from the kitchen into the den, he started, and he stuffed the phone down by his side in the cushions. I was sorry I’d startled him, but it really was comical to see this big blond manly man jump three feet off the sofa when he saw two teenage girls. I mean, it would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. Dad was a ferocious lawyer in court. Out of court, he was one of those Big Man on Campus types who shook hands with everybody from the mayor to the alleged ax murderer. A lot like Sean, actually. There were only two things Dad was afraid of. First, he wigged out when anything in the house was misplaced. I won’t even go into all the arguments we’d had about my room being a mess. They’d ended when I told him it was my room, and if he didn’t stop bugging me about it, I would put kitchen utensils in the wrong drawers, maybe even hide some (cue horror movie music). No spoons for you! Second, he was easily startled, and very pissed off afterward. “Damn it, Lori!” he hollered. “It’s great to see you too, loving father. Lo, I have brought my friend Tammy to witness out domestic bliss. She’s on the tennis team with me.” Actually, I was on the tennis team with her. “Hello, Tammy. It’s nice to meet you,” Dad said without getting up or shaking her hand or anything else he would normally do. While the two of them recited a few more snippets of polite nonsense, I watched my dad. From the angle of his body, I could tell he was protecting that cell phone behind the cushions. I nodded toward the hiding place. “Hot date?” I was totally kidding. I didn’t expect him to say, “When?” So I said, “Ever.” And then I realized I’d brought up a subject that I didn’t want to bring up, especially not while I was busy being self-absorbed. I clapped my hands. “Okay, then! Tammy and I are going upstairs very loudly, and after a few minutes we will come back down, ringing a cowbell. Please continue with your top secret phone convo.” I turned and headed for the stairs. Tammy followed me. I thought Dad might order me back, send Tammy out, and give me one of those lectures about my attitude (who, me?). But obviously he was chatting with Pamela Anderson and couldn’t wait for me to leave the room. Behind us, I heard him say, “I’m so sorry. I’m still here. Lori came in. Oh, yeah? I’d like to see you try.” “He seems jumpy,” Tammy whispered on the stairs. “Always,” I said. “Do you have a lot of explosions around your house?” I glanced at my watch. “Not this early.