Paper Boat Quotes

Anger is like flowing water; there's nothing wrong with it as long as you let it flow. Hate is like stagnant water; anger that you denied yourself the freedom to feel, the freedom to flow; water that you gathered in one place and left to forget. Stagnant water becomes dirty, stinky, disease-ridden, poisonous, deadly; that is your hate. On flowing water travels little paper boats; paper boats of forgiveness. Allow yourself to feel anger, allow your waters to flow, along with all the paper boats of forgiveness. Be human.

Tomorrow. The word hangs in the air for a moment, both a promise and a threat. Then it floats away like a paper boat, taken from her by the water licking at her ankles.

Some details in life may look insignificant but appear to be vital leitmotifs in a person's life. They may have the value of "Rosebuds" of Citizen Kane or "Madeleine cookies" of Marcel Proust or "Strawberry fields" of the Beatles. People regularly walk down the memory lane of their early youth. The paper boats of their childhood are recurrently floating on the waves of their mind and bring back the mood and the spirit of the early days. They enable us to retreat from the trivial, daily worries and can generate delightful bliss and true joy in a sometimes frantic and chaotic life. ("Paper boats forever" )

These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination.

And then, in boating supplies, Margo located an air horn. She took it out of the box and held it up in the air, and I said, "No," and she said, "No what?" And I said, "No don't blow the air horn," except when I got to the b in blow, she squeezed on it and it let out an excruciatingly loud honk that felt in my head like the auditory equivalent of an aneurysm, and then she said, "I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. What was that?" And I said, "Stop b-" and then she did it again.

Every abyss is navigable by little paper boats.

The day we are jettisoned back to the spring of our lives can be disorienting and emotionally challenging. By navigating the transformational milestones, a mental spark can discharge a fulguration in our memory and provoke confusion of existential questions about the nature of our identity, personal growth, and time perception. (“Paper Boats Forever »)

Letting go of attachments to material possessions, relationships, or past experiences that stifle or no longer serve us can be liberating and allow us to move forward with our lives. When we contain our 'loss aversion,' we learn to bounce back from setbacks and master the qualities for navigating life's challenges. We can convert the terror of loss aversion into a mindset leading to greater freedom and personal empowerment. (“Paper Boats Forever »)

Rocking Chair Sad is. Scared is. That is all. The rocking chair I live in rocks like a paper boat. Sometimes I am all words, and no boot. No muster. No yes. All lag and tired pray, all miss my hometown. Miss the woods and the quiet porch and the talking slow. I caught the snow on my tongue. Snow angel, I. My heart a blue lamp. My mother calling me home. We cannot be called home enough times in our lives. Dear lonely, what is your name? I will open my front door and ring it through the streets.

I was a paper boat drifting in a massive night ocean.

Nothing is set in stone. A bird can be refolded into a boat, a fish, a kimono, or any other extravagant vision. At other times it aches to return to its original folds. The paper begins to fray. It tires, rebels.

if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

sometimes I wonder what my interior actually is. A heart that goes pitter-patter and thoughts that glide by like little paper boats on flowing water,

It’s funny because you always think a real friendship can weather any storm, but human relationships can be as flimsy as paper boats in a tsunami.” ~ page 97

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.

It's just money," he replied. "It's just paper." "It's time," I said, sharper than I'd meant. "It's the means to purchase time. It's the cost of a new bed in a hospital, a solar panel on a roof; it's a year's salary for a tailor in Dhaka, it's the price of a fishing boat, the cost of an education, it's not money. It's what it could have been.

In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific "The Open Boat," and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls.

Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, like hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress.

It was a strange time in their lives: the children like paper boats they were releasing into the water and watching float away.

He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy. They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back? Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would? Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal. Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.

You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curbside, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you're in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth. There are dentists. She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kristen in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.

