Jackpot Quotes

I whirled around and saw no one. No psychotic mad scientists, anyway. "Jackpot, Max! Jackpot!" It was was Fang, and he was giggling hysterically. For those of you just joining us, Fang doesn't giggle. Especially hysterically. So for a second, this seemed like one of the weirder dreams of recent days.

Happiness is not an unexpected jackpot nor a monolithic cluster but a forbearing casting and a daily discovery process. ("Why has shé got stars in the sky?")

Jackpot, Max! Jackpot!" It was Fang and he was giggling hysterically. For those of you just joining us, Fang doesn't giggle, esspecially hysterically.

Now a guarantee of happiness—that's a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.

You and Cami aren’t a deal. You two are a lottery jackpot, and it’s time someone treated you both that way.

You should see some of the stuff she keeps." He shuddered. I couldn’t help but be curious. "Like what?" "Finger bones. "Um … ew." "You want ew? She keeps them in an old Cadbury box. Try being seven years old and thinking you found the jackpot secret stash of chocolate. Talk about a rude awakening.

I rolled over and picked up Us Weekly magazine off the floor. The cover had a picture of Angelina, Brad, and their little Eskimo son, Maddox. I saw staring at the photo, wondering why this little boy looks so pissed off in every picture. At first I thought he was just pissed about his Mohawk, but then I realized he’s probably furious. Maddox must have thought he hit the jackpot when some A-list celebrity rescued him from third-world Cambodia, only to discover that she was going to shuffle him back and for the to EVERY other third-world country in the universe. He’s probably like, 'When the fuck are we gonna get to Malibu, bitch?

Luck is not as random as you think. Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it.

Her laugh was the sound of a slot-machine jackpot, a soda can cracking open, fairground music in the distance, a Corvette engine coming to life, a thousand hands applauding at once. It was one of those truly beautiful sounds.

Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were.

Hayden’s gaze fell to my lips. My heart did a stupid little jump that made me all warm and fuzzy. He liked me— really liked me. Even after seeing my scars. It was like hitting the jackpot of awesome guys.

The child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.

Seamus: "I was wondering if you would like to go get some coffee" Cara: "Well that depends ... do you like to take long walks?" Seamus: "Yes" Cara: "Do you like sex?" Seamus: "Yeees" Cara: "Then take a f***ing hike and leave me the hell alone.

Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.

If you can go home to someone who loves you, if your children are proud of you, if you can keep your integrity, you’ve hit the jackpot. You don’t need the state to call your number. It’s already been called.

You think you're paying your dollar for a chance at the $6.2 million jackpot on Saturday, but really you're paying for the pleasure of the car ride home, deciding which credit card to pay off first and where your kid will suddenly be able to go to college.

Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time.

My thoughts are punctured by the feel of Anna's hand on me. Down there. Jackpot. I look down, and she's pulling my mobile from my pocket, holding it out to me. Damn. Major false alarm. "That was brave," I tell her.

It is amateurs who have one big bright beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot.

The part that wasn't a jackpot was his baseball mound of red pubic hair that looked like it had literally been attached with a glue gun. I couldn't believe how much there was, and wondered how he had never heard of scissors, or--more appropriate for that kind of growth--hedge trimmers. I didn't understand what porn he was watching to not be aware of the trimming that was happening all across the world among his compatriots. I'm not a finicky person when it comes to pubic hair maintenance and I certainly don't expect men to shave it all off, leaving themselves to look like a hairless cat. That's even creepier then than seeing what Austin had, which could really only be compared to one thing: A clown in a leg lock.

This is how it feels in the split second you suddenly become aware that you’re falling in love with someone. The click of a jigsaw’s last piece, the rainfall of coins in a jackpot slot machine, the right song striking up and your being swept away by its opening bars. That conviction of making complete sense of the universe, in one moment. Of course. You’re where I should be. You’re here.

You aren’t a vampire.” Silver's voice mirrored his shock. She repeated the phrase with a huge smile on her face. “You aren’t a vampire!” “They don’t call me Jackpot for nothing,” he joked.

Encryption isn’t optional, when we address one another,” she said.

A perfect invitation to use and abuse her, a wanton lust for what she knows comes next. I have no idea how any of this can work. But I think I just hit the jackpot. I can have my sweet cake and beat it too.

Cinder inhaled sharply. “Is the video … is it worth it?” “Oh!” Iko clapped her hands to her face. “It’s horrifying!” Thorne grinned. “It’s a jackpot.” “I’ll load it on the projector,” said Cress, turning toward the holograph node. “Please, no,” said Iko, “we don’t need to see it that big again.

Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way.

