House Slab Quotes

I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of houses and beating down the steps. The sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day.

Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunch-backed makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed form kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries' vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters' sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

She turned her tiramisu slab on its side to cut it better. She had nearly forgotten who she was.

The phone rang. “Hauptmans’ mortuary,” I answered. “You stab ’em, we slab “em.” Baba Yaga was wearing off on me. “Hard-boiled is the best way to eat eggs,” said Baba Yaga. “But I’ve quit eating eggs—it upset my household. What did the boy-who-isn’t-a-boy have to say?” I decided I didn’t want to know what inspired the information about eggs.” “She hung up. I’d just replaced the handset when it rang again. “Yes?” I said. “I’m waiting for more cleverness,” Baba Yaga said. “Hauptman House of Horrors, don’t mind the screaming—we don’t. Something of the sort.” “Okay,” I said. “Hauptman House of Horrors—” “Sssss,” she said.

Names came patterning into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference.

life was different before 9/11, Waris said, as they left the town behind and walked along a busy main road passing big old houses made of thick slabs of grey stone; she was too young to remember the 'before era', when her mother said people looked at hijabbed women with surprise, curiosity or pity

Our toilet was in a corrugated-iron outhouse shared among the adjoining houses. Inside, there was a concrete slab with a hole in it and a plastic toilet seat on top; there had been a lid at some point, but it had broken and disappeared long ago. We couldn’t afford toilet paper, so on the wall next to the seat was a wire hanger with old newspaper on it for you to wipe. The newspaper was uncomfortable, but at least I stayed informed while I handled my business.

Hazel heads up the hill to the cemetery where generations of my husband’s people are buried behind a low iron fence, and for whatever reason I follow the dog. A plush vegetation is knitted over all the graves, and I think of how meticulously Joe’s aunt had kept things here, but this is not the summer for weeding. The cemetery is the highest point on the property and would have been the logical site for a house, the way it overlooks the trees and the barn and all the way to the edge of the lake, but those first settlers gave the best land to their dead, the very first a two-year-old named Mary. One by one they followed her up the hill until twenty-nine of them were resting beneath the mossy slabs, and there they wait for us to join them. That’s what life was like back in the day, you buried your children, your husband, your parents right there on the farm. They had never been anywhere else. They had never wanted to be anywhere else.

The whole process disgusts me, just put me in the goddamn earth and walk away. I don’t want to lie on a cold slab in some old house waiting to have my innards drained and embalming fluid put inside my poor dead body, just put me in the goddamn earth and walk away.

In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery, and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee.  Or there were stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam.  At the mid-day meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima- beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn-bread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits-- cherries, pears, peaches.  At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork-chops, fish, young fried chicken.

You can’t save the world, Stryder. (Rowena) If I save one person, then I have saved their world. Homes are not built of one single slab, but rather they are made of hundreds of stones. If one stone is crushed, then the entire house is compromised, if not ruined. I might not save them all, but I have to save as many as I can. (Stryder)

Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without the sound of fathers and their children, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers’ shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet-crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference.

The Fish She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her—there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

And presently I was shaking hands with both of them in the street, the sloping street, and everything was whirling and flying before the approaching white deluge, and a truck with a mattress from Philadelphia was confidently rolling down to an empty house, and dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone where Charlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still wet, matted, like yours, Lolita.

Alcibiades’ pride in his properties knew no bounds. But, as usual, Socrates tried to bring him down to earth. Carved on a marble slab was displayed a map of the world as it was then known. Socrates took Alcibiades to see it and asked if he could point out Attica. He could. “And your estates and houses?” Alcibiades replied that they were not marked, to which Socrates exclaimed: “Exactly. They don’t add up to even a small portion of the earth—and yet you hold them in such high regard?

Price began to speed the process. He hurried from one unanswered name to the next. Byrne, Hunt, Jones, Tipper, Wood, Leslie, Barnes, Studd, Richardson, Savile, Thompson, Hodgson, Birkenshaw, Llewellyn, Francis, Arkwright, Duncan, Shea, Simons, Anderson, Blum, Fairbrother. Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegram would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without the sound of fathers and their children, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers’ shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet-crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference.

