Kitchen Sink Quotes

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

we write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are.

You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.

Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.

i gut fruit with my mouth push tongue into black belly of papaya peel lychee with teeth bite into ripe pear suck on stone of mango all of this, over the kitchen sink barefoot middle of winter sticky hands pushing hair away from face moaning into sweet flesh the whole time your name flat against the roof of my mouth.

You can have everything in the world, but if you don't have love, none of it means crap," he said promptly. "Love is patient. Love is kind. Love always forgives, trusts, supports, and endures. Love never fails. When every star in the heavens grows cold, and when silence lies once more on the face of the deep, three things will endure: faith, hope, and love." And the greatest of these is love," I finished. "That's from the Bible." First Corinthians, chapter thirteen," Thomas confirmed. "I paraphrased. Father makes all of us memorize that passage. Like when parents put those green yucky-face stickers on the poisonous cleaning products under the kitchen sink.

Life will throw everything but the kitchen sink in your path, and then it will throw the kitchen sink. It's your job to avoid the obstacles. If you let them stop you or distract you, you're not doing your job, and failing to do your job will cause regrets that paralyze you more than a bad back.

Haruhi: This story has everything but the kitchen sink in it.

If you were only one inch tall, you'd ride a worm to school. The teardrop of a crying ant would be your swimming pool. A crumb of cake would be a feast And last you seven days at least, A flea would be a frightening beast If you were one inch tall. If you were only one inch tall, you'd walk beneath the door, And it would take about a month to get down to the store. A bit of fluff would be your bed, You'd swing upon a spider's thread, And wear a thimble on your head If you were one inch tall. You'd surf across the kitchen sink upon a stick of gum. You couldn't hug your mama, you'd just have to hug her thumb. You'd run from people's feet in fright, To move a pen would take all night, (This poem took fourteen years to write-- 'Cause I'm just one inch tall).

Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day. The woman had to skewer the hole in the kitchen sink, when it was blocked up. The man went to the pub every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The other nights he mended his broken bicycle, did the pool coupons, and longed for money and power. The woman read love stories and longed for things to be different. The children fought and yelled and played and had scabs on their knees. In the end they all died.

Heartache often drives us to consume things we wouldn't otherwise, such as an entire pint of Caramel Pecan Perfection high-fat ice cream, covered in ganache, the crack cocaine of frozed dairy. Twelve hundred calories per pint, six hundred and eighty of which are fat calories, but is only dulls the pain for the moment, there's that carb fog while you're standing at the sink shoving it in your face, and then it's over and you feel...used. Like a cheap pickup the Dove people seduced and abandoned in your kitchen, leaving you with sticky hands and an empty cup and a still-broken heart, except now you're mad at Dove, too.

At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.

There was a horrible smell in the kitchen the next morning when Harry went in for breakfast. It seemed to be coming from a large metal tub in the sink. He went to have a look. The tub was full of what looked like dirty rags swimming in gray water. "What's this?" he asked Aunt Petunia. "Your new school uniform," she said. Harry looked in the bowl again. "Oh," he said, "I didn't realize it had to be so wet.

Are you searching for purpose? Then write something, yeah it might be worthless Then paint something then, it might be wordless Pointless curses, nonsense verses You'll see purpose start to surface No one else is dealing with your demons Meaning maybe defeating them Could be the beginning of your meaning, friend.

I closed my eyes under the fluroescent lights and tried to make another birthday wish, a onetime do-over, a rebate, a trade-in on the kitchen sink kiss that started everything, offered up for just one last miracle.

So this is the young man who has intentions toward my little girl." Bobby shifted in his seat and crossed his legs. "It is not fun on this side of the table, is it, Robert?" Uncle Eddie huffed, and Kat had to remember that once upon a time her mother had been a dark-haired girl in that kitchen, and her dad had been the stray she'd brought home. She watched the two men looking at Hale as if they'd never before laid eyes on him. "He's better-looking than the last vagabond I had to take in," Eddie said, standing and carrying empty bowls to the sink. "I'll give him that.

I want to tell him that it's just a stupid car, but bits of me are scattered all over town; the graveyard, school, Cassie's room, the motel, and standing in from of the sink in my mother's kitchen. It takes too much energy to gather all the bits together, so I just sit there and watch him implode.

Someday I will stop being young and wanting stupid tattoos. There are 7 people in my house. We each have different genders. I cut my hair over the bathroom sink and everything I own has a hole in it. There is a banner in our living room that says “Love Cats Hate Capitalism.” We sit around the kitchen table and argue about the compost pile and Karl Marx and the necessity of violence when The Rev comes. Whatever the fuck The Rev means. Every time my best friend laughs I want to grab him by the shoulders and shout “Grow old with me and never kiss me on the mouth!” I want us to spend the next 80 years together eating Doritos and riding bikes. I want to be Oscar the Grouch. I want him and his girlfriend to be Bert and Ernie. I want us to live on Sesame Street and I will park my trash can on their front stoop and we will be friends every day. If I ever seem grouchy it’s just because I am a little afraid of all that fun. There is a river running through this city I know as well as my own name. It’s the first place I’ve ever called home. I don’t think its poetry to say I’m in love with the water. I don’t think it’s poetry to say I’m in love with the train tracks. I don’t think it’s blasphemy to say I see God in the skyline. There is always cold beer asking to be slurped on back porches. There are always crushed packs of Marlboro’s in my back pockets. I have been wearing the same patched-up shorts for 10 days. Someday I will stop being young and wanting stupid tattoos.

The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep. They could see how love might control you, from your head to your toes, not to mention every single part of you in between. A woman could want a man so much she might vomit in the kitchen sink or cry so fiercly blood would form in the corners of her eyes. She put her hand to her throat as though someone were strangling her, but really she was choking on all that love she thought she’d needed so badly. What had she thought, that love was a toy, something easy and sweet, just to play with? Real love was dangerous, it got you from inside and held on tight, and if you didn’t let go fast enough you might be willing to do anything for it’s sake. She refused to believe in superstition, she wouldn’t; yet it was claiming her. Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene. After all I’ve done for you is lodged somewhere in her brain, and far worse, it’s in her heart as well. She was bad luck, ill-fated and unfortunate as the plague. She is not worth his devotion. She wishes he would evaporate into thin air. Maybe then she wouldn’t have this feeling deep inside, a feeling she can deny all she wants, but that won’t stop it from being desire. Love is worth the sum of itself and nothing more. But that’s what happens when you’re a liar, especially when you’re telling the worst of these lies to yourself. He has stumbled into love, and now he’s stuck there. He’s fairly used to not getting what he wants, and he’s dealt with it, yet he can’t help but wonder if that’s only because he didn’t want anything so badly. It’s music, it’s a sound that is absurdly beautiful in his mouth, but she won’t pay attention. She knows from the time she spent on the back stairs of the aunts’ house that most things men say are lies. Don’t listen, she tells herself. None if it’s true and none of it matters, because he’s whispering that he’s been looking for her forever. She can’t believe it. She can’t listen to anything he tells her and she certainly can’t think, because if she did she might just think she’d better stop. What good would it do her to get involved with someone like him? She’d have to feel so much, and she’s not that kind. The greatest portion of grief is the one you dish out for yourself. She preferred cats to human beings and turned down every offer from the men who fell in love with her. They told her how sticks and stones could break bones, but taunting and name-calling were only for fools. — & now here she is, all used up. Although she’d never believe it, those lines in *’s face are the most beautiful part about her. They reveal what she’s gone through and what she’s survived and who exactly she is, deep inside. She’s gotten back some of what she’s lost. Attraction, she now understands, is a state of mind. If there’s one thing * is now certain of, it’s house you can amaze yourself by the things you’re willing to do. You really don’t know? That heart-attack thing you’ve been having? It’s love, that’s what it feels like. She knows now that when you don’t lose yourself in the bargain, you find you have double the love you started with, and that’s one recipe that can’t be tampered with. Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.

It's all about perspective. The sinking of the Titanic was a miracle to the lobsters in the ship's kitchen. (Oct 4, 2011)

You know why doctors slap babies on the bottom when they're born? So the dicks fall off the smart ones." He laughed. "You know why women don't have dicks? So they can stand closer to the kitchen sink.

Everything was normal and right. There were dishes in the sink and the sound of kids playing in the street and the trains passing smutty wind. Something had settled over the kitchen. Rose kept the colours inside the lines and all the patterns were proper, sensible and neat. Happiness. That's what it was.

