Losing A Limb Quotes

I have heard sometimes that men who lose an arm of a leg still feel that pain in those limbs, though they are gone,' said Will. 'It is like that sometimes. I can feel Jem with me, though he is gone, and it is like I am missing a part of myself.

I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can’t believe I’m here without her.”- on losing her best friend

It's not easy losing someone," she said. "It never goes away, does it?" "The Phantom Pain, they call it," I said. "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can't have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it's a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that's worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.

We come into this world alone, and we die alone. If we get sick, we fight it alone. Our parents are not there to go through chemo treatments for us. They’re not the ones losing their hair, puking buckets, or getting their asses kicked at school. If we’re involved in an accident, they’re not the ones losing blood, fighting for their lives on the operating table, losing a limb. “I’m here for you” is the dumbest sentence I’d ever heard anyone say.

We need to talk about the hierarchy of grief. You hear it all the time—no grief is worse than any other. I don’t think that’s one bit true. There is a hierarchy of grief. Divorce is not the same as the death of a partner. Death of a grandparent is not the same as the death of a child. Losing your job is not the same as losing a limb. Here’s the thing: every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn’t. It’s easier to see when we take it out of the intensely personal: stubbing your toe hurts. It totally hurts. For a moment, the pain can be all-consuming. You might even hobble for a while. Having your foot ripped off by a passing freight train hurts, too. Differently. The pain lasts longer. The injury needs recovery time, which may be uncertain or complicated. It affects and impacts your life moving forward. You can’t go back to the life you had before you became a one-footed person. No one would say these two injuries are exactly the same.

My sense of being, my identity, whatever you want to call it, it doesn't reside in my parts. It lives in my past, and in the continuity of my present thoughts, and in my hopes for the future. I'm more afraid of losing a memory than a limb.

I’m here for whatever you need, whenever you need, because you’re my best friend and my true love and I’ve missed you. Not having you in my life has been like losing a limb that no one can see is missing.

Love means never having to lose your limbs.

There were times, Sham felt, when the captains regretted there being only two types of limb they could lose to their obsessions.

Sivbarat referred to a person's dearest friend, someone so close that to lose them would be like losing a limb.

Losing a child was like losing a limb. You were reminded of it every time you moved, until the consistent adjustments to life became a permanent part of you.

How easy it would be for a lamb to lose herself in the eyes of a wolf that first time. She would be unprepared. She would be frightened. Her little heart would pound. Blood would flow to her limbs. Her breathing would catch—and quicken. Perhaps the wolf would consume her. I think in most cases, he would. Yes. But this lamb possesses something that arouses his curiosity—and makes him hunger for something more than flesh or blood. And so the wolf lay with the lamb.

A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap. There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night-watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.

Yeah," Chris said. "I lose a couple limbs getting drunk and falling into harvesting combine, I'm an idiot. I lose the same limbs because I happened to be standing next to the right door when the ship was damaged, I'm a hero.

Her limbs inform her that they ache where they clutch this ancient trunk above an unfathomable drop.

We had survived, but in war, a man does not have to be killed or wounded to become a casualty. His life, his sight, or limbs are not the only things he stands to lose.

I think I’m losing myself,” I whisper to her after we’ve come, our bodies naked, sweaty and sated, limbs draped over limbs, hands holding onto hands. My throat feels thick, my breath heavy, my words weigh a ton. “Every time I’m inside you, with you, I think I lose a little bit more.” I turn my head to the side to look at her. She’s staring at me with big, wet eyes so full of everything I could ever want from her. “In the end you might have all my pieces,” I tell her. “Please be gentle with them.

I think I could lose most of my limbs and you’d still like me.” Matthew wrapped the scarf around his neck, hiding his collar. “Depends…would you still have your cock?” If this was a date—and he was damn sure it was no matter what Tarrick said—then he sure as fuck was going to flirt. “I don’t need my cock to pleasure you.” “No?” “No.” “Prove it,” Matthew said, issuing a challenge.

Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it´s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that is worth it and a limb you can accept losing.

Here are the sounds of Wear. It rattles stone on stone. It sucks its teeth. It sings. It hisses like the rain. It roars. It laughs. It claps its hands. Sometimes I think it prays. In winter, through the ice, I've seen it moving swift and black as Tune, without a sound. Here are the sights of Wear. It falls in braids. It parts at rocks and tumbles round them white as down or flashes over them in silver quilts. It tosses fallen trees like bits of straw yet spins a single leaf as gentle as a maid. Sometimes it coils for rest in darkling pools and sometimes it leaps its banks and shatters in the air. In autumn, I've seen it breathe a mist so thick and grey you'd never know old Wear was there at all. Each day, for years and years, I've gone and sat in it. Usually at dusk I clamber down and slowly sink myself to where it laps against my breast. Is it too much to say, in winter, that I die? Something of me dies at least. First there's the fiery sting of cold that almost stops my breath, the aching torment in my limbs. I think I may go mad, my wits so outraged that they seek to flee my skull like rats a ship that's going down. I puff. I gasp. Then inch by inch a blessed numbness comes. I have no legs, no arms. My very heart grows still. These floating hands are not my hands. The ancient flesh I wear is rags for all I feel of it. "Praise, Praise!" I croak. Praise God for all that's holy, cold, and dark. Praise him for all we lose, for all the river of the years bears off. Praise him for stillness in the wake of pain. Praise him for emptiness. And as you race to spill into the sea, praise him yourself, old Wear. Praise him for dying and the peace of death. In the little church I built of wood for Mary, I hollowed out a place for him. Perkin brings him by the pail and pours him in. Now that I can hardly walk, I crawl to meet him there. He takes me in his chilly lap to wash me of my sins. Or I kneel down beside him till within his depths I see a star. Sometimes this star is still. Sometimes she dances. She is Mary's star. Within that little pool of Wear she winks at me. I wink at her. The secret that we share I cannot tell in full. But this much I will tell. What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.

Tana started to shake like the trees, her limbs trembling, and was overcome by such a wave of nausea that she was barely able to twist onto her knees before she was sick in the grass. You said that you were allowed to lose it, some part of her reminded herself. Not yet, not yet, she told herself, although the very fact that she was renegotiating bargains with her own brain suggested things had already gotten pretty bad.

It's not easy losing someone," she said. "It never goes away, does it?" "The Phantom Pain, they call it," I said. "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.

One does not swim with sharks unless they're able to focus fully on not losing a limb in the process.

My climax takes me by surprise. One second I’m fighting Wes over whose tongue belongs in whose mouth. The next, I’m fighting the urge to explode. And losing. “Fuck. I have to come.” Wes moans into my mouth, and I jam myself down on him one more time. That’s when I feel it—the whole-body orgasm. My limbs tingle unpredictably as I slump forward, my face landing in Wes’s neck. The world goes fuzzy at the edges, but I feel myself shooting all over him while he bucks beneath me.

Consider your self-respect, your pride. Do not lose yourself in an alien world. Avoid that swamp, that isle of Circe—for you are not Odysseus enough to dwell there unharmed. You will walk on all fours, you are tipping down onto your front limbs already, and will soon begin to grunt—beware!

I have heard sometimes that men who lose an arm or a leg still feel the pain in those limbs, though they are gone," said Will. "It is like that sometimes. I can feel Jem with me, though he is gone, and it is like I am missing a part of myself.” “But you are not,” Magnus said. “He is not dead, Will. He lives because you let him go. He would have stayed with you and died, if you had asked it, but you loved him enough to prefer that he live, even if that life is separate from yours.

it’s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that’s worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.

I want to know why you’re so obsessed with my leg hair and the idea of me losing a limb. Is it because you secretly want to come to San Diego and take care of me? I’ll let you tweeze my legs if it means I have you on your knees in front of me.

If you had one last breath - what would you say? If you had one hour to use your limbs before you would lose the use of them forever - would you sit there on the coach? If you knew that you wouldn't see tomorrow who would you make amends with? If you knew you had only an hour left on this earth - what would be so pressing that you just had to do it, say it, or see it? Well there is something that I can guarantee - that one day you will have one day, one hour and one breath left. Just make sure that before that day that you have said, done and experienced everything that you dream of doing now. Do it now - that is what today is for. So pick up the phone and call an old friend that you have fallen out of touch with. Get out and run a mile and use your body and sweat. Seek out someone in your life to say your sorry to. Seek someone In your life that you need to thank. Seek someone in your life that you need to express your feelings of love to. Then when that day comes you will be ok with it all.

So I assume that those of you who are married and thus purchased a diamond for your wife are aware of how evil and corrupt the diamond cartel is. I was not. Apparently, diamonds are almost worthless other than the value attached to them by the silly tramps that DeBeers has brainwashed into thinking 'diamond equals love.' Congratulations, ladies, your quest for the perfect princess cut not only supports terrorism and genocide, but has managed to destroy an entire continent. - speaking of blood diamonds, what the hell is going on here? Everyone is upset about African children losing their limbs? Perhaps I missed their concern about these same children during the Rwandan genocide. Here's a solution: Stop buying diamonds. No no, the avarice of the entitled whore cannot be contained. And if blood diamonds are so fucking bad, why can't I by them at a discount? Or at least get them with a death certificate or an appendage or some sort of cogent backstory that might indicate an actual meaning to this useless little cube of carbon. Clearly the diamond market is broken on multiple levels.