Most of the houses were of logs—all of them, indeed, except three or four; these latter were frame ones. There were none of brick, and none of stone. There was a log church, with a puncheon floor and slab benches. A puncheon floor is made of logs whose upper surfaces have been chipped flat with the adze. The cracks between the logs were not filled; there was no carpet; consequently, if you dropped anything smaller than a peach, it was likely to go through. The church was perched upon short sections of logs, which elevated it two or three feet from the ground. Hogs slept under there, and whenever the dogs got after them during services, the minister had to wait till the disturbance was over. In winter there was always a refreshing breeze up through the puncheon floor; in summer there were fleas enough for all.

One day I watched a man sweep all the yellow leaves off the street in front of his house, and then he proceeded to do the same thing in front of his neighbor's houses on both sides. If I was the neighbor I'd be mad. Leave my leaves alone, I'd think. As soon as the man went back in there was a gust of wind and a couple leaves trickled into his clear pristine black tar, and I laughed out loud, as if I'm not always trying to stave off death and the death of my loved ones.

A hurricane delayed our meeting. First date force majeure. Online late one night we rescheduled – "Right now! As-is!" Sleep pants and t-shirts were good enough for Waffle House. Over coffee and pie we said the same sorts things we had sent as instant messages. To a person not a screen name. After she gave me the tour. Her cat's old collar on the rear-view mirror. A place where graffiti was allowed. The Slab by the river. Places where the young could be young. She stopped for cigarettes. The cashier had dirt on her face and ate an onion like an apple. We pretended not to notice. It only seemed polite.

The back of the house looks out onto a wide lawn and beyond it, a lake. At the bottom of the lawn is a pool, which is lined with slabs of slate so that the water is always cold and clear, even on the hottest days, and in the barn there is an indoor pool and a living room; every wall of the barn can be lifted up and away from the structure, so that the entire interior is exposed to the outdoors, to the tree peonies and lilac bushes that bloom around it in the early spring; to the panicles of wisteria that drip from its roof in the early summer. To the right of the house is a field that paints itself red with poppies in July; to the left is another through which he and Willem scattered thousands of wildflower seeds: cosmos and daisies and foxglove and Queen Anne’s lace.

Then at last, when he could stand it no longer, he would peel back a tiny bit of the paper wrapping at one corner to expose a tiny bit of chocolate, and then he would take a tiny nibble – just enough to allow the lovely sweet taste to spread out slowly over his tongue. The next day, he would take another tiny nibble, and so on, and so on. And in this way, Charlie would make his sixpenny bar of birthday chocolate last him for more than a month. But I haven’t yet told you about the one awful thing that tortured little Charlie, the lover of chocolate, more than anything else. This thing, for him, was far, far worse than seeing slabs of chocolate in the shop windows or watching other children munching bars of creamy chocolate right in front of him. It was the most terrible torturing thing you could imagine, and it was this: In the town itself, actually within sight of the house in which Charlie lived, there was an ENORMOUS CHOCOLATE FACTORY! Just imagine that! And it wasn’t simply an ordinary enormous chocolate factory, either. It was the largest and most famous in the whole world! It was WONKA’S FACTORY, owned by a man called Mr Willy Wonka, the greatest inventor and maker of chocolates that there has ever been. And what a tremendous, marvellous place it was! It had huge iron gates leading into it, and a high wall surrounding it, and smoke belching from its chimneys, and strange whizzing sounds coming from deep inside it. And outside the walls, for half a mile around in every direction, the air was scented with the heavy rich smell of melting chocolate! Twice a day, on his way to and from school, little Charlie Bucket had to walk right past the gates of the factory. And every time he went by, he would begin to walk very, very slowly, and he would hold his nose high in the air and take long deep sniffs of the gorgeous chocolatey smell all around him. Oh, how he loved that smell! And oh, how he wished he could go inside the factory and see what it was like!