Can I get you anything? A drink? A fresh change of clothes? A membership card to Hypocrites International?

If you fancy resenting the tedious, I recommend intentional communities, particularly those led by charismatics.” “You

Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.

They’re still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least.” She took the seat opposite. “Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me. Hard to imagine they weren’t constantly happy, given all they still had. Tigers, for instance.” Picking

Her face lit up. Like seriously... Lit. The. Fuck. Up. Like I'd just told her she'd hit the jackpot.

And the child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.

Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn. The trouble with learning the backgrounds is that you end up wanting to deck somebody, possibly Bettina Cook and the horse she rode in on. (Not happening. Her dad being head of the football boosters and major donor.) Once upon a time we had our honest living that was God and country. Then the world turns and there’s no God anymore, no country, but it’s still in your blood that coal is God’s gift and you want to believe. Because otherwise it was one more scam in the fuck-train that’s railroaded over these mountains since George Washington rode in and set his crew to cutting down our trees. Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.

Here is an all-too-brief summary of Buffett’s approach: He looks for what he calls “franchise” companies with strong consumer brands, easily understandable businesses, robust financial health, and near-monopolies in their markets, like H & R Block, Gillette, and the Washington Post Co. Buffett likes to snap up a stock when a scandal, big loss, or other bad news passes over it like a storm cloud—as when he bought Coca-Cola soon after its disastrous rollout of “New Coke” and the market crash of 1987. He also wants to see managers who set and meet realistic goals; build their businesses from within rather than through acquisition; allocate capital wisely; and do not pay themselves hundred-million-dollar jackpots of stock options. Buffett insists on steady and sustainable growth in earnings, so the company will be worth more in the future than it is today.

Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable. Rule of thieves brings collapse, eventually, because they can't stop stealing.

The plus sign is a hipster ampersand.

I think I’m getting a notion of how to do this. O.K., a carnival works because people pay to feel amazed and scared. They can nibble around a midway getting amazed here and scared there, or both. And do you know what else? Hope. Hope they’ll win a prize, break the jackpot, meet a girl, hit a bull’s-eye in front of their buddies. In a carnival you call it luck or chance, but it’s the same as hope. Now hope is a good feeling that needs risk to work. How good it is depends on how big the risk is if what you hope doesn’t happen. You hope your old auntie croaks and leaves you a carload of shekels, but she might leave them to her cat. You might not hit the target or win the stuffed dog, you might lose your money and look like a fool. You don’t get the surge without the risk. Well. Religion works the same way. The only difference is that it’s more amazing than even Chick or the twins. And it’s a whole lot scarier than the Roll-a-plane or the Screamer, or any simp twister. This scare stuff laps over into the hope department too. The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous. Bad! Well, I’m working on it. I’ve got the amazing part down. And the scary bits are a snap. But I’ve got to come up with a hope.

Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega jackpot" Hiro Protagonist - Snow Crash

Stop!” she screamed. “Don’t hurt him.” “Back off!” Billy shouted. She yanked harder on Billy’s arm. “He isn’t a vampire anymore, idiot. Look! Do you see that big, yellow thing up in the sky? That’s called the sun. It’s shining down on him, and he isn’t exploding. His fangs are gone. He’s as human as we are. Case closed.” Billy stared up at the sky, his jaw slack. “Not possible.” Jack mumbled, “They don’t call me Jackpot for nothing.” “What?” Billy blinked at him. “Private joke.

Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable. Rule of thieves brings collapse, eventually, because they can’t stop stealing.

You can't expect to hit the jackpot if you don't put a few nickels in the machine

They had puddled in the floorboards and they poured out onto the pavement like the jackpot from the Devil’s slot machine, the bugs raining down with a sound like frying bacon.

It’s like winning a lottery. Although the odds are astronomical, most weeks, someone hits the jackpot.

but I could see the glint of light off glass in the back. Jackpot!

You should have seen her this morning,' he said, smiling. 'She's got into the pantry and tipped a box of Cheerios all over the kitchen floor. I walk in and she's crawling around eating them as fast as she can. Mum's standing there, watching her - she got this embarrassed look when she saw me - she does, 'I know, I know, but I can't bring myself to stop her. She thinks she's hit the jackpot.

I don't believe art is meant to be economical. Art is adventurous, sloppy and hugely imaginative. What I look at is hitting the jackpot. I don't even think about the intermediate levels of getting paid. What I want to create is something that revolutionizes ideas and it just so happens that I'm not good at it enough yet to become the next William Blake, but I'm trying. I'm not interested in trying - and it might sound weird to hear a guy say this - to become popular for a certain marketplace. I'd rather create something that has its own light and people have to pick it up because they feel it's going to wake them up or inspire them to move forward.