Can two walk together, unless they are agreed?’ Amos 3:3 ‘Does This Person Belong in your Life?’ A toxic relationship is like a limb with gangrene: unless you amputate it the infection can spread and kill you. Without the courage to cut off what refuses to heal, you’ll end up losing a lot more. Your personal growth - and in some cases your healing - will only be expedited by establishing relationships with the right people. Maybe you’ve heard the story about the scorpion who asked the frog to carry him across the river because he couldn’t swim. ‘I’m afraid you’ll sting me,’ replied the frog. The scorpion smiled reassuringly and said, ‘Of course I won’t. If I did that we’d both drown!’ So the frog agreed, and the scorpion hopped on his back. Wouldn’t you know it: halfway across the river the scorpion stung him! As they began to sink the frog lamented, ‘You promised you wouldn’t sting me. Why’d you do it?’ The scorpion replied, ‘I can’t help it. It’s my nature!’ Until God changes the other person’s nature, they have the power to affect and infect you. For example, when you feel passionately about something but others don’t, it’s like trying to dance a foxtrot with someone who only knows how to waltz. You picked the wrong dance partner! Don’t get tied up with someone who doesn’t share your values and God-given goals. Some issues can be corrected through counselling, prayer, teaching, and leadership. But you can’t teach someone to care; if they don’t care they’ll pollute your environment, kill your productivity, and break your rhythm with constant complaints. That’s why it’s important to pray and ask God, ‘Does this person belong in my life?

I don’t know what you want to call it, what we are to each other now,” I said. “But I wanted you to know that your friendship has...quite literally altered me.” For a few long seconds, he just stared at me. There were new things to discover in his face still, even after so long spent in close company. Faint shadows under his cheekbones. The scar that ran through his eyebrow. “You don’t know what to call it?” he said, when he finally spoke again. His armor hit the ground with a clatter, and he reached for me. Wrapped an arm around my waist. Pulled me against him. Whispered against my mouth: “Sivbarat. Zethetet.” One Shotet word, one Thuvhesit. Sivbarat referred to a person’s dearest friend, someone so close that to lose them would be like losing a limb. And the Thuvhesit word, I had never heard before. We didn’t quite know how to fit together, lips too wet, teeth where they didn’t belong. But that was all right; we tried again, and this time it was like the spark that came from friction, a jolt of energy through my body. He clutched at my sides, pulled my shirt into his fists. His hands were deft from handling carving knives and powders, and he smelled like it, too, like herbs and potions and vapor. I pressed into him, feeling the rough stairwell wall against my hands, and his quick, hot breaths against my neck. I had wondered, I had wondered what it was like to go through life without feeling pain, but this was not the absence of pain I had always craved, it was the opposite, it was pure sensation. Soft, warm, aching, heavy, everything, everything. I heard, echoing through the safe house, a kind of commotion. But before I let myself pull away so we could see what it was, I asked him quietly, “What does it mean, ‘zethetet’?” He looked away, like he was embarrassed. I caught sight of that creeping blush around the collar of his shirt. “Beloved,” he said softly. He kissed me again, then picked up his armor and led the way toward the renegades. I couldn’t stop smiling.

I don’t know why everyone is still trying to find out whether heaven and hell exist. Why do we need more evidence? They exist here on this very Earth. Heaven is standing atop Mount Qasioun overlooking the Damascene sights with the wind carrying Qabbani’s dulcet words all around you. And hell is only four hours away in Aleppo where children’s cries drown out the explosions of mortar bombs until they lose their voice, their families, and their limbs. Yes, hell certainly does exist right now, at this moment, as I pen this poem. And all we’re doing to extinguish this hellfire is sighing, shrugging, liking, and sharing. Tell me: what exactly does that make us? Are we any better than the gatekeepers of hell?

I would run through fire and burn for you. I would lose arm and leg and limb. I’d do it all over, knowing what would happen to me, if it meant eventually having you as I do now.

It’s not easy losing someone,” she said. “It never goes away, does it?” “The Phantom Pain, they call it,” I said. “Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.

If someone commits an unwelcome touch in front of me, I'll go to jail later, they'll lose their limb first.

In some environments in the universe, the most efficient way for humans to thrive might be to alter their own genes. Indeed, we are already doing that in our present environment, to eliminate diseases that have in the past blighted many lives. Some people object to this on the grounds (in effect) that a genetically altered human is no longer human. This is an anthropomorphic mistake. The only uniquely significant thing about humans (whether in the cosmic scheme of things or according to any rational human criterion) is our ability to create new explanations, and we have that in common with all people. You do not become less of a person if you lose a limb in an accident; it is only if you lose your brain that you do. Changing our genes in order to improve our lives and to facilitate further improvements is no different in this regard from augmenting our skin with clothes or our eyes with telescopes.

If you love somebody deeply and you lose that relationship - whether through death, rejection or separation - you will feel pain. That pain is called grief. Grief is a normal emotional reaction to any significant loss, whether a loved one, a job or a limb. There's no way to avoid or get rid of it - it's just there. And, once accepted, it will pass in its own time. Unfortunately, many of us refuse to accept grief. We will do anything rather than feel it. We may bury ourselves in work, drink heavily, throw ourselves into a new relationship 'on the rebound' or numb ourselves with prescribed medications. But no matter how hard we try to push grief away, deep down inside it's still there. And eventually it will be back. It's like holding a football underwater. As long as you keep holding it down, it stays beneath the surface. But eventually your arm gets tired and the moment you release your grip, the ball leaps straight up out of the water.

Dying was OK because it was sleep and there wasn't no gray ball in death, was there? Was there? She would have to ask somebody about that, somebody she could confide in, and who knew a lot of things, like Sula, for Sula would know or if she didn't she would say something funny that would make it all right. Ooo no, not Sula. Here she was in the midst of it, hating it, scared of it, and again she thought of Sula as though they were still friends and talked things over. That was too much. To lose Jude and not have Sula to talk to about it because it was Sula that he had left her for. Now her thighs were really empty. And it was then that what those women said about never looking at another man made some sense to her, for the real point, the heart of what they said, was the word looked. Not to promise never to make love to another man, not to refuse to marry another man, but to promise and know that she could never afford to look again, to see and accept the way in which their heads cut the air or see moons or tree limbs framed by their necks and shoulders... never to look, for now she could not risk looking - and anyway, so what? For now her thighs were truly empty and dead too and it was Sula who had taken the life from them and Jude who smashed her heart and the both of them who left her with no thighs and no heart just her brain raveling away.

Twitter is not a place where people lose limbs. Social media cancellation rarely has violent consequences, and the casualties of war do not at all compare to people's hurt feelings and damaged reputations.

Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you; one loses all relation to you because you die, the other maintains its relation to you because you survive in it. Just as you would take off your clothes, you abandon the universe in which you are still alive. In other words, various universes emerge around each of us the way tree limbs and leaves branch away from the trunk.

ELPHABA Hands touch, eyes meet Sudden silence, sudden heat Hearts leap in a giddy whirl He could be that boy But I'm not that girl Don't dream too far Don't lose sight of who you are Don't remember that rush of joy He could be that boy I'm not that girl Ev'ry so often we long to steal To the land of what-might-have-been But that doesn't soften the ache we feel When reality sets back in Blithe smile, lithe limb She who's winsome, she wins him Gold hair with a gentle curl That's the girl he chose And Heaven knows I'm not that girl Don't wish, don't start Wishing only wounds the heart I wasn't born for the rose and the pearl There's a girl I know He loves her so I'm not that girl... "I'm Not That Girl" Reprise lyrics GLINDA Don't wish, don't start Wishing only wounds the heart: There's a girl I know He loves her so I'm not that girl....

But what is character? How solid? We cut our hair, we shave our beards, we lose a limb. We remain ourselves. In dreams, however, we swap identities licentiously. We sabotage the structures of our character without a thought.

Enough, Aunt Josephine," Jack said, cutting her off, ignoring the stubborn light in her eyes. Oh, she was a Tremont all right, and one of the "mad" Tremonts at that, but she was no longer in charge of this house. He was. And it was about time he took the reins of this manor and ran it as he saw fit. "There will be no next time," he told her. "But Jack, my dear boy--" He rose from Miranda's side. "There will be no next time. For any of you. I have had enough of seeing my friends, my family, let alone the woman I love risk life, limb, and for what?" He paced the room. "There will never be an end to this if something isn't done, so I am ending it. Here and now." "But Jack--" Miranda protested. He swung around on her. "And not a word from you. Do you think I want my wife risking her life on such an improper fashion?" "You love me?" she whispered. "Yes," he barked at her. She grinned up at him. "You want to marry me?" "Should have years ago." He paced back and forth. "I lost you once, Miranda, I shall not lose you again." He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at everyone in the room, daring them to defy him.

When someone betrays you, you don’t have a chance to lose feelings. You’re left with all that love leftover, plus anger right alongside it, with nowhere for it to go and no one to give it to. It’s like a phantom limb or something, I guess,

My sense of being, my identity, whatever you want to call it, it doesn’t reside in my parts. It lives in my past, and in the continuity of my present thoughts, and in my hopes for the future. I’m more afraid of losing a memory than a limb.