But you are not listening, sapperment! great big she-fool that you are—sheep’s-head! Dummkopf! Donnerwetter! you are looking at the chimney-pots when Svengali talks! Look a little lower down between the houses, on the other side of the river! There is a little ugly grey building there, and inside are eight slanting slabs of brass, all of a row, like beds in a school dormitory, and one fine day you shall lie asleep on one of those slabs—you, Drilpy, who would not listen to Svengali, and therefore lost him! … And over the middle of you will be a little leather apron, and over your head a little brass tap, and all day long and all night the cold water shall trickle, trickle, trickle all the way down your beautiful white body to your beautiful white feet till they turn green, and your poor, damp, draggled, muddy rags will hang above you from the ceiling for your friends to know you by; drip, drip, drip! But you will have no friends…. ‘And people of all sorts, strangers, will stare at you through the big plate-glass window—Englanders,

Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunchbacked makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries’ vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers; heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters’ sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etoliated lacquerers; mottled-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men’s wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night’s rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

Notice the granite slab you’re passing under with the lettering engraved by GT’s high-precision explosive forming process. They said nobody could work natural stone explosively so we went ahead and did it, thus bearing out the company motto at the head of the list.” A dropout near Stal moved lips in an audible whisper as he struggled to interpret the obliquely viewed writing. “Underneath are listed prime examples of human shortsightedness, like you’ll see it’s impossible for men to breathe at over thirty miles an hour, and a bumblebee cannot possibly fly, and interplanetary spaces are God’s quarantine regulations. Try telling the folk at Moonbase Zero about that!” A few sycophantic laughs. Several places ahead of Stal the Divine Daughter crossed herself at the Name. “Why is it so sheeting cold in here?” yelled someone up the front near the guide. “If you were wearing GT’s new Polyclime fabrics, like me, you wouldn’t feel it,” the guide responded promptly. Drecky plantees, yet. How much of this crowd are GT staff members hired by government order and kept hanging about on makeweight jobs for want of anything better to do? “But that cues me in to another prime instance of how wrong can you be? Seventy or eighty years back they were saying to build a computer to match a human brain would take a skyscraper to house it and Niagara Falls to cool it. Well, that’s not up on the slab there because they were only half wrong about the cooling bit—in fact Niagara Falls wouldn’t do, it’s not cold enough. We use liquid helium by the ton load. But they were sheeting wrong about the skyscraper. Spread around this balcony and I’ll show you why.” Passive, the hundred and nine filed around a horseshoe gallery overlooking the chill sliced-egg volume of the vault. Below on the main floor identical-looking men and women came and went, occasionally glancing upwards with an air of incuriosity. Resentful, another score or so of the hundred and nine decided they weren’t going to be interested no matter what.

She decided at that moment that she wanted Gina for a friend... if Gina wasn't already a friend. She rather hoped that the Champion was. The more she thought about it, the more she hoped. Really, Gina had been very nice to someone that she'd had no real reason to like. After all, if it wasn't for Andie, where would she be now? 'On some other uncomfortable Quest?' Well, maybe. Or maybe still at the Chapter-House. And Andie was the one who had thrust herself on a reluctant Gina. The Champion had no reason to be happy about that. 'But she said herself that having me along made getting around the countryside easier.' Still, when it came right down to it, Andie had been an inconvenience. Yet Gina had never made things uncomfortable for Andie. And once she'd been revealed as being another girl- 'I'd really like her for a friend.' She looked around at the other young women clustered about the makeshift table, which looked as if someone had taken a slab of the fallen stone of the fortress walls and set it on four stumpy columns. Actually, someone probably had- that someone being one of the dragons. 'I'd like to have all of them for friends,' she found herself deciding in surprise. Uncommon trial and hardship, danger and uncertainty had brought them together, but they were making the most of it, and even seemed to be finding ways to enjoy themselves. They'd come to some sort of understanding, it seemed, because she honestly couldn't tell any differences of rank among them by the way they behaved toward one another.

This piece from a larger collection—likely one that would have wrapped around the entire exterior of a building, each slab telling a different part of the story. This one says: Thus the seven Princes of Hel looked in envy upon Midgard and unleashed their unholy hordes upon our united armies.” “Apparently nothing’s changed in fifteen thousand years,” Ember said, shadows darkening her eyes. Bryce kept her mouth shut. She’d never told her mom about Prince Aidas—how he’d helped her twice now, and had seemed unaware of his brothers’ dark plans. If her mom knew she’d consorted with the fifth Prince of Hel, they’d have to redefine the concept of going berserk.