History is like the kitchen sink,” Adam answered. “Everything goes round and round until eventually, sooner or later, most of it goes down the waste pipe. Things are forgotten. Things are mislaid. Things are covered up. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of neglect.

WHAT THE LIVING DO Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you.

Hephzibah normally left the dishes until the next day. Piled up in the sink so that it was near impossible to fill a kettle. And what the sink wouldn't take would stay on the kitchen table. Treslove liked that about her. She didn't believe they had to clean up after every excess. There wasn't a price to pay for pleasure.

She snorted. “Talking doesn’t leave my kitchen six inches underwater. Talking doesn’t leave two full-grown demons soaking wet. Unless you were both pretending to be mermaids trying to perfect freshwater communication in my sink, I fail to see how talking had anything to do with whatever you two were up to.

Real arms races are run by highly intelligent, bespectacled engineers in glass offices thoughtfully designing shiny weapons on modern computers. But there's no thinking in the mud and cold of nature's trenches. At best, weapons thrown together amidst the explosions and confusion of smoky battlefields are tiny variations on old ones, held together by chewing gum. If they don't work, then something else is thrown at the enemy, including the kitchen sink - there's nothing "progressive" about that. At its usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition. If the enemy can be stopped or slowed by burning your own bridges and bombing your own radio towers and oil refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench warfare does not lead to progress - it leads back to the Stone Age.

Sometimes my kitchen sink doubles as a duck pond. Problem is, I can't exactly move my diving board, so I have to relocate Greg Louganis Hour to another slot, like one on the toaster.

I got an abortion and learned how to make dehydrated tuna flakes and turkey jerky and took a refresher course on basic first aid and practiced using my water purifier in my kitchen sink. I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be -- strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good. And the PCT would make me that way. There, I'd walk and think about my entire life. I'd find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous.

Why not? It's true. I don't even laugh for anyone but you." She hesitated, for that one. Did he really mean that? Surely not. "Tim seems like a really funny guy." She tried, but all it did was make his mouth form that mean line. "Tim pees in the kitchen sink." "Well, okay. I could atleast promise not to do that, but even so-

On her way to the sink, she says, "Where's Toraf and Rayna? Oh!" She gasps. "Did they find an island?" Galen shakes his head and pours himself some water from a pitcher on the table, grateful for a topic change. "Nope. They're upstairs. He snuck into her bed. I've never seen anyone risk his life like that." Rachel makes a tsking sound as she rinses some dishes. "Why does everyone keep talking about finding an island?" Emma asks, finishing the rest of her juice. "Who else is talking about it?" Galen frowns. "In the living room, I hear Toraf give her a choice between going to the kitchen or finding an island." Galen laughs. "And she picked the kitchen, right?" Emma nods. "What? What's so funny?" "Rayna and Toraf are mated. I guess humans call it married," he says. "Syrena find an island when they're ready to...mate in a physical sense. We can only do that in human form." "Oh. Oh. Um, okay," she says, blushing anew. "I wondered about that. The physical part, I mean. So they're married? Seems like she hates him.

The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island.

Whatever you do, do not allow an army of white wine bottles to amass under your kitchen sink, like those terra-cotta soldiers, except made of shame.

An old man told me about how his wife had heard voices speaking to her from the drain of her kitchen sink in the three weeks before their daughter died—that was in the early winter of 1957–58.

To borrow a metaphor from the kitchen sink… Children form strong opinions easily. They soak up information from their parents, school, and the media, and repeat it back to the world. So when you don’t look or act like what everyone has been told is the norm, you get proverbially barfed on a lot.

The aim of cleaning, then, should be to reduce bacteria numbers—but not to zero. Even harmful bacteria can be good for us when the immune system uses them for training. A couple of thousand Salmonella bacteria in the kitchen sink are a chance for our immune system to do a little sightseeing. They become dangerous only when they turn up in greater numbers. Bacteria get out of hand when they encounter the perfect conditions: a protected location that is warm and moist with a supply of delicious food.

I don’t know why we fight. It takes much too effort to stay mad at you. To dodge your skin in the hallway and leave the kitchen without bringing you a treat. It takes much too effort to stare at the sink so my eyes don’t smile at you in the mirror. It takes much too effort to look away as we undress and lie apart in the now bigger bed. It takes much too effort to stiffen my body because sleepy limbs forget fights and pride is always lost in dreams. It takes much too effort to awaken every hour to make sure we are islands with a gulf of white sheets separating us. I dread the light peeking through the parted curtains and empathise with your groans — I didn’t get any sleep either. I really don’t know why we fight. It takes much too effort to stay mad at one another when it’s so easy for us to love.

In the kitchen, chickens had overflowed into the sink. They weren't making much noise, except for the occasional 'werk' a chicken makes when it's a bit uncertain about things, which is more or less all the time.

One time one guy said he had a stroke reading my absurd writing, so I said, “Thank you for your service.” Then I continued washing my dishes in my lawnmower, because my ducks were splashing around in the kitchen sink.

A series of tests conducted by Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, discovered far more fecal bacteria in the average American kitchen sink than on the average American toilet seat. According to Gerba, ‘You’d be better off eating a carrot stick that fell in your toilet than one that fell in your sink.

IT’S SO WEIRD HOW A PERSON can be a normal part of your everyday life, and then just disappear. And when they do, you realize that some of those everyday things go with them. Like the smell of food cooking. Or the sound of Rick James, Frankie Beverly, or the Isley Brothers playing as background music in our house. The kettle, whistling. Water running in the kitchen sink. She was always at the kitchen sink, my mom, doing a two-step or something. Her voice, and her voices.

Why is he so mad about white tiled sinks and ‘kitchen machinery’ he calls it? People have good hearts whether or not they live like Dharma Bums.

The kitchen was at the back of the house and there was a window over the sink. Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink. “My

genius,” he mumbled. I looked out of the kitchen window as I filled up Frankie’s plastic bag in the sink, and there

Standing in front of the kitchen sink, Sandra was shaking her head, her eyes unfocused. “Okay. I’m so confused. About so many things. First of all,” she pointed at me, “I need the whole story. When did this happen? I didn’t even know you liked him. And secondly,” she turned to Greg, “what is the deal with you guys and the efficiency of your man-gossip phone tree?” Greg gave her a droll look. “Don’t be a hater, Sandra. You ladies need to learn how to communicate more effectively.

I pulled out a kitchen stool, sinking down onto it. Running a half marathon didn’t exhaust me as much as all of this did. My love for her was a heavy, pulsing, living thing, and it made me feel crazy, and anxious, and famished. I hated seeing her stressed and scared. I hated seeing her upset at my anger, but even worse was the knowledge that she had the power to break my heart and had very little experience being careful about it. I was completely at her fumbling, inexperienced mercy.

In a lifetime of hearing people celebrate weekends, she finally saw what all the fuss was about. By no means did her workload cease on Saturday, but it did shift gears. If her kids wanted to pull everything out of the laundry basket to make a bird's nest and sit in it, fine. Dellarobia could even sit in there with them and incubate, if she so desired. Household chores no longer called her name exclusively. She had an income. She'd never before understood how much her life in this little house had felt to her like confinement in a sinking vehicle after driving off a bridge. ..... To open a hatch and swim away felt miraculous. Working outside the home took her about fifty yards from her kitchen, which was far enough. She couldn't see the dishes in the sink.

​As a little girl, a woman is groomed to become a wife and a mother. She is trained to always make wise decisions, yet there will forever be limits and boundaries. As I look back, I remember being told what I could and could not do, simply because I was a girl. A little girl is told she cannot act like a boy; if she does, she will be classified as a “tomboy”. Climbing trees was prohibited, instead, she was taught to put a baby doll in a stroller and take the doll for a walk. She couldn’t sit as she pleased; she was told to only sit with her ankles crossed. Girls were given a kitchen playset that was equipped with a stove, sink, and an accessory set of play food dishes, pots, and pans, etc., along with a tea set to bring out the “elegance” in them. As the saying goes, “Girls are sugar and spice, and everything nice.” I’m taken aback by how girls are groomed to be a certain way; however, boys are able to love life and live freely without limitations and criticism.

Her feet tingled. One whole hour to forget about the leaky kitchen sink, her father’s retirement party, and her mother’s relentless questions about it. She closed her eyes. One whole hour to completely unwind and indulge her thoughts in something beside caterers, plumbers, and homicide cases.

