Mirror's Edge Quotes

She was a very pretty woman. She had dark red hair and her eyes -- her eyes are just like mine, Harry thought, edging a little closer to the glass. Bright green -- exactly the same shape, but then he noticed that she was crying; smiling, but crying at the same time. The tall, thin, black-haired man standing next to her put his arm around her. He wore glasses, and his hair was very untidy. It stuck up at the back, just like Harry's did. Harry was so close to the mirror now that his nose was nearly touching that of his reflection. "Mum?" he whispered. "Dad?" They just looked at him, smiling. And slowly, Harry looked into the faces of the other people in the mirror and saw other pairs of green eyes like his, other noses like his, even a little old man who looked as though he had Harry's knobbly knees -- Harry was looking at his family, for the first time in his life. The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside of him, half joy, half terrible sadness.

Before you came, things were as they should be: the sky was the dead-end of sight, the road was just a road, wine merely wine. Now everything is like my heart, a color at the edge of blood: the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns, the gold when we meet, the season ablaze, the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames, and the black when you cover the earth with the coal of dead fires. And the sky, the road, the glass of wine? The sky is a shirt wet with tears, the road a vein about to break, and the glass of wine a mirror in which the sky, the road, the world keep changing. Don’t leave now that you’re here— Stay. So the world may become like itself again: so the sky may be the sky, the road a road, and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.

It's like I keep waiting to look in the mirror and recognize the person staring back.

When it reached the mirror’s edge, the blood began to drip and the synchronous echo of each drop that hit the white, porcelain sink below almost felt relaxing.

Hestia sighed. “Do not stay longer than you must inside the mirror’s edge. Glass is like a heart. It has a fragile nature. It is easily broken.

He remembered the time he had hooked one of a pair of marlin. The male fish always let the female fish feed first and the hooked fish, the female, made a wild, panic-stricken, despairing fight that soon exhausted her, and all the time the male had stayed with her, crossing the line and circling with her on the surface. He had stayed so close that the old man was afraid he would cut the line with his tail which was sharp as a scythe and almost of that size and shape. When the old man had gaffed her and clubbed her, holding the rapier bill with its sandpaper edge and clubbing her across the top of her head until her colour turned to a colour almost like the backing of mirrors, and then, with the boy’s aid, hoisted her aboard, the male fish had stayed by the side of the boat. Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.

Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes. Children have always traveled, and because they are young and bright and full of contradictions, they haven’t always restricted their travel to the possible. Adulthood brings limitations like gravity and linear space and the idea that bedtime is a real thing, and not an artificially imposed curfew. Adults can still tumble down rabbit holes and into enchanted wardrobes, but it happens less and less with every year they live. Maybe this is a natural consequence of living in a world where being careful is a necessary survival trait, where logic wears away the potential for something bigger and better than the obvious. Childhood melts, and flights of fancy are replaced by rules. Tornados kill people: they don’t carry them off to magical worlds. Talking foxes are a sign of fever, not guides sent to start some grand adventure. But children, ah, children. Children follow the foxes, and open the wardrobes, and peek beneath the bridge. Children climb the walls and fall down the wells and run the razor’s edge of possibility until sometimes, just sometimes, the possible surrenders and shows them the way to go home.

Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars. Then the breeze died too and there was no noise save the drip and tickle of water that ran out of clefts and spilled down, leaf by leaf, to the brown earth of the island. The air was cool, moist, and clear; and presently even the sound of the water was still. The beast lay huddled on the pale beach and the stains spread, inch by inch. The edge of the lagoon became a streak of phosphorescence which advanced minutely, as the great wave of the tide flowed. The clear water mirrored the clear sky and the angular bright constellations. The line of phosphorescence bulged about the sand grains and little pebbles; it held them each in a dimple of tension, then suddenly accepted them with an inaudible syllable and moved on. Along the shoreward edge of the shallows the advancing clearness was full of strange, moonbeam-bodied creatures with fiery eyes. Here and there a larger pebble clung to its own air and was covered with a coat of pearls. The tide swelled in over the rain-pitted sand and smoothed everything with a layer of silver. Now it touched the first of the stains that seeped from the broken body and the creatures made a moving patch of light as they gathered at the edge. The water rose further and dressed Simon's coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble. The strange, attendant creatures, with their fiery eyes and trailing vapours busied themselves round his head. The body lifted a fraction of an inch from the sand and a bubble of air escaped from the mouth with a wet plop. Then it turned gently in the water. Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling; and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved further along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon's dead body moved out towards the open sea.

L'union libre [Freedom of Love]" My wife with the hair of a wood fire With the thoughts of heat lightning With the waist of an hourglass With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes With the tongue of an unbelievable stone My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof And of steam on the panes My wife with shoulders of champagne And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice My wife with wrists of matches My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts With fingers of mown hay My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut And of Midsummer Night Of privet and of an angelfish nest With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill My wife with legs of flares With the movements of clockwork and despair My wife with calves of eldertree pith My wife with feet of initials With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking My wife with a neck of unpearled barley My wife with a throat of the valley of gold Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent With breasts of night My wife with breasts of a marine molehill My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days With the belly of a gigantic claw My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically With a back of quicksilver With a back of light With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking My wife with hips of a skiff With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers And of shafts of white peacock plumes Of an insensible pendulum My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos My wife with buttocks of swans' backs My wife with buttocks of spring With the sex of an iris My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat My wife with a sex of mirror My wife with eyes full of tears With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle My wife with savanna eyes My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water's edge.

My world was one of only broken images, like I was standing always on the threshold of a mirror, unable to tell the reflection from the real. The shining city and the blasted heath-the truth lay somewhere between, a thin grey line, slender as the edge of knife.

Author's Prayer If I speak for the dead, I must leave this animal of my body, I must write the same poem over and over for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender. If I speak of them, I must walk on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man who runs through the rooms without touching the furniture. Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year is it?" I can dance in my sleep and laugh in front of the mirror. Even sleep is a prayer, Lord, I will praise your madness, and in a language not mine, speak of music that wakes us, music in which we move. For whatever I say is a kind of petition and the darkest days must I praise.

He didn't think he was edging into dementia. He suspected he was edging into sanity, the long way around. The hard way.

When it rains, the world softens around the edges; streets and sidewalks become a liquid mirror onto which lights and colors bleed. When it rains, everything becomes beautiful . . . for a while.

We don't exactly fit in. Anywhere. And we've made that our greatest strength.

Ah, and this is the trouble with a diary. We are allowed to stand too long before its mirror and gaze at ourselves, where we unavoidably find vanity and fault.

I stared at him for a long time. If he wanted to end his search for the beast, he need look no further than a mirror.

There's a moment on the arch of a jump, when you are neither rising nor falling. All you can see is the sky. All you can feel is the air and all you can hear is your heartbeat. That is all you are. Muscle and motion. It's called the deadpoint. I live for that.

the edges of the steel blade as Iron glamour flared around her, a maelstrom of deadly power. I saw her lips move, a name on them, perhaps mine, and felt nothing. My glamour rose up to meet hers, cold and dangerous, and our powers slammed into each other with the roar of dueling dragons. Flashes of images, like broken mirror shards, falling to the earth. Iron and ice, clashing against each other. Rage and hate, swirling in vicious, ugly colors around us. Glamour and pain and blood.

I’m officially giving myself permission to ask; What are Mr. Garcia’s intentions? Maybe I’m late to the game on this question. The thing is, I’ve seen myself in the mirror. Why would I suspect anyone of wanting this?

As I stepped out to face myself in the mirror, reaching a hand to smooth away the steam, I saw myself differently. It was as if I had grown again as I slept, but this time just to fit my own size. As if my soul had expanded, filling out the gaps of the height that had burdened me all these months. Like a balloon filling slowly with air, becoming all smooth and buoyant, I felt like I finally fit within myself, edge to edge, every crevice filled.

He had forgotten how convincing the world could look, how sure of itself: its outlines and edges; it's gradations, recessions, protrusions; it's startling and vulgar colors.

The moment you exchange spontaneity with rules you've lost the edge of romance

At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death; the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens; the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments; the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page; the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses, for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert; the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self; the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors; the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl; the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought; the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands; the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language; the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.

Throughout my life I have seen, without one exception, narrow-shouldered men performing innumerable idiotic acts, brustalising their fellows, and corrupted souls by every means. They call the motive for their actions: fame. Seeing these exhibitions I’ve longed to laugh, with the rest, but that strange imitation was impossible. Taking a penknife with a sharp-edged blade, I slit the flesh at the points joining the lips. For an instant I believed my aim was achieved. I saw in a mirror the mouth ruined at my own will! An error! Besides, the blood gushing freely from the two wounds prevented my distinguishing whether this really was the grin of others. But after some moments of comparison I saw quite clearly that my smile did not resemble that of humans: the fact is, I was not laughing.

The way the Rider flourished his sword afterward- spinning it in a quick circle by his side- suddenly seemed familiar to Eragon, as did all his preceding swordsmanship. He stared with growing horror at his enemy's hand-and-a-half sword, then back up at the eye slits of his mirrored helm, and shouted, "I know you! He threw himself at the Rider, trapping both swords between their bodies, hooked his fingers underneath the helm, and ripped it off. And there in the center of the plateau, on the edge of the Burning Plains of Allagaesia, stood Murtagh.

Go to the mirror, there stands the most important person you'll ever meet.

Sometimes answeres can change everything.

We can be everywhere and nowhere.