In my little house I have my worktable, I have my Smith-Corona, my mattress, my box springs, my bed frame. I have a couch I found on the street in Pacific Grove. I have kitchen utensils—a pot, a teakettle, a frying pan. I have one spoon and one fork. I have a knife. I have no TV, no radio, no stereo. This is before computers, so no email, no Instagram, no social media. I have no correspondents. I write to nobody—not friends, not family. Nobody. And nobody writes to me. My day goes like this. I wake before dawn, eat a breakfast for a lumberjack. Four eggs, raw milk, potatoes, tomatoes. Bacon or sausage are too weak for me. Liver. A big slab for power. I walk for an hour. The sun is coming up now.

White salt, black salt, gray salt—in grains of every size: from near-powder to flakes to great, rough hunks of it. Salts for protection against darker powers. Against demons. Many Vanir built their houses with slabs of salt at the cornerstones. Rumor claimed that the entire base of the Asteri’s crystal palace was a slab of salt. That it had been built atop a natural deposit.

Step 5: Roof Fill in the whole area inside the stairs with birch wood slabs, only fill up the lower half layer. Step 6: Remove Tree Trunk Remove three blocks of the tree trunk right below the ceiling to leave space for our floor. Step 7: Oak Wood Outline Build a row of oak wood on the 1st and the 4th block below the ceiling between the pillars. Follow the blue lines in the picture and do this on all four sides. Check out the 2nd picture to see how the tree house should look by now.

Two streets west and he was back in the guts of the Estate, the ten-storey slabs of housing blocks with the nauseatingly bright orange balconies festooned with satellite dishes.

Step 8: Ladders Place ladders on the tree trunk all the way up to the top along the blue lines in the picture. The side you put your ladders on is going to be the front side of the house. Step 9: Floor Fill out the top half of the floor level with oak wood slabs and leave a two block gap (X) for the ladders. Check out the 2nd picture to see how the house should look.

The Resource List Oak Wood 104, Oak Wood Planks 12, Oak Wood Slabs 58, Birch Wood Planks 28, Birch Wood Stairs 36, Birch Wood Slabs 60, Cobblestone Wall 44, Gravel, Glass 16, Ladders 18, Fence 26, Torch 10, Redstone Torch 4, Redstone Lamp 4, Painting, Crafting Table, Furnace, Trapdoors, Chests, Wooden Door, Flower Pots 3, Jungle Leaves, Jungle Sapling 4, Fern 2, Flowers

Tree House   This jungle tree house build is both fun and rewarding, especially once you get finished in the evening and can watch the sun set from the patio of your new house suspended a hundred feet in the air. Here’s how to get started.   Once you locate a jungle biome in your world, pick out a few tall trees that are close to each other:         Start by building a platform around one of the trees and adding columns at the corners to support a half-roof:           With the columns in place, begin adding on a roof, using stairs as the roof portions. Note that all of the wood I’m using for this build is jungle wood.             Add fencing between the columns to keep people from falling out, leaving a space on one side for your patio. Create the patio using bottom stone slabs for a lower portion where a fountain/waterfall will go, then using top stone slabs for the eating area.               Once the patio is completed, you can use pressure plates on top of fence posts for tables, stairs for chairs and then use a water bucket to create a nice flow of water through a hole in the patio. Fences around the perimeter keep people safe and a few torches keep things well-lit.   Next, find a nearby tree and construct a second platform:           Make sure the second platform is surrounded by fending as well, then connect both platforms with stairs and wood planks, adding in fencing on the sides for safety:           This new platform will be the sleeping area, and three sets of beds arranged around the tree in the middle look cozy and inviting. Top this platform off with a few torches and you’re set!         Adding some jungle leaves above the platform will protect sleepers below from getting wet when it rains, and will help keep things looking natural and open.         Go back to the main platform and construct an additional, smaller platform above it:         Cut a hole in both platforms and add a tall ladder going from the uppermost platform down to the ground, passing through the main platform on its way. At the bottom, add a landing with torches and stairs leading down to the beach:           Clear the upper platform of leaves and then add on fencing for safety, torches for light and use a staircase and wooden slab to create long chairs that people can sit on to watch the sunsets. A pair of stairs on the sides of the upper platform add additional seating for more guests:             Wow! This tree house looks amazing! You’ve got all of the basic set up, so now it’s up to you to take it to the next level! Add in more personal touches, expand the tree house with more connected platforms or build even higher into the jungle!  

