Metallic Clothing Quotes

I like to use two basic elements for my clothing: rock... you know, metal and chains and stuff - mixed with fairies and drama and Victorian clothing - fantasy.

By now you know: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, "Take me to your leaders." Even I--unused to your ways though I am--would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them. Instead I will say, "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths." These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them. Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths. These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history -- certain humans are situations.

All along the street, keys rattle in key-holes as each shop's ornate metal clothing is stripped away...It's as if, having unlocked the chastity of shutters and doors, they can't see the point in maintaining any shred of modesty.

And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman. She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witchmen, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, halt-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscoutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her. She looked at us all as if her life had depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance

A pastiche of eyes. But faces all gray. Not the color of metal, but the color of old ash in a campfire. Ash faces. Ash clothes. Ash lives.

He steps away from her, going to a little side table and removing a cloth that's lying on top. Underneath are severale shiny bits of metal. Mr. Hammar picks one up. "And now for the second part of our interview", he says, approaching the woman. Who starts to scream. "That was," Davy says, pacing around as we wait outside but it's all he can get out. "That was." He turns to me. "Holy crap, Todd." I don't say nothing, just take the apple I've been saving outta my pocket. "Apple," I whisper to Angharrad, my head close to hers.

The Citizen's attic was, objectively, breathtaking. The place was littered with trunks and old clothes and wardrobes and pieces of furniture and strange metal toys no one had played with in sixty years and half-painted canvases and on and on. There were several round windows to let in the sunlight, and I loved how it raked its way across the floor as I watched, dust dancing like sugerplum fairies in the bold yellow glow. If attics could make wishes, this one would have nothing to wish for.

Pat and Ian have since been to Kalgoorlie with metal detectors, scouring the red dirt in the hope of locating Lisa’s remains. If her clothes had something metal attached then the metal detector just might pick that up. Ian would locate something of interest with the detector then Pat would get down on her hands and knees and dig at the dirt, searching for her buried child.

Is there such a thing as public good? That's all I'm asking. I mean, is your good the same as my good? I doubt that seriously. So, if we do not agree on a common sense of good, then how can there be any larger public good? What about some homeless person who sleeps on a heat grating down the street from that sculpture? Does he feel the public good when he stares up at this excessive interplay of metallic shapes? More likely he interprets this art through the way its form and function are relevant to his life, making this piece fairly useless. Such a lost soul's aesthetic viewpoint is overriden by the terms of his subsistence. Maybe he feels frustrated and hopeless that a behemoth made almost entirely of metal contains no surfaces large enough that he could use as shelter from rain or snow. Seeing the abstract metaphors, analogies, and conclusions that they invoke, or just laughing at the artist's pretense or the corrupt visions, which are particularly rife as this century comes to an end, requires taking your bank account for granted. That's a fine luxury for those with places to sleep and clothes that are clean.

I’ll hold the door as a shield, but you’ll have to fire.” “Why can’t you just slice them to pieces like that chopstick?” “Because my telekinetic magic doesn’t work on living things. I can throw something metal fast enough to slice an opponent to pieces. I can hurl a board at him, because cut wood is dead. I can choke him with his own clothes if they are loose enough. But I can’t simply throw a body.” Oh. “So the best way to fight you is to strip naked and attack?” His eyes flashed with wicked light. “Yes. You should try it and see what happens.” Well, I did walk right into that one.

[John] watched the flames for a while. "I would have to say that I find God in serving His children. 'When I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was a stanger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you cared for me, imprisoned and you came to me.'" The words lingered in the air as the fire popped and hissed softly. Sondoz had stopped pacing and stood motionless in a far corner of the room, his face in shadows, firelight glittering on the metallic exoskeleton of his hands. "Don't hope for more than that, John," he said. "God will break your heart.

It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.

The men digging in on both sides of me cursed the stench and the mud. I began moving the heavy, sticky clay mud with my entrenching shovel to shape out the extent of the foxhole before digging deeper. Each shovelful had to be knocked off the spade, because it stuck like glue. I was thoroughly exhausted and thought my strength wouldn’t last from one sticky shovelful to the next. Kneeling on the mud, I had dug the hole no more than six or eight inches deep when the odor of rotting flesh got worse. There was nothing to do but continue to dig, so I closed up my mouth and inhaled with short shallow breaths. Another spadeful of soil out of the hole released a mass of wriggling maggots that came welling up as though those beneath were pushing them out. I cursed and told the NCO as he came by what a mess I was digging into. ‘You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart.’ In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket in the mud—and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit the breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shoved skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels. I began choking and gagging as I yelled in desperation, ‘I can’t dig in here! There’s a dead Nip here!’ The NCO came over, looked down at my problem and at me, and growled, ‘You heard him; he said put the holes five yards apart.

Being perceived as excessively domestic can get you socially ostracized. When I made hand-rolled pasta for a dinner, I learned the hard way that some guests will find this annoying, as they do not feel comfortable eating a meal that they regard as the product of too much trouble. When my son was in nursery school, I made the mistake of spending a few hours sewing for him a Halloween astronaut costume of metallic cloth, earning the disgust, suspicion, and hard stares of many a fellow parent who had bought a Batman or Esmeralda costume. When

She stood leaning against a column, a cocktail glass in her hand. She wore a suit of black velvet; the heavy cloth, which transmitted no light rays, held her anchored to reality by stopping the light that flowed too freely through the flesh of her hands, her neck, her face. A white spark of fire flashed like a cold metallic cross in the glass she held, as if it were a lens gathering the diffused radiance of her skin.

After dinner, I went upstairs and found Ren standing on the veranda again, looking at the sunset. I approached him shyly and stood behind him. “Hello, Ren.” He turned and openly studied my appearance. His gaze drifted ever so slowly down my body. The longer he looked, the wider his smile got. Eventually, his eyes worked their way back up to my bright red face. He sighed and bowed deeply. “Sundari. I was standing here thinking nothing could be more beautiful than this sunset tonight, but I was mistaken. You standing here in the setting sun with your hair and skin aglow is almost more than a man can…fully appreciate.” I tried to change the subject. “What does sundari mean?” “It means ‘most beautiful.’” I blushed again, which made him laugh. He took my hand, tucked it under his arm, and led me to the patio chairs. Just then, the sun dipped below the trees leaving its tangerine glow in the sky for just a few more moments. We sat again, but this time he sat next to me on the swinging patio seat and kept my hand in his. I ventured shyly, “I hope you don’t mind, but I explored your house today, including your room.” “I don’t mind. I’m sure you found my room the least interesting.” “Actually, I was curious about the note I found. Did you write it?” “A note? Ah, yes. I just scribbled a few notes to help me remember what Phet had said. It just says seek Durga’s prophecy, the Cave of Kanheri, Kelsey is Durga’s favored one, that sort of thing.” “Oh. I…also noticed a ribbon. Is it mine?” “Yes. If you’d like it back, you can take it.” “Why would you want it?” He shrugged, looking embarrassed. “I wanted a memento, a token from the girl who saved my life.” “A token? Like a fair maiden giving her handkerchief to a knight in shining armor?” He grinned. “Exactly.” I jested wryly, “Too bad you didn’t wait for Cathleen to get a little older. She’s going to be very pretty.” He frowned. “Cathleen from the circus?” He shook his head. “You were the chosen one, Kelsey. And if I had the option of choosing the girl to save me, I still would have picked you.” “Why?” “A number of reasons. I liked you. You are interesting. I enjoyed listening to your voice. I felt like you saw through the tiger skin to the person underneath. When you spoke, it felt like you were saying exactly the things I needed to hear. You’re smart. You like poetry, and you’re very pretty.” I laughed at his statement. Me, pretty? He can’t be serious. I was average in so many ways. I didn’t really concern myself with current makeup, hairstyles, or fashionable, but uncomfortable, clothes like other teenagers. My complexion was pale, and my eyes were so brown that they were almost black. By far, my best feature was my smile, which my parents paid dearly for and so did I-with three years of metal braces. Still, I was flattered. “Okay, Prince Charming, you can keep your memento.” I hesitated, and then said softly, “I wear those ribbons in memory of my mom. She used to brush out my hair and braid ribbons through it while we talked.” Ren smiled understandingly. “Then it means even more to me.

He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient -- nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

I am a starving man, Jovie. Don’t appear without clothes again.” “Or what?” I say, not recognizing the timbre of my voice. Lips tracing the outer shell of my ear, he tilts his pelvis toward mine, revealing the truth of his arousal. “Or I’ll make you finally confront the desire you’ve been so determined to pretend doesn’t exist between us.

Calypso took pity on him in some ways. She sent her invisible servants to leave bowls of stew and goblets of apple cider at the edge of the garden. She even sent him a few new sets of clothes—simple, undyed cotton pants and shirts that she must have made on her loom. They fit him so well, Leo wondered how she’d gotten his measurements. Maybe she just used her generic pattern for SCRAWNY MALE. Anyway, he was glad to have new threads, since his old ones were pretty smelly and burned up. Usually Leo could keep his clothes from burning when he caught fire, but it took concentration. Sometimes back at camp, if he wasn’t thinking about it, he’d be working on some metal project at the hot forge, look down, and realize his clothes had burned away, except for his magic tool belt and a smoking pair of underwear. Kind of embarrassing. Despite the gifts, Calypso obviously didn’t want to see him. One time he poked his head inside the cave and she freaked out, yelling and throwing pots at his head. Yeah, she was definitely on Team Leo. He ended up pitching a more permanent camp near the footpath, where the beach met the hills. That way he was close enough to pick up his meals, but Calypso didn’t have to see him and go into a pot-throwing rage.

There were even proper cloth serviettes in metal rings. Who does that anymore? What’s wrong with a square of kitchen roll?

The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal parts shooting off against the wall of salt-rotten cloth gave, then was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held.

Because my telekinetic magic doesn’t work on living things. I can throw something metal fast enough to slice an opponent to pieces. I can hurl a board at him, because cut wood is dead. I can choke him with his own clothes if they are loose enough. But I can’t simply throw a body.” Oh. “So the best way to fight you is to strip naked and attack?” His eyes flashed with a wicked light. “Yes. You should try it and see what happens.” Well, I did walk right into that one.

I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow roots, fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibers of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade routes, building boats, and founding navigation—ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.