The built-in preventative of another person meant I couldn’t indulge the animal feelings, couldn’t leave orange peels in the kitchen sink. I dressed right after breakfast instead of haunting my robe all day. Swiped on mascara from a mostly dried-up tube. These were the cogent human labors, the daily tasks that staved larger panics, but living alone had gotten me out of the habit—I didn’t feel substantial enough to warrant this kind of effort. I

Can we talk now?” she asked. “Nay, we need to . . . load the dishwasher.” He padded into the kitchen and took his time rinsing everything in the sink before stacking it into the machine. He even scrubbed the pot he’d warmed the soup in. When he closed the dishwasher, she was waiting there, holding a mop. She offered it to him. “Do you want to clean the floors now? And sweep the porch? I think the antlers on the moose head need polishing.

A sweeping vista of Northern sky opens up between the warehouses and hangs motionless above the cobbled streets. It’s a world of unrequited love beneath the smoke stacks and awkward moments in the underpass. A great crashing wave of romantic despair that washes over my dramatic heart, dousing it with a thin grey rinse. I’m James Dean, I’m Albert Camus, I posture in doorways with a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth. My great iron bedstead, my kitchen sink drama, the grainy black and white days of this life...

James watches a line of ants march out of the kitchen drain, up the sink, into his life.

Hey, Melissa-is there anything I should know about having this kid that isn't in the books I've been reading?" Sunlight streamed through the window, making the golden, hormone-induced mutton chops glisten upon my cheeks. As I waited for her answer, I thumbed through the glossy parenting magazines on her kitchen table. A candle flickered by the sink, adding sweetness to the spit-up scented air that was gutting punched in the face by a diaper change...

The green painted concrete out in front of the house, which at first seemed like a novel way to save money on lawn-moving, was now just plain depressing. The hot water came reluctantly to the kitchen sink as if from miles away, and even then without conviction, and sometimes a pale brownish color. Many of the windows wouldn't open properly to let flies out. Others wouldn't shut properly to stop them getting in. The newly planted fruit trees died in the sandy soil of a too-bright backyard and were left like grave-markers under the slack laundry lines, a small cemetery of disappointment. It appeared to be impossible to find the right kinds of food, or learn the right way to say even simple things. The children said very little that wasn't a complaint.

I had a lot of disasters in the kitchen, even during the long period when I was cooking under my mother's supervision and with the benefit of her experience. I still fail all the time, in particular when I turn to baking. After hundreds of attempts, following dozens of different formulas, I don't think I have ever made what I would consider to be a completely successful pie crust. Disaster is somehow part of the appeal of cooking for me. If that first Velvet Crumb Cake had turned out to be a flop, I don't know if I would have pursued my interest in cooking. But cooking entails stubbornness and a tolerance--maybe even a taste--for last-minute collapse. You have to be able to enjoy the repeated and deliberate following of a more of less lengthy, more or less complicated series of steps whose product is very likely--after all that work, with no warning, right at the end--to curdle, sink, scorch, dry up, congeal, burn, or simply taste bad.

For weeks Charlie had been singing the same song over and over again. “Dinah won’t you blow…” He sang it twenty-four hours a day, with the same vacant, cheerful tone. ”Dinah won’t you blow your hor-or-orn?” He kept the beat with his head, endlessly banging it against the hallways bulkhead. “Dinah won’t you blow…” Johnnie-O, who had very little patience to begin with, would have pulled out his hair, were it possible for an Afterlight’s hair to come out. “Dinah won’t you blow…” Johnnie squeezed his oversized hands into fists, wishing there was something he could bust, but having spent many years trying to break things, he knew more than anyone that Everlost stuff didn’t break, unless breakage was its purpose. “Dinah won’t you blow your horn!” “Dammit, will you shut your hole or I swear I’m gonna pound you into next Tuesday and then throw you out of the stinkin’ window where you and your song can drown and sink down to the center of earth for all I care, so you better shut your hole right now!” Charlie looked at him for a moment, eyes wide, considering it. Then he said, ”Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah!” Johnnie groaned.

Just then, Toot buzzed back into the apartment from somewhere. He zipped in frantic, dizzying circles, starting at the point he'd last seen Lacuna, until his spiral search pattern took him to the kitchen. Then he swooped down to Lacuna, landing neatly on the counter. I peered at the two little faeries. Toot held out to Lacuna a wrapped watermelon Jolly Ranger, as if he were offering frankincense and myrrh to the Christ child. "Hi!" he said brightly. "I'm Major General Toot-toot!" Lacuna looked up from her food and saw Toot's gift. Her eyes narrowed. And then she sucker punched Toot-toot right in the face. My little bodyguard flew back a couple of feet and landed on his ass. Both of his hands went up to his nose, and he blinked in startled bewilderment. Toot had dropped the Jolly Rancher. Lacuna calmly kicked it into the disposal drain of the kitchen sink. Then she turned her back on Toot, ignoring him completely, and went back to eating her meal. Toot's eyes were even wider as he started at Lacuna. "Wow!" he said.

The real achievement of the script and the people making it is that they throw the kitchen sink at us... and it all works. Daleks, Anne Robinson, the end of a complicated storyline, tears, jokes, action, more Daleks, romance, pathos, satire, an outrageous cheat and more Daleks than we have ever seen even in drawings we did as eight year olds. And then David Tennant shows up, and we realise we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Watson,” says Frank, “experiment time. Could you go into the kitchen and get one balloon, two packets of salt, three packets of pepper, and one plastic spoon?” “That sounds about as scientific as . . . my peashooter,” says Watson, heading for the kitchen as Frank and the robots finish cleaning up the lab. Watson returns with the experiment supplies. “I can’t wait to see what you make with this.” Frank rips open the salt and pepper packets and dumps everything into one pile on the table. He blows up the balloon. “Rub this on your head, Watson.” Watson rubs the balloon on his head. “Oh, this is much more scientific.” “Just watch,” says Frank. “Now put the balloon over the salt and pepper.” Watson moves the balloon. The positively charged, lighter pieces of pepper separate from the heavier pieces of salt and stick to the balloon. “Wireless,” says Frank. “And cheap. Now watch this.” Frank rubs the plastic spoon on Watson’s sweater. He turns the water on in the lab sink so that a small, steady stream flows out. “Observe.” Frank puts the spoon near the water column. “No way!” says Watson. “The water is bending toward the spoon!” Klink beeps, “In both cases, extra negative charge caused by gathering electrons . . . attracts positively charged pepper pieces and water stream.

I think it's the future. At least, it's the future we called "tomorrow." Here it is, "today": one hundred cups of effort, good intentions, small misunderstandings, stretching away from the bed and finally leading back to it.

Neither of us ever threw anything away. We made a lot of mix tapes while we were together. Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep. Tapes for doing the dishes, for walking the dog. I kept them all. I have them piled up on my bookshelves, spilling out of my kitchen cabinets, scattered all over the bedroom floor. I don’t even have pots or pans in my kitchen, just that old boom-box on the counter, next to the sink. So many tapes.

The Irish essayist has us close our eyes and listen to the words she says without trying to control our thoughts. I keep mine open a crack, to scan the packed room. He’s not here. ‘A rainy day,’ she says. My mother and me running from the Mustang to the house. ‘The sound of a musical instrument.’ Caleb playing the guitar. ‘An act of love.’ My father cleaning my golf clubs in the kitchen sink. She has us write about one of these moments that come up unbidden, unforced.

I dont suppose you have any glasses. They’re in the kitchen. Western started to get up. I dont think you want to go back there. He sat back down again. It aint a pretty sight. Sink’s so full of dishes you got to go outside to take a leak.

There was the sink incident - which I may have overreacted to because it reminded me of a memory I had of my parents - the walking in while I was having a shower to ask me where the television remote was incident, the eating his lunch in the kitchen without a shirt on incident- he said he 'accidently' spilled coffee down it and had to put it in the washer/dryer- and there were the many, many 'looking at me for no reason' incidents. I swear to God he was wearing on my panties

Early on, Zinkoff's mother impressed upon her son the etiquette of throwing up: That is, do not throw up at random, but throw up into something, preferably a toilet or bucket. Since toilets or buckets are not always handy, Zinkoff has learned to reach for the nearest container. Thus, at one time or another he has thrown up into soup bowls, flowerpots, wastebaskets, trash bins, shopping bags, winter boots, kitchen sinks and, once, a clown's hat. But never his father's mailbag.