Not surprisingly, when Barbie achieved superstar status, her houses became more ostentatious. Yet even Barbie's three-story town house, with its Tara-like pillars and ersatz wrought-iron birdcage elevator, is an outsider's interpretation of upper-class life. Authentic valuables are to Barbie's possessions what a pungent slab of gorgonzola is to "cheese food"; her furniture and artwork would not look out of place in a Ramada Inn. For all her implicit disposable income, her tastes remain doggedly middle- to lower-middle-class. As pictured in the catalogue, the town house also reflects Dynasty thinking. Both Ken and Barbie are absurdly overdressed—he in a parodic "tuxedo," she in a flouncy confection that barely fits into the elevator.

Thank you.” I hated feeling indebted to him, but I took great comfort in the hams and bacon slabs soaking in the curing syrup. He shrugged. “Nothing one neighbor wouldn’t do for another.” “I think you are more neighborly than most.” He poked a stick into the cooling ash. “It isn’t hard to want to help you.” I sucked in the smoky night air, its cold stinging my nose and chest. Though that night with Arthur on the front steps of the schoolhouse in Downington hadn’t been cold, suddenly it seemed too similar to this one. All alone. In the dark. Words that could mean so many different things. “Thank you,” I said. His shoulder raised and lowered as he stared into the distance. I wondered what his life was like, a single man in this small town. No family to speak of. Prater’s Junction didn’t seem to have many girls of an age for him to be interested in. So why didn’t he go elsewhere? Nothing held him here that I could see. He threw the stick on top of the fire pit. “I did it.” I pulled my coat closer around me. “Did what?” “Asked to be considered for a Texas Ranger.” I shoved my hands into the pockets of my coat. “Congratulations. I hope they accept you.” He stepped closer, so close that I could see every inch of his face, in spite of the cloak of night. “I’d never have dared, but for you.” With a hard swallow, I stepped away. Away from the reach of his arms, his lips. I had no intention of falling for a man I didn’t really know. Not again. Besides, though the sheriff had endearing qualities, my heart didn’t leap at his nearness. “Rebekah?” Ollie’s voice, from the house. Sheriff Jeffries touched his hat, stepped back, and nodded. “See you at church on Sunday, Rebekah.

flavourings, and many other assorted pollutants. I got a plain house blend, black, no sugar, in the middle-sized go-cup, not the enormous grande bucket some folks like, and a slab of lemon pound cake to go with it, and I sat alone on a hard wooden chair at a table for two. The cake lasted five minutes and the coffee another five, and eighteen minutes after that Shoemaker’s guy showed up. Which made him navy, because twenty-eight minutes was pretty fast, and the navy is right there in Seattle. And his car was dark blue. It was a low-spec domestic sedan, not very desirable, but polished to a high shine. The guy himself was nearer forty

The address of the Tip O'Neill building is 10 Causeway Street. It may be torn down soon, because it is one of the most wonderfully unsightly buildings ever constructed. In the eighties they blew up a grand hotel that had gone seedy, and in its place they built this shrine to Congressman Tip O'Neill. It houses all the federal offices - the office of Social Security, and the Firearms Legitimization Bureau, the Bioshock Informant Management Corps, and the Soy Protein Tax Credit Administration, and the Federal Security Corn Slab Ektachrome Mediocrity Desk, plus another twelve important outposts of American impotence. And it has wireless Internet.