And what, exactly, does this Band of Exiles plan to do? Host events? Organise party-planning committees?' Lucien's metal eye clicked faintly and narrowed. 'You can be as much of an asshole as that mate of yours, you know that?' True. I sighed again. 'I'm sorry. I just-' 'I don't have anywhere else to go.' Before I could object, he said. 'You ruined any chance I have of going back to Spring. Not to Tamlin, but to the court beyond his house. Everyone either still believes the lies you spun or they believe me complicit in your deceit. And as for here...' He shook off my grip and headed for the door. 'I can't stand to be in the same room as her for more than two minutes. I can't stand to be in this court and have your mate pay for the very clothes on my back.

Don’t know if I should be pleased or worried,” Alis said the next night as she slid the golden underdress over my upraised arms, then tugged it down. I smiled a bit, marveling at the intricate metallic lace that clung to my arms and torso like a second skin before falling loosely to the rug. “It’s just a dress,” I said, lifting my arms again as she brought over the gossamer turquoise overgown. It was sheer enough to see the gleaming gold mesh beneath, and light and airy and full of movement, as if it flowed on an invisible current. Alis just chuckled to herself and guided me over to the vanity to work on my hair. I didn’t have the courage to look at the mirror as she fussed over me. “Does this mean you’ll be wearing gowns from now on?” she asked, separating sections of my hair for whatever wonders she was doing to it. “No,” I said quickly. “I mean—I’ll be wearing my usual clothes during the day, but I thought it might be nice to … try it out, at least for tonight.” “I see. Good that you aren’t losing your common sense entirely, then.

Tears comes to my eyes when I think about some of God's people I have had the privilege to meet in the past few years. These are people with families, with dreams, people who are made in God's image as much as you and I are. And these people are suffering. Many of them are sick, some even dying, as they live out their lives in dwellings that we would not consider good enough for our household pets. I am not exaggerating. Much of their daily hardship and suffering could be relieved with access to food, clean water, clothing, adequate shelter, or basic medical attention. I believe that God wants His people, His church, to meet these needs. The Scriptures are filled with commands and references about caring for the poor and for those who cannot help themselves. The crazy part about God's heart is that He doesn't just ask us to give; He desires that we love those in need as much as we love ourselves. That is the core of the second greatest command, to 'love your neighbor as yourself' (Matthew 22:39). He is asking that you love as you would want to be loved if it were your child who was blind from drinking contaminated water; to love the way you would want to be loved if you were the homeless woman sitting outside the cafe; to love as though it were your family living in the shack slapped together from cardboard and scrap metal...

Last chance, Robbie.” “Fuck off, Gordo.” “All right,” he said. “If that’s how it’s going to be.” I thought he was going to leave. I should have known better. One moment I was in my blanket cocoon, and the next the cot was tipping over, sending me tumbling to the floor. “Hey!” “Shut up. I don’t want to hear it. Get dressed.” “No.” He bent over me, eyes narrowed. “Tell me no one more time, I dare you.” I steeled my nerves, looked up at him, and said, “No.” Five minutes later I was glaring daggers at his back as I followed him up the stairs. The clothes he’d given me were a little tight, but they smelled like oil and metal and wolves. The shirt had a patch on it, my name stitched neatly into it. “The sun isn’t even up,” I grumbled. “It’s good to know your powers of observation are still intact.

Perhaps part of the uncanny allure of fashionable clothing resides in the paradoxical impact of its expressiveness: the act of covering up with mere dead matter--cloth, fur, leather, or even metal when it is ingeniously shaped to the purpose--appears to reveal something magical about the life inside.

To promote trade along these routes, Mongol authorities distributed an early type of combined passport and credit card. The Mongol paiza was a tablet of gold, silver, or wood larger than a man’s hand, and it would be worn on a chain around the neck or attached to the clothing. Depending on which metal was used and the symbols such as tigers or gyrfalcons, illiterate people could ascertain the importance of the traveler and thereby render the appropriate level of service. The paiza allowed the holder to travel throughout the empire and be assured of protection, accommodations, transportation, and exemption from local taxes or duties.

My jaw throbs under another punch in response to my silence. I'm sure this one has dislodged my tooth. The harsh metal taste of my blood fills my mouth as I try to catch my breath and spit a ball of saliva in his face.” “ The blood gushes from my swollen eyebrow making it nearly impossible to see. I recall how the rebels ambushed us in the village and all hell broke loose. The ground team scattered all over the place. I lost sight of Eric when they pulled the black sack-cloth over my face. I did recognize the gunshot. One single bullet. Is it possible that Eric got shot?” Excerpt by Urcelia Teixeira - ALEX HUNT and the Chase for Rhapta

His fingers went to the buttons of his jacket, and her mouth dried. His buttons were simple cloth and metal affairs, scarcely worth a second thought. And yet as he undid them, she had second thoughts and third thoughts, none of them proper. His gloved fingers were long and graceful, and every button he undid revealed another inch of creamy linen, one that hinted at broad shoulders and strong muscles. He’d not shown her the slightest bit of skin, but the act of unbuttoning his coat sparked indecent thoughts—memories of his arm coming around her, his mouth on hers… He stopped undoing buttons, and she realized he’d only wanted to reach the inside pocket. She sat back in disappointment.

This is the place to which he is coming. This is the table at which he will sit. Here, incredible as it seems, will be his actual body. This table, these chairs, this metal vase with its three red flowers are about to undergo an extraordinary transformation. Already the room, with its swing-doors, its tables heaped with fruit, with cold joints, wears the wavering, unreal appearance of a place where one waits expecting something to happen. Things quiver as if not yet in being. The blankness of the white table-cloth glares. The hostility, the indifference of other people dining here is oppressive. We look at each other; see that we do not know each other, stare, and go off. Such looks are lashes. I feel the whole cruelty and indifference of the world in them. If he should not come I could not bear it. I should go. Yet somebody must be seeing him now. He must be in some cab; he must be passing some shop. And every moment he seems to pump into this room this prickly light, this intensity of being, so that things have lost their normal uses--this knife-blade is only a flash of light, not a thing to cut with. The normal is abolished.

The singing of birds became an orchestra- a symphony of gossip and mirth. I'd never heard so many layers of music, never heard the variations and themes that wove between their arpeggios. And beyond the birdsong, there was an ethereal melody- a woman, melancholy and weary... the willow. Gasping, I opened my eyes. The world had become richer, clearer. The brook was a near-invisible rainbow of water that flowed over stones as invitingly smooth as silk. The trees were clothed in a faint shimmer that radiated from their centres and danced along the edges of their leaves. There was no tangy metallic stench- no, the smell of magic had become like jasmine, like lilac, like roses. I would never be able to paint it, the richness, the feel- Maybe fractions of it, but not the whole thing. Magic- everything was magic, and it broke my heart.

Byzantium The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong; A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins. Before me floats an image, man or shade, Shade more than man, more image than a shade; For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth May unwind the winding path; A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death. Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork, Planted on the starlit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow, Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire or blood. At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave, Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood, Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood, The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

It was a dead hole, smelling of synthetic leather and disinfectant, both of which odors seemed to emanate from the torn scratched material of the seats that lined the three walls. It smelled of the tobacco ashes which had flooded the two standing metal ashtrays. On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef. There was the smell of peanut shells and of the waxy candy wrappers that littered the floor, the smell of old newspapers, dry, inky, smothering and faintly like a urinal, the smell of sweat from armpits and groins and backs and faces, pouring out and drying up in the lifeless air, the smell of clothes—cleaning fluids imbedded in fabric and blooming horribly in the warm sweetish air, picking at the nostrils like thorns—all the exudations of the human flesh, a bouquet of animal being, flowing out, drying up, but leaving a peculiar and ineradicable odor of despair in the room as though chemistry was transformed into spirit, an ascension of a kind, …Light issuing from spotlights in the ceiling was sour and blinding like a sick breath. There was in that room an underlying confusion in the function of the senses. Smell became color, color became smell. Mute started at mute so intently they might have been listening with their eyes, and hearing grew preternaturally acute, yet waited only for the familiar syllables of surnames. Taste died, mouth opened in the negative drowsiness of waiting.

I can see it in your eyes. If it weren’t for this I would have stopped trying long ago, to communicate with you in this halfway language which is so difficult for both of us, which exhausts the throat and fills the mouth with sand; if it weren’t for this I would have gone away, gone back. It’s this knowledge of death, which we share, where we overlap. Death is our common ground. Together, on it, we can walk forward. By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, take me to your leaders. Even I – unused to your ways though I am – would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them. Instead I will say, take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths. These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

With my polished Verses as a trellis of pure metal Studded cunningly with rhymes of crystal, I shall make for your head an immense Crown, And from my Jealousy, O mortal Madonna, I shall know how to cut a cloak in a fashion, Barbaric, heavy, and stiff, lined with suspicion, Which, like a sentry-box, will enclose your charms; Embroidered not with Pearls, but with all of my Tears! Your Gown will be my Desire, quivering, Undulant, my Desire which rises and which falls, Balances on the crests, reposes in the troughs, And clothes with a kiss your white and rose body. Of my Self-respect I shall make you Slippers Of satin which, humbled by your divine feet, Will imprison them in a gentle embrace, And assume their form like a faithful mold; If I can’t, in spite of all my painstaking art, Carve a Moon of silver for your Pedestal, I shall put the Serpent which is eating my heart Under your heels, so that you may trample and mock, Triumphant queen, fecund in redemptions, That monster all swollen with hatred and spittle. from “To a Madonna

13:11  You must understand the urgency and context of time; it is most certainly now the hour to wake up at once out of the hypnotic state of slumber and unbelief. Salvation has come. 13:12  It was 1night for long enough; the day has arrived. Cease immediately with any action associated with the darkness of ignorance. Clothe yourself in the radiance of light as a soldier would wear his full weaponry. (The night is far spent, 1prokopto, as a smith forges a piece of metal until he has hammered it into its maximum length.)

It was spring, and while my new house was cramped and humble, it was on the sand and the ocean still came to the front door. At dawn I'd roll out of bed, not even bothering to change clothes, and walk. Squalls came and went. Storm surges carried huge swells into the cove, and as rain inebriated the coast, the thick stub of a rainbow pushed out of the sea like a green thumb on the horizon. After, the dark blue sheet of water turned metallic, and I wondered: What in nature is not a mirror, does not give back a true image of mind?