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea-cosy. I can't say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring - I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn't a very good poem. I have decided my best poetry is so bad that I mustn't write any more of it. Drips from the roof are plopping into the water-butt by the back door. The view through the windows above the sink is excessively drear. Beyond the dank garden in the courtyard are the ruined walls on the edge of the moat. Beyond the moat, the boggy ploughed fields stretch to the leaden sky. I tell myself that all the rain we have had lately is good for nature, and that at any moment spring will surge on us. I try to see leaves on the trees and the courtyard filled with sunlight. Unfortunately, the more my mind's eye sees green and gold, the more drained of all colour does the twilight seem. It is comforting to look away from the windows and towards the kitchen fire, near which my sister Rose is ironing - though she obviously can't see properly, and it will be a pity if she scorches her only nightgown. (I have two, but one is minus its behind.) Rose looks particularly fetching by firelight because she is a pinkish person; her skin has a pink glow and her hair is pinkish gold, very light and feathery. Although I am rather used to her I know she is a beauty. She is nearly twenty-one and very bitter with life. I am seventeen, look younger, feel older. I am no beauty but I have a neatish face. I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic - two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud. I must admit that our home is an unreasonable place to live in. Yet I love it. The house itself was built in the time of Charles II, but it was grafted on to a fourteenth-century castle that had been damaged by Cromwell. The whole of our east wall was part of the castle; there are two round towers in it. The gatehouse is intact and a stretch of the old walls at their full height joins it to the house. And Belmotte Tower, all that remains of an even older castle, still stands on its mound close by. But I won't attempt to describe our peculiar home fully until I can see more time ahead of me than I do now. I am writing this journal partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel - I intend to capture all our characters and put in conversations. It ought to be good for my style to dash along without much thought, as up to now my stories have been very stiff and self-conscious. The only time father obliged me by reading one of them, he said I combined stateliness with a desperate effort to be funny. He told me to relax and let the words flow out of me.

Like That" Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road late at night, with no moon and no town anywhere and a large hungry animal moving heavily through the brush in the ditch. Love me with a blindfold over your eyes and the sound of rusty water blurting from the faucet in the kitchen, leaking down through the floorboards to hot cement. Do it without asking, without wondering or thinking anything, while the machinery’s shut down and the watchman’s slumped asleep before his small TV showing the empty garage, the deserted hallways, while the thieves slice through the fence with steel clippers. Love me when you can’t find a decent restaurant open anywhere, when you’re alone in a glaring diner with two nuns arguing in the back booth, when your eggs are greasy and your hash browns underdone. Snick the buttons off the front of my dress and toss them one by one into the pond where carp lurk just beneath the surface, their cold fins waving. Love me on the hood of a truck no one’s driven in years, sunk to its fenders in weeds and dead sunflowers; and in the lilies, your mouth on my white throat, while turtles drag their bellies through slick mud, through the footprints of coots and ducks. Do it when no one’s looking, when the riots begin and the planes open up, when the bus leaps the curb and the driver hits the brakes and the pedal sinks to the floor, while someone hurls a plate against the wall and picks up another, love me like a freezing shot of vodka, like pure agave, love me when you’re lonely, when we’re both too tired to speak, when you don’t believe in anything, listen, there isn’t anything, it doesn’t matter; lie down with me and close your eyes, the road curves here, I’m cranking up the radio and we’re going, we won’t turn back as long as you love me, as long as you keep on doing it exactly like that.

Suddenly the air got colder, and a black cloud appeared - the black cloud that you saw before, since Snodrog was, at bottom, a cheapskate. Only this time the cloud looked like an overdone hamburger, and it hovered low over the Shuffly's head. Then Snodrog's devious machine spread under the Shuffly's unsuspecting feet a glistening patina of Generalizations, and the immobilized hulk slid the hill into the valley below, ricocheting off trees with a sound like wet sponges being slapped on kitchen sinks.

If we lose the war, our creditors—mainly Americans—will go bankrupt. And if we win, we’ll make the Germans pay. ‘Reparations’ is the word they use.” “How will they manage it?” “They will starve. But nobody cares what happens to the losers. Anyway, the Germans did the same to the French in 1871.” He stood up and put his cup in the kitchen sink. “So you see why we can’t make peace with Germany. Who then would pay the bill?” Ethel was aghast. “And so we have to keep sending boys to die in the trenches. Because we can’t pay the bill. Poor Billy. What a wicked world we live in.” “But

Like you, I’m figuring out how to walk with Christ into my day, into Target, into church, into the kitchen, and most importantly, into the lives of other people. Christ doesn’t stop being relevant just because I’m standing at my sink, cleaning out my closet, meeting over coffee, driving to the bank.

The act of cooking imposed a kind of dignity on hunger, which had become terrifying. I couldn’t remember how I had managed hunger, the animal wildness of it, before. At home we gobbled, we were a family who ate. You could sit in front of the television and shove handfuls of crisps into your mouth, you could smother ripped-up pieces of bread with margarine over the kitchen sink. There was a bravado in it: leftovers were for losers, and if you didn’t have a hearty appetite, there was something wrong with you. But the eating always had a kind of context: in my mum’s house, with its flotsam of dressing gowns and stupid shows on the television, it felt reasonable and normal and right. Now my eating, my bottomless, yearning hunger, was a horror. I felt monstrous, shoveling in the amount of food I wanted to, more anxious with every bite. Cooking became the buffer: an act of civility before the carnage ensued.

As Strane works at me, part of me leaves the bedroom and wanders into the kitchen, where the cup he drank from lies tipped over in the sink. The faucet drips; the refrigerator hums. The kitten pads in from the living room, wanting to be held. Standing by the window, the broken-off part of me takes the kitten in her arms, gazes down at the quiet street below. It’s started to storm, a streetlight’s orange glow illuminating the sheets of rain, and the broken-off part of me watches it fall, humming softly to herself to block out the sounds coming from the bedroom. Every so often, she holds her breath and listens to check if it’s still happening. When she hears the metal scrape of the bed frame, the slap of skin on skin, she holds the kitten closer, turns back to the rain.

I found my wife at the kitchen sink and told her the good news. She was more reserved in her enthusiasm than I had hoped. “You’re going into the woods for weeks and weeks with a person you have barely seen for twenty-five years. Have you really thought this through?” (As if I have ever thought anything through.) “I thought you two ended up getting on each other’s nerves in Europe.” “No.” This was not quite correct. “We started off on each other’s nerves. We ended up despising each other. But that was a long time ago.” She gave me a look of some dubiety. “You have nothing in common.” “We have everything in common. We’re forty-four years old. We’ll talk about hemorrhoids and lower back pain and how we can’t remember where we put anything, and the next night I’ll say, ‘Hey, did I tell you about my back problems?’ and he’ll say, ‘No, I don’t think so,’ and we’ll do it all over again. It’ll be great.” “It’ll be hell.” “Yeah, I know,” I said.

I mention this because there is the question of how children become aware of what the world is, and how to act in it. How, for example, do you learn that it is impolite to ask a couple why they have no children? How do you set a table? How do you know if you are chewing with your mouth open if no one has ever told you? How do you even know what you look like if the only mirror in the house is a tiny one high above the kitchen sink, or if you have never heard a living soul say that you are pretty, but rather, as your breasts develop, are told by your mother that you are starting to look like one of the cows in the Pedersons’ barn?

She turned and smiled. “Kitchen-sink pasta.” “My favorite. But you really ought to come up with a better name for it than kitchen-sink pasta. Sounds only slightly more appealing than bathtub gefilte fish.” She shuddered. “Who in god’s name would make bathtub gefilte fish?” “I dated a Jewish girl whose grandmother made it,” I laughed.