I was afraid to look in the mirror—afraid the image of myself in the wedding dress would send me over the edge into a full-scale panic attack.

Every time I stare into those eyes of yours, they shine like a mirror with the sharp edges, piercing trough every bit of my reflection. It makes me feel like a child lost in the woods. And all of a sudden I hear a song somewhere and a shiver runs down my spine. A song that I have heard somewhere before. A song that makes all my demons dance forcefully at once.

If I walked too far and wondered loud enough the fields would change. I could look down and see horse corn and I could hear it then- singing- a kind of low humming and moaning warning me back from the edge. My head would throb and the sky would darken and it would be that night again, that perpetual yesterday lived again. My soul solidifying, growing heavy. I came up to the lip of my grave this way many times but had yet to stare in. I did begin to wonder what the word heaven meant. I thought, if this were heaven, truly heaven, it would be where my grandparents lived. Where my father's father, my favorite of them all, would lift me up and dance with me. I would feel only joy and have no memory, no cornfield and no grave. You can have that,' Franny said to me. 'Plenty of people do.' How do you make the switch?' I asked. It's not as easy as you might think,' she said. 'You have to stop desiring certain answers.' I don't get it.' If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vaccum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling,' she said, 'you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.' This seemed impossible to me. ... She used the bathroom, running the tap noisily and disturbing the towels. She knew immediately that her mother had bought these towels- cream, a ridiculous color for towels- and monogrammed- also ridiculous, my mother thought. But then, just as quickly, she laughed at herself. She was beginning to wonder how useful her scorched-earth policy had been to her all these years. Her mother was loving if she was drunk, solid if she was vain. When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living- to learn to accept? I was not in the bathroom, in the tub, or in the spigot; I did not hold court in the mirror above her head or stand in miniature at the tip of every bristle on Lindsey's or Buckley's toothbrush. In some way I could not account for- had they reached a state of bliss? were my parents back together forever? had Buckley begun to tell someone his troubles? would my father's heart truly heal?- I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always.

Being witnessed is essential to our humanity, our growth, and our ability to move past the trauma that we have survived. If astrology does its job, it offers a mirror in which we see both our best selves and our growth edges.

It was a love that had nothing to do with Joe Camber's day-to-day behavior toward him or his mother; it was a brute, biological thing that he would never be free of, a phenomenon with many illusory referents of the sort which haunt for a lifetime: the smell of cigarette smoke, the look of a double-edged razor reflected in a mirror, pants hung over a chair, certain curse words.

Kaldar picked up a rock and tossed it into the clearing. It landed between two wards. A green stem shot out of the ground, and a hail of needle-thin thorns peppered the soil, striking sparks off the rock. "You got any money on you?" "No." Kaldar grimaced. "What do you have?" William made a mental inventory of some twenty-odd items he'd pulled out of the Mirror's bag of tricks and hid in his clothes this morning. Not much he could part with. "A knife," he said. "Fine. I'll bet my knife against your knife that I can walk through there unharmed.

We stand on the edge of the abyss, across whose unknowable face we paint meaning so as not to see into it. It is always there. But we’re here too, and we are no less real than the abyss. We are no less meaningful for being transient creatures caught up in something too big for us. There is still value to our lives. I’ve learned that those things that are most fragile are also the most precious.

At the farther edge of the town they came upon a solitary house in a field and they crossed and entered and walked through the rooms. They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It's us, Papa, the boy whispered. It's us.

The pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along, unfolding itself in scene-pictures that succeeded itself in stately procession. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willow-herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset-cloud was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string music has announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet, debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin.

He laughed, a big, open-mouthed laugh that made her think of words beginning with the letter O.

Why do men walk to the edge of a chasm? Is the view so different, right at the edge, than it is two steps back? They walk to the edge because it scares them.

Her heart is smashed glass. Peer into her jagged edges to see what refracts from the light of her past. Kaleidoscopic beauty.

I went back in and grabbed my running clothes, then changed in the bathroom. I opened the door to the bathroom, stopping when I saw Kaidan's toiletry bag on the sink. I was overcome with curiosity about his cologne or aftershave, because I'd never smelled it on anyone else before. Feeling sneaky, I prodded one finger into the bag and peeked. No cologne bottle. Only a razor, shaving cream, toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant. I picked up the deodorant, pulled off the lid, and smelled it. Nope, that wasn't it. The sound of Kaidan's deep chuckle close to the doorway made me scream and drop the deodorant into the sink with a clatter. I smacked one hand to my chest and grabbed the edge of the sink with the other. He laughed out loud now. “Okay, that must have looked really bad.” I spoke to his reflection in the mirror, then fumbled to pick up the deodorant. I put the lid on and dropped it in his bag. “But I was just trying to figure out what cologne you wear.” My face was on fire as Kaidan stepped into the small bathroom and leaned against the counter, crossing his arms over his chest. I stepped away. He seemed entertained by my predicament. “I haven't been wearing any cologne.” “Oh.” I cleared my throat. “Well, I didn't see any, so I thought it might be your deodorant, but that's not it either. Maybe it's your laundry detergent or something. Let's just forget about it.” “What is it you smell, exactly?” His voice took on a husky quality, and it felt like he was taking up a lot of room. I couldn't bring myself to look at him. Something strange was going on here. I stepped back, hitting the tub with my heel as I tried to put the scent into words. “I don't know. It's like citrus and the forest or something...leaves and tree sap. I can't explain it.” His eyes bored into mine while he wore that trademark sexy smirk, arms still crossed. “Citrus?” he asked. “Like lemons?” “Oranges mostly. And a little lime, too.” He nodded and flicked his head to the side to get hair out of his eyes. Then his smile disappeared and his badge throbbed. “What you smell are my pheromones, Anna.” A small, nervous laugh burst from my throat. “Oh, okay, then. Well...” I eyed the small space that was available to pass through the door. I made an awkward move toward it, but he shifted his body and I stepped back again. “People can't usually smell pheromones,” he told me. “You must be using your extra senses without realizing it. I've heard of Neph losing control of their senses with certain emotions. Fear, surprise...lust.” I rubbed my hands up and down my upper arms, wanting nothing more than to veer this conversation out of the danger zone. “Yeah, I do have a hard time reining in the scent sometimes,” I babbled. “It even gets away from me while I sleep now and then. I wake up thinking Patti's making cinnamon rolls and it ends up being from someone else's apartment. Then I'm just stuck with cereal. Anyway...” “Would you like to know your own scent?” he asked me. My heart swelled up big in my chest and squeezed small again. This whole scent thing was way too sensual to be discussed in this small space. Any second now my traitorous body would be emitting some of those pheromones and there'd be red in my aura. “Uh, not really,” I said, keeping my eyes averted. “I think I should probably go.” He made no attempt to move out of the doorway. “You smell like pears with freesia undertones.” “Wow, okay.” I cleared my throat, still refusing eye contact. I had to get out of there. “I think I'll just...” I pointed to the door and began to shuffle past him, doing my best not to brush up against him. He finally took a step back and put his hands up by his sides to show that he wouldn't touch me. I broke out of the confined bathroom and took a deep breath.

Merc: Sometimes I wonder if you just encourage trouble, like by running DELIBERATELY into the blues. Faith: Maybe, it's cute the way they try to catch me. Merc: Yeah, well, I hear the bullet. And you CAN'T outrun those. Faith: But i CAN outthink the brain behind the gun. That's half the battle. Merc: See, occasionally, just occasionally i actually think you listen to me.

Just that winter she had found herself saying to a young woman who worked with her at the tasting bar on Saturdays that between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. 'That doesn't mean the weaker one doesn't love the stronger,' she'd pleaded. The girl looked at her blankly. But for my mother what mattered was that as she spoke, she had suddenly identified herself as the weaker one. This revelation sent her reeling. What had she thought all those years but the opposite? She pulled her chair as close to his head as she could and laid her face on the edge of his pillow to watch him breathing, to see the flutter of the eye beneath his eyelid when he dreamed. How could it be that you could love someone so far from home? She had put billboards and roads in between them, throwing roadblocks behind her and ripping off the rearview mirror, and thought that that would make him disappear? erase their life and children? It was so simple, as she watched him, as his regular breathing calmed her, that she did not even see it happening at first. She began to think of the rooms in our house and the hours that she had worked so hard to forget spent inside of them. Like fruit put up in jars and forgotten about, the sweetness seemed even more distilled as she returned. There on that shelf were all the dates and silliness of thier early love, the braid that began to form of their dreams, the solid root of a burgeoning family. The first solid evidence of it all. Me.

It’s at the edge where the truth lies. It’s like hair. Everyone brushes their hair so it looks good from straight on. Why? Because that’s how we see it in the mirror. Straight on. We only ever see ourselves straight on, so that’s the only angle we worry about.

I’ve never awaited a kiss more in my whole life. “It won’t hurt, I promise.” He husks throatily, lowering his head, blocking out the sun so all I see are twin blues and my own lust mirrored back in them. I’m right. It’s a kiss like no other I’ve had before. He doesn’t plunder, not at first. His lips edge across mine—first the top, then the bottom, coaxing me to open. He presses lightly, teasing me almost into whimpering. Of course I want more, I’m out of my flipping mind wanting the kiss, so I drag at his shirt, as if to tell him to get on with it already and that’s when his mouth opens, and my brain switches off. His mouth lays waste to mine in a not-so-surprising and yet all arousing eating kiss that feels as though he’s wolfing me down from the inside with each measured flick of his tongue. His taste floods through me, not a corner of my body is left out of the pleasure soaking out of Theo and into me. He kisses like I’ve always wanted to be kissed by a man.