Language as communication has three aspects or elements. There first what Karl Marx once called the language of real life, the element basic to the whole notion of language, its origins and development: that is, the relations people enter into with one another in the labour process, the links they necessarily establish among themselves in the act of a people, a community of human beings, producing wealth or means of life like food, clothing, houses. A human community really starts its historical being as a community of co-operation in production through the division of labour; the simplest is between man, woman and child within a household; the more complex divisions are between branches of production such as those who are sole hunters, sole gatherers of fruits or sole workers in metal. Then there are the most complex divisions such as those in modern factories where a single product, say a shirt or a shoe, is the result of many hands and minds. Production is co-operation, is communication, is language, is expression of a relation between human beings and it is specifically human.

But her no leather - no fur policy drew fire. Critics charged that faux hides, many of which are petroleum based, were more damaging to the earth than the real stuff. Bull, said McCartney. "Livestock production is one of the major causes of ... global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity", she shot back, with more than fifty million animals farme and slaughtered each year just to make handbags and shoes. Conventional leather tanning employs heavy metals such as chromium, which results in waste that is toxic to humans.

They [mountains] are portions of the heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot melted metals and stones. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried sunlight—that is what it is. Now think: out of that caldron, where all the bubbles would be as big as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain bubbles have bubbled out and escaped—up and away, and there they stand in the cool, cold sky—mountains. Think of the change, and you will no more wonder that there should be something awful about the very look of a mountain: from the darkness—for where the light has nothing to shine upon, it is much the same as darkness—from the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling unrest—up, with a sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the cold, and the starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine above the blue-green mail of the glaciers; and the great sun, their grandfather, up there in the sky; and their little old cold aunt, the moon, that comes wandering about the house at night; and everlasting stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and caverns into a roaring organ for the young archangels that are studying how to let out the pent-up praises of their hearts, and the molten music of the streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of the glaciers fresh-born. Think too of the change in their own substance—no longer molten and soft, heaving and glowing, but hard and shining and cold. Think of the creatures scampering over and burrowing in it, and the birds building their nests upon it, and the trees growing out of its sides, like hair to clothe it, and the lovely grass in the valleys, and the gracious flowers even at the very edge of its armour of ice, like the rich embroidery of the garment below, and the rivers galloping down the valleys in a tumult of white and green! And along with all these, think of the terrible precipices down which the traveller may fall and be lost, and the frightful gulfs of blue air cracked in the glaciers, and the dark profound lakes, covered like little arctic oceans with floating lumps of ice. All this outside the mountain! But the inside, who shall tell what lies there? Caverns of awfullest solitude, their walls miles thick, sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin or mercury, studded perhaps with precious stones—perhaps a brook, with eyeless fish in it, running, running ceaseless, cold and babbling, through banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes, or over a gravel of which some of the stones are rubies and emeralds, perhaps diamonds and sapphires—who can tell?—and whoever can't tell is free to think—all waiting to flash, waiting for millions of ages—ever since the earth flew off from the sun, a great blot of fire, and began to cool. Then there are caverns full of water, numbing cold, fiercely hot—hotter than any boiling water. From some of these the water cannot get out, and from others it runs in channels as the blood in the body: little veins bring it down from the ice above into the great caverns of the mountain's heart, whence the arteries let it out again, gushing in pipes and clefts and ducts of all shapes and kinds, through and through its bulk, until it springs newborn to the light, and rushes down the mountain side in torrents, and down the valleys in rivers—down, down, rejoicing, to the mighty lungs of the world, that is the sea, where it is tossed in storms and cyclones, heaved up in billows, twisted in waterspouts, dashed to mist upon rocks, beaten by millions of tails, and breathed by millions of gills, whence at last, melted into vapour by the sun, it is lifted up pure into the air, and borne by the servant winds back to the mountain tops and the snow, the solid ice, and the molten stream.

Illusions, illusions, he interrupted. You are a tomb, not a church. Faith is dead. No one believes anymore, no one bows his head. You are so cold. There is no life in you. You are all marble and dead metal. You have transformed everything into dead matter. You have denied life. You have preached mortification and asceticism. You have terrified the world with the gaunt faces of martyrs, instead of delighting it with a smile and cheerful faith. How chilling are your crucifixes, chalices, and reliquaries! The roses of your altar drip blood from their leaves. Your altar cloths have the pallor of a corpse’s vesture. Your chapels resemble jail cells. And what darkness in your depths!

The sharpie uniform is perhaps the most unlikely fashion statement you will ever see, a Frankenstein’s monster of baby-doll plucked eyebrows, skinhead-meets-mullet hair, 1970s fat ties and just a hint of bovver boy. Clothes worn too tight and too small. Kerry had prepared a shopping list: • bluebird earrings • three-inch Mary Jane corkie platform shoes • treads (shoes made using recycled tyres for the sole with suede thonging for the upper) • Lee canvas jeans • beachcombers • short white bobby socks • ribbed tights • a short, flared, preferably panelled skirt • satin baggies • a striped Golden Breed t-shirt or a KrestKnit polo shirt • a tight coral necklace from the surf shop • a Conti brand striped cardigan • blue metallic eye shadow from a small pot or a crayon

shivering cold, sweat soaked her. Mud rose around her ankles. The corpse of a child lay before her, its face gone, trampled into the mud. A broken school bus smoldered nearby, human skeletons within it. Addy knelt, lifted a stuffed animal from the mud, and yowled as a marauder jabbed her back with claws. She marched on, moving toward the massive ships. "Undress, humans!" a marauder cackled, dangling from a web between metal poles. A red triangle was painted onto his forehead, denoting his rank of command. "We burn your flea-infested clothes." "Clothes off!" shouted another marauder, clattering toward them on six legs. "You stink of parasites." The humans stood, staring around, hesitant. Claws reached out, grabbing clothes, ripping them off. People shouted. One man fought

Compared to cotton, synthetic fibers require a lot less water to produce, but that’s not necessarily a good enough argument for using them, since they have other significant impacts: they are still made of oil, and their production can require a lot of energy. MIT calculated that the global impact of producing polyester alone was somewhere between 706 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or about what 185 coal-fired power plants emit in a year.2 Samit Chevli, the principal investigator for biomaterials at DuPont, the giant chemical company, has said that it will be hundreds of years before regular polyester degrades.3 Plus, while the chemicals used in production typically aren’t released to the environment, if factories don’t have treatment systems in the last phase of production, they can release antimony, an element that can be harmful to human health, as well as other toxins and heavy metals. Despite having just written a good amount about the impacts associated with the production of synthetic fibers, that’s actually not why I wanted to call attention to your yoga pants and dry-fit sweat-wicking T-shirts, which we wear out to dinner. It is hard for me to leave my fashion critique at the door, but what I actually want to say about synthetic fibers is that they are everywhere—not just in all of our clothes, but literally everywhere: rivers, lakes, oceans, agricultural fields, mountaintops, glaciers. Everywhere. Synthetic fibers, actually, may be one of the most abundant, widespread, and stubborn forms of pollution that we have inadvertently created.

But when, by the improvement and cultivation of land, the labour of one family can provide food for two, the labour of half the society becomes sufficient to provide food for the whole. The other half, therefore, or at least the greater part of them, can be employed in providing other things, or in satisfying the other wants and fancies of mankind. Clothing and lodging, household furniture, and what is called equipage, are the principal objects of the greater part of those wants and fancies. The rich man consumes no more food than his poor neighbour. In quality it may be very different, and to select and prepare it may require more labour and art; but in quantity it is very nearly the same. But compare the spacious palace and great wardrobe of the one, with the hovel and the few rags of the other, and you will be sensible that the difference between their clothing, lodging, and household furniture, is almost as great in quantity as it is in quality. The desire of food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire of the conveniencies and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary. Those, therefore, who have the command of more food than they themselves can consume, are always willing to exchange the surplus, or, what is the same thing, the price of it, for gratifications of this other kind. What is over and above satisfying the limited desire, is given for the amusement of those desires which cannot be satisfied, but seem to be altogether endless. The poor, in order to obtain food, exert themselves to gratify those fancies of the rich; and to obtain it more certainly, they vie with one another in the cheapness and perfection of their work. The number of workmen increases with the increasing quantity of food, or with the growing improvement and cultivation of the lands; and as the nature of their business admits of the utmost subdivisions of labour, the quantity of materials which they can work up, increases in a much greater proportion than their numbers. Hence arises a demand for every sort of material which human invention can employ, either usefully or ornamentally, in building, dress, equipage, or household furniture; for the fossils and minerals contained in the bowels of the earth, the precious metals, and the precious stones.

A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. They have not adapted themselves to the new reality. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. It's made a mess of everything. But words, as you yourself understand, are capable of change. The problem is how to demonstrate this. That is why I now work with the simplest means possible - so simple that even a child can grasp what I am saying. Consider a word that refers to a thing - "umbrella", for example. When I say the word "umbrella", you see the object in your mind. You see a kind of stick, with collapsible metal spokes on top that form an armature for a waterproof material which, when opened, will protect you from the rain. This last detail is important. Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function - in other words, expresses the will of man. When you stop to think of it, every object is similar to the umbrella, in that it serves a function. A pencil is for writing, a shoe is for wearing, a car is for driving. Now, my question is this. What happens when a thing no longer performs its function ? Is it still the thing or has it become something else ? When you rip the cloth off the umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella ? You open the spokes, put them over your head, walk out into the rain, and you get drenched. Is it possible to go one calling this object an umbrella ? In general, people do. At the very limit, they will say the umbrella is broken. To me this is a serious error, the source of all our troubles. Because it can no longer perform its function, the umbrella has ceased to be an umbrella. It might resemble an umbrella, it might once have been an umbrella, but now it has changed into something else. The word, however, has remained the same. Therefore, it can no longer express the thing. It is imprecise; it is false; it hides the thing it is supposed to reveal. And if we cannot even name a common, everyday object that we hold in our hands, how can we expect to speak of the things that truly concern us? Unless we can begin to embody the position of change in the words we use, we will continue to be lost.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing. In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. The figure is advisedly chosen, for if the canneries dipped their mouths into the bay the canned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least, even more horrifying. Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again-quiet and magical. Its normal life returns. The bums who retired in disgust under the black cypress-tree come out to sit on the rusty pipes in the vacant lot. The girls from Dora's emerge for a bit of sun if there is any. Doc strolls from the Western Biological Laboratory and crosses the street to Lee Chong's grocery for two quarts of beer. Henri the painter noses like an Airedale through the junk in the grass-grown lot for some pan or piece of wood or metal he needs for the boat he is building. Then the darkness edges in and the street light comes on in front of Dora's-- the lamp which makes perpetual moonlight in Cannery Row. Callers arrive at Western Biological to see Doc, and he crosses the street to Lee Chong's for five quarts of beer. How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise-- the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream-- be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will on to a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-- to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

Metal bit into her throat. Icy, deathly cold. “Do not,” Nesta said quietly, panting, “move.” Bryce glared up at the female but didn’t shove the blade from her throat. Her very bones roared at her not to touch the sword more than necessary. “Neat trick with the shadows.” Nesta just stared imperiously at her. “Get up.” “Put down your sword and I will.” Their gazes clashed, but the sword moved a fraction. Bryce got to her feet, wiping dust and debris from her clothes. “What now?” Her knees buckled with exhaustion. Her magic was spent, her veins utterly devoid of starlight. Nesta glanced to the cave-in. Whatever shadow magic she possessed seemed to have little ability to move it. The warrior nodded to the tunnel ahead. “I suppose you’re getting your way.” “I didn’t mean to cause that—” “It doesn’t matter. There’s only one way out now. If there’s a way out at all.