Morality and performance of duty are artificial measures that become necessary when something essential is lacking. The more successfully a person was denied access to his or her feelings in childhood, the larger the arsenal of intellectual weapons and the supply of moral prostheses has to be, because morality and a sense of duty are not sources of strength or fruitful soil for genuine affection. Blood does not flow in artificial limbs; they are for sale and can serve many masters. What was considered good yesterday can--depending on the decree of government or party--be considered evil and corrupt today, and vice versa. But those who have spontaneous feelings can only be themselves. They have no other choice if they want to remain true to themselves. Rejection, ostracism, loss of love, and name calling will not fail to affect them; they will suffer as a result and will dread them, but once they have found their authentic self they will not want to lose it. And when they sense that something is being demanded of them to which their whole being says no, they cannot do it. They simply cannot.

Losing a soulmate is like losing two limbs, or all of them at once. Suddenly, you don't know what to do with your body. You go through life like a zombie, with infrequent flashes of awareness which anchor you to the world around you, if you're lucky. For me, that flash was Kai.

As one refugee, Amila, from Gradačac, commented 20 years later: “The most important part of being a refugee is being a good loser; it’s the only way to survive this. You learn to lose your nationality, your home to strangers with bigger guns, your father to mental illness, one aunt to genocide, and another to nationalism and ignorance. You learn to lose your kids, friends, dreams, neighbours, loves, diplomas, careers, photo albums, home movies, schools, museums, histories, landmarks, limbs, teeth, eyesight, sense of safety, sanity, and your sense of belonging in the world”.

[Kinsey's studies included] stutterers, amputees, paraplegics, even those with cerebral palsy were observed. Kinsey wanted to document the full spectrum of human sexuality, but it was more than that. He believed these people might have things to teach us about the physiology of sex. And he was right. These groups alerted Kinsey--and the scientific community as a whole--to the complicated and crucial role of the central nervous system in sex and reproduction. Kinsey had noted that a stutterer in the throes of sexual abandon may temporarily lose his stutter. Similarly, the phantom limb pain some amputees feel temporarily disappears. Even the muscle spasticity of cerebral palsy may be briefly quieted. The body's limiting factors seem to get shut off. The organism is driven toward nature's singular goal--conception, the passing on of one's genes--and anything that stands in the way is pushed into the background.

Every individual believer is precious in the sight of the Lord, a shepherd would not lose one sheep, nor a jeweller one diamond, nor a mother one child, nor a man one limb of his body, nor will the Lord lose one of his redeemed people. However little we may be, if we are the Lord's, we may rejoice that we are preserved in Christ Jesus.

He gathered her carefully into his arms, tucking her head into his shoulder and aligning her frozen limbs with his. She felt stiff enough to shatter, but bit by bit, her muscles began to relax until she lay pliant against him. Pliant and sleeping. It didn’t take very long. Maybe fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes for her to regain herself. Fifteen minutes for him to lose himself.

It is life and death, Life like you are left With a phantom limb: To lose your wife Or your best friend - With the right leg gone - Attempting to feel, A tempting to mend - Or an arm stretched strong - Our tendencies to steal, Thence heal the way it ends; Prolonging as we reach back again, But then again, So far? See, to reject what is real, My love, has been Our greatest sin

This is the supreme anguish of the soul; it realizes itself as itself, as thing separate from that which is not itself, from God. In this spasm there are two ways: if fear and pride are left in the soul, it shuts itself up, like a warlock in a tower, gnashing its teeth with agony. "I am I," it cried, "I will not lose myself," and in that state damned, it is slowly torn by the claws of circumstance disintegrated bitterly, for all its struggles, throughout ages and ages, its rags to be cast piecemeal upon the dungheap without the city. But the soul that has understood the blessedness of that resignation which grasps the universe and devours it, which is without hope or fear, without faith or doubt, without hate or love, dissolves itself ineffable into the abounding bliss of God. It cries with Shelley, as the "chains of lead about its flight of fire" drop molten from its limbs: "I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire," and in that last outbreaking is made one with the primal and final breath, the Holy Spirit of God. Such must be the climax of any retirement to the Desert on the part of any aspirant of the Mysteries who has the spark of that fire in him.

Being born without a limb or losing one in an accident will soon not be a major disadvantage. As technology improves at a fast rate, these may even augment normal human capabilities. The real question facing us is not whether technology will be able to help such patients, but how to persuade healthy people in the near future not to change their own limbs to smart, state–of–the–art prosthetics.

hospital. I would go see her tomorrow. In the meantime, I'd had a memorable but exhausting day; chased into a pond by a serial limb-barber, surviving a car crash only to be nearly drowned, losing a perfectly good shoe, and on top of all that, as if that wasn't bad enough, forced to buddy up with Sergeant Doakes. Poor Drained Dexter. No wonder I was so tired. I fell into bed and went to sleep at once.

In this country faith is absolute and universal. The choice, if there is a choice, is made at birth. Everyone believes. For these people, God is a near neighbour. I thought of Sundays at home when I was a child, buttoned up in an uncomfortable tweed jacket and forced to go to Sunday communion. I remember mouthing the hymns without really singing, peering between my fingers at the rest of the congregation when I was supposed to be praying, twisting in my seat during the sermon, aching with impatience for the whole boring ritual to be over. I can’t remember when I last went to church. I must have been since Mary and I were married but I can’t remember when. I don’t know anyone who does go to church now. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? I know I live amongst scientists and civil servants, and Mary’s friends are all bankers or economists, so perhaps we are not typical. You still see people coming out of church on Sunday morning, chatting on the steps, shaking hands with the vicar, as you drive past on your way to get the Sunday papers, relieved you are too old now to be told to go. But no one I know goes any more. We never talk about it. We never think about it. I cannot easily remember the words of the Lord’s Prayer. We have moved on from religion. Instead of going to church, which would never occur to us, Mary and I go to Tesco together on Sundays. At least, that is what we did when she still lived in London. We never have time to shop during the week and Saturdays are too busy. But on Sunday our local Tesco is just quiet enough to get round without being hit in the ankles all the time by other people’s shopping carts. We take our time wheeling the shopping cart around the vast cavern, goggling at the flatscreen TVs we cannot afford, occasionally tossing some minor luxury into the trolley that we can afford but not justify. I suppose shopping in Tesco on Sunday morning is in itself a sort of meditative experience: in some way a shared moment with the hundreds of other shoppers all wheeling their shopping carts, and a shared moment with Mary, come to that. Most of the people I see shopping on Sunday morning have that peaceful, dreamy expression on their faces that I know is on ours. That is our Sunday ritual. Now, I am in a different country, with a different woman by my side. But I feel as if I am in more than just a different country; I am in another world, a world where faith and prayer are instinctive and universal, where not to pray, not to be able to pray, is an affliction worse than blindness, where disconnection from God is worse than losing a limb.

When at last with limbs intertwined They enjoy the flower of their youth And the body anticipates already the pleasure to come And they have reached the oint at which Venus Sows seed in the field of womankind, They tighten against each other avidly Mingling the saliva in their mouths And, pressing lips against teeth, Each inhales the breath of the other- In vain, since nothing can detach from her body, He cannot penetrate it with his entire body, Losing himself in that body.

according to Jewish teaching, the ban on blood consumption specifically banned tearing off the limb of a live animal. This practice was used in the ancient world to avoid killing an animal and losing some of its meat to decay. This practice kept the animal alive—and its meat fresh—for a few more days, but it resulted in terrible suffering to the animal. As this ban is written before Jews existed, it is considered a universal ban—one of the “Seven Noahide Laws” incumbent upon all of humanity.

I don’t know what you want to call it, what we are to each other now,” I said. “But I wanted you to know that your friendship has...quite literally altered me.” For a few long seconds, he just stared at me. There were new things to discover in his face still, even after so long spent in close company. Faint shadows under his cheekbones. The scar that ran through his eyebrow. “You don’t know what to call it?” he said, when he finally spoke again. His armor hit the ground with a clatter, and he reached for me. Wrapped an arm around my waist. Pulled me against him. Whispered against my mouth: “Sivbarat. Zethetet.” One Shotet word, one Thuvhesit. Sivbarat referred to a person’s dearest friend, someone so close that to lose them would be like losing a limb. And the Thuvhesit word, I had never heard before. We didn’t quite know how to fit together, lips too wet, teeth where they didn’t belong. But that was all right; we tried again, and this time it was like the spark that came from friction, a jolt of energy through my body.

Sit up straight and resolve neither to move a limb nor to blink, and to remain as still as a statue; then you will see how your body, filled with hatred, rebels against you, attempting to subjugate you again. It will assail you with a thousand weapons and give you no rest until you allow it to move again. By its fierce anger and its excessive struggle, as if flinging dart after dart at you, if you are sly you will realize how much it fears to lose its control and how great your power must be if it is so afraid of you

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.