Spruce Wood 155 Spruce Wood Planks 51 Spruce Wood Stairs 122 Spruce Wood Slabs 16 Oak Wood Planks 77 Stone Bricks 178 Stone Brick Stairs 25 Stone Brick Slabs 38 Mossy Stone Bricks 22 Bookshelves 18 Oak Leaves 9 Fence 34 Glass Panes 8

We ended up at the bar of a little steak house I had never noticed before. It was one of those places that seemed to have slipped through time unscathed and walking into it was like walking into a different decade. Dark walls, leather booths, thick slabs of beef, ashtrays on every table. The man behind the bar in a red plaid vest had the open, sad face of an old-time baseball player. “Mrs. S.,” he said in a thick nasally voice when we sat on the red-leather stools. “Terrific as always to see you.” “Rocco, this is Victor,” she said. “Victor and I are in desperate need of a drink. I’ll have the usual. What will it be for you, Victor?” “Do you make a sea breeze?” I said. Rocco looked at me like I had spit on the bar. I got the message. This was a serious place for serious drinking, a leftover from an era when the cocktail hour was a sacred thing, when a man was defined by his drink and no man wanted to be defined by something as sweet and inconsequential as a sea breeze. Kids in short pants with ball gloves sticking out of their pockets drank soda pop, men drank like men. “What’s she having?” I said, nodding at my companion. “A manhattan.” “What’s that?” “Whiskey, bitters, sweet vermouth.” “And a cherry,” said Alura Straczynski. “Mustn’t forget the cherry.” “No, Mrs. S.,” said Rocco. “I wouldn’t forget your cherry.

We wonder what First Contact will be like. Hollywood imagines spaceships with laser beams blowing up buildings, or UFOs hovering over the White House, but I don’t think we’ve ever stopped to realize what First Contact actually means. My take might be overly simplistic, but Life from over there reaches out to Life over here. That’s it. Life understands that Life is important. And here I am, standing in a place of death, humbled by a life form from beyond the furthest reaches of the solar system. I’ve always thought of cemeteries as creepy—places to be avoided—but Sharon’s right. They’re a memorial to life. These aging marble headstones and cold concrete slabs show we care. We should never stop caring.

A. J. Wheeler. He says: “Nothing is more important about the quantum principle than this, that it destroys the concept of the world as ‘sitting out there,’ with the observer safely separated from it by a 20-centimeter slab of plate glass. Even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, we must shatter the glass.

Resigned that I wasn’t going back to sleep, I rolled up and got out of bed once another glance at my phone confirmed it was seven thirty and instantly peeked out the window. There was a dull, repetitive sound coming from out there. It was Mr. Rhodes. Chopping wood. Shirtless. And I mean shirtless. I’d expected something nice beneath his clothes from the way he filled them out, but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of… him. Reality. If I wasn’t already pretty sure that there was dry drool on my face, there would have been five minutes after seeing all…. That through the window. A pile of foot-long logs were tossed around his feet, with another small pile that he’d obviously already chopped, just to the side. But it was the rest of him that really drew my attention. Dark chest hair was sprinkled high over his pectorals. The body hair did nothing to take away from the hard slabs of abdominal muscles he’d been hiding; he was broad up top, narrow at the waist, and covering all that was firm, beautiful skin. His biceps were big and supple. Shoulders rounded. His forearms were incredible. And even though his shorts grazed his knees, I could tell the rest of his downtown area was nice and muscular. He was the DILF to end all DILFs. My ex had been fit. He’d worked out several times a week at our home gym with a trainer. Being attractive had been part of his job. Kaden’s physique had nothing on Mr. Rhodes though. My mouth watered a little more. I whistled. And I must have done it a lot louder than I’d thought because his head instantly went up and his gaze landed on me through the window almost immediately. Busted. I waved. And inside… inside, I died. He lifted his chin. I backed away, trying to play it off. Maybe he wouldn’t think anything of it. Maybe he’d think I’d whistled… to say hi. Sure, yeah. A girl could dream. I backed up some more and felt my soul shriveling as I made my breakfast, making sure to stay away from the window the rest of the time. I tried to focus on other stuff. You know, so I wouldn’t want to have to move out from shame. Was I tired? Absolutely. But there were things I wanted to do. Needed to do. Including but not limited to getting away from Mr. Rhodes so my soul could come back to life. So an hour later, with a plan in mind, a sandwich, a couple bottles of water, and my whistle in my backpack, I headed down the stairs, hoping and praying that Mr. Rhodes was back in his house. I wasn’t that lucky. He had a shirt on, but that was the only difference. Darn.

Thick, fragrant loam behind the house, where Astraia and I once dug with our bare hands to plant stolen rose cuttings. Thin gray dust on the summer wind, blown into my mouth to grit against my teeth. Father's rock collection: malachite, rhodonite, and the slab of simple limestone inlaid with the skeleton of a curious fanged bird with claws on its wings.