Oh no. Not this again. It’s the clothing dream. I’ve been having it for fifty years. Aisle after aisle, closetful after closetful, metal rack after metal rack of clothing, stretching into the distance under the glare of the fluorescent tubing – as gaudy and ornate and confusing, and finally as glum and oppressive, as the dreams of a long-time opium smoker. Why am I compelled to riffle through these outfits, tangling up the hangers, tripping on the ribbons, snagging myself on a hook or button while feathers and sequins and fake pearls drop to the floor like ants from a burning tree? What is the occasion? Who do I need to impress? ___________ There’s a smell of stale underarms. Everything’s been worn before. Nothing fits. Too small, too big, too magenta. These flounces, hoops, ruffles, wired collars, cut-velvet capes – none of these disguises is mine. How old am I in this dream? Do I have tits? Whose life am I living? Whose life am I failing to live?

BRUNO WAS WAKING up. The room seemed to be dark. He held his breath, testing the quality of the darkness, wondering if it was night or day, morning or afternoon. If it was night that was bad and might be terrible. Afternoon could be terrible too if he woke up too early. The drama of sleeping and waking had become preoccupying and fearful now that consciousness itself could be so heavy a burden. One had to be cunning. He never let himself doze in the mornings for fear of not being able to fall asleep after lunch. The television had been banished with its false sadnesses and its images of war. Perhaps he had nodded off over his book. He had had that dream again, about Janie and Maureen and the hatpin. He felt about him and began to push himself up a little on his pillows, his stockinged feet scrabbling inside the metal cage which lifted the weight of the blankets off them. Tight bed clothes are a major cause of bad feet. Not that Bruno’s feet minded much at this stage.

Hearth to hearth, the Flame of War went. Over snow-blasted mountains and amongst the trees of tangled forests, hiding from the enemies that prowled the skies. Through long, bitterly cold nights where the wind howled as it tried to wipe out any trace of that flame. But the wind did not succeed, not against the flame of the queen. So hearth to hearth, it went. To remote villages where people screamed and scattered as a young-faced woman descended from the skies on a broom, waving her torch high. Not to signal them, but the few women who did not run. Who walked toward the flame, the rider, as she called out, “Your queen summons you to war. Will you fly?” Trunks hidden in attics were thrown open. Folded swaths of red cloth pulled from within. Brooms left in closets, beside doorways, tucked under beds, were brought out, bound in gold or silver or twine. And swords—ancient and beautiful—were drawn from beneath floorboards, or hauled down from haylofts, their metal shining as bright and fresh as the day they had been forged in a city now lying in ruin. Witches, the townsfolk whispered, husbands wide-eyed and disbelieving as the women took to the skies, red cloaks billowing. Witches amongst us all this time. Village to village, where hearths that had never once gone fully dark blazed in answer. Always one rider going out, to find the next hearth, the next bastion of their people. Witches, here amongst us. Witches, now going to war. A rising tide of witches, who took to the skies in their red cloaks, swords strapped to their backs, brooms shedding years of dust with each mile northward. Witches who bade their families farewell, offering no explanation before they kissed their sleeping babes and vanished into the starry night. Mile after mile, across the darkening world, the call went out, ceaseless and unending as the eternal flame that passed from hearth to hearth. “Fly, fly, fly!” they shouted. “To the queen! To war!” Far and wide, through snow and storm and peril, the Crochans flew.

But on the Y chromosome, the studies found a pattern that was strikingly different. In East Asians, Europeans, Near Easterners, and North Africans, the authors found many Star Clusters with common male ancestors living roughly around five thousand years ago.18 The time around five thousand years ago coincides with the period in Eurasia that the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt called the “Secondary Products Revolution,” in which people began to find many uses for domesticated animals beyond meat production, including employing them to pull carts and plows and to produce dairy products and clothing such as wool.19 This was also around the time of the onset of the Bronze Age, a period of greatly increased human mobility and wealth accumulation, facilitated by the domestication of the horse, the invention of the wheel and wheeled vehicles, and the accumulation of rare metals like copper and tin, which are the ingredients of bronze and had to be imported from hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away.

Ode to a Dressmaker’s Dummy" Papier-mache body; blue-and-black cotton jersey cover. Metal stand. Instructions included. --Sears, Roebuck Catalogue O my coy darling, still You wear for me the scent Of those long afternoons we spent, The two of us together, Safe in the attic from the jealous eyes Of household spies And the remote buffooneries of the weather; So high, Our sole remaining neighbor was the sky, Which, often enough, at dusk, Leaning its cloudy shoulders on the sill, Used to regard us with a bored and cynical eye. How like the terrified, Shy figure of a bride You stood there then, without your clothes, Drawn up into So classic and so strict a pose Almost, it seemed, our little attic grew Dark with the first charmed night of the honeymoon. Or was it only some obscure Shape of my mother’s youth I saw in you, There where the rude shadows of the afternoon Crept up your ankles and you stood Hiding your sex as best you could?-- Prim ghost the evening light shone through.

They’re leaving at first light to go back to Virki.” Fiske spoke behind me. I walked toward the tree and pried the blade free, pressing against its edge with my thumb. “And then what?” “And then they return with the Aska. We’ll meet them in Aurvanger in two days.” I pressed my thumb harder to the metal. “And then we all die?” “Maybe.” He kept his distance from me. “Will you go with them? Back to Virki?” I looked at the house, where my father was still talking with the Riki. How did we get here? How could we ever go back? I wanted to push my face into the snow. I wanted to scream. He stepped toward me, taking my cut hand into his. He turned it over before wrapping a strip of cloth around it, knotting it on my palm. I breathed through the feeling flowing through me, like candle wax melting. “Don’t.” The word hit me in the chest as he said it. I bit down on my lip until my eyes watered. To keep myself from speaking. I was afraid of what I would say if I did. “Stay with me and come with us to the valley. We’ll meet the Aska there.

Money was created many times in many places. Its development required no technological breakthroughs – it was a purely mental revolution. It involved the creation of a new inter-subjective reality that exists solely in people’s shared imagination. Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services. Money enables people to compare quickly and easily the value of different commodities (such as apples, shoes and divorces), to easily exchange one thing for another, and to store wealth conveniently. There have been many types of money. The most familiar is the coin, which is a standardised piece of imprinted metal. Yet money existed long before the invention of coinage, and cultures have prospered using other things as currency, such as shells, cattle, skins, salt, grain, beads, cloth and promissory notes. Cowry shells were used as money for about 4,000 years all over Africa, South Asia, East Asia and Oceania. Taxes could still be paid in cowry shells in British Uganda in the early twentieth century.

Grace adored Amelia. The older woman was a close friend of her grandmother and mother, and a constant in Grace's life. She visited Amelia often. The inn was her second home. As a child she'd always raced up the stairs and raided Amelia's bedroom closet, and Amelia had encouraged her unconventional behavior. Grace had loved dressing up in vintage clothing. Attempting to walk up in a pair of high button shoes. Amelia was the first to recognize Grace's love of costume. Her enjoyment of tea parties. She'd supported Grace's dream of opening her business, Charade, when Grace sought a career. From birthdays to holidays, the costume shop was popular and successful. Grace couldn't have been happier. She admired Amelia now. Her long, braided hair was the same soft gray as her eyes. Years accumulated, but never seemed to touch her. She appeared youthful, ageless, in a sage-green tunic, belted over a paisley gauze skirt in shades of cranberry, green, and gold. Elaborate gold hoops hung at her ears, ones designed with silver beads and tiny gold bells. The thin metal chains on her three-tiered necklace sparkled with lavender rhinestones and reflective mirror discs. Bangles of charms looped her wrist. A thick, hammered-silver bracelet curved near her right elbow. A triple gold ring with three pearls arched from her index finger to her fourth. She sparkled.

Back to Copper Cliff: on the eastern limit of the town, really not a defined edge, the town ended, and a few feet later the smelter—the the heart of Inco’s operations in the Sudbury area—rose up. Huge buildings humming and whining, acre after acre of industrial devastation, hot metal and slag cars to-ing and fro-ing. Row upon row of blast furnaces, molten metal being carried in giant ladles the size of small submarines by overhead moving cranes, with bits of white-hot crap falling out of them, and the mind-numbing hiss of mighty industrial production, punctuated by warning horns, and all viewed through a smog of sulphur dioxide so potent that it would sting your eyes, nose and throat to the point of tears. Workers wore “gas masks” that were little more than cloth nose and mouth covers, dipped in some solution intended to neutralize the paralyzing acidity of sulphur dioxide. They did not work. My dad worked here, and when he later became a shift boss in the Orford building and I was a summer student at Inco, he showed me through this inferno (not Dante’s; that’s only in fiction). This was the real deal and the guys who worked there pretty much all succumbed to some form of lung disease—emphysema, cancer, COPD, you name it—anything you can get from inhaling eight hours a day, five days a week, concentrated S02 and S03, not to mention the particulate crap that filled the air.