In the silence, Kestrel heard a falling leaf scratch the glass of the window, opened out toward the dimming sky. It was warm, but summer was almost over. “Play your tiles,” Arin said roughly. Kestrel turned them over, taking no joy in the fact that she had surely won. She had four scorpions. Arin flipped his. The sound of ivory clacking against the wooden table was unnaturally loud. Four vipers. “I win,” he said, and swept the matches into his hand. Kestrel stared at the tiles, feeling a numbness creep along her limbs. “Well,” she said. She cleared her throat. “Well played.” He gave her a humorless smile. “I did warn you.” “Yes. You did.” He stood. “I think I’ll take my leave while I have the advantage.” “Until next time.” Kestrel realized she had offered him her hand. He looked at it, then took it in his own. She felt the numbness ebb, only to be replaced by a different kind of surprise. He dropped her hand. “I have things to do.” “Like what?” She tried for a lighthearted tone. He answered in kind. “Like contemplate what I am going to do with my sudden windfall of matches.” He widened his eyes in pretend glee, and Kestrel smiled. “I’ll walk you out,” she said. “Do you think I will lose my way? Or steal something as I go?” She felt her expression turn haughty. “I am leaving the villa anyway,” she said, though she had had no such plans until the words left her mouth. They walked in silence through the house until they had reached the ground floor. Kestrel saw his stride pause, almost imperceptibly, as they passed the closed doors that hid her piano. She stopped. “What is your interest in that room?” The look he gave her was cutting. “I have no interest in the music room.” Her eyes narrowed as she watched him walk away.

He couldn’t bear to live, but he couldn’t bear to die. He couldn’t bear the thought of her making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn’t bear to keep it, but he couldn’t bear to destroy it either. So he tried to lose it. He left it by the wax-weeping candle holders, placed it between matzos every Passover, dropped it without regard among rumpled papers on his cluttered desk, hoping it wouldn’t be there when he returned. But it was always there. He tried to massage it out of his pocket while sitting on the bench in front of the fountain of the prostrate mermaid, but when he inserted his hand for his hanky, it was there. He hid it like a bookmark in one of the novels he most hated, but the note would appear several days later between the pages of one of the Western books that he alone in the shtetl read, one of the books that the note had now spoiled for him forever. But like his life, he couldn’t for the life of him lose the note. It kept returning to him. It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn: I had to do it for myself.

Jin thought he heard a gunshot. He knew the sound of that pistol and felt a terrible sinking, wrenching, *knowing.* Calibore. Arthie. His other half in this world of destruction. She would never, *ever* fire it herself. Not when they knew what it was capable of. He ran for her, stumbling over pools of blood and wayward limbs, journals soaked red and shining pens. He pushed past a pair of Ram's men, swerving away from their attacks, and finally spotted the shimmer of Arthie's sari in the fray. *Don't die, don't die, don't die.* He could lose Spindrift a thousand times, but he could never lose his sister.

You’re just living a normal life — never been sick, never been unhealthy, and all of a sudden you are fighting for your life. And this is happening to individuals every day,” Thomas said. The infection went to her blood stream and bone marrow and caused septic shock and organ failure. After undergoing multiple surgeries including a bone-marrow transplant and a “never-ending cycle of antibiotics,” she survived the ordeal.1​➔​ Thomas survived relatively intact. Some don’t, losing limbs in a desperate bid to stop the infection from spreading and then living permanently debilitated lives. Others aren’t even that “lucky.” Denis

Shall we go," he said, "from the woods that all folk know, and the pleasant ways of the Land, to see a new thing, and be swept away by time?" And there was a murmur among the trolls, that hummed away through the forest and died out, as on Earth the sound of beetles going home. "Is it not to-day?" he said. "But there they call it to-day, yet none knows what it is: come back through the border again to look at it and it is gone. Time is raging there, like the dogs that stray over our frontier, barking, frightened and angry and wild to be home." "It is even so," said the trolls, though they did not know; but this was a troll whose words carried weight in the forest. "Let us keep to-day," said that weighty troll, "while we have it, and not be lured where to-day is too easily lost. For every time men lose it their hair grows whiter, their limbs grow weaker and their faces sadder, and they are nearer still to to-morrow." So gravely he spoke when he uttered that word "to-morrow" that the brown trolls were frightened. "What happens to-morrow?" one said. "They die," said the grizzled troll. "And the others dig in their earth and put them in, as I have seen them do, and then they go to Heaven, as I have heard them tell." And a shudder went through the trolls far over the floor of the forest. And Lurulu who had sat angry all this while to hear that weighty troll speak ill of Earth, where he would have them come, to astonish them with its quaintness, spoke now in defence of Heaven. "Heaven is a good place," he blurted hotly, though any tales he had heard of it were few. "All the blessed are there," the grizzled troll replied, "and it is full of angels. What chance would a troll have there? The angels would catch him, for they say on Earth that the angels all have wings; they would catch a troll and smack him forever and ever." And all the brown trolls in the forest wept.

What did you say to them?” “Told them I was Stan Shunpike. First person I could think of.” “And they believed that?” “They weren’t the brightest. One of them was definitely part troll, the smell off him…” Ron glanced at Hermione, clearly hopeful she might soften at this small instance of humor, but her expression remained stony above her tightly knotted limbs. “Anyway, they had a row about whether I was Stan or not. It was a bit pathetic to be honest, but there were still five of them and only one of me and they’d taken my wand. Then two of them got into a fight and while the others were distracted I managed to hit the one holding me in the stomach, grabbed his wand, Disarmed the bloke holding mine, and Disapparated. I didn’t do it so well, Splinched myself again”--Ron held up his right hand to show two missing fingernails; Hermione raised her eyebrows coldly--“and I came out miles from where you were. By the time I got back to that bit of riverbank where we’d been…you’d gone.” “Gosh, what a gripping story,” Hermione said in the lofty voice she adopted when wishing to wound. “You must have been simply terrified. Meanwhile we went to Godric’s Hollow and, let’s think, what happened there, Harry? Oh yes, You-Know-Who’s snake turned up, it nearly killed both of us, and then You-Know-Who himself arrived and missed us by about a second.” “What?” Ron said, gaping from her to Harry, but Hermione ignored him. “Imagine losing fingernails, Harry! That really puts our sufferings into perspective, doesn’t it?

A boy who is still a child grows baby teeth and loses them all in seven years. When God makes him fourteen, the signs of maturity begin to shine on his body. In the third seven, limbs growing, chin bearded, his skin acquires the color of manhood. In the fourth age a man is at a peak in strength—a sign in man of excellence. The time is ripe in the fifth for a young man to think of marriage and of offspring. In the sixth the mind of man is trained in all things; he doesn't try the impossible. In the seventh and eighth, that is, fourteen years, he speaks most eloquently in his life. He can still do much in the ninth but his speech and thought are discernibly less keen, and if he makes the full measure of ten sevens, when death comes, it will not come too soon.

Beings Trees in Autumn
 These trees in Buddhist saffron robes renouncing everything,
becoming naked without fear,
in win that is a part of them, disclose a beauty in this death, become new shapes, interior.
To live they cannot hoard;
This losing, too, is growth.
New shapes emerge, new vision clears. Surrender strengthens in the soul another song. This emptying is confidence
in springs, but more-a farthing in the growth that’s come before, a counting of the gifts
and then releasing one by one, so as to give again,
Knowing growth is not a season, but is in the root of things.
This is no losing,
but a becoming.
Coveting such openness
of limb and heart and hand, such bareness in the singing,
I only now discover that I want this wind, blowing where it will, within.

The deaths of writers aren’t special deaths; they just happen to be described deaths. I think of Flaubert lying on his sofa, struck down – who can tell at this distance? – by epilepsy, apoplexy or syphilis, or perhaps some malign axis of the three. Yet Zola called it une belle mort – to be crushed like an insect beneath a giant finger. I think of Bouilhet in his final delirium, feverishly composing a new play in his head and declaring that it must be read to Gustave. I think of the slow decline of Jules de Goncourt: first stumbling over his consonants, the c’s turning to t’s in his mouth; then being unable to remember the titles of his own books; then the haggard mask of imbecility (his brother’s phrase) slipping over his face; then the deathbed visions and panics, and all night long the rasping breaths that sounded (his brother’s words again) like a saw cutting through wet wood. I think of Maupassant slowly disintegrating from the same disease, transported in a strait-jacket to the Passy sanatorium of Dr Blanche, who kept the Paris salons entertained with news of his celebrated client; Baudelaire dying just as inexorably, deprived of speech, arguing with Nadar about the existence of God by pointing mutely at the sunset; Rimbaud, his right leg amputated, slowly losing all feeling in the limbs that remained, and repudiating, amputating his own genius –‘Merde pour la poésie’; Daudet ‘vaulting from forty-five to sixty-five’, his joints collapsing, able to become bright and witty for an evening by giving himself five morphine injections in a row, tempted by suicide –But one doesn’t have the right.