Paths of the mirror" I And above all else, to look with innocence. As if nothing was happening, which is true. II But you, I want to look at you until your face escapes from my fear like a bird from the sharp edge of the night. III Like a girl made of pink chalk on a very old wall that is suddenly washed away by the rain. IV Like when a flower blooms and reveals the heart that isn’t there. V Every gesture of my body and my voice to make myself into the offering, the bouquet that is abandoned by the wind on the porch. VI Cover the memory of your face with the mask of who you will be and scare the girl you once were. VII The night of us both scattered with the fog. It’s the season of cold foods. VIII And the thirst, my memory is of the thirst, me underneath, at the bottom, in the hole, I drank, I remember. IX To fall like a wounded animal in a place that was meant to be for revelations. X As if it meant nothing. No thing. Mouth zipped. Eyelids sewn. I forgot. Inside, the wind. Everything closed and the wind inside. XI Under the black sun of the silence the words burned slowly. XII But the silence is true. That’s why I write. I’m alone and I write. No, I’m not alone. There’s somebody here shivering. XIII Even if I say sun and moon and star I’m talking about things that happen to me. And what did I wish for? I wished for a perfect silence. That’s why I speak. XIV The night is shaped like a wolf’s scream. XV Delight of losing one-self in the presaged image. I rose from my corpse, I went looking for who I am. Migrant of myself, I’ve gone towards the one who sleeps in a country of wind. XVI My endless falling into my endless falling where nobody waited for me –because when I saw who was waiting for me I saw no one but myself. XVII Something was falling in the silence. My last word was “I” but I was talking about the luminiscent dawn. XVIII Yellow flowers constellate a circle of blue earth. The water trembles full of wind. XIX The blinding of day, yellow birds in the morning. A hand untangles the darkness, a hand drags the hair of a drowned woman that never stops going through the mirror. To return to the memory of the body, I have to return to my mourning bones, I have to understand what my voice is saying.

It was almost a mystical experience. I do not know how else to put it. My mind outran time as he neared, and it was as though I had an eternity to ponder the approach of this man who was my brother. His garments were filthy, his face blackened, the stump of his right arm raised, gesturing anywhere. The great beast that he rode was striped, black and red, with a wild red mane and tail. But it really was a horse, and its eyes rolled and there was foam at its mouth and its breathing was painful to hear. I saw then that he wore his blade slung across his back, for its haft protruded high above his right shoulder. Still slowing, eyes fixed upon me, he departed the road, bearing slightly toward my left, jerked the reins once and released them, keeping control of the horse with his knees. His left hand went up in a salute-like movement that passed above his head and seized the hilt of his weapon. It came free without a sound, describing a beautiful arc above him and coming to rest in a lethal position out from his left shoulder and slanting back, like a single wing of dull steel with a minuscule line of edge that gleamed like a filament of mirror. The picture he presented was burned into my mind with a kind of magnificence, a certain splendor that was strangely moving. The blade was a long, scythe like affair that I had seen him use before. Only then we had stood as allies against a mutual foe I had begun to believe unbeatable. Benedict had proved otherwise that night. Now that I saw it raised against me I was overwhelmed with a sense of my own mortality, which I had never experienced before in this fashion. It was as though a layer had been stripped from the world and I had a sudden, full understanding of death itself.

People have always been vain. Can you imagine what it was like when some guy invented the first mirror? Maidens probably spent all day and night just staring at their own reflection in the dim candle light of their drafty castle tower, back when the first mirrors were cutting edge technology.

She was a very pretty woman. She had dark red hair and her eyes- her eyes are just like mine, Harry thought, edging a little closer to the glass. Bright green- exactly the same shape, but then he noticed that she was crying; smiling, but crying at the same time. The tall, thin, black-haired man standing next to her put his arm around her. He wore glasses, and his hair was very untidy. It stuck up at the back, just as Harry's did. Harry was so close to the mirror now that his nose was nearly touching that of his reflection. "Mom?" he whispered. "Dad?" They just looked at him, smiling. And slowly, Harry looked into the faces of the other people in the mirror, and saw other pairs of green eyes like his, other noses like his, even a little old man who looked as though he had Harry's knobbly knees- Harry was looking at his family, for the first time in his life. The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness.

Paper: Some inexpensive plain bond paper A pad of Strathmore Drawing Paper, 80 lb., 11" × 14" Pencils: A #2 ordinary yellow writing pencil with an eraser at the top A #4 drawing pencil—Faber-Castell, Prismacolor Turquoise, or other brand Marking pens: Sharpie (or other brand) fine point non-permanent black A second marker, fine point permanent black Graphite stick: #4 General’s is a good brand, or other brand Pencil sharpener: A small handheld sharpener is fine Erasers: A Pink Pearl eraser A Staedtler Mars white plastic eraser A kneaded eraser—Lyra, Design, or other brand Masking tape: 3M Scotch Low Tack Artist Tape Clips: Two 1-inch-wide black clips Drawing board: A firm surface large enough to hold your 11" × 14" drawing paper—about 15" × 18" is a good size. This can be improvised from a kitchen cutting board, a piece of foam board, a piece of Masonite, or thick cardboard. Picture plane: This too can be improvised using an 8" × 10" piece of glass (you will need to tape the edges), or an 8" × 10" piece of clear plastic, about 1⁄16" thick. Viewfinders: You will make these from black paper—“construction” paper is a good thickness, or you could use thin black cardboard. You will find instructions for making the viewfinders here A small mirror: About 5" × 7" that can be taped to a wall, or any available wall mirror.

When you’re someone who likes control, this world can often resemble staring into a broken mirror. You see the sharp, ragged edges but lose sight of yourself.

Any person or thing of significance to you unconsciously plays a role in mirroring your own internal universe, just as you do theirs.

It was like looking in a mirror. The same flickering hope in Loo, the same desperate need to be loved, was right here in Marshall's mother. And it was in Principal Gunderson, clutching Lily's waist in that old prom photo. And it was Agnes, pressing her feet into the stirrups, listening for her child's cry. And it was in Hawley, mourning with his scraps of paper in the bathroom. Their hearts were all cycling through the same madness—the discovery, the bliss, the loss, the despair—like planets taking turns in orbit around the sun. Each containing their own unique gravity. Their own force of attraction. Drawing near and holding fast to whatever entered their own atmosphere. Even Loo, penning her thousands of names way out at the edge of the universe, felt better knowing others were traveling this same elliptical course, that they would sometimes cross paths, that they would find love and lose love and recover from love and love again—because, if they were all going in circles, and Loo was Pluto, then every 248 years even she would have the chance to be closer to the sun.

If you leave the homeless to wander without shelter, will you be able to meet your own eyes in the mirror without shame? If you do what’s easy, instead of what’s right, will you ever hold your head up again when your spouse speaks your name? If you turn your backs while children starve in your fields, can you ever again touch your own child’s face without agony?

Gathering her bags, Alani started around the side of her house to the front door. She drew up short at the sight of Jackson sprawled on her porch steps, a cowboy hat on his head, mirrored sunglasses hiding his eyes. He didn’t move, and neither did she. He had an utterly relaxed look about him. But then, Jackson had perfected a deceptively indolent pose that hid razor-sharp reflexes and phenomenal speed. Last night, all night, he’d been far from indolent. Breathing fast, Alani studied him. His continued stillness suggested sleep. Even when she inched closer, he didn’t move. He was now clean-shaven. A white T-shirt was pulled across his wide chest and shoulders, and hung looser around his taut abs. Awareness stiffened her knees. Memories of touching his body, tasting hit hot flesh, sent a tide of sensation through her veins. She swallowed audibly—and stared some more. He sat with his long legs loose, one foot braced on a step, the other stretched out, his elbows back, his breathing deep and even. Alani licked her lips and started to slowly, silently retreat. “Don’t make me chase you, darlin’.” Shock snapped her shoulders back. The big faker! He’d been watching her watch him. Teeth set, Alani asked, “What are you doing here?” He gave a slow smile. “Whatever it takes . . .

He doesn’t understand why Harry is doing this to him, why Harry is trying to pull him apart. He doesn’t understand how Harry has seen past his carefully crafted display. Louis has got smoke and mirrors down to a science, he knows how to deflect and he knows how to act and he’s managed to keep people at arms length so nobody would ever question how the magic works. He’s got his relationship with Zayn and Liam down to an art, how to give enough so that he doesn’t have to lie to them, but able to keep them from knowing how close he is to the edge. Yet here is Harry, ready to unravel everything Louis has sewn together.

The early bats are tying the air, the heart, into knots. They fly on the wings of grief. The late butterfly follows them over the edge of the cliff where the earth becomes the air we turn into. It’s called mirror vision when we see what isn’t here. The kind of faith that fails at unexpected moments the way a climber reaches for a hold that will never in his life, be there. It’s called despair when we open the door of a heart that no longer exists.