HOME no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay. no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet hot blood in your belly it’s not something you ever thought of doing until the blade burnt threats into your neck and even then you carried the anthem under your breath only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back. you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled means something more than journey. no one crawls under fences no one wants to be beaten pitied no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire and one prison guard in the night is better than a truckload of men who look like your father no one could take it no one could stomach it no one skin would be tough enough the go home blacks refugees dirty immigrants asylum seekers sucking our country dry niggers with their hands out they smell strange savage messed up their country and now they want to mess ours up how do the words the dirty looks roll off your backs maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone than your child body in pieces. i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through the oceans drown save be hunger beg forget pride your survival is more important no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i dont know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here

It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone you loved him and when you had nothing else to give you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use it changed nothing it did not produce more chocolate it did not avert the child's death of her own but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper...What mattered were individual relationships and a completely helpless gesture an embrace a tear a word spoken to a dying man could have value in itself.

Did you look at the memo?” “What memo? We’re getting memos now?” “I sent a memo a week ago. I’ve been sending you a memo every week with a list of all the updates and my notes on all our cases for weeks now.” Holy cow. Missed the boat on that one. “Oh, those memos. I totally knew that.” “You’re not even reading them, are you?” “I thought they were optional.” Note to self: Stop making paper airplanes out of Cookie’s memos.

If I could go back in time to when I wrote sad little poems, I’d punch myself right in the fucking face because it gets worse man. It gets much, much worse and the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can just start dying and I know. I know—blahblahblah, nobody gives a fuck about your broken heart, but you know something? Most days, I’m not even sure what I’m upset about.

Here, on this deck, I’d kissed my husband at sunrise and made impossible promises over sunsets. Here, we’d made little paper boats of our dreams and set them adrift on love’s vast shore. So, here, I turned in our lover’s arms and told him I loved him.

I wondered whether mad people would be better off if their memories could be neatened up, or taken off the shelves on which they were stored and replaced with nicer ones, and if they'd be the same person then, or completely different ones, and whether dreams were like a vandal rampaging through a library of memories, tearing out random pages and turning them into paper boats...

Katherine and the children have made paper boats and are floating them on the moat to see which one stays up the longest, contriving always that Edward’s should be the winner. He is learning from an early age that the world conspires magically to favor him. After all, he will be King one day and that is the way of things for kings.

the children like paper boats they were releasing into the water and watching float away.

sailing paper boats on lily ponds... a city drenched, like a watercolor on an artist’s wall...

I have a habit of being an archaeologist of my own past, a sentimental collector of personal artefacts which may at first glance appear random, but each of which holds a unique significance. As the years pass me by, I find that the number of objects within my possession begins to accumulate. A torn map. A sealed letter. A boat full of paper animals. Each item encapsulates within itself a story, akin to an outward manifestation of my inner journey.

I read used books because fingerprint-smudged and dog-eared pages are heavier on the eye. Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who'll onto them for a spell. Books should die like people, consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on a shelf.

He was talking about books as if they were alive - old friends, powerful adversaries at times, insolent teenagers and elderly ladies sitting by the fire. In our bookcases? Grumpy wise men and mistresses, uncontrollable passions, future killers, thin paper boys offering their hands to fragile damsels whose beauty grew thin with every description. Some books were wild horses that took you with them in a mad galloping while you were hanging, breathless. Others were like boats sailing softly on a lake lit by the moonlight. And some were prisons.

love built on deception, no matter how pure the intention, was no better than a paper boat set upon a stormy sea. It might float for a time, but in the end, it would only disintegrate.

I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his deck, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles- rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships- the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over the years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death. He smashed that one first. My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched his as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottle, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed- a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven. He left the room and went down two doors to my beadroom. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, hollow enough to easily punch a fist through. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands. 'Daddy?' Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand. My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with his fists, and then he opened up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never to do do before, but Buckley came to him. My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. He remembered the day I'd begged him to paint and paper my room purple. Remembered moving in the old National Geographics to the bottom shelves of my bookcases. (I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived. 'You are so special to me, little man,' my father said, clinging to him. Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. 'Hold still,' my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

One of the few things that August didn't know about her was that sometimes when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life. You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you're in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth. There are dentists. She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kirsten in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. when the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did net avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the party has done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of history.