After hunting for an hour, they found a stray cat small enough to ride in the palm of Noboru’s hand, a mottled, mewing kitten with lackluster eyes. By then they were sweating heavily, so they undressed and took turns splashing in a sink in one corner of the shed. While they bathed, the kitten was passed around. Noboru felt the kitten’s hot heart pumping against his wet naked chest. It was like having stolen into the shed with some of the dark, joy-flushed essence of bright summer sunlight. “How are we going to do it?” “There’s a log over there. We can smack it against that—it’ll be easy. Go ahead, number three.” At last the test of Noboru’s hard, cold heart! Just a minute before, he had taken a cold bath, but he was sweating heavily again. He felt it blow up through his breast like the morning sea breeze: intent to kill. His chest felt like a clothes rack made of hollow metal poles and hung with white shirts drying in the sun. Soon the shirts would be flapping in the wind and then he would be killing, breaking the endless chain of society’s loathsome taboos. Noboru seized the kitten by the neck and stood up. It dangled dumbly from his fingers. He checked himself for pity; like a lighted window seen from an express train, it flickered for an instant in the distance and disappeared. He was relieved. The chief always insisted it would take acts such as this to fill the world’s great hollows. Though nothing else could do it, he said, murder would fill those gaping caves in much the same way that a crack along its face will fill a mirror. Then they would achieve real power over existence.

A long time ago, I collected the flower petals stained with my first blood; I thought there was something significant about that, there was importance in all the little moments of experience, because when you live forever, the first times matter. The first time you bleed, first time you cry — I don’t remember that — first time you see your wings, because new things defile you, purity chips away. your purity. nestled flowers in your belly, waiting to be picked. do you want innocence back? small and young smiles that make your eyes squint and cheeks flare the feeling of your face dripping down onto the grass, the painted walls you tore down, the roads you chipped away, they’ll eat away at you, the lingering feelings of a warm hand on your waist, the taps of your feet as you dance, the beats of your timbrel.’ ‘and now you are like Gods, sparkling brilliant with jewelry that worships you, and you’re splitting in order to create.’ ‘The tosses of your wet hair, the rushes of chariots speeding past, the holy, holy, holy lord god of hosts, the sweetness of a strawberry, knocks against the window by your head, the little tunes of your pipes, the cuts sliced into your fingers by uptight cacti fruits, the brisk scent of a sea crashing into the rocks, the sweat of wrestling, onions, cumin, parsley in a metal jug, mud clinging to your skin, a friendly mouth on your cheeks and forehead, chimes, chirps of chatter in the bazaar, amen, amen, amen, the plump fish rushing to take the bread you toss, scraping of a carpenter, the hiss of chalk, the wisps of clouds cradling you as you nap, the splashes of water in a hot pool, the picnic in a meadow, the pounding of feet that are chasing you, the velvet of petals rustling you awake, a giant water lily beneath you, the innocent kiss, the sprawl of the universe reflected in your eyes for the first time, the bloody wings that shred out of your back, the apples in orchards, a basket of stained flowers, excited chants of a colosseum audience, the heat of spinning and bouncing to drums and claps, the love braided into your hair, the trickles of a piano, smell of myrrh, the scratches of a spoon in a cup, the coarseness of a carpet, the stringed instruments and trumpets, the serene smile of not knowing, the sleeping angel, the delight of a creator, the amusement of gossip and rumors, the rumbling laughter between shy singing, the tangling of legs, squash, celery, carrot, and chayote, the swirled face paint, the warmth of honey in your tea, the timid face in the mirror, mahogany beams, the embrace of a bed of flowers, the taste of a grape as its fed to you, the lip smacks of an angel as you feed him a raspberry, the first dizziness of alcohol, the cool water and scent of natron and the scratch of the rock you beat your dirty clothes against, the strain of your arms, the columns of an entrance, the high ceilings of a dark cathedral, the boiling surface of bubbling stew, the burn of stained-glass, the little joyous jump you do seeing bread rise, the silky taste of olive oil, the lap of an angel humming as he embroiders a little fox into his tunic, the softness of browned feathers lulling you to sleep, the weight of a dozen blankets and pillows on your small bed, the proud smile on the other side of a window in a newly-finished building, the myrtle trees only you two know about, the palm of god as he fashions you from threads of copper, his praises, his love, his kiss to your hair, your father.

It was a feeling that I could be a little different from everyone else of my age, and that, if pushed, I could battle against the forces of nature and prevail. Adventure felt the most natural thing in the world, and it was where I came alive. It is what made me feel, for the first time, really myself. As I got older and the rest of my world got more complicated and unnatural, I sought more and more the identity and wholeness that adventure gave me. In short, when I was wet, muddy, and cold, I felt like a million dollars, and when I was with the lads, with everyone desperately trying to be “cool,” I felt more awkward and unsure of myself. I could do mud, but trying to be cool was never a success. So I learned to love the former and shy away from the latter. (Although I gave “cool” a brief, good go as a young teenager, buying winklepicker boots and listening to heavy metal records all through one long winter, both of which were wholly unsatisfying, and subsequently dropped as “boring.”) Instead, I would often dress up in my “worst” (aka my best) and dirtiest clothes, stand under the hosepipe in the garden, get soaking wet--in December--and then go off for a run on my own in the hills. The locals thought me a bit bonkers, but my dog loved it, and I loved it. It felt wild, and it was a feeling that captured me more and more. Once, I returned from one such run caked in mud and ran past a girl I quite fancied. I wondered if she might like the muddy look. It was at least original, I thought. Instead, she crossed the road very quickly, looking at me as if I were just weird. It took me a while to begin to learn that girls don’t always like people who are totally scruffy and covered in mud. And what I considered natural, raw, and wild didn’t necessarily equal sexy. Lesson still in progress.

As Rohan pulled the man upward, he glanced toward the threshold of a door that led into the club, where a club employee waited. “Dawson, escort Lord Latimer to his carriage out front. I’ll take Lord Selway.” “No need,” said the aristocrat who had just struggled to his feet, sounding winded. “I can walk to my own bloody carriage.” Tugging his clothes back into place over his bulky form, he threw the dark-haired man an anxious glance. “Rohan, I will have your word on something.” “Yes, my lord?” “If word of this gets out—if Lady Selway should discover that I was fighting over the favors of a fallen woman—my life won’t be worth a farthing.” Rohan replied with reassuring calm. “She’ll never know, my lord.” “She knows everything,” Selway said. “She’s in league with the devil. If you are ever questioned about this minor altercation…” “It was caused by a particularly vicious game of whist,” came the bland reply. “Yes. Yes. Good man.” Selway patted the younger man on the shoulder. “And to put a seal on your silence—” He reached a beefy hand inside his waistcoat and extracted a small bag. “No, my lord.” Rohan stepped back with a firm shake of his head, his shiny black hair flying with the movement and settling back into place. “There’s no price for my silence.” “Take it,” the aristocrat insisted. “I can’t, my lord.” “It’s yours.” The bag of coins was tossed to the ground, landing at Rohan’s feet with a metallic thud. “There. Whether you choose to leave it lying on the street or not is entirely your choice.” As the gentleman left, Rohan stared at the bag as if it were a dead rodent. “I don’t want it,” he muttered to no one in particular. “I’ll take it,” the prostitute said, sauntering over to him. She scooped up the bag and tested its heft in her palm. A taunting grin split her face. “Gor’, I’ve never seen a Gypsy what’s afraid o’ blunt.” “I’m not afraid of it,” Rohan said sourly. “I just don’t need it.

Alis coughed from the shadows of the house, and I remembered to start walking, to look toward the dais- At Tamlin. The breath knocked from me, and it was an effort to keep going down the stairs, to keep going my knees from buckling. He was resplendent in a tunic of green and gold, a crown of burnished laurel leaves gleaming on his head. He'd loosened the grip on his glamour, letting that immortal light and beauty shine through- for me. My vision narrowed on him, on my High Lord, his wide eyes glistening as I stepped onto the soft grass, white rose petals scattered down it- And Red ones. Like drops of blood amongst the white, red petals had been sprayed across the path ahead. I forced my gaze up, to Tamlin, his shoulders back, head high. So unaware of the true extent of how broken and dark I was inside. How unfit I was to be clothed in white when my hands were so filthy. Everyone else was thinking it. They had to be. Every step was too fast, propelling me toward the dais and Tamlin. And toward Ianthe, clothed in dark blue robes tonight, beaming beneath the hood and silver crown. As if I were good- as if I hadn't murdered two of their kind. I was a murderer and a liar. A cluster of red petals loomed ahead- just like the Fae youth's blood had pooled at my feet. Ten steps from the dais, at the edge of that splatter of red, I slowed. Then stopped. Everyone was watching, exactly as they had when I'd nearly died, spectators to my torment. Tamlin extended a broad hand, brows narrowing slightly. My heart beat so fast, too fast. I was going to vomit. Right over those rose petals, right over the grass and ribbons trailing into the ailse from the chairs flanking it. And between my skin and bones, something thrummed and pounded, rising and pushing, lashing through my blood- So many eyes, too many eyes, pressed on me, witness to every crime I'd committed, every humiliation- I don't know why I'd even bothered to wear gloves, why I'd let Ianthe convince me. The fading sun was too hot, the garden too hedged in. As inescapable as the vow I was about to make, binding me to him forever, shackling him to my broken and weary soul. The thing inside me was roiling now, my body shaking with the building force of it as it hunted for a way out- Forever- I would never get better, never get free of myself, of the dungeon where I'd spent three months- 'Feyre,' Tamlin said, his hand steady, as he continued to reach for mine. The sun sank past the lip of the western garden wall; shadows pooled, chilling the air. If I turned away, they'd start talking, but I couldn't make the last few steps, couldn't, couldn't, couldn't- I was going to fall apart, right there, right then- and they'd see precisely how ruined I was. Help me, help me, help me, I begged someone, anyone. Begged Lucien, standing in the front row, his metal eye fixed on me. Begged Ianthe, face serene and patient and lovely within that hood. Save me- please, save me. Get me out. End this. Tamlin took a step toward me- concern shading those eyes. I retreated a step. No. Tamlin's mouth tightened. The crowd murmured. Silk streamers laden with globes of gold faelight twinkled into life above and around us. Ianthe said smoothly. 'Come, Bride and be joined with your true love. Come, Bride, and let good triumph at last.' Good. I was not good. I was nothing, and my soul, my eternal soul was damned- I tried to get my traitorous lungs to draw air so I could voice a word. No- no. But I didn't have to say it. Thunder crackled behind me, as if two boulders have been hurled against each other. People screamed, falling back, a few vanishing outright as darkness erupted. I whirled, and through the night drifting away like smoke on a wind, I found Rhysand straightening the lapels of his black jacket. 'Hello, Feyre darkling,' he purred.