Lucian attempted a wan smile, although he did not open his eyes. “You are the miracle my brother has named you in his thoughts.” “Has he named me a miracle?” Even her voice was soothing and tranquil to Gabriel’s ears. He wanted to touch her, bask forever in her beauty, in her serenity. After the chaos of a bleak, gray world filled with violence, she was a miracle. “Yes, and for once, he was right.” There was an edge of weariness to the beautiful pitch of Lucian’s voice and it alarmed Gabriel. He had never heard his invincible twin sound so utterly drained of strength. “I am right at all times,” Gabriel corrected, moving at once to his brother’s side. “It is a peculiar phenomenon Lucian finds difficult to live with, but all the same . . .” Lucian opened his eyes to regard his brother with an icy stare clearly meant to intimidate. “Francesca, my dear sister, you have tied yourself to one who has a much inflated opinion of himself. I do not remember a time when he was right about anything.” Gabriel moved to the couch, seating himself beside his brother. “Do not listen to him, my love, he practices his intimidating stare in the mirror on a daily basis. He thinks to silence me with his glare.

There's folly in her stride that's the rumor justified by lies I've seen her up close beneath the sheets and sometime during the summer she was mine for a few sweet months in the fall and parts of December ((( To get to the heart of this unsolvable equation, one must first become familiar with the physical, emotional, and immaterial makeup as to what constitutes both war and peace. ))) I found her looking through a window the same window I'd been looking through She smiled and her eyes never faltered this folly was a crime ((( The very essence of war is destructive, though throughout the years utilized as a means of creating peace, such an equation might seem paradoxical to the untrained eye. Some might say using evil to defeat evil is counterproductive, and gives more meaning to the word “futile”. Others, like Edmund Burke, would argue that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing.” ))) She had an identity I could identify with something my fingertips could caress in the night ((( There is such a limitless landscape within the mind, no two minds are alike. And this is why as a race we will forever be at war with each other. What constitutes peace is in the mind of the beholder. ))) Have you heard the argument? This displacement of men and women and women and men the minds we all have the beliefs we all share Slipping inside of us thoughts and religions and bodies all bare ((( “Without darkness, there can be no light,” he once said. To demonstrate this theory, during one of his seminars he held a piece of white chalk and drew a line down the center of a blackboard. Explaining that without the blackness of the board, the white line would be invisible. ))) When she left she kissed with eyes open I knew this because I'd done the same Sometimes we saw eye to eye like that Very briefly, she considered an apotheosis a synthesis a rendering of her folly into solidarity ((( To believe that a world-wide lay down of arms is possible, however, is the delusion of the pacifist; the dream of the optimist; and the joke of the realist. Diplomacy only goes so far, and in spite of our efforts to fight with words- there are times when drawing swords of a very different nature are surely called for. ))) Experiencing the subsequent sunrise inhaling and drinking breaking mirrors and regurgitating just to start again all in all I was just another gash in the bark ((( Plato once said: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Perhaps the death of us all is called for in this time of emotional desperation. War is a product of the mind; only with the death of such will come the end of the bloodshed. Though this may be a fairly realistic view of such an issue, perhaps there is an optimistic outlook on the horizon. Not every sword is double edged, but every coin is double sided. ))) Leaving town and throwing shit out the window drinking boroughs and borrowing spare change I glimpsed the rear view mirror stole a glimpse really I've believed in looking back for a while it helps to have one last view a reminder in case one ever decides to rebel in the event the self regresses and makes the declaration of devastation once more ((( Thus, if we wish to eliminate the threat of war today- complete human annihilation may be called for. )))

The Wild Swans at Coole The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine and fifty swans. The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me Since I first made my count; I saw, before I had well finished, All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings. I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore. All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight, The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter tread. Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold, Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old; Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Attend upon them still. But now they drift on the still water Mysterious, beautiful; Among what rushes will they build, By what lake’s edge or pool Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day To find they have flown away

Three years after my birth, my mother swells again. When Lanka is born and brought home, Shiva and I gaze over the edge of the bassinet at this strange, alien creature and claim her as our own. We are a threesome from then on. Joined at the hip. A pyramid. A triangle.

But the person in the mirror was paralyzed and too stupid to do a thing. Then I thought maybe I ought to spill a little blood for practice, so I sat on the edge of the tub and crossed my right ankle over my left knee. Then I lifted my right hand with the razor and let it drop its own weight, like a guillotine, onto the calf of my leg. I felt nothing. Then I felt a small, deep thrill, and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash. The blood gathered darkly, like fruit, and rolled down my ankle into the cup of my black patent leather shoe.

The scars of my anorexia, perfectly hand-drawn in red, immaculately colouring one-fourth of my left arm. It had hurt like hell, but it still wasn’t as painful as the last two years of my life. The mental, excruciating pain within the depths of my brain had managed to surpass the aching pain of the pointed edge of the object I’d used on my arm. I’d thought that overshadowing the pain I already felt with a much harsher form and intensity would make the emotional pain disappear. I was wrong. The latter pain always remains stronger; that is something I realized.

Okay, what in Hades just happened? Stones don’t glow blue or any other color and they certainly don’t burn circles on you.” The stone wasn’t talking. Alexandra considered herself well grounded, yet here she stood, talking to a stone that glowed, burned circles, and refused to answer. A thread of sensation pricked at the edges of her mind, then grew stronger. It mirrored an idea then became clear. Tell no one. What? Looking from side to side, she backed against the wall. Although it felt like someone whispered in her ear, she stood there alone. The day’s trauma must have pushed her over the edge, yet the sensation persisted. Tell no one. She froze. Her eyes darted around the room. The muscles in her legs tightened as she prepared to bolt from the room. Alexandra swallowed and licked her lips. “Who would believe me anyway?” she whispered.

Faerie was divided into seasons that mirrored the mortal realm, except all four seasons coexisted here. This world wasn’t spherical like Earth. Faerie was more of a geographic map, and it was possible to fall off the edges. Though it was more likely you would be eaten before that happened.

I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spirals of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer, she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the past generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speaker’s blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver… –and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.

Where most friends would say, “Poor baby,” running friends say, “You’re being a baby.” Where most friends offer gentle encouragement, running friends talk smack. Running buddies celebrate the best, tolerate the worst, and pretend not to notice the embarrassing. They’re a vault for the secrets that we share on the trail, when we’re hungry, hot, and way too tired to be anything but 100 percent real. And when someone asks, “Would it be a horrible idea if . . . ?” the running buddy’s answer is always, “Yes. What time?” A running buddy sees your limitless potential and will happily act as a mirror until you see it, too.

It never was about the musician or the instrument - it was about the laser notes in a hall of mirrors, the music itself. It was going to change the world for the better and it has. Maybe not as fast or as much as we wanted, but it has and it still will. Whether your name is Mozart, or Django Reinhardt, or Robert Johnson, or Jimi Hendrix, or whoever is next; who you are doesn't matter so long as you can open that conduit and let the music come through. It is the burning edge, whatever it sounds like and whoever is playing it. It is the noisy, messy, silly, invincible voice of life that comes through the LP on the turn-table, the transistor radio, or the Bose in your new Lexus that makes you want to get up out of whatever you are stuck in and dance. It is Dionysus and the Maenads all over again. No one can control it and I pity whoever tries. I am old now and only a house cat sunning herself in the window - but I was a tigress once, and I remember. I still remember.

The pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along, unfolding itself in scene-pictures that succeeded each other in stately procession. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant tangled locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willow-herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset cloud, was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string-music had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here.

So what happened?" "I don't know." Another glance to ensure his continued state of Not Looking, and then I rip off my clothes in one fast swoop. I am now officially stark naked in the room with the most beautiful boy I know. Funny,but this isn't how I imagined this moment. No.Not funny.One hundred percent the exact opposite of funny. "I think I maybe,possibly, vaguely remember hitting the snooze button." I jabber to cover my mortification. "Only I guess it was the off button.But I had the alarm on my phone set,too, so I don't know what happened." Underwear,on. "Did you turn the ringer back on last night?" "What?" I hop into my jeans, a noise he seems to determinedly ignore.His ears are apple red. "You went to see a film,right? Don't you set your mobile to silent at the theater?" He's right.I'm so stupid. If I hadn't taken Meredith to A Hard Day's Night, a Beatles movie I know she loves, I would have never turned it off. We'd already be in a taxi to the airport. "The taxi!" I tug my sweater over my head and look up to find myself standing across from a mirror. A mirror St. Clair is facing. "It's all right," he says. "I told the driver to wait when I came up here. We'll just have to tip him a little extra." His head is still down. I don't think he saw anything.I clear my throat, and he glances up. Our eyes meet in the mirror,and he jumps. "God! I didn't...I mean,not until just now..." "Cool.Yeah,fine." I try to shake it off by looking away,and he does the same. His cheeks are blazing.I edge past him and rinse the white crust off my face while he throws my toothbrush and deodorant and makeup into my luggage, and then we tear downstairs and into the lobby.

An image is seen based on the light speed between the observer and the event. An image is light. Scientists theorize about sighting the edge of the universe and believe they are looking at the beginning of time. Things started moving away from each other when the Big Bang exploded 18 billion years ago. Sages theorize that this impassive distancing will end someday. Then things will reverse and start moving back towards each other. If reversal fails and contraction continues, the universe will collapse into itself, imploding into a Black Hole that can encapsulate an entire universe into a dark space the size of a fist. The size of a fist mirrors the size of a heart.