Equally important was the fact that the interpretation provided the model for how Tianming had hidden his message in the three stories. He employed two basic methods: dual-layer metaphors and two-dimensional metaphors. The dual-layer metaphors in the stories did not directly point to the real meaning, but to something far simpler. The tenor of this first metaphor became the vehicle for a second metaphor, which pointed to the real intelligence. In the current example, the princess’s boat, the He’ershingenmosiken soap, and the Glutton’s Sea formed a metaphor for a paper boat driven by soap. The paper boat, in turn, pointed to curvature propulsion. Previous attempts at decipherment had failed largely due to people’s habitual belief that the stories only involved a single layer of metaphors to hide the real message. The two-dimensional metaphors were a technique used to resolve the ambiguities introduced by literary devices employed in conveying strategic intelligence. After a dual-layer metaphor, a single-layer supporting metaphor was added to confirm the meaning of the dual-layer metaphor. In the current example, the curved snow-wave paper and the ironing required to flatten it served as a metaphor for curved space, confirming the interpretation of the soap-driven boat. If one viewed the stories as a two-dimensional plane, the dual-layer metaphor only provided one coordinate; the supporting single-layer metaphor provided a second coordinate that fixed the interpretation on the plane. Thus, this single-layer metaphor was also called the bearing coordinate. Viewed by itself, the bearing coordinate seemed meaningless, but once combined with the dual-layer metaphor, it resolved the inherent ambiguities in literary language. “A subtle and sophisticated system,” a PIA specialist said admiringly. All the committee members congratulated Cheng Xin and AA. AA, who had always been looked down on, saw her status greatly elevated among the committee members. Cheng

Here, I could see, was choice matter on which the expert and art critic could exercise their knowledge and judgment. As I had neither, I made an experiment or two, and was able to inform the readers of the paper that if you walked briskly past the picture, winking both eyes as fast as possible, you really got a sort of impression of movement and activity, of ships and boats coming into the harbour and sailing out of it, of sails lowered and hoisted, of an uncertain background, now obscured, now left visible as a ship in full sail passed before it. It struck me that, in my hands, art criticism was in a fair way to become a popular sport.

Take me away to a Deep-wood cabin; Hide me from these Carbon skies. Bring me back my Paper boats; Save me from these Virtual highs. Show me all the Hippie trails; Rid me of these Dollar-sign eyes. Help me recall my Childhood laugh; Make me forget these Urban lies.

There were two streets: Main ran along the oceanfront with a row of shops; the Piggly Wiggly grocery at one end, the Western Auto at the other, the diner in the middle. Mixed in there were Kress's Five and Dime, a Penney's (catalog only), Parker's Bakery, and a Buster Brown Shoe Shop. Next to the Piggly was the Dog-Gone Beer Hall, which offered roasted hot dogs, red-hot chili, and fried shrimp served in folded paper boats. No ladies or children stepped inside because it wasn't considered proper, but a take-out window had been cut out of the wall so they could order hot dogs and Nehi cola from the street.

You don't even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

Lexie and I made little paper boats like that and sent them down the canal that flowed to the stream. She’d write messages inside them, hoping they would get carried far away, be picked up by a stranger who would read: I’m being held prisoner, send help, please! This is a note from the other side of the world. Everything is upside down here.

It is raining, perhaps clouds voiding their deepest longings! Upon the streams I have drove those paper boats to the farthest. Listening to the lonely drops of rain I am trying in vain to sing melodious, Alas the voice ends deep within! Were you the song within? O my dear, but I know you are silence that sings wordless, a melody hummed nameless!