That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.

You hit the jackpot," I said, throwing my arms around his neck. He looked down at me, his hands slowly coming down. The slot machine lights reflected red, blue and green in his eyes. The chime of falling coins dwindled away in my ears. The entire casino faded to the background. "I did," he whispered. His hands took my face and he kissed me.

Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.” “I’ve

A reward-sensitive person is highly motivated to seek rewards—from a promotion to a lottery jackpot to an enjoyable evening out with friends. Reward sensitivity motivates us to pursue goals like sex and money, social status and influence.

Don't just listen to people, hear them

And this other evening light, rainy, rose and silver, and to her left a river the color of cold lead. Dark tumble of city, towers in the distance, few lights.

A few stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata, like bright rectilinear beetles

History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.

In the early part of the ninth century, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a mathematician working in Baghdad, wrote a seminal textbook in which he highlighted the usefulness of restoring a quantity being subtracted (like 2, above) by adding it to the other side of an equation. He called this process al-jabr (Arabic for “restoring”), which later morphed into “algebra.” Then, long after his death, he hit the etymological jackpot again. His own name, al-Khwarizmi, lives on today in the word “algorithm.

I hit the goddamn jackpot with celebrity dreams this a.m. In the latest dream I was in bed with Tom and Katie. I’ve never thought much of Tom Cruise but as I watched him fuck Katie fueled with insane lust and cocaine I murmured, 'God, Tom, I admire you so much.' Katie went to the bathroom to clean up and Tom fucked me. I was too happy to remember that I always preferred Ice Man to Maverick.

As the jackpot got seriously going, after the first wave of pandemics, without EU membership to buffer anything, England started looking a lot like a competitive control area. Lowbeer did what she knew how to do, which by then was run a CCA. But as she kept building it back up, every time another change driver impacted, she found herself using Russians. They knew how to work a CCA. They’d been there before the jackpot hit the fan.

But now it seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push. Those forces – incomparably the most potent in our culture – have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdathon; a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go. Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth’s poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics – his attitude toward the poor, say, or his unconscious ‘valorization’ of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, everyone has become a literary critic – or at least, a book-reviewer.

I was careful, then, to present myself as just another immigrant, glad to be in the land where the pursuit of happiness was guaranteed in writing, which, when one comes to think about it, is not such a great deal. Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.

One corner was filled by an elderly flat-top desk; the papers on it were neatly in order. Near it, on its own stand, was a small electric calculator.

The Colorado River was at a record low and the towers in Lake Mead stood high out of the water. But the Angelenos committed communal suicide by watering lawns as usual.

What Shaylene saw as Burton’s primary symptom of traumatic stress, Flynne thought, was his ongoing failure to ask her out.

Fuck it. Just fuck it.

I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. —H. G. WELLS

It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it.

a chronic malcontent, albeit quite a purposeless one.

Love whomever you want to love. Just make sure they’re deserving of your love.

In Franklins, a million weighs twenty-two pounds. If you want to keep your weight down, go with the Swiss thousand-franc notes.

Are you familiar with the strategic concept of competitive control areas?” Ash asked. “Yes,” Stets said.

It is silly. The whole notion of cause-and-effect is probably superstition. But the same cycle shows a peak in house building right after a peak in marriages.

Some questions were years old, and as the jackpots grew, so did the difficulty of finding people who had now moved elsewhere. Some winners never were found.

His mouth meets my clit and I’m not lost on the fact that this man will have gone down on me four times today. Forget winning the mega millions, I’ve hit the cunnilingus jackpot.

People always say when luck meets opportunity, that equals success. But I call bullshit. And today is proof. Because even when you get knot so lucky, you can still hit a jackpot.

So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn't happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming, anyway.

Only the neurosurgeon dares to improve upon five billion years of evolution in a few hours. The human brain. A trillion nerve cells storing electrical patterns more numerous than the water molecules of the world’s oceans. The soul’s tapestry lies woven in the brain’s nerve threads. Delicate, inviolate, the brain floats serenely in a bone vault like the crown jewel of biology. What motivated the vast leap in intellectual horsepower between chimp and man? Between tree dweller and moon walker? Is the brain a gift from God, or simply the jackpot of a trillion rolls of DNA dice?