Yesterday while I was on the side of the mat next to some wrestlers who were warming up for their next match, I found myself standing side by side next to an extraordinary wrestler. He was warming up and he had that look of desperation on his face that wrestlers get when their match is about to start and their coach is across the gym coaching on another mat in a match that is already in progress. “Hey do you have a coach.” I asked him. “He's not here right now.” He quietly answered me ready to take on the task of wrestling his opponent alone. “Would you mind if I coached you?” His face tilted up at me with a slight smile and said. “That would be great.” Through the sounds of whistles and yelling fans I heard him ask me what my name was. “My name is John.” I replied. “Hi John, I am Nishan” he said while extending his hand for a handshake. He paused for a second and then he said to me: “John I am going to lose this match”. He said that as if he was preparing me so I wouldn’t get hurt when my coaching skills didn’t work magic with him today. I just said, “Nishan - No score of a match will ever make you a winner. You are already a winner by stepping onto that mat.” With that he just smiled and slowly ran on to the mat, ready for battle, but half knowing what the probable outcome would be. When you first see Nishan you will notice that his legs are frail - very frail. So frail that they have to be supported by custom made, form fitted braces to help support and straighten his limbs. Braces that I recognize all to well. Some would say Nishan has a handicap. I say that he has a gift. To me the word handicap is a word that describes what one “can’t do”. That doesn’t describe Nishan. Nishan is doing. The word “gift” is a word that describes something of value that you give to others. And without knowing it, Nishan is giving us all a gift. I believe Nishan’s gift is inspiration. The ability to look the odds in the eye and say “You don’t pertain to me.” The ability to keep moving forward. Perseverance. A “Whatever it takes” attitude. As he predicted, the outcome of his match wasn’t great. That is, if the only thing you judge a wrestling match by is the actual score. Nishan tried as hard as he could, but he couldn’t overcome the twenty-six pound weight difference that he was giving up to his opponent on this day in order to compete. You see, Nishan weighs only 80 pounds and the lowest weight class in this tournament was 106. Nishan knew he was spotting his opponent 26 pounds going into every match on this day. He wrestled anyway. I never did get the chance to ask him why he wrestles, but if I had to guess I would say, after watching him all day long, that Nishan wrestles for the same reasons that we all wrestle for. We wrestle to feel alive, to push ourselves to our mental, physical and emotional limits - levels we never knew we could reach. We wrestle to learn to use 100% of what we have today in hopes that our maximum today will be our minimum tomorrow. We wrestle to measure where we started from, to know where we are now, and to plan on getting where we want to be in the future. We wrestle to look the seemingly insurmountable opponent right in the eye and say, “Bring it on. - I can take whatever you can dish out.” Sometimes life is your opponent and just showing up is a victory. You don't need to score more points than your opponent in order to accomplish that. No Nishan didn’t score more points than any of his opponents on this day, that would have been nice, but I don’t believe that was the most important thing to Nishan. Without knowing for sure - the most important thing to him on this day was to walk with pride like a wrestler up to a thirty two foot circle, have all eyes from the crowd on him, to watch him compete one on one against his opponent - giving it all that he had. That is what competition is all about. Most of the times in wrestlin

How strange and delicious it was to sit here like this, entwined and filled, while sea breezes rustled through the marram grass on the dunes and quiet waves lapped at the shore. Eventually Keir lifted his head, his eyes very light in his flushed face. "Put your legs around my waist," he said. He helped to rearrange her limbs until they were pressed together closely in a seated embrace, with his bent knees supporting her. It was surprisingly comfortable, but didn't permit much movement. Instead of thrusting, they were limited to a rocking motion that allowed only an inch or two of his length to withdraw and plunge. "I don't think this is going to work," Merritt said, her arms looped around his neck. "Be patient." His mouth sought hers in a warm, flirting kiss. One of his hands searched beneath her skirts to settle on her naked bottom, pulling her forward as they rocked rhythmically. Feeling awkward, but also having fun, Merritt experimented by bracing her feet on the ground and pushing to help their momentum. The combination of pressure and movement had a stunning effect in her. Every forward pitch brought her weight fully onto him, in deep steady nudges that sent bolts of pure erotic feeling through every nerve pathway. The tension was building, compelling her toward a culmination more intense than anything she'd ever felt. She couldn't drive herself hard onto the heavy shaft, her body taking every inch and clenching frantically on each withdrawal as if trying to keep him inside. Nothing mattered except the rhythmic lunges that pumped more and more pleasure into her. Keir's breath hissed through his teeth as he felt her electrified response, the cinch of her intimate muscles. His hand gripped over her bottom, pulling her onto him again, again, again, until the relentless unfaltering movement finally catapulted her into a climax that was like losing consciousness, blinding her vision with a shower of white sparks and extinguishing every rational thought.

. . . and only as she leads him up the stairs does a voice in his head point out how this girl comes up to exactly where . . . and isn’t her profile just like . . . but now they’ve reached the room with its unclean sheets, its blood-colored oil lamp, its smell of rose water and dirty feet. In the intoxication of his young senses Lefty doesn’t pay attention to the growing similarities the girl’s disrobing reveals. His eyes take in the large breasts, the slim waist, the hair cascading down to the defenseless coccyx; but Lefty doesn’t make connections. The girl fills a hookah for him. Soon he drifts off, no longer hearing the voice in his head. In the soft hashish dream of the ensuing hours, he loses sense of who he is and who he’s with. The limbs of the prostitute become those of another woman. A few times he calls out a name, but by then he is too stoned to notice. Only later, showing him out, does the girl bring him back to reality. “By the way, I’m Irini. We don’t have a Desdemona here.

He concluded the speech with an irritated motion of his hands. Unfortunately, Evie had been conditioned by too many encounters with Uncle Peregrine to discern between angry gestures and the beginnings of a physical attack. She flinched instinctively, her own arms flying up to shield her head. When the expected pain of a blow did not come, she let out a breath and tentatively lowered her arms to find Sebastian staring at her with blank astonishment. Then his face went dark. “Evie,” he said, his voice containing a bladelike ferocity that frightened her. “Did you think I was about to…Christ. Someone hit you. Someone hit you in the past—who the hell was it?” He reached for her suddenly—too suddenly—and she stumbled backward, coming up hard against the wall. Sebastian went very still. “Goddamn,” he whispered. Appearing to struggle with some powerful emotion, he stared at her intently. After a long moment, he spoke softly. “I would never strike a woman. I would never harm you. You know that, don’t you?” Transfixed by the light, glittering eyes that held hers with such intensity, Evie couldn’t move or make a sound. She started as he approached her slowly. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “Let me come to you. It’s all right. Easy.” One of his arms slid around her, while he used his free hand to smooth her hair, and then she was breathing, sighing, as relief flowed through her. Sebastian brought her closer against him, his mouth brushing her temple. “Who was it?” he asked. “M-my uncle,” she managed to say. The motion of his hand on her back paused as he heard her stammer. “Maybrick?” he asked patiently. “No, th-the other one.” “Stubbins.” “Yes.” Evie closed her eyes in pleasure as his other arm slid around her. Clasped against Sebastian’s hard chest, with her cheek tucked against his shoulder, she inhaled the scent of clean male skin, and the subtle touch of sandalwood cologne. “How often?” she heard him ask. “More than once?” “I…i-it’s not important now.” “How often, Evie?” Realizing that he was going to persist until she answered, Evie muttered, “Not t-terribly often, but…sometimes when I displeased him, or Aunt Fl-Florence, he would lose his temper. The l-last time I tr-tried to run away, he blackened my eye and spl-split my lip.” “Did he?” Sebastian was silent for a long moment, and then he spoke with chilling softness. “I’m going to tear him limb from limb.” “I don’t want that,” Evie said earnestly. “I-I just want to be safe from him. From all of them.” Sebastian drew his head back to look down into her flushed face. “You are safe,” he said in a low voice. He lifted one of his hands to her face, caressing the plane of her cheekbone, letting his fingertip follow the trail of pale golden freckles across the bridge of her nose. As her lashes fluttered downward, he stroked the slender arcs of her brows, and cradled the side of her face in his palm. “Evie,” he murmured. “I swear on my life, you will never feel pain from my hands. I may prove a devil of a husband in every other regard…but I wouldn’t hurt you that way. You must believe that.

Arin watched the fire flare crimson. Then he went outside and surveyed the grounds, saw through leafless trees that no one was near. He could steal a few minutes. When he stepped back inside the forge, he leaned against the anvil. With one hand he pulled a book from its hiding place behind the kindling box, and in the other he held a hammer so that, if in danger of being caught, he could more quickly pretend to have been working. He began to read. It was a book he had seen in Kestrel’s possession, one on the history of the Valorian empire. He had taken it from the library after she had returned it, weeks ago. What would she say, if she saw him reading a book about his enemy, in his enemy’s tongue? What would she do? Arin knew this: her gaze would measure him, and he would sense a shift of perception within her. Her opinion of him would change as daylight changed, growing or losing shadow. Subtle. Almost indiscernible. She would see him differently, though he wouldn’t know in what way. He wouldn’t know what it meant. This had happened, again and again, since he had come here. Sometimes he wished he had never come here. Well. Kestrel couldn’t see him in the forge, or know what he read, because she couldn’t leave her rooms. She couldn’t even walk. Arin shut the book, gripped it between rigid fingers. He nearly threw it into the fire. I will have you torn limb from limb, the general had said. That wasn’t why Arin stayed away from her. Not really. He forced his thoughts from his head. He hid the book where it had been. He busied himself with quiet work, heating iron and charcoal in a crucible to produce steel. It took some time before Arin realized he was humming a dark tune. For once, he didn’t stop himself. The pressure of song was too strong, the need for distraction too great. Then he found that the music caged behind his closed teeth was the melody Kestrel had played for him months ago. He felt the sensation of it, low and alive, on his mouth. For a moment, he imagined it wasn’t the melody that touched his lips, but Kestrel. The thought stopped his breath, and the music, too.