One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling. Werner’s head swivels lightly on his neck. The wind is strong and gusting stronger, and the corners of the tent strain against their guy ropes, and where the flaps at the two ends come up, he can see trees buck and sway. Everything rustles. Werner zips his old notebook and the little house into his duffel and the man beside him murmurs questions to himself and the rest of the ruined company sleeps. Even Werner’s thirst has faded. He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters. Out there, through the open flaps of the tent, clouds hurtle above treetops. Toward Germany, toward home. Silver and blue, blue and silver. Sheets of paper tumble down the rows of cots, and in Werner’s chest comes a quickening. He sees Frau Elena kneel beside the coal stove and bank up the fire. Children in their beds. Baby Jutta sleeps in her cradle. His father lights a lamp, steps into an elevator, and disappears. The voice of Volkheimer: What you could be. Werner’s body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed. “Ernst,” says the man beside him. “Ernst.” But there is no Ernst; the men in the cots do not reply; the American soldier at the door of the tent sleeps. Werner walks past him into the grass. The wind moves through his undershirt. He is a kite, a balloon. Once, he and Jutta built a little sailboat from scraps of wood and carried it to the river. Jutta painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality. But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and the flat black water swallowed it. Jutta blinked at Werner with wet eyes, pulling at the battered loops of yarn in her sweater. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.” Did they? He hopes they did. He seems to remember a little boat—a more seaworthy one—gliding down a river. It sailed around a bend and left them behind. Didn’t it? The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn’t the wind move the light? Across the field, an American watches a boy leave the sick tent and move against the background of the trees. He sits up. He raises his hand. “Stop,” he calls. “Halt,” he calls. But Werner has crossed the edge of the field, where he steps on a trigger land mine set there by his own army three months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth.

Tolerance over time breeds resentment. Only through understanding, that comes from the acceptance of one another's differences, shall we find true peace.

The magnificent car made the wind roar; it made the plains unfold like a roll of paper; it cast hot tar from itself with deference—an imperial boat.

If I ever found where he’d stashed my spiked heels, I was going to nail his black heart to the mast of his fucking boat.

He rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper.

She knew he would, and Jacob had said she could use the phone to call him. But she had not. How would she say the words: Please come; I’m in jail, charged with murder. Carefully, she put the paper back into the bag and lifted out the World War I compass Tate had given her. She let the needle swing north and watched it settle true. She held it against her heart. Where else would one need a compass more than in this place? Then she whispered Emily Dickinson’s words: The sweeping up the heart, And putting Love away We shall not want to use again Until Eternity. 46. King of the World 1969 The September sea and sky glistened pale blue from a soft sun as Kya churned in her little boat toward Jumpin’s to get the bus schedule

For so uncaring is life constructed that a minute before a happy man kills a child he is still happy and a minute before a woman screams with fear she can close her eyes and dream of the sea and the last minute of a child's life this child's parents can sit in the kitchen and wait for sugar and speak of their child's white teeth and about a rowing boat and the child itself can close a gate and start walking across a road with a few lumps of sugar wrapped in white paper in its right hand and this entire last minute nothing see except a long, shiny river and a broad boat with silent oars.

I’m convinced that frats are the beginning of the end for most of the people who end up running the world. It teaches them to give up individuality, independence, and even their paper for acceptance.

After the Flood(1957) … with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain… A small boy in a yellow slicker and red galoshes ran cheerfully along beside the newspaper boat…the boy in the yellow slicker was George Denbrough…. After the Flood(1985) A kid in a red rain slicker and green rubber boots was sailing a paper boat along the brisk run of water in the gutter.

Let me see a complete reorganization of the North Atlantic fleet’s defensive strategy against Nazi U-boats. And if it won’t go on one side of one sheet of paper, it hasn’t been properly thought out—Winston Churchill.

I liked the way the boats looked, but I didn’t do anything about it. After a blowup with the feculent Times bloater—lying there on his waterbed playing the paper comb and drinking black rum—I flew up to Houston, Texas— don’t ask me why—and bought a touring bike. A bicycle, not a motorcycle. And I pedaled it to Los Angeles. The most terrible trip in the world. I mean Apsley Cherry-Garrard with Scott at the pole didn’t have a clue. I endured sandstorms, terrifying and lethal heat, thirst, freezing winds, trucks that tried to kill me, mechanical breakdowns, a Blue Norther, torrential downpours and floods, wolves, ranchers in single-engine planes dropping flour bombs. And Quoyle, the only thing that kept me going through all this was the thought of a little boat, a silent, sweet sailboat slipping through the cool water. It grew on me. I swore if I ever got off that fucking bicycle seat which was, by that time, welded into the crack of me arse, if ever I got pried off the thing I’d take to the sea and never leave her.