The Mongols made no technological breakthroughs, founded no new religions, wrote few books or dramas, and gave the world no new crops or methods of agriculture. Their own craftsmen could not weave cloth, cast metal, make pottery, or even bake bread. They manufactured neither porcelain nor pottery, painted no pictures, and built no buildings. Yet, as their army conquered culture after culture, they collected and passed all of these skills from one civilization to the next.

But let’s be clear: the madness of everyday life was its own issue. It didn’t have any relationship to whether or not Christianity was bullshit. Obviously, Christianity was total bullshit. It was the most insane bullshit! But it was impossible to make an argument against superstition and magical nonsense, and have it stick, when that argument was delivered from a society where every citizen was a magician. And yes, reader, that includes you. You too are a magician. Your life is dominated by one of the oldest and most perverse forms of magic, one with less interior cohesion than the Christian faith, and you invest its empty symbolism with a level of belief that far outpaces that of any Christian. Here are some strips of paper and bits of metal! Watch as I transform these strips of paper and bits of metal into: (a) sex (b) food (c) clothing (d) shelter (e) transportation that allows me to acquire strips of paper and bits of money (f) intoxicants that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (g) leisure items that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (h) pointless vacations to exotic locales where I will replicate the brutish behavior that I display in my point of origin as a brief respite from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (i) unfair social advantages that allow my rotten children to undertake their own moronic pursuits of strips of paper and bits of metal. Humiliate yourself for strips of paper. Murder for the strips of paper. Humiliate others for the strips of paper. Worship the people who’ve accumulated such vast quantities of strips of paper that their strips of paper no longer have any physical existence and are now represented by binary notation. Treat the vast accumulators like gods. Free blowies for the moldering corpse of Steve Jobs! Fawning profile pieces for Jay-Z! The Presidency for billionaire socialite and real-estate developer Donald J. Trump! Kill! Kill! Kill! Work! Work! Work! Die! Die! Die! Go on. Pretend this is not the most magical thing that has ever happened. Historical arguments against Christianity tended to be delivered in tones of pearl-clutching horror, usually by subpar British intellectuals pimping their accent in America, a country where sounding like an Oxbridge twat conferred an unearned credibility. Yes, the Crusades were horrible. Yes, the Inquisition was awful. Yes, they shouldn’t have burned witches in Salem. Yes, there is an unfathomable amount of sexually abused walking wounded. Yes, every Christian country has oriented itself around the rich and done nothing but abuse the fuck out of its poor. But it’s not like the secular conversion of the industrialized world has alleviated any of the horror. Read the news. Murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape...Despair. All secularism has done, really, is remove a yoke from the rich. They’d always been horrible, but at least when they still paid lip service to Christian virtues, they could be shamed into philanthropy. Now they use market forces to slide the whole thing into feudalism. New York University built a campus [in Abu Dhabi] with slave labor! In the Twenty-First Century AD! And has suffered no rebuke! Applications are at an all-time high! The historical arguments against Christianity are as facile as reviews on Goodreads.com, and come down to this: Why do you organize around bad people who tell you that a Skyman wants you to be good? To which the rejoinder is: yes, the clergy sucks, but who cares how normal people are delivered into goodness?

The first half of your detention will be spent digging an eight foot deep hole in the meadow.” Darius stalked off with the other guys and I moved forward to collect my shovel. Orion scooped it up, holding it out for me. Before I took it he caught my hand, brushing his thumb across my palm and sending a shiver through me. He repeated the process on the other hand then pressed his index finger to his lips. “That'll stop your skin chaffing,” he whispered. I stared at him in complete surprise as he passed me the shovel and moved aside. “Thank you,” I said, confused as I stepped past him, making my way through the high grass and colourful array of meadow flowers as I walked toward the Heirs. The four of them had formed a circle and were already getting to work digging the hole. ... “Vega!” Orion beckoned me and I was grateful to put the shovel down. I was a little dizzy as I walked up to his high metal chair where he was sitting a few feet above my head. He now had a large umbrella set up over it and a flask of coffee in his hand which he'd apparently brought with him. His Atlas was propped on his knee and he looked like he was thoroughly enjoying his morning as he gazed down at my mud stained skin with a bright smile. Thanks to his magic, at least I didn't have any blisters on my hands. “Water.” Orion waved his hand and water gathered in the air before me, circling into a glistening sphere. Orion tossed me a cup and I caught it at the last second. The water dropped straight into it with a splash and I guzzled it down greedily, “That's favouritism, sir!” Caleb called. “You're right, how rude of me!” Orion shouted back, lifting a hand and a torrential waterfall poured down on all of the heirs. Max crowed like a cockerel, pounding his chest, seemingly spurred on by the downpour. The others didn't seem quite as happy as the water continued to fall down on them. A laugh rushed from my throat and Orion threw me a wink. “So I'm having a little trouble, Miss Vega.” “With what, sir?” “Telling you apart from your sister,” he said in a low voice that I imagined only I could hear through the torrential storm he was still casting over the Heirs. “And you never did answer my question. Blue or green?” A smile twisted up my lips and I shrugged, deciding to leave him in continued suspense over that question, walking back to join the group. “I want an answer by sundown,” he called after me and my grin grew even wider. ... “Shut the fuck up!” Orion shouted. “I'm trying to concentrate here.” “Watching porn again, sir?” Seth shot at him with a smirk. “Yeah, your mom's really improved since the last edition,” he answered without missing a beat and Seth's face dropped into a scowl as a laugh tore from my throat. “Do you know who is always watching porn?” Max chipped in. “You?” the three other guys answered in unison. They all burst out laughing and I fought the urge to join in. “Hilarious,” Max said dryly. “I meant Washer. He snuck off in class the other day to rub one out.” “Useless. Well up you go then,” he said and I moved toward the ladder, taking hold of the first rung. Orion stepped up close behind me and his fingers brushed my waist, barely perceptible but I felt it everywhere. It scored a line of goosebumps across my back and a heavenly shiver fluttered up my spine. Heated air pushed under my clothes, drying them out almost instantly. “Thank you,” I whispered for the second time today. What’s gotten into him? He took hold of the ladder either side of my hands. “Up,” he breathed against my cheek and hot wax seemed to pour down each of my legs, making it almost impossible to move. But somehow, I managed it.

Suburbia Knocks by Stewart Stafford Covert dawn's surreptitious light, A magpie sentry's warning song, Swooping, scanning silent streets, Cackling danger all night long. Metallic cross of crucified clothes, A choir of colours in the breeze, Waterboarded by lashing rain, Made them suffer incrementally. One knock for no, two knocks for yes, One and a half for uncertainty, Three knocks for drinks and company, The rite of suburban courtesy. 37 years ago, down at number 37, Came the first and last royal visit, Dizzying anticipation from first light, Fading fairytale in a curtsying gibbet. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

There have been many types of money. The most familiar is the coin, which is a standardised piece of imprinted metal. Yet money existed long before the invention of coinage, and cultures have prospered using other things as currency, such as shells, cattle, skins, salt, grain, beads, cloth and promissory notes.

Thomas hitched his pants to keep the ironing crisp, and sat. Rose put creases in his shirtsleeves, too. Used starch. Even in dull clay-green work clothes, he looked respectable. His collar never flopped. But he wanted to flop. The chair was padded, comfortable. Too comfortable. Thomas opened his thermos. It was a top-of-the-line Stanley, a gift from his oldest daughters. They had given him this thermos to celebrate his salaried position. He poured a measure of black coffee into the steel cover that was also a cup. The warm metal, the gentle ridges, the rounded feminine base of the cap, were pleasant to hold. He allowed his eyelids a long and luxurious blink each time he drank. Nearly slipped over the edge. Jerked awake. Fiercely commanded the dregs in the cup to do their work

You walk outside your studio apartment to a hot Oakland summer day, an Oakland you remember as gray, always gray. Oakland summer days from your childhood. Mornings so gray they filled the whole day with gloom and cool even when the blue broke through. This heat’s too much. You sweat easy. Sweat from walking. Sweat at the thought of sweating. Sweat through clothes to where it shows. You take off your hat and squint up at the sun. At this point you should probably accept the reality of global warming, of climate change. The ozone thinning again like they said in the nineties when your sisters used to bomb their hair with Aqua Net and you’d gag and spit in the sink extra loud to let them know you hated it and to remind them about the ozone, how hair spray was the reason the world might burn like it said in Revelation, the next end, the second end after the flood, a flood of fire from the sky this time, maybe from the lack of ozone protection, maybe because of their abuse of Aqua Net—and why did they need their hair three inches in the air, curled over like a breaking wave, because what? You never knew. Except that all the other girls did it too. And hadn’t you also heard or read that the world tilts on its axis ever so slightly every year so that the angle made the earth like a piece of metal when the sun hits it just right and it becomes just as bright as the sun itself? Hadn’t you heard that it was getting hotter because of this tilt, this ever increasing tilt of the earth, which was inevitable and not humanity’s fault, not our cars or emissions or Aqua Net but plain and simple entropy, or was it atrophy, or was it apathy? —

It was summer, so the sun appeared in the bottom left-hand corner of the big window at quarter past six. Ish. It was hard to tell exactly until the sun rose just a little bit more, enough to send his beams through the holes carefully bored through a piece of wood, above which the hours were marked off in beautifully painted flourishes. This simple timepiece hung from the ceiling off a stick hammered sturdily in, because a string would have let it spin and therefore fail its task of tracking the sun. The wind chimes, however, assembled from more bits of wood, and pieces of metal, and shaped and dried bits of pottery, were free to swing and tinkle as they pleased. These were surrounded by celestial bric-a-brac that also dangled from the ceiling and spun with abandon when the breeze found them: paper-mâché stars, comets of hoarded glass shards and mirror, a very carefully re-created (and golden) replica of the constellation Orion, a quilted and embroidered cloth model of the sun, and several paintings on rectangular panels hung such that they faced straight down. So that the viewer, in bed, might look up at them and pretend they were windows or friends, depending on whether the subject was landscapes or faces.