Dude, Kellan, I know you and Kiera are in there . . . people saw you two head that way. Open the door.” Cursing, Kellan separated from me. I instantly went for his mouth, but he pushed me back a little and unlocked the bathroom door right next to us. Cracking it open, he scowled at the person on the other side of it. “What, Matt?” I laid my head on Kellan’s chest and stared blankly at Matt looking at us through the slit in the door. He didn’t look happy. “Are you about to have sex in my bathroom?” Without missing a beat, Kellan responded with “Yes,” and started closing the door. My hazed mind found it funny, and I started laughing. Matt stopped the door with his hand. “Kell, we only have one bathroom. I don’t want people peeing in my kitchen sink.” Sighing in irritation, Kellan opened the door wider and glared at Matt. Matt looked down at Kellan’s bare chest, then my half-naked chest, then snapped his eyes up to Kellan’s eyes. Kellan shook his head and shrugged. “Bedroom or bathroom,” was all he said. Matt scrunched his brow and Kellan repeated himself, raising his eyebrows. “Bedroom or bathroom? You pick, Matt.” Sighing, Matt rolled his eyes. “Fine, but make it quick.” Grinning, Kellan slammed the door shut and locked it again. I giggled as my mind swam. On the other side I heard Matt slurringly yell, “And clean up when you’re done, damn it!

And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep. Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips, murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky. 'Mag-gie!' the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path--the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.

Is cooking dangerous?" Most would answer no. But what is a gas range but a short - range flame thrower? Any number of flammable materials might lie waiting beneath the average kitchen sink. Shelves lined with pots could weaken and fall in an avalanche of iron and steel. A butcher's knife could kill as easily as a dagger. Yet few people would consider cooking a dangerous profession, and indeed, the actual danger is remote. Anyone who has spent any time in a kitchen is familiar with the inherent risks, such as they are, and knows what can be done safely and what can't. Never throw water on an oil fire, keep the knife pointed away from your carotid artery, don't use rat poison when the recipe calls for parmesan cheese.

Mommy! Mommy! Mommy is asleep on the floor. She has been asleep for a long time. I brush her hair because she likes that. She doesn’t wake up. I shake her. Mommy! My tummy hurts. It is hungry. He isn’t here. I am thirsty. In the kitchen I pull a chair to the sink, and I have a drink. The water splashes over my blue sweater. Mommy is still asleep. Mommy wake up! Sh

By the middle of the afternoon it had rained so much that the drains were overflowing, clogged up with leaves and newspapers. The water built up until it was sliding across the road in great sheets, rippled by the wind and parted like a football crowd by passing cars. I was shocked by the sheer volume of water that came pouring out of the darkness of the sky. Watching the weight of it crashing into the ground made me feel like a very young child, unable to understand what was really happening. Like trying to understand radio waves, or imagining computers communicating along glass cables. I leant my face against the window as the rain piled upon it, streaming down in waves, blurring my vision, making the shops opposite waver and disappear. There was a time when I might have found this exhilarating, even miraculous, but not that day. That day it made me nervous and tense, unable to concentrate on anything while the noise of it clattered against the windows and the roof. I kept opening the door to look for clear skies, and slamming it shut again. And then around teatime, from nowhere, I smashed all the dirty plates and mugs into the washing-up bowl. Something swept through me, swept out of and over me, something unstoppable, like water surging from a broken tap and flooding across the kitchen floor. I don't quite understand why I felt that way, why I reacted like that. I wanted to be saying it's just something that happens. But I was there, that day, slamming the kitchen door over and over again until the handle came loose. Smacking my hand against the worktop, kicking the cupboard doors, throwing the plates into the sink. Going fuckfuckfuck through my clenched teeth. I wanted someone to see me, I wanted someone to come rushing in, to take hold of me and say hey hey what are you doing, hey come on, what's wrong. But there was no one there, and no one came.

As tight as it had been in the kitchen before they’d left, there were three times as many people crammed in there now, most of them men. Beverly’s mother was nowhere in sight and neither was the baby. Beverly was standing at the sink, a butcher’s knife in her hand. She was slicing oranges from an enormous pile that was sliding across the counter while the two lawyers from the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office, Dick Spencer and Albert Cousins—suit jackets off, ties off, and shirtsleeves rolled up high above the elbow—were twisting the halves of oranges on two metal juicers. Their foreheads were flushed and damp with sweat, their opened collars just beginning to darken, they worked as if the safety of their city relied on the making of orange juice.

Still, this moment belongs to the two of them, Mom and this handsome stranger. He reaches the passenger side door and stares down at her with steely violet eyes-down at my mother who never cries, down at my mother who’s now bawling like a spanked child-his face contorted in a rainbow of so many emotions, some that I can’t even name. Then Grom the Triton king sinks to his knees in front of her, and a single tear spills down his face. “Nalia,” he whispers. And then my mother slaps him. It’s not the kind of slap you get for talking back. It’s not the kind of punch she dealt Galen and Toraf in our kitchen. It’s the kind of slap a woman gives a man when he’s hurt her deeply. And Grom accepts it with grace. “I looked for you,” she shouts, even though he’s inches from her. Slowly, as if in a show of peace, he takes the hand that slapped him and sandwiches it between his own. He seems to revel in the feel of her touch. His face is pure tenderness, his voice like a massage to the nerves. “And I looked for you.” “Your pulse was gone,” she insists. By now she chokes back sobs between words. She’s fighting for control. I’ve never seen my mother fight for control. “As was yours.” I realize Grom knows what not to say, what not to do to provoke her. He is the complete opposite of her, or maybe just a completion of her. Her eyes focus on his wrist, and tears slip down her face, leaving faint trails of mascara on her cheeks. He smiles and slowly pulls his hand away. I think he’s going to show her the bracelet he’s wearing, but instead he rips it off his wrist and holds it out for her inspection. From where I’m standing it looks like a single black ball tied to some sort of string. By my mom’s expression, this black ball has meaning. So much meaning that I think she’s forgotten to breathe. “My pearl,” she whispers. “I thought I’d lost it.” He encloses it in her hand. “This isn’t your pearl, love. That one was lost in the explosion with you. For almost an entire season, I scoured the oyster beds, looking for another one that would do. I don’t know why, but I thought maybe if I found another perfect pearl, I would somehow find you, too. When I found this though, it didn’t bring me the peace I’d hoped for. But I couldn’t bring myself to discard it. I’ve worn it on my wrist ever since.” This is all it takes for my mom to throw herself into his arms, bringing Rachel partially with her. Even so, it’s probably the most moving moment I’ve ever encountered in my eighteen years. Or at least it would be, if my mom weren’t clinging to a man who is not my dad.

You're wearing a bow tie," I said necessarily. He glanced over at me. "Mom said I had to dress up for this." I heard a low snort of laughter coming through the open window above the sink. And I knew. I stalked over to the window and looked outside. There, sitting spread out on the grass, were the rest of the Bennetts. Goddamn fucking werewolves. "Hello, Ox," Elizabeth said without a jint of shame. "Lovely day, isn't it?" "I will deal with you late," I said. Ooh," Carter said. "I actually got chills from that." "We're just here for support," Kelly said. "And to laugh at how embarrassing Joe is." "I heard that!" Joe shouted from behind me. I banged my head on the windowsill. "Maggie," Joe said. Then, "May I call you Maggie?" "Sure." My mother sound like she was enjoying this. The traitor. "You can call me Maggie." "Good," Joe glanced down at his card berfore looking back up at my mother. " There comes a time in every werewolf's life when he is of age to make certain decisions about his future." I wondered if I threw something at him if it'd distract him enough for me to drag him out of the kitchen. I glanced over my shoulder out the window. Cater waved at me. Like an asshole. "My future," Joe said, "is Ox." Ah god, that made me ache. “Is that so?” Mom asked. “How do you figure?” “He’s really nice,” Joe said seriously. “And smells good. And he makes me happy. And I want to do nothing more than put my mouth on him.” “Ah well,” Thomas said. "We tried." "He's our little snowflake," Elizabeth told him. "You want to do what?!" I asked Joe incredulously. He winced. "I didn't mean to say it like that.

There had been a time, once, when he had not lived like this, a .32 under his pillow, a lunatic in the back yard firing off a pistol for God knew what purpose, some other nut or perhaps the same one imposing a brain-print of his own shorted-out upstairs on an incredibly expensive and valued cephscope that everyone in the house, plus all their friends, loved and enjoyed. In former days Bob Arctor had run his affairs differently: there had been a wife much like other wives, two small daughters, a stable household that got swept and cleaned and emptied out daily, the dead newspapers not even opened carried from the front walk to the garbage pail, or even, sometimes, read. But then one day, while lifting out an electric corn popper from under the sink, Arctor had hit his head on the corner of a kitchen cabinet directly above him. The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. It flashed on him instantly that he didn't hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it. He wanted a divorce; he wanted to split. And so he had, very soon. And entered, by degrees, a new and somber life, lacking all of that. Probably he should have regretted his decision. He had not. That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected. It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all. But in this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.