There are many examples where species share common plastic traits. What appears to be convergence may just be the plastic response of the organism to its environment. Examples include the following: Limbs that protrude from an animal’s body have more surface area per unit mass than the rest of the body. In cold weather the animal loses more heat per unit mass from these limbs than from other parts of the body. In many species the tails and legs are shorter for those living in colder climates and larger for those in warmer climates. Gulls’ wings are shorter in cold climates than in warm. Hares and foxes also have shorter ears in cold climates than in warm. Eskimos have shorter arms and legs than do people living in warmer climates. . . . Jodan’s rule: Many species of fish tend to have more vertebrae when they live in cold water than do the same species living in warm water. These differences have been shown to depend on the temperature at which the fish have been reared. What these rules show is not convergence. They show that different species adopt the same anatomical strategies when they have to cope with the same environmental conditions. We have seen that these strategies cannot come from random mutations. It is much more reasonable to say they come from environmental cues acting on the genetic program.

The truth about my family was that we disappointed one another. When I heard the word 'disappoint,' I tasted toast, slightly burned. But when I saw the word written, I thought of it first and foremost as the combining or the collapsing together of the words 'disappear' and 'point,' as in how something in us ceased to exist the moment someone let us down. Small children understood this better than adults, this irreparable diminution of the self that occurred at each instance, large and small, of someone forgetting a promise, arriving late, losing interest, leaving too soon, and otherwise making us feel like a fool. That was why children, in the face of disappointments, large and small, were so quick to cry and scream, often throwing their bodies to the ground as if their tiny limbs were on fire. That was a good instinct. We, the adults or the survivors of our youth, traded in instinct for a societal norm. We stayed calm. We swallowed the hurt. We forgave the infraction. We ignored that our skin was on fire. We became our own fools. Sometimes, when we were very successful, we forgot entirely the memory of the disappointment. The loss that resulted, of course, could not be undone. What was gone was gone. We just could no longer remember how we ended up with so much less of our selves. Why we expected nothing, why we deserved so little, and why we brought strangers into our lives to fill the void.

What did you say to them?” “Told them I was Stan Shunpike. First person I could think of.” “And they believed that?” “They weren’t the brightest. One of them was definitely part troll, the smell off him…” Ron glanced at Hermione, clearly hopeful she might soften at this small instance of humor, but her expression remained stony above her tightly knotted limbs. “Anyway, they had a row about whether I was Stan or not. It was a bit pathetic to be honest, but there were still five of them and only one of me and they’d taken my wand. Then two of them got into a fight and while the others were distracted I managed to hit the one holding me in the stomach, grabbed his wand, Disarmed the bloke holding mine, and Disapparated. I didn’t do it so well, Splinched myself again”--Ron held up his right hand to show two missing fingernails; Hermione raised her eyebrows coldly--“and I came out miles from where you were. By the time I got back to that bit of riverbank where we’d been…you’d gone.” “Gosh, what a gripping story,” Hermione said in the lofty voice she adopted when wishing to wound. “You must have been simply terrified. Meanwhile we went to Godric’s Hollow and, let’s think, what happened there, Harry? Oh yes, You-Know-Who’s snake turned up, it nearly killed both of us, and then You-Know-Who himself arrived and missed us by about a second.” “What?” Ron said, gaping from her to Harry, but Hermione ignored him. “Imagine losing fingernails, Harry! That really puts our sufferings into perspective, doesn’t it?” “Hermione,” said Harry quietly, “Ron just saved my life.” She appeared not to have heard him. “One thing I would like to know, though,” she said, fixing her eyes on a spot a foot over Ron’s head. “How exactly did you find us tonight? That’s important. Once we know, we’ll be able to make sure we’re not visited by anyone else we don’t want to see.” Ron glared at her, then pulled a small silver object from his jeans pocket. “This.” She had to look at Ron to see what he was showing them. “The Deluminator?” she asked, so surprised she forgot to look cold and fierce. “It doesn’t just turn the lights on and off,” said Ron. “I don’t know how it works or why it happened then and not any other time, because I’ve been wanting to come back ever since I left. But I was listening to the radio really early on Christmas morning and I heard…I heard you.” He was looking at Hermione. “You heard me on the radio?” she asked incredulously. “No, I heard you coming out of my pocket. Your voice,” he held up the Deluminator again, “came out of this.” “And what exactly did I say?” asked Hermione, her tone somewhere between skepticism and curiosity. “My name. ‘Ron.’ And you said…something about a wand…” Hermione turned a fiery shade of scarlet. Harry remembered: It had been the first time Ron’s name had been said aloud by either of them since the day he had left; Hermione had mentioned it when talking about repairing Harry’s wand.

I look down at my body and marvel at its ability to survive something so frightening, and I gaze lingeringly at my limbs as if there were magic blood coursing in my veins. How extraordinary it is, to be alive when one should be dead. The accident happened as the clock struck midnight, when the date changed to 09/09/09. Nine, that’s what the Kabbalist told me; nine, the number of death and rebirth, endings and beginnings, is the sign I was supposed to look out for. I may always look back on this day as the one that divided my life in two. Eli comes to see me in the hospital and I’m furious with him. He had been telling me that the tires on the car were too thin, but he had refused to have them changed. He claimed he couldn’t afford it. “But you could afford to lose me?” I ask bitterly. “Yitzy could have been in that car.” But Eli shows no signs of remorse. He refuses to accept any responsibility for the accident. I don’t want to see his face anymore. I tell him to go home, I will call a friend to come stay with me. I never want to see his face again. Could this be the sign from God, then? That clean break with my past that I was looking for, the emphatic separation between one life and the other? Maybe the fact that I’m not dead is the big miracle I always thought would come my way. Only now can I truly feel invincible, after I’ve been through the worst. I am no longer nervous, no longer uncertain. I have no past to cling to; the last twenty-three years belong to someone else, someone I no longer know.

The moment before the gun goes off is always the most silent. Your world is quiet, but it is not calm. The runners around you bounce and flex and relax, flex and relax. They slap their faces for motivation, they look to the sky and mumble prayers to God. The coaches shout instructions and the teammates cheer as do the fans in the stands, but you cannot hear because you are somewhere else, somewhere deep inside, preparing your body to deal with the coming pain, the breath sucked from you, your limbs on fire and the voices that won't let you stop. They say keep moving, it gets better, it will be better if you can only break through this pain. They say there's another life after this torture, a new level, just keep breathing. Then the gunshot and your body no longer belongs to you. Yes, you are there, you are present but you are no longer in control. Whatever happens from this point happens and all you can do, all you must do now is breathe, keep breathing, don't lose your nerve, don't choke, no matter how much it hurts, don't stop breathing otherwise it will all be over before it's time. They cheer for me. I can't breathe. Harvard isn't going to know what hit them, I hear. I can't breathe. We are the champions, I hear, we are the champions, they sing around me. I can't breathe. Your personal best by a long shot. That's Coach Erickson's voice. That's my boy. It's my father. It's like I'm dying, trying to hold on. My body says oh no, and my knees buckle but so many arms are around me, they hold me up. The voices they say breathe, keep breathing. They bring me water, they bring me something sweet and then they lay me down in the soft grass where I feel the blades against my tingling skin.

Taking the catcher’s place, he sank to his haunches and gestured to Arthur. “Throw some easy ones to begin with,” he called, and Arthur nodded, seeming to lose his apprehensiveness. “Yes, milord!” Arthur wound up and released a relaxed, straight pitch. Squinting in determination, Lilian gripped the bat hard, stepped into the swing, and turned her hips to lend more impetus to the motion. To her disgust, she missed the ball completely. Turning around, she gave Westcliff a pointed glance. “Well, your advice certainly helped,” she muttered sarcastically. “Elbows,” came his succinct reminder, and he tossed the ball to Arthur. “Try again.” Heaving a sigh, Lillian raised the bat and faced the pitcher once more. Arthur drew his arm back, and lunged forward as he delivered another fast ball. Lillian brought the bat around with a grunt of effort, finding an unexpected ease in adjusting the swing to just the right angle, and she received a jolt of visceral delight as she felt the solid connection between the bat and the leather ball. With a loud crack the ball was catapulted high into the air, over Arthur’s head, beyond the reach of those in the back field. Shrieking in triumph, Lillian dropped the bat and ran headlong toward the first sanctuary post, rounding it and heading toward second. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Daisy hurtling across the field to scoop up the ball, and in nearly the same motion, throwing it to the nearest boy. Increasing her pace, her feet flying beneath her skirts, Lillian rounded third, while the ball was tossed to Arthur. Before her disbelieving eyes, she saw Westcliff standing at the last post, Castle Rock, with his hands held up in readiness to catch the ball. How could he? After showing her how to hit the ball, he was now going to tag her out? “Get out of my way!” Lillian shouted, running pellmell toward the post, determined to reach it before he caught the ball. “I’m not going to stop!” “Oh, I’ll stop you,” Westcliff assured her with a grin, standing right in front of the post. He called to the pitcher. “Throw it home, Arthur!” She would go through him, if necessary. Letting out a warlike cry, Lillian slammed full-length into him, causing him to stagger backward just as his fingers closed over the ball. Though he could have fought for balance, he chose not to, collapsing backward onto the soft earth with Lillian tumbling on top of him, burying him in a heap of skirts and wayward limbs. A cloud of fine beige dust enveloped them upon their descent. Lillian lifted herself on his chest and glared down at him. At first she thought that he had been winded, but it immediately became apparent that he was choking with laughter. “You cheated!” she accused, which only seemed to make him laugh harder. She struggled for breath, drawing in huge lungfuls of air. “You’re not supposed…to stand in front…of the post…you dirty cheater!” Gasping and snorting, Westcliff handed her the ball with the ginger reverence of someone yielding a priceless artifact to a museum curator. Lillian took the ball and hurled it aside. “I was not out,” she told him, jabbing her finger into his hard chest for emphasis. It felt as if she were poking a hearthstone. “I was safe, do you…hear me?” She heard Arthur’s amused voice as he approached them. “Actually, miss—” “Never argue with a lady, Arthur,” the earl interrupted, having managed to regain his powers of speech, and the boy grinned at him. “Yes, milord.” “Are there ladies here?” Daisy asked cheerfully, coming from the field. “I don’t see any.” Still smiling, the earl looked up at Lillian.