Cultures have tried to teach a malign and apparently persuasive lie: that the most important metric of a good life is wealth and the luxury and power it brings. The rich think they live better when they are even richer. In America and many other places they use their wealth politically, to persuade the public to elect or accept leaders who will do that for them. They say that the justice we have imagined is socialism that threatens our freedom. Not everyone is gullible: many people lead contented lives without wealth. But many others are persuaded; they vote for low taxes to keep the jackpot full in case they too can win it, even though that is a lottery they are almost bound to lose. Nothing better illustrates the tragedy of an unexamined life: there are no winners in this macabre dance of greed and delusion. No respectable or even intelligible theory of value supposes that making and spending money has any value or importance in itself and almost everything people buy with that money lacks any importance as well. The ridiculous dream of a princely life is kept alive by ethical sleepwalkers. And they in turn keep injustice alive because their self-contempt breeds a politics of contempt for others. Dignity is indivisible.

In science, there is something called a “jackpot effect,” where a male scientist hires women in his lab early in the development of a certain field, and these women hire other talented women, and, as a result, the field ends up with an unusually high number of women. Something like this was at work in cryptanalysis. A few key women proved themselves gifted, early on; a few key men were willing to hire and encourage

Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn’t tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather’s fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall.

Life is amazing, Stephanie Reilly. We won the jackpot, getting to live on this beautiful Earth. When I can keep that kind of positive attitude, a madman can beat me all he wants. He can break every bone in my body. There is no pain,

Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.

Free education, almost free healthcare, a generous benefits system and a better state pension than elsewhere, guarantee equal opportunities for all citizens. The only problem is that all these require a considerable amount of public revenue. This is why the common assertion that to be born in Finland is like winning the jackpot in the lottery is only applicable when you are at the receiving end. A far more common experience is that you need to win the lottery just to cover the tax bill.

Open-faced sandwiches with the meat married to toasted buns and the flavor garnished rather than suppressed by scraped Bermuda onion and thin-sliced dill, a salad made from things she had scrounged out of his refrigerator, potatoes crisp but not vulcanized.

Intellectually, she recognized the summer could’ve lasted only so many days, but, in remembrance, it seemed to last epochs, from the creation of the Milky Way to its expiration. Not because the time was dull but rather it was so damn fun and so life-affirming, it could’ve been a magical potion concocted to revive the dead. Even in her advanced age, she could see that time, so clearly delineated in what the novelist John Dos Passos called the Camera Eye—mental snapshots, frozen in bliss, which neither age nor time could mar their perfection.

His cancer was rare, they told him. Even rarer for it to be in both eyes, still rarer to be so aggressive. It felt like a great bitter joke at one point, that out of all the people in the world he had beaten every probability, but instead of a lottery jackpot he’d won cancer.

Our group pressed west on what was left of Highway 93, toward the pass leading to Las Vegas. Sand covered the road in loose drifts so deep the horses' hooves sank into them. The metal highway signs were bent low by the strong wind, and above us, billboards that once screamed ads for the casinos were now stripped of their promises of penny slots and large jackpots. The raw boards underneath were exposed, like showgirls without their makeup. Some signs had been blown over completely and lay half-buried under mounds of sand, like sleeping animals. Cars dotted the highway, their paint scoured off and dead tumbleweeds caught underneath them. Their windows were fogged with death, and despite my effort not to look, my eyes were drawn to the blurred images of the still forms inside. I tried to concentrate on the dark road ahead of us instead.

But now it seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push. Those forces – incomparably the most potent in our culture – have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdathon; a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go. Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth’s poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics – his attitude toward the poor, say, or his unconscious ‘valorization’ of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, everyone has become a literary critic – or at least, a book-reviewer.

It is not their quantative scarcity vis-a-vis the majority that makes minorities hapless but rather their qualitative similarity. As a member of a minority group, you can be as industrious as an ant, even hit the jackpot and acquire a considerable fortune, but someday, just because you presently and will always belong to the same community, you could in an instant find yourself on par with those of your community who have idled their lives away since birth. That is why the affluent among the minorities are never affluent enough; neither are their exceptional members ever sufficiently so.

The problem is we have a standard of what evil is, Hitler, the Holocaust—THE standard of absolute evil. . . . But then everyone gets frantic as soon as you try to use the standard, nothing compares, nothing resembles—and the standard becomes unusable and nothing qualifies as Evil with a capital E. . . . I mean like a certain ex-actor-turned-president who shall go nameless sat idly and I do mean idly by and watched tens of thousands die of a plague and he couldn't even bother to say he felt bad about it, much less try to help . . . I mean do you have to pile up some magic number of bodies before you hit the jackpot and rare a comparison with you-know-who?

This person sees not her own hand depositing the next dollar in a slot machine, but the hand of fate, or God. It’s her true conviction that there are forces at work for her to win a large jackpot— or at least to win back the money lost. After all, the only-for-show pictures of fruit had almost aligned with one another the last couple spins.