Sunday morning dawned bright and cloudless. Ernest awoke early as always. He put on the red "Emporor's robe" and padded softly down the carpeted stairway. The early sunlight lay in pools on the living room floor. He had noticed that the guns were locked up in the basement. But the keys, as he well knew, were on the window ledge above the kitchen sink. He tiptoed down the basement stairs and unlocked the storage room. It smelled as dank as a grave. He chose a double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke. He had used it for years of pigeon shooting. He took some shells from one of the boxes in the storage room, closed and locked the door, and climbed the basement stairs. If he saw the bright day outside, it did not deter him. He crossed the living room to the front foyer, a shrinelike entryway five by seven feet, with oak-paneled walls and a floor of linoleum tile. He had held for years to the maxim: "il faut (d'abord) durer". Now it had been succeeded by another: "il faut (apres tout) mourir". The idea, if not the phrase, filled all his mind. He slipped in two shells, lowered the gun butt carefully to the floor, leaned forward, pressed the twin barrels against his forehead just above the eyebrows, and tripped both triggers.

disgust, by a hatred of everything: this apartment, this washing machine, this still-filthy sink, these toys that have escaped their boxes and crawled under the tables to die, the sword pointed at the sky, the dangling ear. She will be Louise, Louise pushing her fingers in her ears to stop the shouting and the crying. Louise who goes back and forth from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the bathroom to the kitchen, from the trash to the tumble dryer, from the bed to the cupboard in the entrance hall, from the balcony to the bathroom. Louise who comes back and then starts again, Louise who bends down and stands on tiptoe. Louise who takes a knife from a cupboard. Louise who drinks a glass of wine, the window open, one foot resting on the little balcony. “Come on, children. Time to take a bath.

I got up and took the cake out from under its cake-shaped cover. I had made it at three o'clock in the morning in a desperate attempt to comfort myself. And it was an enormous comfort, standing alone in the kitchen in my nightgown, sifting fresh ground nutmeg with allspice and cloves by the little light over the sink. I peeled the apples with ridiculous care, taking the skins off in long, even ribbons that spiraled down to the floor without breaking. I didn't think of any of them while I peeled those apples. I didn't work anything out in my mind. I just relaxed into the creaming of butter and sugar, the sweet expansion of every egg. I had hoped the mixer wouldn't wake anyone up.The last thing I had wanted was company. I cut off big, hulking slices and slid them onto dessert plates. The apples were soft and golden, the cake was a rust color.

World, turn all you want to, faster even. I've come to like the way the breeze feels as it rips me limb from limb. and I'm running the city water now in a sink safe from harm, and across the surface of most states there's a phone ringing and a somebody's lost a somebody, and a somebody's come home, and I'm unmoved in the kitchen pulling wings out of my teeth, praying for loads more wishes and a body out there waiting for this somebody in the kitchen waiting to be done stung. You mis everyone. Even the people you read about today you didn't know, their faces on the brain as if on paper. Maybe you don't even say it for yourself, maybe you move your mouth like everyone moves their mouth. Maybe your mouth is the same mouth as everyone's, all trying to say the same thing. You come home on the train and you have bought gifts and tried to be decent.

Do you know Mastering the Art of French Cooking? You must, at least, know of it- it's a cultural landmark, for Pete's sake. Even if you just think of it as the book by that lady who looks like Dan Aykroyd and bleeds a lot, you know of it. But do you know the book itself? Try to get your hands on one of the early hardback editions- they're not exactly rare. For a while there, every American housewife who could boil water had a copy, or so I've heard. It's not lushly illustrated; there are no shiny soft-core images of the glossy-haired author sinking her teeth into a juicy strawberry or smiling stonily before a perfectly rustic tart with carving knife in hand, like some chilly blonde kitchen dominatrix. The dishes are hopelessly dated- the cooking times outrageously long, the use of butter and cream beyond the pale, and not a single reference to pancetta or sea salt or wasabi.

Hallie didn't believe she was invulnerable. She was never one of those daredevil types; she knew she could get hurt. What I think she meant was that she was lucky to be on her way to Nicaragua. It was the slowest thing to sink into my head, how happy she was. Happy to be leaving. We'd had one time of perfect togetherness in our adult lives, the year when we were both in college in Tucson-her first year, my last-and living together for the first time away from Doc Homer. That winter I'd wanted to fail a subject just so I could hang back, stay there with her, the two of us walking around the drafty house in sweatshirts and wool socks and understanding each other precisely. Bringing each other cups of tea without having to ask. So I stayed on in Tucson for medical school, instead of going to Boston as I'd planned, and met Carlo in Parasitology. Hallie, around the same time, befriended some people who ran a safehouse for Central American refugees. After that we'd have strangers in our kitchen every time of night, kids scared senseless, people with all kinds of damage. Our life was never again idyllic. I should have seen it coming. Once she and I had gone to see a documentary on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was these Americans who volunteered without our government's blessing to fight against Franco and Hitler in the Spanish Civil War. At that point in U.S. history fascism was only maybe wrong, whereas communism was definitely. When we came home from the movie Hallie cried. Not because of the people who gave up life and limb only to lose Spain to Franco, and not for the ones who came back and were harassed for the rest of their lives for being Reds. The tragedy for Hallie was that there might never be a cause worth risking everything for in our lifetime. She was nineteen years old then, and as she lay blowing her nose and sobbing on my bed she told me this. That there were no real causes left. Now she had one-she was off to Nicaragua, a revolution of co-op farms and literacy crusades-and so I guess she was lucky. Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. Almost no one really gets the chance to alter the course of human events on purpose, in the exact way they wish for it to be altered.

sprint, woodwinds fluttering behind. More instruments join in. Flutes? Harps? The song races, seems to loop back over itself. “Werner?” Jutta whispers. He blinks; he has to swallow back tears. The parlor looks the same as it always has: two cribs beneath two Latin crosses, dust floating in the open mouth of the stove, a dozen layers of paint peeling off the baseboards. A needlepoint of Frau Elena’s snowy Alsatian village above the sink. Yet now there is music. As if, inside Werner’s head, an infinitesimal orchestra has stirred to life. The room seems to fall into a slow spin. His sister says his name more urgently, and he presses the earphone to her ear. “Music,” she says. He holds the pin as stock-still as he can. The signal is weak enough that, though the earphone is six inches away, he can’t hear any trace of the song. But he watches his sister’s face, motionless except for her eyelids, and in the kitchen Frau Elena holds her flour-whitened hands in the air and cocks her head, studying Werner, and two older boys rush in and stop, sensing some change in the air, and the little radio with its four terminals and trailing aerial sits motionless on the floor between them all like a miracle.

When negative experiences such as having one's house shot at occur in my dad's life he tends to come alive. His confusion lifts. Pieces of life's puzzle fuse into meaning like the continents before that colossal rift. It's entirely logical to him that his house has been shot at and when he's able to spend a minute or two in a world that makes sense he appears almost happy. And when he gets happy he does decisive things like this time he went over to the bulletin board in the kitchen and took down the city bus schedule that we've had up there since Tash left and before the bus depot itself closed down. He put it in the garbage can under the sink. Phew. Done. Goodbye past. But then I imagined him on a day when shitty things weren't happening and he'd be feeling his usual mystified self and go to the dump and there he would see that little piece of paper with the schedule on it and it would bring him to his knees. Just destroy him for a minute or two and he'd probably pick it up and wipe whatever seagull crap there was on it and straighten it out with the side of his hand and bring it back to the kitchen bulletin board and ARRANGE it on there so you'd know it was the centerpiece of his life.