(The two ladies in the Bower of Bliss) Two naked Damzelles he therein espyde, Which therein bathing, seemed to contend, And wrestle wantonly, ne car’d to hyde, Their dainty parts from vew of any, which them eyde. Sometimes the one would lift the other quight Aboue the waters, and then downe againe Her plong, as ouer maistered by might, Where both awhile would couered remaine, And each the other from to rise restraine; The whiles their snowy limbes, as through a vele, So through the Christall waues appeared plaine: Then suddeinly both would themselues vnhele, And th’amarous sweet spoiles to greedy eyes reuele. ... The wanton Maidens him espying, stood Gazing a while at his vnwonted guise; Then th’one her selfe low ducked in the flood, Abasht, that her a straunger did avise: But th’other rather higher did arise, And her two lilly paps aloft displayd, And all, that might his melting hart entise To her delights, she vnto him bewrayd: The rest hid vnderneath, him more desirous made. With that, the other likewise vp arose, And her faire lockes, which formerly were bownd Vp in one knot, she low adowne did lose: Which flowing long and thick, her cloth’d arownd, And th’yuorie in golden mantle gownd: So that faire spectacle from him was reft, Yet that, which reft it, no lesse faire was fownd: So hid in lockes and waues from lookers theft, Nought but her louely face she for his looking left. Withall she laughed, and she blusht withall, That blushing to her laughter gaue more grace, And laughter to her blushing, as did fall: Now when they spide the knight to slacke his pace, Them to behold, and in his sparkling face The secret signes of kindled lust appeare, Their wanton meriments they did encreace, And to him beckned, to approch more neare, And shewd him many sights, that courage cold could reare.

When examining the history of any human network, it is therefore advisable to stop from time to time and look at things from the perspective of some real entity. How do you know if an entity is real? Very simple – just ask yourself, ‘Can it suffer?’ When people burn down the temple of Zeus, Zeus doesn’t suffer. When the euro loses its value, the euro doesn’t suffer. When a bank goes bankrupt, the bank doesn’t suffer. When a country suffers a defeat in war, the country doesn’t really suffer. It’s just a metaphor. In contrast, when a soldier is wounded in battle, he really does suffer. When a famished peasant has nothing to eat, she suffers. When a cow is separated from her newborn calf, she suffers. This is reality. Of course suffering might well be caused by our belief in fictions. For example, belief in national and religious myths might cause the outbreak of war, in which millions lose their homes, their limbs and even their lives. The cause of war is fictional, but the suffering is 100 per cent real. This is exactly why we should strive to distinguish fiction from reality. Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can’t play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can’t enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. Then we begin entire wars ‘to make a lot of money for the corporation’ or ‘to protect the national interest’. Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; how come we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?

I was thinking, The last thing I want to do is get in a wreck and lose another limb. I completely lost it and blew up at my father. “Why did you do that? I can’t get injured again! Pull over. I’ll drive!” I screamed. Dad is not the kind of person who would have ever taken that kind of behavior from me in the past, but I think he understood the paranoia. I’d asked him while I was in the hospital, “Did you ever think one of your kids would ever lose a limb?” And he said, “No, it never crossed my mind. I was always more afraid I would lost another limb.” It wasn’t until later that I realized how great it was of him that he kept his cool and understood where I was coming from. He just let me freak out and let me drive. I think in some ways it was the same kind of lesson he taught me as a child without ever saying a word. I watched him just get on with things with one arm. He never made a fuss about it. It was an example that growing up I didn’t know I’d need eventually. So I got in the driver’s seat and we continued on our way. After a while we stopped at a gas station to stretch our legs and get some snacks. I grabbed a lemon-line Gatorade and Dad grabbed something to drink and we got back in the car. I turned the car on, so the air and the radio were going as I tried and tried to get my Gatorade bottle open, but the top was too big and I couldn’t quite get my fingers to grab it, hold it, and twist it open. My finger strength just wasn’t there yet. So I put it between my legs and tried to hold it still while I twisted the top. I heard the creak of release as I managed to break the seal of the plastic orange cap but my legs were squeezing the bottle so hard that the bright yellow liquid squirted all over me. “Crap!” I yelled. I heard my dad snicker. I turned to look at him and he smirked while holding a can of Coke in his hand. “And that’s why I drink out of a can,” he declared with a smug grin. Click. Fizzzz. With one hand, Dad popped that can open and took a big slug of his soda.

I had always been a very physically active person. And I loved my job. I got into the military because of September 11, but I stumbled into a career that I absolutely loved. I was meant to be an infantry soldier. I thought, I will never be physical again and my career in the military is over. One tiny trip wire had taken everything away from me in one explosive moment. I sank into a very dark place. I wallowed in both my physical pain and my mental anguish. One day my parents were sitting by my side in the hospital room--as they did every day--and I turned to my mom and blurted out, “How am I ever gonna be able to tie my shoes again?” Mom rebutted my pity party with, “Well, your father can tie his shoes with one hand. Andy! Show Noah how you can tie your shoes with one hand.” And as I started to protest, Dad cut my whining off at the pass. “Oh my gosh, Noah, I can tie my shoes with one hand.” And he did, as I had seen him do so many times growing up. “I just need a little sympathy,” I said. To which Mom replied, “Well, you’re not getting it today.” A few days after I’d had my shoelace meltdown, after many tears, I found myself drained of emotion, a hollowed-out shell. My mother saw the blank expression on my face and she saw an opportunity to drag me out of the fog. She took it. She came up to my bed, leaned in close--but not so close that the other people in the room couldn’t hear her, and said, “You just had to outdo your dad and lose your arm and your leg.” She smiled, waiting for my reply, but all I could do was laugh. It was funny but it was also at that moment that I think I felt a little spark of excitement and anticipation again. It would take a while to fully ignite the flame but what she said definitely tapped into some important part of me. I have a very competitive side and Mom knew that. She knew just what to say to shake me up, so I could realize, Okay, life will go on from here. I thought to myself, My dad could do a whole lot with just one hand. Imagine how much more impressive it’ll look with two missing limbs. And I smiled the best I could through a wired jaw.

He was but three-and-twenty, and had only just learned what it is to love—­to love with that adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself. Love of this sort is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so, whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery. And this blessed gift of venerating love has been given to too many humble craftsmen since the world began for us to feel any surprise that it should have existed in the soul of a Methodist carpenter half a century ago, while there was yet a lingering after-glow from the time when Wesley and his fellow-labourer fed on the hips and haws of the Cornwall hedges, after exhausting limbs and lungs in carrying a divine message to the poor. That afterglow has long faded away; and the picture we are apt to make of Methodism in our imagination is not an amphitheatre of green hills, or the deep shade of broad-leaved sycamores, where a crowd of rough men and weary-hearted women drank in a faith which was a rudimentary culture, which linked their thoughts with the past, lifted their imagination above the sordid details of their own narrow lives, and suffused their souls with the sense of a pitying, loving, infinite Presence, sweet as summer to the houseless needy. It is too possible that to some of my readers Methodism may mean nothing more than low-pitched gables up dingy streets, sleek grocers, sponging preachers, and hypocritical jargon—­elements which are regarded as an exhaustive analysis of Methodism in many fashionable quarters. That would be a pity; for I cannot pretend that Seth and Dinah were anything else than Methodists—­not indeed of that modern type which reads quarterly reviews and attends in chapels with pillared porticoes, but of a very old-fashioned kind. They believed in present miracles, in instantaneous conversions, in revelations by dreams and visions; they drew lots, and sought for Divine guidance by opening the Bible at hazard; having a literal way of interpreting the Scriptures, which is not at all sanctioned by approved commentators; and it is impossible for me to represent their diction as correct, or their instruction as liberal. Still—­if I have read religious history aright—­faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords, and it is possible—­thank Heaven!—­to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store that she may carry it to her neighbour’s child to “stop the fits,” may be a piteously inefficacious remedy; but the generous stirring of neighbourly kindness that prompted the deed has a beneficent radiation that is not lost. Considering these things, we can hardly think Dinah and Seth beneath our sympathy, accustomed as we may be to weep over the loftier sorrows of heroines in satin boots and crinoline, and of heroes riding fiery horses, themselves ridden by still more fiery passions.