We all sat there, silently looking out over an expanse of floating clothes, body parts, and an occasional length of twisted metal trapped in between some weeds, as jet fuel trailed gently across our nostrils. It was so starkly unfamiliar that it was disorienting. Silently, we surveyed it all and then, as if someone had flipped a switch, we went to work.

The Tigrina’s pavilion was constructed of sparkling midnight-blue cloth and adorned with silver tassels that hung motionless in the still air. A single torch glowed blue-white at the entrance. Light reflected from spilled jewels, silken cloth, and metal.

eye combination my mother always made a fuss about. Maybe that’s why my skin crawled every time someone commented on how attractive a couple we were. It was more a reflection on me than us. He lifts his hand and moves my hair off my forehead. The gesture is intimate, but I’m too stunned to stop him. He brushes his thumb over the scar on my temple. “I was worried about you. You wouldn’t let me see you in the hospital. Or after?” A sigh escapes before I can school my features into something a little more… regretful. “Well, I was embarrassed.” That’s a lie. I just didn’t want to face whatever the fuck emotional roller coaster I was riding the last six months. Seriously. My life went from normal to shit in a split second. Adding Jack—and the life that I thought I had, the one that seemed to go up in a puff of smoke when I woke up in the hospital—would’ve been more pain than I was ready to accept. “Violet!” I step away from Jack, ignoring his wounded expression, and turn to my other friends. Half the dance team is here, and they all crowd around me. Someone pulls at my coffee-stained blouse, and another swoops in to clean the floor where my cup dropped. I had forgotten, in my Jack-shock. “Lucky it wasn’t hot.” Willow nudges me. “Luck and I aren’t on speaking terms.” She visited faithfully every day while I was stuck in the hospital. Kept me sane, kept me looped in to the gossip. She’s the only one who knows what I went through, and I’m keeping it that way. I’m not in the habit of airing my dirty laundry—or my newfound nightmares. I’ve been plagued by bright lights, crunching metal, and snapping bones. She rolls her eyes at my luck comment. “You need to change. We’re taking you out.” Oh boy. My first instinct is to say no, but honestly? I could use a bit of normalcy. My therapist—the talk one, not the physical one—said something about getting back into a routine. Well, for the last two years, I’ve gone out with my girls on Friday nights. There’s nothing more normal than that. I’m actually looking forward to it. She leads the way to the bedroom I haven’t been in since… before. She steps aside and lets me do the honors. Opening the door is like cracking into a time capsule. Fucking devastating. Willow stands behind me, her hand on my shoulder, as I stare around at the remnants of the person I used to be. If I wasn’t aware of how different I was after six months away, I am now. Mentally, physically. There are still clothes that I left on the floor. My chair is pulled out and covered in clothes. There’s a pile of books that I had planned to conquer over the summer in the center of the desk. My bed is made. “I kept the door open

He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient — nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one’s body aged, was it not a sign that this was NOT the natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

It seemed stupid that I had stayed in the cold stone room, knowing that as soon as the new day had crested, I was no longer in the Inquisitor’s service and no longer had to follow his orders. I finished eating and opened the package, revealing the complicated sections of leather pieces that somehow made up an outfit. Some of the sections were hardened with inlaid metal, a tarnished golden colour peeking through the stitching. I finally discerned something resembling the usual bodysuits worn beneath sectorian women’s clothing, though this one was different. It was thick brown leather, a silk underlining hidden on the inside. It moulded tightly to the body, two ovals cut into the sides, exposing the hips and the sides of the stomach and back. Some sort of covering fit over the top of the bodysuit, ending a few inches above the waist. The metal-inlaid patterns curved around the front of my chest and the top of my spine, connected with brown, buckled straps along my sides. A belted skirt slid over the hips, the belt pulling along the cut of the bodysuit, above my hips, another band looping around my hips. The skirt had two short layers. Yet another section of the outfit fit over my shoulders, metallic glimpses peering out from the leather that cupped my shoulders, attaching to the upper chest armour with straps. Another set of wraps covered my wrists and forearms, and I was glad to see the Inquisitor’s mark and the Spider’s mark disappearing from view. I was able to re-wear the same footwear, as there were also knee and thigh wraps in the same boiled brown leather that complemented the knee-high boots. The outfit was clearly some kind of warrior’s uniform. The Vold—and the Sentinels in particular—often wore revealing, scant clothing to show off their impressive physiques. With Calder’s cloak still on the ground, I could see half of his bare back above the golden armour that wrapped his torso. The muscles bunched and stretched as he pulled his forearm up for investigation. He had clearly stitched and re-dressed his wound after my dismal attempt at caring for it the night before. Despite my outfit showing so much skin, it was by far the heaviest thing I had ever worn, and I started to truly appreciate how quickly and silently Calder moved, weighed down as he must have been by so much armour. I tugged my hair over my shoulders, arranging the strands so that they might hide my face better. There was a lump in my throat when I stuffed everything back into my pack and muttered, “Done.

Now, whenever she smelled the gums, the balsams, and the special aromatics that arrived with merchants from afar, her head reeled with images of temples, shrines, palaces, fortresses, mysterious walls, tapestries, paintings, jewels, liquors, icons, drugs, dyes, meats, sweets, sweetmeats, silks, bolts and bolts of cotton cloth, ores, shiny metals, foodstuffs, spices, musical instruments, ivory daggers and ivory dolls, masks, bells, carvings, statues (ten times as tall as she!), lumber, leopards on leashes, peacocks, monkeys, white elephants with tattooed ears, horses, camels, princes, maharajah, conquerors, travelers (Turks with threatening mustaches and Greeks with skin as pale as the stranger who had befriended her at the funeral grounds), singers, fakirs, magicians, acrobats, prophets, scholars, monks, madmen, sages, saints, mystics, dreamers, prostitutes, dancers, fanatics, avatars, poets, thieves, warriors, snake charmers, pageants, parades, rituals, executions, weddings, seductions, concerts, new religions, strange philosophies, fevers, diseases, splendors and magnificences and things too fearsome to be recounted, all writhing, cascading, jumbling, mixing, splashing, and spinning; vast, complex, inexhaustible, forever.

On another table were telephones with cloth leads and metal mouthpieces, brass, copper and silver ashtrays and cigar boxes, and matchboxes with branding only the dead would recognize.

be followed in making a sewn or knitted item.  a wooden or metal model from which a mold is made for a casting.  an example for others to follow: he set the pattern for subsequent study.  a sample of cloth or wallpaper.   v. [trans.] 1 [usu. as adj.] (patterned) decorate with a recurring design: rosebud patterned wallpapers;violet-tinged flowers patterned the grassy banks. 2 give a regular or intelligible form to: the brain not only receives information, but interprets and patterns it.  (pattern something on/after) give something a form based on that of (something else): the clothing is patterned on athletes' wear.

When I reach Pan, he opens his legs for me so I can crawl up between them. His gaze is bright and satisfied as I unlatch his belt buckle and pull the leather through the clasp. The metal clanks. Pan watches. He’s straining against his pants as I undo the button and seeing the bulge of him lights a fire in my chest. When I have the zipper open, I yank his clothes down, letting his cock spring free. Rising up, I position my mouth over the swollen head of his cock and his body tenses up, waiting.

Corporal?’ Jack turned as Ham grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘What is it?’ Jack asked, as he turned to face the large soldier. ‘Is the tin meant to look like that?’ Ham asked, before pointing to the self heating soup, the sides bulging as it shook violently on the ground. ‘Jesus Christ, you’re supposed to put a hole in it,’ Jack said, before reaching for the tin, the metal hot between his fingers. He lifted it up as bubbles started to spit from the seams, a thin whistling noise filling his ears before it burst in his hands, sending a shower of hot tomato soup spilling over his uniform. ‘Yow are supposed to eat it, not wear it,’ Fred said, as the men broke into laughter. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Jack cursed, as he wiped the soup off his body. ‘What am I going to eat now?’ Ham asked. Jack turned to the large soldier and wagged his finger at him, his mouth opening to speak, when he saw Shorthouse approaching. ‘What’s happened to you?’ The sergeant major asked, as he looked at Jack’s stained clothes. ‘He got in a fight with a can of soup,’ Fred replied. ‘Nasty things those,

The Edge of Reason by Stewart Stafford I do not want to die or take my own life, I cling to the outside of skyscraper metal, Thick, choking smoke rakes my shoulder, Scorching flames lash my back and legs. I showered, dressed and went to work, I arrived early, said hello, found my desk, Then the building shifted, smiles faded, Everything changed, and here we are. God, please take me quickly, I beg you, Bless my loved ones, I hope they understand, A Rorschach test for shocked rubberneckers, I let the air pressure suck me out and drop. The initial relief of vacating impossibility, Turns to violent buffeting in wind currents, Clothes ripped off as I spin, falling faster, Crowds point, the ground rushes towards me. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

Excerpted From Chapter Eighteen Pacific Coast Highway ends with a sharp right turn onto Sepulveda. Approaching that intersection, I saw several cars pulled to the shoulder of the road and two fresh, black skid marks leading straight to the edge of the beach beyond Sepulveda. Halfway between the road and the water, a big red Caddy convertible lay upside down on the sand. I parked and jogged to the wreckage. The windshield and the cloth top had collapsed, so the car was resting on its hood and trunk lid. A young man in swimming trunks and an older fellow in a suit were pulling at the driver's side door, trying to get it open. The twisted metal was resisting their efforts, but the door finally came loose just as I got there. Through the opening I could see Diana Dean sprawled across the shredded remains of her convertible top. From where I stood, she looked to be in about the same shape as her mangled red Caddy. Maybe worse.