Good night, Grandma!” I called as I was skipping out of the kitchen with Adria on my heels. Grandma, who was at the sink rinsing dishes to stack in the dishwasher, stopped and looked at us. She had a funny expression on her face, which made Adria and me pause in the doorway and look back at her, waiting. Grandma wiped her hands on a dishtowel and said, “Simone, Adria, come here.” There was something different in her tone. I didn’t know what to expect “You know, girls,” she said as we stood in front of her, “we adopted you both today. So I’m your mother now, and he”—she pointed at my grandpa, who was wiping the table mats—“he’s your father.” Grandpa paused what he was doing, stood up straight, and smiled. I just glanced from one to the other, my eyes big and round. What had happened in court that day suddenly became clear. “Does that mean I can call you Mom and Dad?” I asked. “It’s up to you,” my grandma said, one hand cupping my cheek, the other one smoothing Adria’s hair. “Call us whatever you want to. Now go to bed.” The two of us scampered upstairs without another word. But when Adria went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, I stood in the middle of our bedroom, my hands pressed against my temples. I was hopping from one foot to the other and jumping up and down, so much excitement was flowing through me. Mom. Dad. Mom. Dad. I kept whispering the words, getting used to the sound of them. Finally, feeling as if I would burst, I ran back downstairs to the kitchen. “Mom?” I said, standing in the doorway. She looked across at me, her lips twitching like she was trying not to smile. “Yes, Simone?” I turned to where Grandpa was putting away the table mats. “Dad?” “What is it, Simone?” “Nothing!” I said, squealing and bouncing up and down gleefully. I had done it—I’d called them Mom and Dad! I turned without another word and raced back up the stairs. In my room, I flopped backward onto my bed and let out a happy sigh. Adria and I were finally and forever home.

Buster Friendly said, “We may never know. Nor can we fathom the peculiar purpose behind this swindle. Yes, folks, swindle. Mercerism is a swindle!” “I think we know,” Roy Baty said. “It’s obvious. Mercerism came into existence—” “But ponder this,” Buster Friendly continued. “Ask yourselves what is it that Mercerism does. Well, if we’re to believe its many practitioners, the experience fuses—” “It’s that empathy that humans have,” Irmgard said. “—men and women throughout the Sol System into a single entity. But an entity which is manageable by the so-called telepathic voice of ‘Mercer.’ Mark that. An ambitious politically minded would-be Hitler could—” “No, it’s that empathy,” Irmgard said vigorously. Fists clenched, she roved into the kitchen, up to Isidore. “Isn’t it a way of proving that humans can do something we can’t do? Because without the Mercer experience we just have your word that you feel this empathy business, this shared, group thing. How’s the spider?” She bent over Pris’s shoulder. With the scissors, Pris snipped off another of the spider’s legs. “Four now,” she said. She nudged the spider. “He won’t go. But he can.” Roy Baty appeared at the doorway, inhaling deeply, an expression of accomplishment on his face. “It’s done. Buster said it out loud, and nearly every human in the system heard him say it. ‘Mercerism is a swindle.’ The whole experience of empathy is a swindle.” He came over to look curiously at the spider. “It won’t try to walk,” Irmgard said. “I can make it walk.” Roy Baty got out a book of matches, lit a match; he held it near the spider, closer and closer, until at last it crept feebly away. “I was right,” Irmgard said. “Didn’t I say it could walk with only four legs?” She peered up expectantly at Isidore. “What’s the matter?” Touching his arm she said, “You didn’t lose anything; we’ll pay you what that—what’s it called?—that Sidney’s catalogue says. Don’t look so grim. Isn’t that something about Mercer, what they discovered? All that research? Hey, answer.” She prodded him anxiously. “He’s upset,” Pris said. “Because he has an empathy box. In the other room. Do you use it, J. R.?” she asked Isidore. Roy Baty said, “Of course he uses it. They all do—or did. Maybe now they’ll start wondering.” “I don’t think this will end the cult of Mercer,” Pris said. “But right this minute there’re a lot of unhappy human beings.” To Isidore she said, “We’ve waited for months; we all knew it was coming, this pitch of Buster’s.” She hesitated and then said, “Well, why not. Buster is one of us.” “An android,” Irmgard explained. “And nobody knows. No humans, I mean.” Pris, with the scissors, cut yet another leg from the spider. All at once John Isidore pushed her away and lifted up the mutilated creature. He carried it to the sink and there he drowned it. In him, his mind, his hopes, drowned, too. As swiftly as the spider.

An android,” Irmgard explained. “And nobody knows. No humans, I mean.” Pris, with the scissors, cut yet another leg from the spider. All at once John Isidore pushed her away and lifted up the mutilated creature. He carried it to the sink and there he drowned it. In him, his mind, his hopes, drowned, too. As swiftly as the spider. “He’s really upset,” Irmgard said nervously. “Don’t look like that, J. R. And why don’t you say anything?” To Pris and to her husband she said, “It makes me terribly upset, him just standing there by the sink and not speaking; he hasn’t said anything since we turned on the TV.” “It’s not the TV,” Pris said. “It’s the spider. Isn’t it, John R. Isidore? He’ll get over it,” she said to Irmgard, who had gone into the other room to shut off the TV. Regarding Isidore with easy amusement, Roy Baty said, “It’s all over now, Iz. For Mercerism, I mean.” With his nails he managed to lift the corpse of the spider from the sink. “Maybe this was the last spider,” he said. “The last living spider on Earth.” He reflected. “In that case it’s all over for spiders, too.” “I—don’t feel well,” Isidore said. From the kitchen cupboard he got a cup; he stood holding it for an interval—he did not know exactly how long. And then he said to Roy Baty, “Is the sky behind Mercer just painted? Not real?” “You saw the enlargements on the TV screen,” Roy Baty said. “The brush strokes.” “Mercerism isn’t finished,” Isidore said. Something ailed the three androids, something terrible. The spider, he thought. Maybe it had been the last spider on Earth, as Roy Baty said. And the spider is gone; Mercer is gone; he saw the dust and the ruin of the apartment as it lay spreading out everywhere—he heard the kipple coming, the final disorder of all forms, the absence which would win out. It grew around him as he stood holding the empty ceramic cup; the cupboards of the kitchen creaked and split and he felt the floor beneath his feet give.

When she was finished with the mailbox, Lisey trudged back down the driveway with her buckets in the long evening light. Breakfast had been coffee and oatmeal, lunch little more than a scoop of tuna and mayo on a scrap of lettuce, and dead cat or no dead cat, she was starved. She decided to put off her call to Woodbody until she had some food in her belly. The thought of calling the Sheriff's Office—anyone in a blue uniform, for that matter—hadn't yet returned to her. She washed her hands for three minutes, using very hot water and making sure any speck of blood was gone from under her nails. Then she found the Tupperware dish containing the leftover Cheeseburger Pie, scraped it onto a plate, and blasted it in the microwave. While she waited for the chime, she hunted a Pepsi out of the fridge. She remembered thinking she'd never finish the Hamburger Helper stuff once her initial lust for it had been slaked. You could add that to the bottom of the long, long list of Things in Life Lisey Has Been Wrong About, but so what? Big diddly, as Cantata had been fond of saying in her teenage years. "I never claimed to be the brains of the outfit," Lisey told the empty kitchen, and the microwave bleeped as if to second that. The reheated gloop was almost too hot to eat but Lisey gobbled it anyway, cooling her mouth with fizzy mouthfuls of cold Pepsi. As she was finishing the last bite, she remembered the low whispering sound the cat's fur had made against the tin sleeve of the mailbox, and the weird pulling sensation she'd felt as the body began, reluctantly, to come forward. He must have really crammed it in there, she thought, and Dick Powell once more came to mind, black-and-white Dick Powell, this time saying And have some stuffing! She was up and rushing for the sink so fast she knocked her chair over, sure she was going to vomit everything she'd just eaten, she was going to blow her groceries, toss her cookies, throw her heels, donate her lunch. She hung over the sink, eyes closed, mouth open, midsection locked and straining. After a pregnant five-second pause, she produced one monstrous cola-burp that buzzed like a cicada. She leaned there a moment longer, wanting to make absolutely sure that was all. When she was, she rinsed her mouth, spat, and pulled "Zack McCool"'s letter from her jeans pocket. It was time to call Joseph Woodbody.