He concluded the speech with an irritated motion of his hands. Unfortunately, Evie had been conditioned by too many encounters with Uncle Peregrine to discern between angry gestures and the beginnings of a physical attack. She flinched instinctively, her own arms flying up to shield her head. When the expected pain of a blow did not come, she let out a breath and tentatively lowered her arms to find Sebastian staring at her with blank astonishment. Then his face went dark. "Evie," he said, his voice containing a bladelike ferocity that frightened her. "Did you think I was about to... Christ. Someone hit you. Someone hit you in the past---who the hell was it?" He reached for her suddenly---too suddenly---and she stumbled backward, coming up hard against the wall. Sebastian went very still. "Goddamn," he whispered. Appearing to struggle with some powerful emotion, he stared at her intently. After a long moment, he spoke softly. "I would never strike a woman. I would never harm you. You know that, don't you?" Transfixed by the light, glittering eyes that held hers with such intensity, Evie couldn't move or make a sound. She started as he approached her slowly. "It's all right," he murmured. "Let me come to you. It's all right. Easy." One of his arms slid around her, while he used his free hand to smooth her hair, and then she was breathing, sighing, as relief flowed through her. Sebastian brought her closer against him, his mouth brushing her temple. "Who was it?" he asked. "M-my uncle," she managed to say. The motion of his hand on her back paused as he heard her stammer. "Maybrick?" he asked patiently. "No, th-the other one." "Stubbins." "Yes." Evie closed her eyes in pleasure as his other arm slid around her. Clasped against Sebastian's hard chest, with her cheek tucked against his shoulder, she inhaled the scent of clean male skin, and the subtle touch of sandalwood cologne. "How often?" she heard him ask. "More than once?" "I... i-it's not important now." "How often, Evie?" Realizing that he was going to persist until she answered, Evie muttered, "Not t-terribly often, but... sometimes when I displeased him, or Aunt Fl-Florence, he would lose his temper. The l-last time I tr-tried to run away, he blackened my eye and spl-split my lip." "Did he?" Sebastian was silent for a long moment, and then he spoke with chilling softness. "I'm going to tear him limb from limb." "I don't want that," Evie said earnestly. "I-I just want to be safe from him. From all of them." Sebastian drew his head back to look down into her flushed face. "You are safe," he said in a low voice. He lifted one of his hands to her face, caressing the plane of her cheekbone, letting his fingertip follow the trail of pale golden freckles across the bridge of her nose. As her lashes fluttered downward, he stroked the slender arcs of her brows, and cradled the side of her face with his palm. "Evie," he murmured. "I swear on my life, you will never feel pain from my hands. I may prove a devil of a husband in every other regard... but I wouldn't hurt you that way. You must believe that." The delicate nerves of her skin drank in sensations thirstily... his touch, the erotic waft of his breath against her lips. Evie was afraid to open her eyes, or to do anything that might interrupt the moment. "Yes," she managed to whisper. "Yes... I---" There was the sweet shock of a probing kiss against her lips... another... She opened to him with a slight gasp. His mouth was hot silk and tender fire, invading her with gently questing pressure. His fingertips traced over her face, tenderly adjusting the angle between them.

Carnivorous dinosaurs get successively more birdlike over time. Primitive species have five-fingered limbs. Over tens of millions of years species lose digits until they are left with the bird pattern of three, including an enlarged central one that in birds serves as the base of the wing. Like birds, these dinosaurs lose wristbones and develop a semilunate bone, akin to the one that birds use in flapping flight.

Botticelli’s St. Sebastian" I have seen a robin cock his head so, Listening for the change in weather, Feeling in the field’s pale grass turning paler The moment of his own departure. I have seen the bird throw his whole body In the air, and go, the small bird go. And the bared ground at once lose heart, As if taken by a sudden grippe. And I have seen blood wood, fire-grained As the stripped flesh, seen the long Boards of strong wood—when seen bound And bitten by the drill—spew up phases As curled and as extravagant as Sebastian’s gaze, The way the lover does at consummation, Lost to himself and the world, but still Safley shaded by the tree he rose from. I have seen, I have seen the lake’s heart When the rain comes through, when the water’s Dark flesh is driven, I have seen the heart Move like a doe through the woods, move Like a stunned doe, deeper and deeper, Through trees that turn and close behind her, The way water closes over a dropped stone, Or a torn limb, or a lasting wound … Oh, the forgotten traveler! Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Song. (BOA Editions; 1st edition 1995)

Fifteen years ago, Israeli scientists published a study in which engineers observed patient care in ICUs for twenty-four-hour stretches. They found that the average patient required 178 individual actions per day, ranging from administering a drug to suctioning the lungs, and every one of them posed risks. Remarkably, the nurses and doctors were observed to make an error in just 1 percent of these actions—but that still amounted to an average of two errors a day with every patient. Intensive care succeeds only when we hold the odds of doing harm low enough for the odds of doing good to prevail. This is hard. There are dangers simply in lying unconscious in bed for a few days. Muscles atrophy. Bones lose mass. Pressure ulcers form. Veins begin to clot. You have to stretch and exercise patients’ flaccid limbs daily to avoid contractures; you have to give subcutaneous injections of blood thinners at least twice a day, turn patients in bed every few hours, bathe them and change their sheets without knocking out a tube or a line, brush their teeth twice a day to avoid pneumonia from bacterial buildup in their mouths. Add a ventilator, dialysis, and the care of open wounds, and the difficulties only accumulate.

you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss. Then, too, at sea—to use a homely but expressive phrase—you miss a man so much. A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark, upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap. There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.

I unbuttoned the top of my shirt as the heat of my magic made my skin prickle and I got a little carried away with the idea of making Roxy Vega bow for me in my own mind. I wanted my hand fisted in her black hair, her mouth on mine and her naked flesh pressed up against me as she gasped my name like a prayer to a god and I ruined her like a demon born to sin. But I needed to stop those thoughts in their track. Not least because I wasn't ever going to be able to indulge in them. By the time I was through with her, she'd hate me far too much for her to ever consider parting her thighs for me. More’s the pity. Marguerite appeared out of nowhere, jerking me from my fantasies about Roxanya Vega and dropping into my lap where she gasped as she found the hardness of my cock driving into her ass. She leaned in to kiss me and I dragged her closer, kissing her hard and grinding her down over my cock to try and gain some relief from the ache in it. I closed my eyes as I kissed her hard, sinking my tongue into her mouth and thinking of a girl with dark hair and fire in her soul. But as she mewled like a kitten and melted for me, my fantasy was somewhat ruined. I may not have known Roxy well, but she didn't seem like the kind of girl to melt into a puddle when I kissed her. No, she'd be all fire and spite and the kind of lust that burned the roof from houses while her fingernails gouged lines in my flesh. I tried to push that thought out, gripping Marguerite's ass and rocking her back and forth over my cock, but I was fighting a losing battle because she was mewling again and her limbs were going as floppy as my dick was becoming as she instantly let me take control. I released my grip on her waist, sighing as I pulled back and let her start sucking on my neck while I just looked up at the ceiling and waited for it to get more interesting again. Or maybe for it to just stop. But before I could make a decision on that, Milton's voice drew my attention to the other side of our group and I instantly perked up at his words. “Oh hey, it's Tory, right?” he asked and I nudged Marguerite aside to look over at the girl in question where she stood before him as she raised her hand and a tsunami of water slammed into him. The attack sent him flying back off of his chair and slamming to the floor, but my gaze was fixed on her furious features and the curl of those full lips as she glared at him. My pulse picked up as she blasted him with more water which rolled him across the wooden floor before pinning him to the wall. The group surrounding me all leapt up in shock and I almost dropped Marguerite on her ass as I stood too. (Darius POV)

Ah fuck, he’s going to gnaw my arm off; I’m losing a limb. I can’t go through life with one arm. I mean, fuck, I’m already a hideous rodent with no game,” he said, sniffling. “I’ll be a wobbly, off-balanced dipshit who lost his arm to an ass. And not even the good type of ass. “Are you crying?” “No, no, I have sweat in my eyes,” he explained as the donkey’s tongue kept licking his face.

Dad turned to me, his pupils still huge. He worked his jaw as he spoke. “They found your mother.” Mom. I flattened into the bed like a balloon losing all its air. My limbs felt like they were coming loose. “Is she . . . is she . . .” “She’s alive,” Dad said.

Bradford’s handlers blended into the crowd and passed out big signs and buttons and even those goofy Styrofoam hats, all with the same hip “BRADFORD FOR GOVERNOR” lettering. Every once in a while the interspersed handlers would break into applause, and the rest of the crowd would lazily follow suit. There was also a sprinkling of media and cable stations, local political correspondents who looked visibly pained by what they were doing, wondering what was worse: covering yet another canned political speech or losing a limb in a machinery mishap. Their expressions indicated a toss-up.

You can stay over any time you want. I could kiss you right now.” “Not if you don’t want to lose a limb or two.” Cole strolls into the kitchen, sending his roommate straight to hell with his glare. “Nobody’s losing any limbs. There’s plenty of food and coffee for everyone.” “But he said he was going to kiss you. Not allowed. Mine.

But as life passed by while shut up in here, I came to understand something. I realized that no matter how much we lost, or however badly we were treated, the fact is we are still human. All we can do is keep on going with our lives, even if we lose limbs, because this is not a fatal illness. In the midst of darkness and a struggle we had no hope of winning, I held on to this one thing – the fact of our humanity – and I was proud of it. That’s maybe why I tried to Listen, because I believe that human beings are living creatures with this capability. When I Listened, I sometimes heard things.