George Pontifex put up a monument to his parents, a plain slab in Paleham church, inscribed with the following epitaph: SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN PONTIFEX WHO WAS BORN AUGUST 16TH, 1727, AND DIED FEBRUARY 8, 1812, IN HIS 85TH YEAR, AND OF RUTH PONTIFEX, HIS WIFE, WHO WAS BORN OCTOBER 13, 1727, AND DIED JANUARY 10, 1811, IN HER 84TH YEAR. THEY WERE UNOSTENTATIOUS BUT EXEMPLARY IN HER DISCHARGE OF THEIR RELIGIOUS, MORAL, AND SOCIAL DUTIES THIS MONUMENT WAS PLACED BY THEIR ONLY SON.

Bryce silently translated the text. “This is a piece from a larger collection—likely one that would have wrapped around the entire exterior of a building, each slab telling a different part of the story. This one says: Thus the seven Princes of Hel looked in envy upon Midgard and unleashed their unholy hordes upon our united armies.” “Apparently nothing’s changed in fifteen thousand years,” Ember said, shadows darkening her eyes.

The stone from quarries like the Kehoes’ had been carved into skyscrapers in New York and monuments in Washington, DC—places most people around here would never see. It had been used to build temples to the glory of commerce these folks didn’t enjoy, for centers of learning they wouldn’t attend, and for places of worship where they would never kneel. Stone from the next county had been crafted into state houses and courthouses across the country, and even sent to fix up the Pentagon after 9/11. The ground beneath them had been chiseled out and carted away for the far-off business of other places. Close to home, you didn’t see the pretty white stone from their hills turned into monuments to beauty or progress. It was the rubble lining your garden path or maybe, at the end of your days, a slab might mark the resting place of your bones.

The darkness offered no comfort. It only shrouded the true nature of that place. It hid the mocking and gloating eyes of the unseen. The cold, dank air chilled everything in the room and had long since seeped into the very marrow of the girl’s bones. It gave no relief and only aggravated the already sore skin around her wrists and ankles. The skin that had been rubbed raw by the manacles that bit into them. The manacles that kept her chained to the stone slab on which she was forced to lie. The girl did not know how long she had been there, nor where ‘there’ was. All that she knew was that she had been forsaken, and that there were only two ways she would ever see the outside of that room again, and neither of them were desirable.

None of the Slab Town houses had running water, and the well water used by the local families smelled foul without extensive boiling.

And I saw the roof of the shack in Hanoi where my mother lived. Sheet metal patched together with tar paper. On rainy days, the roof leaked. In the heat of summer, the acrid smell of tar was overpowering, nauseating. All around, the gutters, gurgling under slabs of cement, flowed from one house to the next. Children played in this filthy black water, sailing their little white paper boats. The few mangy patches of grass were at the foot of the wall where men drunk on too much beer came to relieve themselves. The place reeked of urine. This was my street. I had grown up here.

Like a contractor building a house, this book is constructed from the ground up: first comes the big slabs of foundation, then the necessary load-bearing walls, the elegant but impermeable roof, and the lovely interior decorations.

There was no footage to show on television, no burning buildings or broken bridges, no twisted metal or scorched earth, no houses sliding off slabs. No one was wounded. No one was dead. It was, at the beginning, a quite invisible catastrophe.

My Girls There isn't much that I feel I need A solid soul and the blood I bleed But with a little girl, and by my spouse, I only want a proper house I don't care for fancy things Or to take part in the freshest wave, But to provide for mine who ask I will, with heart, on my father's grave On my father's grave (On your father's grave) I don't mean to seem like I Care about material things, Like a social status, I just want Four walls and adobe slabs For my girls

Like old peasants, we could sit by the fireplace, grilling slabs of bread and oil, pour a young Chianti. After rooms of Renaissance virgins and dusty back roads from Umbertide, I cook a pan of small eels fried with garlic and sage. Under the fig where two cats curl, we’re cool. I’ve counted: the dove coos sixty times per minute. The Etruscan wall above the house dates from the eighth century B.C. We can talk. We have time.