I work as fast as I can. Binah will come soon looking for me. It’s Mother, however, who descends the back steps into the yard. Binah and the other house slaves are clumped behind her, moving with cautious, synchronized steps as if they’re a single creature, a centipede crossing an unprotected space. I sense the shadow that hovers over them in the air, some devouring dread, and I crawl back into the green-black gloom of the tree. The slaves stare at Mother’s back, which is straight and without give. She turns and admonishes them. “You are lagging. Quickly now, let us be done with this.” As she speaks, an older slave, Rosetta, is dragged from the cow house, dragged by a man, a yard slave. She fights, clawing at his face. Mother watches, impassive. He ties Rosetta’s hands to the corner column of the kitchen house porch. She looks over her shoulder and begs. Missus, please. Missus. Missus. Please. She begs even as the man lashes her with his whip. Her dress is cotton, a pale yellow color. I stare transfixed as the back of it sprouts blood, blooms of red that open like petals. I cannot reconcile the savagery of the blows with the mellifluous way she keens or the beauty of the roses coiling along the trellis of her spine. Someone counts the lashes—is it Mother? Six, seven. The scourging continues, but Rosetta stops wailing and sinks against the porch rail. Nine, ten. My eyes look away. They follow a black ant traveling the far reaches beneath the tree—the mountainous roots and forested mosses, the endless perils—and in my head I say the words I fashioned earlier. Boy Run. Girl Jump. Sarah Go. Thirteen. Fourteen . . . I bolt from the shadows, past the man who now coils his whip, job well done, past Rosetta hanging by her hands in a heap. As I bound up the back steps into the house, Mother calls to me, and Binah reaches to scoop me up, but I escape them, thrashing along the main passage, out the front door, where I break blindly for the wharves. I don’t remember the rest with clarity, only that I find myself wandering across the gangplank of a sailing vessel, sobbing, stumbling over a turban of rope. A kind man with a beard and a dark cap asks what I want. I plead with him, Sarah Go. Binah chases me, though I’m unaware of her until she pulls me into her arms and coos, “Poor Miss Sarah, poor Miss Sarah.” Like a decree, a proclamation, a prophecy. When I arrive home, I am a muss of snot, tears, yard dirt, and harbor filth. Mother holds me against her, rears back and gives me an incensed shake, then clasps me again. “You must promise never to run away again. Promise me.” I want to. I try to. The words are on my tongue—the rounded lumps of them, shining like the marbles beneath the tree. “Sarah!” she demands. Nothing comes. Not a sound. I remained mute for a week. My words seemed sucked into the cleft between my collar bones. I rescued them by degrees, by praying, bullying and wooing. I came to speak again, but with an odd and mercurial form of stammer. I’d never been a fluid speaker, even my first spoken words had possessed a certain belligerent quality, but now there were ugly, halting gaps between my sentences, endless seconds when the words cowered against my lips and people averted their eyes. Eventually, these horrid pauses began to come and go according to their own mysterious whims. They might plague me for weeks and then remain away months, only to return again as abruptly as they left.

He opened the door after letting me pound on it for almost five minutes. His truck was in the carport. I knew he was here. He pulled the door open and walked back inside without looking at me or saying a word. I followed him in, and he dropped onto a sofa I’d never seen before. His face was scruffy. I’d never seen him anything but clean-shaven. Not even in pictures. He had bags under his eyes. He’d aged ten years in three days. The apartment was a mess. The boxes were gone. It looked like he had finally unpacked. But laundry was piled up in a basket so full it spilled out onto the floor. Empty food containers littered the kitchen countertops. The coffee table was full of empty beer bottles. His bed was unmade. The place smelled stagnant and dank. A vicious urge to take care of him took hold. The velociraptor tapped its talon on the floor. Josh wasn’t okay. Nobody was okay. And that was what made me not okay. “Hey,” I said, standing in front of him. He didn’t look at me. “Oh, so you’re talking to me now,” he said bitterly, taking a long pull on a beer. “Great. What do you want?” The coldness of his tone took me aback, but I kept my face still. “You haven’t been to the hospital.” His bloodshot eyes dragged up to mine. “Why would I? He’s not there. He’s fucking gone.” I stared at him. He shook his head and looked away from me. “So what do you want? You wanted to see if I’m okay? I’m not fucking okay. My best friend is brain-dead. The woman I love won’t even fucking speak to me.” He picked up a beer cap from the coffee table and threw it hard across the room. My OCD winced. “I’m doing this for you,” I whispered. “Well, don’t,” he snapped. “None of this is for me. Not any of it. I need you, and you abandoned me. Just go. Get out.” I wanted to climb into his lap. Tell him how much I missed him and that I wouldn’t leave him again. I wanted to make love to him and never be away from him ever again in my life—and clean his fucking apartment. But instead, I just stood there. “No. I’m not leaving. We need to talk about what’s happening at the hospital.” He glared up at me. “There’s only one thing I want to talk about. I want to talk about how you and I can be in love with each other and you won’t be with me. Or how you can stand not seeing me or speaking to me for weeks. That’s what I want to talk about, Kristen.” My chin quivered. I turned and went to the kitchen and grabbed a trash bag from under the sink. I started tossing take-out containers and beer bottles. I spoke over my shoulder. “Get up. Go take a shower. Shave. Or don’t if that’s the look you’re going for. But I need you to get your shit together.” My hands were shaking. I wasn’t feeling well. I’d been light-headed and slightly overheated since I went to Josh’s fire station looking for him. But I focused on my task, shoving trash into my bag. “If Brandon is going to be able to donate his organs, he needs to come off life support within the next few days. His parents won’t do it, and Sloan doesn’t get a say. You need to go talk to them.” Hands came up under my elbows, and his touch radiated through me. “Kristen, stop.” I spun on him. “Fuck you, Josh! You need help, and I need to help you!” And then as fast as the anger surged, the sorrow took over. The chains on my mood swing snapped, and feelings broke through my walls like water breaching a crevice in a dam. I began to cry. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. The strength that drove me through my days just wasn’t available to me when it came to Josh. I dropped the trash bag at his feet and put my hands over my face and sobbed. He wrapped his arms around me, and I completely lost it.

For most people moving is a tiring experience. When on the verge of moving out to a new home or into a new office, it's only natural to focus on your new place and forget about the one you’re leaving. Actually, the last thing you would even think about is embarking on a heavy duty move out clean. However, you can be certain that agents, landlords and all the potential renters or buyers of your old home will most definitely notice if it's being cleaned, therefore getting the place cleaned up is something that you need to consider. The process of cleaning will basically depend to things; how dirty your property and the size of the home. If you leave the property in good condition, you'll have a higher the chance of getting back your bond deposit or if you're selling, attracting a potential buyer. Below are the steps you need to consider before moving out. You should start with cleaning. Remove all screws and nails from the walls and the ceilings, fill up all holes and dust all ledges. Large holes should be patched and the entire wall checked the major marks. Remove all the cobwebs from the walls and ceilings, taking care to wash or vacuum the vents. They can get quite dusty. Clean all doors and door knobs, wipe down all the switches, electrical outlets, vacuum/wipe down the drapes, clean the blinds and remove all the light covers from light fixtures and clean them thoroughly as they may contain dead insects. Also, replace all the burnt out light bulbs and empty all cupboards when you clean them. Clean all windows, window sills and tracks. Vacuum all carpets or get them professionally cleaned which quite often is stipulated in the rental agreement. After you've finished the general cleaning, you can now embark on the more specific areas. When cleaning the bathroom, wash off the soap scum and remove mould (if any) from the bathroom tiles. This can be done by pre-spraying the tile grout with bleach and letting it sit for at least half an hour. Clean all the inside drawers and vanity units thoroughly. Clean the toilet/sink, vanity unit and replace anything that you've damaged. Wash all shower curtains and shower doors plus all other enclosures. Polish the mirrors and make sure the exhaust fan is free of dust. You can generally vacuum these quite easily. Finally, clean the bathroom floors by vacuuming and mopping. In the kitchen, clean all the cabinets and liners and wash the cupboards inside out. Clean the counter-tops and shine the facet and sink. If the fridge is staying give it a good clean. You can do this by removing all shelves and wash them individually. Thoroughly degrease the oven inside and out. It's best to use and oven cleaner from your supermarket, just take care to use gloves and a mask as they can be quite toxic. Clean the kitchen floor well by giving it a good vacuum and mop . Sometimes the kitchen floor may need to be degreased. Dust the bedrooms and living room, vacuum throughout then mop. If you have a garage give it a good sweep. Also cut the grass, pull out all weeds and remove all items that may be lying or hanging around. Remember to put your garbage bins out for collection even if collection is a week away as in our experience the bins will be full to the brim from all the rubbish during the moving process. If this all looks too hard then you can always hire a bond cleaner to tackle the job for you or if you're on a tight budget you can download an end of lease cleaning checklist or have one sent to you from your local agent. Just make sure you give yourself at least a day or to take on the job. Its best not to rush through the job, just make sure everything is cleaned thoroughly, so it passes the inspection in order for you to get your bond back in full.