You're from the future, Mr Netherton?" "Not exactly," he said. "I'm in the future that would result from my not being here. But since I am, it isn't your future. Here.

Pada saat saya berpikir bahwa saya telah belajar bagaimana hidup, sebenarnya saya telah belajar cara untuk mati.

You really pay attention to things, don’t you?” “Just with people I care about,” he said with a smile, “I think I get that from my mother. She was a really kind and giving person from what I remember, and she used to tell me, ‘Don’t just listen to people, hear them.’ I never forgot that.” “Wow,” I responded, “That’s so true. How many people really hear what we say?

It is not easy to be a man with growing feminism. It is ideal if women who are very successful in their careers can find a man to complement their strengths and work as a team. I think we should interview the men behind all the successful women, and find out the qualities of good men behind successful women. “Behind every successful woman is a great man.” Finding the right companion on the onset is like striking the jackpot in life.

I had no money, no food, no prospects, no contacts. Eating was my first priority, and for that, one usually needs money, and so lo and behold I had a goal in sight. I collected cans and bottles, scrounged parking lots and sidewalks, my head held low and eyes intent on the ground instead of where I was going. Vending machines and pay phones sometimes gave up their treasures in the form of change people had forgotten to collect. They're not what I'd call jackpots, but finding a dollar here and a dollar there is a lot when you have nothing.

Their aesthetic, if you haven’t noticed, is about benign skin cancers, supernumerary nipples. Conventional tattoos belong firmly among the iconics of the hegemon. It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it. Actually, it’s worse than that. What are they like?

They’d started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals, which was a thing. Basically they were just assholes, though, and took it as the measure of God’s satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes.

We made love for a long time, and he whispered how much he’d missed me, and how beautiful I was, and how lucky he felt that we were together. And though I felt all those things, no words came out of my mouth. The feel of his body was taking my breath away, but that wasn’t the reason I didn’t say anything. At this moment, I felt as if I was in a dream, and I never wanted it to end. I wanted to feel him and touch him and hear him breathe and look in his eyes, and there wasn’t one word I could say thatwouldn’t take away from the overwhelming sense of passion I was feeling at this very moment. “Are you okay?” Drew asked me. “Yeah, why?” I whispered. “Because you’re crying,” he said, wiping tears from my eyes. “No, I’m not.” He gave me a gentle smile. “Yes, you are. Tell me why.” I looked into his eyes so directly that I almost felt like I was trying to look into his soul. And then I whispered, “I love you,” and I realized that for the first time in my life, I actually meant it.

Wouldn’t you think,” he asked us, “the miners wanted a different life for their kids? After all the stories you’ve heard? Don’t you think the mine companies knew that?” What the companies did, he told us, was put the shuthole on any choice other than going into the mines. Not just here, also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of eastern Kentucky, these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn.

Now he took my hands. “I know people, and I know what’s inside of you.” “You do?” “Yes. I know you, Jamie. I see you. I saw how you suffered, and how you gave up on men. And I understand that. You were trying to be tough. You tried to play the game. But I saw through it.” “Wait a minute…” He continued, “Jamie, I’m glad I saw through it. I feel lucky that I saw through it.” Tears welled in my eyes and Drew gently kissed my lips. “I want you,” he said softly, “Not just in bed. I want you. All of you.” “I hope so,” I said softly. “I’m here. Not just for a few days or a few months. I’m here for you long term.

You could me practice. They wouldn't have to know." I don't even feel like practicing. I just seems I should get in the water on principal, since Galen told me not to. And especially since he left me with a babysitter. She throws me a sideways glare. "Fat Lips would know. He can sense me from anywhere, remember? An he'd snitch to Galen. He would know something's wrong if you and me got in without my brother." I shrug. "Since when do you care about getting in trouble?" "Since never. But Galen said if I kept you out of the water, he'd teach me how to drive his car." Jackpot. "I happen to know how to drive. I could teach you." "Galen said I wasn't allowed to ask you, or the deal's off." "You didn't ask me. I offered." She nods, biting her lip. "That's true. You did." I set the book on the ugly glass coffee table and squat next to her. "I'll teach you how to drive if you let me get in the water. You don't even have to get in." The way she raises her brow reminds me of Galen. "You're wasting your time trying to change if you ask me. You're half human. You probably don't even have a fin in there." "What do you know about the half-breeds?" She shrugs. "Not much. Enough to know that if you're one of them, there's no point in trying to change. No one is going to accept you. At least, no Syrena will." I decide not to take offense. I don't put much stock in her opinion anyway, and she won't care if she offended me or not.