Retired missionaries taught us Arts & Crafts each July at Bible Camp: how to glue the kidney, navy, and pinto bean into mosaics, and how to tool the stenciled butterfly on copper sheets they'd cut for us. At night, after hymns, they'd cut the lights and show us slides: wide-spread trees, studded with corsage; saved women tucking T-shirts into wrap-around batiks; a thatched church whitewashed in the equator's light. Above the hum of the projector I could hear the insects flick their heads against the wind screens, aiming for the brightness of that Africa. If Jesus knocks on your heart, be ready to say, "Send me, O Lord, send me," a teacher told us confidentially, doling out her baggies of dried corn. I bent my head, concentrating hard on my tweezers as I glued each colored kernel into a rooster for Mother's kitchen wall. But Jesus noticed me and started to knock. Already saved, I looked for signs to show me what else He would require. At rest hour, I closed my eyes and flipped my Bible open, slid my finger, ouija-like, down the page, and there was His command: Go and do ye likewise— Let the earth and all it contains hear— Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire—. Thursday night, at revival service, I held out through Trust and Obey, Standing on the Promises, Nothing But the Blood, but crumpled on Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling, promising God, cross my heart, I'd witness to Rhodesia. Down the makeshift aisle I walked with the other weeping girls and stood before the little bit of congregation left singing in their metal chairs. The bathhouse that night was silent, young Baptists moving from shower to sink with the stricken look of nuns. Inside a stall, I stripped, slipped my clothes outside the curtain, and turned for the faucet— but there, splayed on the shower's wall, was a luna moth, the eye of its wings fixed on me. It shimmered against the cement block: sherbet-green, plumed, a flamboyant verse lodged in a page of drab ink. I waved my hands to scare it out, but, blinkless, it stayed latched on. It let me move so close my breath stroked the fur on its animal back. One by one the showers cranked dry. The bathhouse door slammed a final time. I pulled my clothes back over my sweat, drew the curtain shut, and walked into a dark pricked by the lightening bugs' inscrutable morse.

When you go into the psych ward, you can’t have anything with you except colored pencils. You can’t have any electronics. If you have a drawstring on your pants, a belt, shoelaces, a hood, or extra-long fabric, your very clothes are ripped off your back. They search you with a metal detector like you’re a criminal, doing everything short of putting their hand up your butt. Before you go through those cold, automatic, barred doors, you know your life is not your own. This is especially true during the first week, while you stare at florescent lighting and wait impatiently for your meds to kick in. I wish I had remembered the psych ward prison cell a week ago. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t be wearing this hospital gown that they gave me until I can get more compliant clothes.

All implements of war or industry known to the early Hawaiians were made either of wood, stone, or bone, as the islands are destitute of metals; but with these rude helps they laid up hewn-stone walls, felled trees, made canoes and barges, manufactured cloths and cordage, fashioned weapons, constructed dwellings and temples, roads and fish-ponds, and tilled the soil. They had axes, adzes and hammers of stone, spades of wood, knives of flint and ivory, needles of thorn and bone, and spears and daggers of hardened wood. They wove mats for sails and other purposes, and from the inner bark of the paper mulberry-tree beat out a fine, thin cloth called kapa, which they ornamented with colors and figures.

Where’s Rowan?” he sneered. His close-fitting dark clothes, armored with black metal at the forearms and shoulders, seemed to gobble up the dim light. “Still warming your bed?” She didn’t want to know how Lorcan knew that. “Isn’t that all you pretty males are good for?

What in the—? My begonias!” he heard someone say behind him. Nick looked over his shoulder. A small but muscular woman in sweaty workout clothes was stepping out of a big shiny car in the neighbor’s driveway. She was gaping in horror at the chewed-up flowerbed and the smoking lawn mower. Scowling, she turned toward Uncle Newt’s house. And the scowl didn’t go away when she noticed Nick looking back at her. In fact, it got scowlier. Nick smiled weakly, waved, and hurried into the house. He closed the door behind him. “Whoa,” he said when his eyes adjusted to the gloom inside. Cluttering the long hall in front of him were dozens of old computers, a telescope, a metal detector connected to a pair of bulky earphones, an old-fashioned diving suit complete with brass helmet, a stuffed polar bear (the real, dead kind), a chainsaw, something that looked like a flamethrower (but couldn’t be … right?), a box marked KEEP REFRIGERATED, another marked THIS END UP (upside down), and a fully lit Christmas tree decorated with ornaments made from broken beakers and test tubes (it was June). Exposed wires and power cables poked out of the plaster and veered off around every corner, and there were so many diplomas and science prizes and patents hanging (all of them earned by Newton Galileo Holt, a.k.a. Uncle Newt) that barely an inch of wall was left uncovered. Off to the left was a living room lined with enough books to put some libraries to shame, a semitransparent couch made of inflated plastic bags, and a wide-screen TV connected by frayed cords to a small trampoline.

I don't like shopping. In movies that depict a futuristic dystopia, people tend to wear uniforms in a single colour, usually a metallic onesie with a high neck and gender-neutral panelling in the front. I am fine with this. I look great in silver and gold.

And there it was—a box of ammunition tucked into one corner of the box. Twenty rounds of .380 ACP hardball. Full metal jacket. Reaching in, he lifted an object wrapped in oilcloth from its resting place. The familiar shape of a pistol beneath his fingers. And the cloth fell away, the distinctive outline of a Walther PPK revealed in the beam of his flashlight.

Much of what I had was handed down to me from others. The fact that I was now the oldest child, since my sister had died, put me first in line for toys. Not that the toys and clothing I acquired were necessarily new, nor were they gender specific, but they were newer when I got them, than later, when they were passed farther down the line. It didn’t matter that my sister was a girl…. A coat was a coat, except for how it was buttoned. Looking at old photographs, I sometimes find it impossible to tell if I am looking at my sister or me. It’s only when I see my nautical blue coat, with miniature petty officer chevrons on it that I’m certain that I’m looking at myself. As a baby, I wore her gowns and sleepwear, and this continued until they were worn out, or I outgrew them. Of course I inherited most of her toys, including a plunger type metal top and her beautiful, porcelain dolls. I don’t believe that these dolls were ever for play. They were beautiful enough to have been collectors’ items, but in my hands, they were doomed.

....Oh, what???.... Can you repeat... okay... I will say I'm against every your though (What can yo do about that?) (Oh, oh you poor little kid, oh, oh you poor little man you can't do anything here is the story)...Once upon a time there was two women and one man,... they weren't let to go outside... they both were married to the same man... it was said to them "If They go outside they won't come back", but the truth was who goes outside he will be slaughtered, every finger one by one will be cutted, then little pushing inside a knife in the body, a lot of blood goes outside in the same time the other woman also get punished if the one get's. She is punished to drink the other woman blood, when this process is going again and again the man removes the clothes and he start jerk off on their faces..., (Yeah I know you will try to kill him, but you can't), you are bound with metal and rope handcuffs your legs and your arms. On your head you have a mask, if you move it detectes and it explodes when it explodes your face goes ugly from ugly you goes disable you are dead because this mask kills the brain... The other woman is next to a trap which detectes if she goes out of one zone, it goes like this if there is so much pressure it won't happen this, but if there isn't it goes very bad... The man is above few meters and he jerkoff on their faces and he does what he wants... and so on and so on... YOu can't change it, once you are the killer (Very bad for you, ...man), once you are the victim wow that's very bad I few awful if I was a victim somebody will jerk off on my face and I'm not a gay....! If this happen remind me to kill my self, I can't live with the thought that I'm a gay...

A chill wind tugged at Tekagi’s black veil and midnight tresses. Her false fingernails, curved metal claws edged with black diamonds snared the fine mesh. The cloth ripped beneath her scalpel strokes when she flexed her fingers.

burned low. The next morning servants brought in bananas, milk, and sweet rice to their room. After breakfast, Madam Vesteria pursed her lips as she inspected them, and satisfied, led them down a white marble hallway, broad and lined with statues of gods, goddesses, and mythical heroes and creatures. They came to the grand foyer, a circular and open room with light streaming in from above, and with one direction leading to a massive carved mahogany door, and opposite, a spiral staircase wound up and around four stories high.  “You will wait here.” Master Vesteria pulled on a long, silken rope that sounded a deep, melodic bell. “Prepare yourselves to meet the young masters of the Five Calazars.” Talis heard the slow clicking of heels down the staircase. Two boys, twins about the same age as Rikar, sauntered down, followed by a girl who appeared a year younger than Mara. Talis laughed to himself, expecting more children from five families. The girl was petite and pale, shy to the point of almost being afraid to glance at them. The twins chuckled as they whispered, staring at Talis as if caught up in some private joke. Their eyes held proud, indifferent expressions. They also were dressed in white, but their clothes were made of woven silk, layered with gold and some black metal.  “Just arrived?” a twin said, his voice laced with sarcasm. “Let

When I took a good look at myself, my stomach flipped. I was a jumble of bruises and ripped clothes. Most people said blood tasted metallic, but to me it tasted like ashes. It tasted like my own funeral. Bile rose in my throat, but I managed to keep it down. The spasms that made my ribcage expand and contract in an increasing tempo created a melody without interlude. I must be crying. I waited, not daring to move, for a long time to turn into a puddle on the floor.

As he lifted his head, he saw himself in the crude metal sheets that were supposed to be mirrors. Even though the reflection was dull, he noted his ugliness and thought of Throe just now. In spite of the fact that the soldier had been out fighting all night, his handsome visage had appeared fresh as a daisy, his well-bred looks overshadowing the reality that he had slayer blood on his clothes and had been scraped and bruised. Xcor, however, could have taken rest for two weeks straight, eaten a large meal, and fed from a fucking Chosen, and he would still appear as repulsive.

The room was small, slightly bigger than his bedroom, but far, far more beautiful. It resembled some of the Asian temples he'd seen in his aunt's coffee-table books. The walls were painted in rich hues of red, green, blue, yellow, and gold. When Alex looked up, he saw a dome-shaped ceiling with a sun, moon and stars made out of pearls and gems. The ground was tiled and shaped into a model of forests, mountains, pastures and rivers-like a mosaic. And across the room was a set of jewel-encrusted thrones where two finely carved statues sat. The life-size carvings were different than those of the army outside the chamber. Theses still wore their original colours, preserved perhaps by the lack of fresh air in the room. Instead of armour, the male figure wore a long, regal robe made of small rectangular-shaped tiles. Alex immediately thought of the chain0mail that knights wore in the Middle Ages, except this was made of jade and not metal. The statue of the beautiful woman also wore clothes or richness and royalty, but hers did not include jade, only gold and precious stones. "They must be the Emperor and Empress," Ryan said.