Today, Arabic numerals are in use pretty much around the world, while the words with which we name numbers naturally differ from language to language. And, as Dehaene and others have noted, these differences are far from trivial. English is cumbersome. There are special words for the numbers from 11 to 19 and for the decades from 20 to 90. This makes counting a challenge for English-speaking children, who are prone to such errors as “twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty-eleven.” French is just as bad, with vestigial base-twenty monstrosities, like quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (four twenty ten nine) for 99. Chinese, by contrast, is simplicity itself; its number syntax perfectly mirrors the base-ten form of Arabic numerals, with a minimum of terms. Consequently, the average Chinese four-year-old can count up to forty, whereas American children of the same age struggle to get to fifteen. And the advantages extend to adults. Because Chinese number words are so brief—they take less than a quarter of a second to say, on average, compared with a third of a second for English—the average Chinese speaker has a memory span of nine digits, versus seven digits for English speakers. (Speakers of the marvelously efficient Cantonese dialect, common in Hong Kong, can juggle ten digits in active memory.)

He had a swift and utterly lucid vision of himself in this position in thirty-odd years. Loathsome tea, hot steam, silver spoon, and fifty-year-old Chloe seated opposite him talking about clothing, because to her it was categorically, absolutely, the most fascinating topic on the planet. Besides, of course, herself. For an unflinching instant, Armand wished with his whole heart that he were dead. Then, at the very edge of his perception, something changed. He glanced up. She was passing by the doorway, walking with that fluid, nearly animal grace that no one else seemed to capture or even notice. He was given four steps of her. One: She moved from the hallway shadows into the light cast from the parlor. He saw her illuminated, drab colors gone bright; her skin alabaster, reflective; her hair tinted pink and gold and pink again. Two: Her gaze met his, finding him past all the other people crowded inside the stuffy mirrored room, dying by inches and taking their tea. Three: He was paralyzed. He couldn’t move, couldn’t smile, couldn’t nod. He was pinned in the gray of her eyes, a prisoner to their piercing clarity. For an unflinching instant, Armand felt his heart explode like a firework, and the future seemed unwritten. Then four: Eleanore looked away and passed the doorway. He was stuck with tea and dresses once more.

In the rearview mirror, they saw the young officer stumble out of the precinct just in time to see them speed away. "A little slower on the turns, Alfred," Bruce managed to say as they screeched around a corner and bolted into a freeway tunnel. Alfred chuckled. He still had his hospital band wrapped around his wrist. "WayneTech cars aren't made for slow turns, Master Wayne." "And you wonder where I get it from." Bruce felt as if his stomach could touch his spine. Even in his Aston Martin, he'd never been able to drive the way Alfred was now. "I used to be in the Royal Air Force, Master Wayne," Alfred answered in a dry tone. "At least I have an excuse. Just because one can doesn't mean one should. I expect you not to use this against me the next time you go for a joyride." "I'll try not to," Bruce managed to reply as he clutched the edges of his seat. In the back seat, Harvey looked green.

It ascended by levels: Da's cameo recessed against the glow of the tuner's parade,the drawer of utensils withdrawn past its fulcrum, the disembodied face of my brother miming and distorting my desperate attempt by expression alone to make Mum look up from me and see him, I no longer feeling my features' movements so much as seeing them on that writhing white face against the pantry's black, the throttle-popped eyes and cheeks ballooning against the gag's restraint, Mum squatting chairside to even my ears, my face before us bother farther and farther from my own control as I saw in his twin face what all lolly-smeared hand-held brats must see in the fun-house mirror- the gross and pitiless sameness, the distortion in which there is, tiny, at the center, something cruelly true about the we who leer and woggle at stick necks and and concave skulls, goggling eyes that swell to the edges- as the mimicry ascended reflected levels to become finally the burlesque of a wet hysteria that plastered cut strands to a wet white brow, the strangled man's sobs blocked by cloth, storm's thrum and electric hiss and Da's mutter against the lalation of shears meant for lambs, an unseen fit that sent my eyes upward again and again into their own shocked white, knowing past sight that my twin's face would show the same, to mock it- until the last refuge was slackness, giving up the ghost completely for a blank sack gagged mask's mindless stare-un seen and seeing- into a mirror I could not know or feel myself without. No not ever again.

Oh,” says Charmaine. She must not sound eager. “What sort of job?” “Working with me,” says Ed. “As my personal assistant. That way, I can keep an eye on you. Make sure you’re not overstrained.” You don’t fool me, thinks Charmaine. “Oh, well, I’m not sure…That sounds…,” she says as if wavering. “No need to discuss it now,” he says. “We have lots of time to do that later. Now eat up, like a good girl.” That’s the role he’s chosen for her: good girl. She feels a sudden wave of longing for Max. Bad girl was what she was for him. Bad, and deserving of punishment. She leans forward to cut up a potato, and Ed leans forward too. She knows exactly what the view is from his vantage point: she’s rehearsed the angles in the mirror. A curve of breast, with an edging of black lace. Is he sweating? Yes, make that a definite. Is that his knee, giving her own knee the gentlest of nudges under the table? Yes, it is: she knows a knee under the table when she feels one. She moves her own knee away. “There,” she says. “I’m eating. I’m being good.

He remembered the time hi fished the female of a pair of swordfish. The male always lets the female eat first, and she, by biting the hook, struggled in a wild, desperate and panicky battle that soon exhausted her. All the time the male stayed with her, crossing the line and circling her partner on the surface. He was so close that the old man had been afraid that he would cut the rope with his tail, which was sharpened like a scythe and almost of that shape and size. The old man put the hook in, hit her, caught the sword, edge like sandpaper and pounded on the tip of the head until her color became almost like the back of a mirror, and then, with the boy's help, lifted her up to put her on board. The male stayed on the side of the boat. Later, when the old man cleaned the strings and prepared the harpoon, the male jumped very high in the air, next to the boat, to see where his partner where, and finally he plunged into the deepest, with blue-reddish wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and with all stripes of the same color in sight. "He was beautiful," recalled the old man, "and he stayed until the end.

A demon seduced an angel in the middle of the night and they gave the stars a glimpse. There was nothing casual about it, it was tender skin and battle scars breathless passion under storm clouds a rapid river stream mirroring the moon light. Until one day, he left her with nothing, just a bruised heart and carved memories iridescent wings chipped on the edges heat under her skin, like an ember burning low. I asked her, "What do you do after a love like that?" She laughed. And madness danced behind her eyes. But she flew so high the world was jealous.

Julius explained that the palace rooms where they stood were called Wunderkammers, or wonder rooms. Souvenirs of nature, of travels across continents and seas; jewels and skulls. A show of wealth, intellect, power. The first room had rose-colored glass walls, with rubies and garnets and bloodred drapes of damask. Bowls of blush quartz; semiprecious stone roses running the spectrum of red down to pink, a hard, glittering garden. The vaulted ceiling, a feature of all the ten rooms Julius and Cymbeline visited, was a trompe l'oeil of a rosy sky at down, golden light edging the morning clouds. The next room was of sapphire and sea and sky; lapis lazuli, turquoise and gold and silver. A silver mermaid lounged on the edge of a lapis lazuli bowl fashioned in the shape of an ocean. Venus stood aloft on the waves draped in pearls. There were gold fish and diamond fish and faceted sterling silver starfish. Silvered mirrors edged in silvered mirror. There were opals and aquamarines and tanzanite and amethyst. Seaweed bloomed in shades of blue-green marble. The ceiling was a dome of endless, pale blue. A jungle room of mica and marble followed, with its rain forest of cats made from tiger's-eye, yellow topaz birds, tortoiseshell giraffes with stubby horns of spun gold. Carved clouds of smoky quartz hovered over a herd of obsidian and ivory zebras. Javelinas of spotted pony hide charged tiny, life-sized dik-diks with velvet hides, and dazzling diamond antlers mingled with miniature stuffed sable minks. Agate columns painted a medley of dark greens were strung with faceted ropes of green gold. A room of ivory: bone, teeth, skulls, and velvet. A room crowded with columns all sheathed in mirrors, reflecting world maps and globes and atlases inlaid with silver, platinum, and white gold; the rubies and diamonds that were sometimes set to mark the location of a city or a town of conquest resembled blood and tears. A room dominated by a fireplace large enough to hold several people, upholstered in velvets and silks the colors of flame. Snakes of gold with orange sapphire and yellow topaz eyes coiled around the room's columns. Statues of smiling black men in turbans offering trays of every gem imaginable-emerald, sapphire, ruby, topaz, diamond-stood at the entrance to a room upholstered in pistachio velvet, accented with malachite, called the Green Vault. Peridot wood nymphs attended to a Diana carved from a single pure crystal of quartz studded with tiny tourmalines. Jade tables, and jade lanterns. The royal jewels, blinding in their sparkling excess: crowns, tiaras, coronets, diadems, heavy ceremonial necklaces, rings, and bracelets that could span a forearm, surrounding the world's largest and most perfect green diamond. Above it all was a night sky of painted stars, with inlaid cut crystal set in a serious of constellations.

He remembered the time he had hooked one of a pair of marlin. The male fish always let the female fish feed first and the hooked fish, the female, made a wild, panic-stricken, despairing fight that soon exhausted her, and all the time the male had stayed with her, crossing the line and circling with her on the surface. He had stayed so close that the old man was afraid he would cut the line with his tail which was sharp as a scythe and almost of that size and shape. When the old man had gaffed her and clubbed her, holding the rapier bill with its sandpaper edge and clubbing her across the top of her head until her colour turned to a colour almost like the backing of mirrors, and then, with the boy's aid, hoisted her aboard, the male fish had stayed by the side of the boat. Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed. That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought.

There are many well-known arguments for why the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis was different. It was higher tech. Death came faster. It was industrial in its scale. All true. But it’s also true that every holocaust is different. Every genocide has its own particular characteristics, and every hated group is hated in its own special way. By sheer numbers of dead, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas surpasses all others. In terms of modern technologies, the transatlantic trade in kidnapped and enslaved Africans, and the plantations the trade served in the antebellum South and the Caribbean, were highly modern for their times. So cutting-edge, scholars have shown, that the systems developed to transport, insure, depreciate, track, control, and extract maximum wealth from this coerced labor shaped many aspects of modern accounting and human resources management. And as Rinaldo Walcott, a scholar of race and gender, writes in his manifesto On Property, “The ideas forged in the plantation economy continue to shape our social relations.” Among those social relations are modern policing, mass surveillance, and mass incarceration. On what else does the claim to exceptionalism rest?

Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley - for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, "planned" communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird's talons, taking your breath away. 'The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,' Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth. ("Family")

Okay.First things first. Three things you don't want me to know about you." "What?" I gaped at him. "You're the one who says we don't know each other.So let's cut to the chase." Oh,but this was too easy: 1. I am wearing my oldest, ugliest underwear. 2.I think your girlfriend is evil and should be destroyed. 3.I am a lying, larcenous creature who talks to dead people and thinks she should be your girlfriend once the aforementioned one is out of the picture. I figured that was just about everything. "I don't think so-" "Doesn't have to be embarrassing or major," Alex interrupted me, "but it has to be something that costs a little to share." When I opened my mouth to object again, he pointed a long finger at the center of my chest. "You opened the box,Pandora.So sit." There was a funny-shaped velour chair near my knees. I sat. The chair promptly molded itself to my butt. I assumed that meant it was expensive, and not dangerous. Alex flopped onto the bed,settling on his side with his elbow bent and his head propped on his hand. "Can't you go first?" I asked. "You opened the box..." "Okay,okay. I'm thinking." He gave me about thirty seconds. Then, "Time." I took a breath. "I'm on full scholarship to Willing." One thing Truth or Dare has taught me is that you can't be too proud and still expect to get anything valuable out of the process. "Next." "I'm terrified of a lot things, including lightning, driving a stick shift, and swimming in the ocean." His expression didn't change at all. He just took in my answers. "Last one." "I am not telling you about my underwear," I muttered. He laughed. "I am sorry to hear that. Not even the color?" I wanted to scowl. I couldn't. "No.But I will tell you that I like anchovies on my pizza." "That's supposed to be consolation for withholding lingeries info?" "Not my concern.But you tell me-is it something you would broadcast around the lunchroom?" "Probably not," he agreed. "Didn't think so." I settled back more deeply into my chair. It didn't escape my notice that, yet again, I was feeling very relaxed around this boy. Yet again, it didn't make me especially happy. "Your turn." I thought about my promise to Frankie. I quietly hoped Alex would tell me something to make me like him even a little less. He was ready. "I cried so much during my first time at camp that my parents had to come get me four days early." I never went to camp. It always seemed a little bit idyllic to me. "How old were you?" "Six.Why?" "Why?" I imagined a very small Alex in a Spider-Man shirt, cuddling the threadbare bunny now sitting on the shelf over his computer. I sighed. "Oh,no reason. Next." "I hated Titanic, The Notebook, and Twilight." "What did you think of Ten Things I Hate About You?" "Hey," he snapped. "I didn't ask questions during your turn." "No,you didn't," I agreed pleasantly. "Anser,please." "Fine.I liked Ten Things. Satisfied?" No,actually. "Alex," I said sadly, "either you are mind-bogglingly clueless about what I wouldn't want to know, or your next revelation is going to be that you have an unpleasant reaction to kryptonite." He was looking at me like I'd spoken Swahili. "What are you talking about?" Just call me Lois. I shook my head. "Never mind. Carry on." "I have been known to dance in front of the mirror-" he cringed a little- "to 'Thriller.'" And there it was. Alex now knew that I was a penniless coward with a penchant for stinky fish.I knew he was officially adorable. He pushed himself up off his elbow and swung his legs around until he was sitting on the edge of the bed. "And on that humiliating note, I will now make you translate bathroom words into French." He picked up a sheaf of papers from the floor. "I have these worksheets. They're great for the irregular verbs...

to be happy This requires a round mirror and a photograph of yourself taken in happier times. The photograph should include no one but yourself. Prop the mirror so that it stands straight on its edge. Next, place the picture on a nearby table, the wall, a chair, or on some other object. The picture should be reflected within the mirror. Allow the mirror to reflect the photograph for at least three minutes. During this time, recall those happier days. Immerse yourself in them. Don’t allow your concentration to waver and melt into a sea of tears concerning your current state; keep your mind firmly fixed on those happier days. Now, sit within the mirror’s reflection, i.e., between the mirror and the picture. Stay there until your sadness truly blossoms into happiness. Repeat as needed.

Now bound by the sudden rush of emotion that reverberates through me as I remain intent on awakening Nadia, I push my fingertips upward over her neck as if pushing a coin from the edge of heaven, waiting to catch where it falls as if I were in all places at once. I then gently attack her pressure points from every side, leaving Nadia completely vulnerable to my wanting her. Nadia now hastens my love as I reveal to her my gentle ways that excite and nourish her every capacity in all mind, body, and soul. I take to her exaggerated lines that press firmly against me with a wet friction that builds between the cold and the heat, tasting and smelling her sweet body that warms my heart to its core. I allow my mind to speak through my gaze as I look into Nadia’s rich brunneous eyes where hints of sable shimmer across the reflection that mirrors her heart.

The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.

The room was two-tiered, its marble balconies filled with rams and water nymphs in fancy dress; a kaleidoscope of colours swayed in time to the beat of hypnotic music. A concerto of absent musicians, it played only in her mind. The numerous chandeliers with sculptured metal frames hung down from chains, with endless fireflies attached. At the far end stretched a grand staircase, dressed with a plush velvet carpet in deep cerise, and ceiling paintings edged with gold embossed dado rails clung to the walls. Then Eve honed in on herself and saw that she wore a crushed white taffeta A-line gown that fit her trim figure like a glove. Her butterfly mask with floral patterns embroidered in red and gold silk sat against her pale skin, her reflection like that of a porcelain doll. A matching shawl rested softly on her shoulders. Everything was so beautiful that she almost totally lost herself in the mirror’s reflection." (little snippet from our book)

You are the lifemate of a senstive, modern male. Julian's lazy amusement warmed her further, confirming what she already suspected, that he often stayed a shadow in her mind. How fortunate for me. Desari smiled at herself in the mirror. Her dark hair cascaded in waves down her back. There was a sparkle in her eyes. She knew Julian had made her feel more alive than she had ever been. Sensitive, modern men are so to my liking. Men? I am certain I did not hear my lifemate use the word men.The plural.No man is allowed to be to your liking other than myself. He sounded stern, the fierce Carpathian male at his most menacing. Desari laughed aloud. I suppose I can see your point, Julian, but really, it is so difficult to keep from noticing all of those handsome hunks in the audience. Handsome hunks? His voice dropped low with the affront. They are more like lovesick fops. If they could feel the vibrations in the air, they would show sense and run for their lives. It is bad enough to read their fantasies and hear them talk their trash, cara,but it is altogether worse to hear that my woman is looking back. One smile at the wrong man, lifemate, and trouble will find the man quickly. You sound jealous,she accused him, amusement curving her soft mouth. The first rule for all women to know and never forget is that Carpathian makes do not share their lifemates. Your brother has much to answer for that this was not drilled into you since birth.It was his job to prepare you for my coming. It was said somewhere between jest and complaint. Desari drew in her breath sharply, finding herself wavering between laughter and exasperation. My brother had no idea of your existence, you arrogant male. Besides, how could he possibly prepare me for your total ignorance of women? More likely, had he known you were coming to speak your ritual words, he would have been waiting to ambush you.I myself would have burrowed deep within the ground until you passed beyond my surroundings. You would have burst from the ground staight into my arms,cara mia, and you know this to be true. Now he was laughing, that smug, taunting, male amusement that should have set her teeth on edge but instead made her laugh. I think you are trying to find something to dictate to me about just so you do not lose your ability. Go away and practice this male art form on someone else. You will be singing to me tonight, piccola,and to no other man. You are a spoiled little boy,not a grown man. Should I come show you what a grown man I am? His voice was suddenly low and warm, so sexy she felt a rush of answering heat. She could feel the brush of his fingers against her throat, trailing down the valley between her suddenly aching breasts. Go away,Julian, she laughed in answer. I cannot have you getting me hot and bothered just now. As long as I know you re hot and bothered for me, I will do as you request and go back to work. I can only hope.

— and then you’re in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it’s the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it’s you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool-and Substance-crusted T-shirt you’ve both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest’s center and center-less eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you’ve been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that It’s your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It’s gotten you into is undeniable and you still can’t stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can’t stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around. You are at a fork in the road that Boston AA calls your Bottom, though the term is misleading, because everybody here agrees it’s more like someplace very high and unsupported: you’re on the edge of something tall and leaning way out forward….

I Never Told You You can fill a book with everything I never said Or the lines of a poem Or an Empty pool Or an empty bedroom, the candles all blown out I never told you how the reflection of myself in your eyes Was the only mirror I could bear to look at Or how I fought every day To transfuse the girl I saw there with the girl I am I tried to breathe in the words you made me: beautiful good brave I tried to be them for you even though they were weighted with impossibility I never told you how I always feared the rough edges of myself were too sharp for you and how I fought everyday to blunt them To bring down the walls To let you in without cutting you because I could never bear to hurt you like the others did Every day a fierce pride roared in me I was so lucky to know the truth I was the beneficiary of your radiance I basked in it and felt special And if not for the pain of your solitude I would have been content to be the only one I never told you How your touch made me feel like laughing and crying and singing all at once How your hand passing over my skin where atrocities Had not yet sloughed off, Skin cells remembering the worst touches Was like a tide washing over the ruddy sand And leaving it whole and smooth You made my skin forget Gave me new memories New sensations that didn't drag the shadows from the past In your arms I could start again, Start over. There is no greater gift in all the world Than you to the wreckage that is me... I never told you How I longed to kiss away your every bruise until there was no evidence No ghosts of your own suffering To put your pieces back together Seal the cracks Vanish them like they never were And never, ever Leave a scar I never told you I would take your pain if I could I would drink it down And take my comfort In making you ache a little less For a little while Did I? I'll never know because I never told you that I loved you I love you I love you It's too lat to say it now The time has passed for words How pathetic and small and weak On the phone Or on a piece of paper Starving Without the force of my own vitality My voice My breath My blood singing n my veins for you To give them power They are lost I love you It's too late but I love you And I'm sorry I never told you.

I brushed my teeth like a crazed lunatic as I examined myself in the mirror. Why couldn’t I look the women in commercials who wake up in a bed with ironed sheets and a dewy complexion with their hair perfectly tousled? I wasn’t fit for human eyes, let alone the piercing eyes of the sexy, magnetic Marlboro Man, who by now was walking up the stairs to my bedroom. I could hear the clomping of his boots. The boots were in my bedroom by now, and so was the gravelly voice attached to them. “Hey,” I heard him say. I patted an ice-cold washcloth on my face and said ten Hail Marys, incredulous that I would yet again find myself trapped in the prison of a bathroom with Marlboro Man, my cowboy love, on the other side of the door. What in the world was he doing there? Didn’t he have some cows to wrangle? Some fence to fix? It was broad daylight; didn’t he have a ranch to run? I needed to speak to him about his work ethic. “Oh, hello,” I responded through the door, ransacking the hamper in my bathroom for something, anything better than the sacrilege that adorned my body. Didn’t I have any respect for myself? I heard Marlboro Man laugh quietly. “What’re you doing in there?” I found my favorite pair of faded, soft jeans. “Hiding,” I replied, stepping into them and buttoning the waist. “Well, c’mere,” he said softly. My jeans were damp from sitting in the hamper next to a wet washcloth for two days, and the best top I could find was a cardinal and gold FIGHT ON! T-shirt from my ‘SC days. It wasn’t dingy, and it didn’t smell. That was the best I could do at the time. Oh, how far I’d fallen from the black heels and glitz of Los Angeles. Accepting defeat, I shrugged and swung open the door. He was standing there, smiling. His impish grin jumped out and grabbed me, as it always did. “Well, good morning!” he said, wrapping his arms around my waist. His lips settled on my neck. I was glad I’d spritzed myself with Giorgio. “Good morning,” I whispered back, a slight edge to my voice. Equal parts embarrassed at my puffy eyes and at the fact that I’d slept so late that day, I kept hugging him tightly, hoping against hope he’d never let go and never back up enough to get a good, long look at me. Maybe if we just stood there for fifty years or so, wrinkles would eventually shield my puffiness. “So,” Marlboro Man said. “What have you been doing all day?” I hesitated for a moment, then launched into a full-scale monologue. “Well, of course I had my usual twenty-mile run, then I went on a hike and then I read The Iliad. Twice. You don’t even want to know the rest. It’ll make you tired just hearing about it.” “Uh-huh,” he said, his blue-green eyes fixed on mine. I melted in his arms once again. It happened any time, every time, he held me. He kissed me, despite my gold FIGHT ON! T-shirt. My eyes were closed, and I was in a black hole, a vortex of romance, existing in something other than a human body. I floated on vapors. Marlboro Man whispered in my ear, “So…,” and his grip around my waist tightened. And then, in an instant, I plunged back to earth, back to my bedroom, and landed with a loud thud on the floor. “R-R-R-R-Ree?” A thundering voice entered the room. It was my brother Mike. And he was barreling toward Marlboro Man and me, his arms outstretched. “Hey!” Mike yelled. “W-w-w-what are you guys doin’?” And before either of us knew it, Mike’s arms were around us both, holding us in a great big bear hug. “Well, hi, Mike,” Marlboro Man said, clearly trying to reconcile the fact that my adult brother had his arms around him. It wasn’t awkward for me; it was just annoying. Mike had interrupted our moment. He was always doing that.

her room now?” They were led down the hall by Beth. Before she turned away she took a last drag on her smoke and said, “However this comes out, there is no way my baby would have had anything to do with something like this, drawing of this asshole or not. No way. Do you hear me? Both of you?” “Loud and clear,” said Decker. But he thought if Debbie were involved she had already paid the ultimate price anyway. The state couldn’t exactly kill her again. Beth casually flicked the cigarette down the hall, where it sparked and then died out on the faded runner. Then she walked off. They opened the door and went into Debbie’s room. Decker stood in the middle of the tiny space and looked around. Lancaster said, “We’ll have the tech guys go through her online stuff. Photos on her phone, her laptop over there, the cloud, whatever. Instagram. Twitter. Facebook. Tumblr. Wherever else the kids do their electronic preening. Keeps changing. But our guys will know where to look.” Decker didn’t answer her. He just kept looking around, taking the room in, fitting things in little niches in his memory and then pulling them back out if something didn’t seem right as weighed against something else. “I just see a typical teenage girl’s room. But what do you see?” asked Lancaster finally. He didn’t look at her but said, “Same things you’re seeing. Give me a minute.” Decker walked around the small space, looked under piles of papers, in the young woman’s closet, knelt down to see under her bed, scrutinized the wall art that hung everywhere, including a whole section of People magazine covers. She also had chalkboard squares affixed to one wall. On them was a musical score and short snatches of poetry and personal messages to herself: Deb, Wake up each day with something to prove. “Pretty busy room,” noted Lancaster, who had perched on the edge of the girl’s desk. “We’ll have forensics come and bag it all.” She looked at Decker, obviously waiting for him to react to this, but instead he walked out of the room. “Decker!” “I’ll be back,” he called over his shoulder. She watched him go and then muttered, “Of all the partners I could have had, I got Rain Man, only giant size.” She pulled a stick of gum out of her bag, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth. Over the next several minutes she strolled the room and then came to the mirror on the back of the closet door. She appraised her appearance and ended it with the resigned sigh of a person who knows their best days physically are well in the past. She automatically reached for her smokes but then decided against it. Debbie’s room could be part of a criminal investigation. Her ash and smoke could only taint that investigation.

The calf is capable of walking quite well now," Dazu said. "He never stumbles." "But I told you to carry him back here," the teacher said. "The first thing a soldier must learn is to obey orders." Every day, the calf grew a little heavier, and every day, Dazu had to struggle a little harder. He would collapse, exhausted, when he finally got to the ranch, and the calf would bound out of his arms, glad to be able to walk on his own and stretch out. When winter rolled around again, Médo handed him a wooden sword and asked him to strike as hard as he could at the practice dummy. Dazu looked with distaste at the crude weapon with no edge, but he swung obediently. The wooden dummy fell in half, cut clean through. He looked at the sword in his hand with wonder. "It's not the sword," his teacher said. "Have you looked at yourself lately?" He brought Dazu to stand in front of a brightly polished shield. The young man could hardly recognize the reflection. His shoulders filled the frame of the mirror. His arms and thighs were twice as thick as he remembered, and his chest bulged over his narrow waist. "A great warrior trusts not his weapons, but himself. When you possess true strength, you can deal a killing blow even if all you have is a blade of grass. "Now you're finally ready to learn from me. But first, go thank the calf for making you strong.

From Tomorrow to Yesterday The tree trunks move in time with the rhythm of her rubber soles on the wet path, where the air is still cool after the night rain. The woodland floor is white with anemones; in one place, growing close to the roots of an ancient tree, they make her think of an old, wrinkled hand. She could go on and on without getting tired, without meeting anyone or thinking of anything in particular, and without coming to the edge of the woods. As if the town did not begin just behind the trees, the leafy suburb with its peaceful roads and its houses hidden behind close-trimmed hedges. She doesn't want to think about anything, and almost succeeds; her body is no more than a porous, pulsating machine. The sun breaks through the clouds as she runs back, its light diffused on the gravel drive and the magnolia in front of the kitchen window. His car is no longer parked beside hers, he must have left while she was in the woods. He hadn't stirred when she rose, and she'd already been in bed when he came home late last night. She lay with her back turned, eyes closed, as he undressed, taking care not to wake her. She leans against one of the pillars of the garage and stretches, before emptying the mailbox and letting herself into the house. She puts the mail on the kitchen table. The little light on the coffeemaker is on; she switches it off. Not so long ago, she would have felt a stab of irritation or a touch of tenderness, depending on her mood. He always forgets to turn off that machine. She puts the kettle on, sprinkles tea leaves into the pot, and goes over to the kitchen window. She observes the magnolia blossoms, already starting to open. They'll have to talk about it, of course, but neither of them seems able to find the right words, the right moment. She pauses on her way through the sitting room. She stands amid her furniture looking out over the lawn and the pond at the end of the garden. The canopies of the trees are dimly reflected in the shining water. She goes into the bathroom. The shower door is still spotted with little drops. As time went on they have come to make contact during the day only briefly, like passing strangers. But that's the way it has been since the children left home, nothing unusual in that. She takes off her clothes and stands in front of the mirror where a little while ago he stood shaving. She greets her reflection with a wry smile. She has never been able to view herself in a mirror without this moue, as if demonstrating a certain guardedness about what she sees. The dark green eyes and wavy black hair, the angularity of her features. She dyes her hair exactly the color it would have been if she hadn't begun to go gray in her thirties, but that's her only protest against age.

Years ago, he shaved off his beard, without telling her, just appeared at the breakfast table one morning with half his face missing, or so it seemed to her in the first, shocked moment of seeing him. If she had met him in the street she would not have recognised him, except for his eyes. How strange he looked, grotesque, almost, with those indecently naked cheeks and the chin flat and square like the blunt edge of a stone axe. It was as if the top part of his head had been taken off and carved and trimmed and jammed down into the scooped-out jaws of a stranger. She almost wept, but he went on eating his toast as if nothing had happened. He had bought a cut-throat razor with an ivory handle, an antique thing from the last century; he showed it to her in its black velvet box lined with scarlet satin. She could not look at it without a shiver. He liked to show off his skill with it, and would leave the bathroom door open so she could admire the deft way he wielded the dangerous, gleaming thing, holding it at an elegant angle between fingertips and thumb, his little finger fastidiously crooked, and sweeping the blade raspingly through the snow-like foam. Harsh light above the bath and the steely shine of the mirror and one dark, humorously cocked eye glancing at her sideways from the glass. Where is it now, she wonders, that razor? In a week or two he got tired of using it and let his beard grow back.

Can I ask you something?" Jamie reaches his hand across his chest and scratches his neck. When I nod, he asks, "What do you see when you look at pictures of yourself?" I swallow. Someone who looks too Asian to be pretty. Because being Asian means I can never be as pretty as the other girls at school—the girls like Mom. I know this because people like Henry and Adam and Mom keep telling me I don't have the right face. I know this because when I look in the mirror, I see what they see—a girl who doesn't belong here. A girl who isn't good enough. But I can't tell him that—he wouldn't understand. "Okay. Well, what do you wish you saw?" He tries again when I remain quiet for so long. Someone with bigger eyes. Lighter hair. A smaller nose. "Someone who looks more like everyone else," I say at last. Jamie runs his thumbs over the edge of his camera. "Do you know how many people would love to have your face? Yeah, you don't look like everyone else in town, but that's special. You stand out because you're unique, and people literally never stop trying to be unique." I twist my mouth. "But I don't want to stand out—not at all. I want to be normal. I want to feel like I belong in the same world as everyone else." If I looked like everyone else, it would probably be easier to make friends. I might even have a mom who cared. That last part really stings. "You might feel that way now, but it isn't like that forever. Wait until you see what the world has to offer besides that small town and your high school. People are different out there.

Quote from "The Dish Keepers of Honest House" ....TO TWIST THE COLD is easy when its only water you want. Tapping of the toothbrush echoes into Ella's mind like footsteps clacking a cobbled street on a bitter, dry, cold morning. Her mind pushes through sleep her body craves. It catches her head falling into a warm, soft pillow. "Go back to bed," she tells herself. "You're still asleep," Ella mumbles, pushes the blanket off, and sits up. The urgency to move persuades her to keep routines. Water from the faucet runs through paste foam like a miniature waterfall. Ella rubs sleep-deprieved eyes, then the bridge of her nose and glances into the sink. Ella's eyes astutely fixate for one, brief millisecond. Water becomes the burgundy of soldiers exiting the drain. Her mouth drops in shock. The flow turns green. It is like the bubbling fungus of flockless, fishless, stagnating ponds. Within the iridescent glimmer of her thinking -- like a brain losing blood flow, Ella's focus is the flickering flashing of gray, white dust, coal-black shadows and crows lifting from the ground. A half minute or two trails off before her mind returns to reality. Ella grasps a toothbrush between thumb and index finger. She rests the outer palm against the sink's edge, breathes in and then exhales. Tension in the brow subsides, and her chest and shoulders drop; she sighs. Ella stares at pasty foam. It exits the drain as if in a race to clear the sink of negativity -- of all germs, slimy spit, the burgundy of imagined soldiers and oppressive plaque. GRASPING THE SILKY STRAND between her fingers, Ella tucks, pulls and slides the floss gently through her teeth. Her breath is an inch or so of the mirror. Inspections leave her demeanor more alert. Clouding steam of the image tugs her conscience. She gazes into silver glass. Bits of hair loosen from the bun piled at her head's posterior. What transforms is what she imagines. The mirror becomes a window. The window possesses her Soul and Spirit. These two become concerned -- much like they did when dishonest housekeepers disrupted Ella's world in another story. Before her is a glorious bird -- shining-dark-as-coal, shimmering in hues of purple-black and black-greens. It is likened unto The Raven in Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem of 1845. Instead of interrupting a cold December night with tapping on a chamber door, it rests its claws in the decorative, carved handle of a backrest on a stiff dining chair. It projects an air of humor and concern. It moves its head to and fro while seeking a clearer understanding. Ella studies the bird. It is surrounded in lofty bends and stretches of leafless, acorn-less, nearly lifeless, oak trees. Like fingers and arms these branches reach below. [Perhaps they are reaching for us? Rest assured; if they had designs on us, I would be someplace else, writing about something more pleasant and less frightening. Of course, you would be asleep.] Balanced in the branches is a chair. It is from Ella's childhood home. The chair sways. Ella imagines modern-day pilgrims of a distant shore. Each step is as if Mother Nature will position them upright like dolls, blown from the stability of their plastic, flat, toe-less feet. These pilgrims take fate by the hand. LIFTING A TOWEL and patting her mouth and hands, Ella pulls the towel through the rack. She walks to the bedroom, sits and picks up the newspaper. Thumbing through pages that leave fingertips black, she reads headlines: "Former Dentist Guilty of Health Care Fraud." She flips the page, pinches the tip of her nose and brushes the edge of her chin -- smearing both with ink. In the middle fold directly affront her eyes is another headline: "Dentist Punished for Misconduct." She turns the page. There is yet another: "Dentist guilty of urinating in surgery sink and using contaminated dental instruments on patients." This world contains those who are simply insane! Every profession has those who stray from goals....

My father had a sister, Mady, who had married badly and ‘ruined her life.’ Her story was a classic. She had fallen in love before the war with an American adventurer, married him against her family’s wishes, and been disinherited by my grandfather. Mady followed her husband romantically across the sea. In America he promptly abandoned her. By the time my parents arrived in America Mady was already a broken woman, sick and prematurely old, living a life two steps removed from destitution. My father, of course, immediately put her on an allowance and made her welcome in his home. But the iron laws of Victorian transgression had been set in motion and it was really all over for Mady. You know what it meant for a woman to have been so disgraced and disinherited in those years? She had the mark of Cain on her. She would live, barely tolerated, on the edge of respectable society for the rest of her life. A year after we arrived in America, I was eleven years old, a cousin of mine was married out of our house. We lived then in a lovely brownstone on New York’s Upper West Side. The entire house had been cleaned and decorated for the wedding. Everything sparkled and shone, from the basement kitchen to the third-floor bedrooms. In a small room on the second floor the women gathered around the bride, preening, fixing their dresses, distributing bouquets of flowers. I was allowed to be there because I was only a child. There was a bunch of long-stemmed roses lying on the bed, blood-red and beautiful, each rose perfection. Mady walked over to them. I remember the other women were wearing magnificent dresses, embroidered and bejeweled. Mady was wearing only a simple white satin blouse and a long black skirt with no ornamentation whatever. She picked up one of the roses, sniffed deeply at it, held it against her face. Then she walked over to a mirror and held the rose against her white blouse. Immediately, the entire look of her plain costume was altered; the rose transferred its color to Mady’s face, brightening her eyes. Suddenly, she looked lovely, and young again. She found a long needle-like pin and began to pin the rose to her blouse. My mother noticed what Mady was doing and walked over to her. Imperiously, she took the rose out of Mady’s hand and said, ‘No, Mady, those flowers are for the bride.’ Mady hastily said, ‘Oh, of course, I’m sorry, how stupid of me not to have realized that,’ and her face instantly assumed its usual mask of patient obligation. “I experienced in that moment an intensity of pain against which I have measured every subsequent pain of life. My heart ached so for Mady I thought I would perish on the spot. Loneliness broke, wave after wave, over my young head and one word burned in my brain. Over and over again, through my tears, I murmured, ‘Unjust! Unjust!’ I knew that if Mady had been one of the ‘ladies’ of the house my mother would never have taken the rose out of her hand in that manner. The memory of what had happened in the bedroom pierced me repeatedly throughout that whole long day, making me feel ill and wounded each time it returned. Mady’s loneliness became mine. I felt connected, as though by an invisible thread, to her alone of all the people in the house. But the odd thing was I never actually went near her all that day. I wanted to comfort her, let her know that I at least loved her and felt for her. But I couldn’t. In fact, I avoided her. In spite of everything, I felt her to be a pariah, and that my attachment to her made me a pariah, also. It was as though we were floating, two pariahs, through the house, among all those relations, related to no one, not even to each other. It was an extraordinary experience, one I can still taste to this day. I was never again able to address myself directly to Mady’s loneliness until I joined the Communist Party. When I joined the Party the stifled memory of that strange wedding day came back to me. . .