Please wait here. "Annoying yet romantic," she said aloud. She sat down on the folding chair and peered inside the paper bag. A handful of tiny jam-filled donuts dusted with cinnamon and sugar sent up an intoxicating scent. The bag was warm in her hands, flecked with little bits of oil seeping through. Luce popped one into her mouth and took a sip from the tiny white cup, which contained the richest, most delightful espresso Luce had ever tasted. "Enjoying the bombolini?" Daniel called from below. Luce shot to her feet and leaned over the railing to find him standing at the back of a gondola painted with images of angels. He wore a flat straw hat bound with a thick red ribbon, and used a broad wooden paddle to steer the boat slowly toward her. Her heart surged the way it did each time she first saw Daniel in another life. But he was here. He was hers. This was happening now. "Dip them in the espresso, then tell me what it's like to be in Heaven," Daniel said, smiling up at her. "How do I get down to you?" she called. He pointed to the narrowest spiral staircase Luce had ever seen, just to the right of the railing. She grabbed the coffee and bag of donuts, slipped the peony stem behind her ear, and made for the steps. She could feel Daniel's eyes on her as she climbed over the railing and slinked down the stairs. Every time she made a full rotation on the staircase, she caught a teasing flash of his violet eyes. By the time she made it to the bottom, he had extended his hand to help her onto the boat. There was the electricity she'd been yearning for since she awoke. The spark that passed between them every time they touched. Daniel wrapped his arms around her waist and drew her in so that there was no space between their bodies. He kissed her, long and deep, until she was dizzy. "Now that's the way to start a morning." Daniel's fingers traced the petals of the peony behind her ear. A slight weight suddenly tugged at her neck and when she reached up, her hands found a find chain, which her fingers traced down to a silver locket. She held it out and looked at the red rose engraved on its face. Her locket!

How vivid, still, are the seagoing smells? Oily bilges, fish entrails, a freshly lit cigarette drawn through salt paper? And at night, if you were not diving, the compressor's exhaust fumes, its lethal monoxides, barking and blattering our darkened boat's position for anyone to hear. But a shift of wind might gently lay its hand on a cheek and turn your head like a weathervane, pointing your nostrils into the smell of unseen land: forest and rot and copra, jasmine, mimosa and ylang-ylang. And you may have thought of the strangeness of it, sitting there in night's scented cocoon, propped up by nails and timber in the middle of the water while men you knew like brothers worked away in the fish mines far beneath the boat, their dim torchlight opening up fugitive seams and corridors. Their wooden goggles and floating hair.

Please do not look only at the dark side All the newspapers in the free world explain why you return their readers understand how you feel You have the sympathy of millions As a tribute to your sorrow we resolve to spend more money on nuclear weapons there is always a bright side If this were only a movie a boat would be available have you ever seen our movies they end happily You would lean at the rail with 'him' the sun would set on China kiss and fade You would marry one of the kind authorities In our movies there is no law higher than love in real life duty is higher You would not want the authorities to neglect duty How do you like the image of the free world sorry you cannot stay This is the first and last time we will see you in our papers When you are back home remember us we will be having a good time.

THE FLOOD One day, there was a big flood and an old woman was trapped on her roof as the waters rose. A boat with two young men approached her and the men yelled out to her, "Lady, get off that roof and climb in this boat!" "No, it’s alright! God is going to save me!" She replied. The men thought she was crazy, but the boat left and the waters rose. A second boat came. The water was at the edge of the rooftop - same thing, "I put my faith in the Lord! God is going to save me!" And so, they left too. A third boat came, the water was up to her neck- same thing, "God is going to save me!!!!" They too left, shaking there heads. After she drowned and went to heaven, the old woman was very upset. She stood before God angrily, "My Lord, I put all my faith in you. I knew you'd save me But you didn’t!!! Why not???" God replied back- "But lady... I sent you three boats!!!" MORAL: God still works miracles today. But if you are praying for a miracle, he is not going to send you down a box wrapped in shiny, silver, foil paper with ribbon and a fancy bow wrapped around it to solve your problems. Most of the time, today, God works His miracles through people.

Dear lady, ... dear gentleman, reader, [it's] not right ... to put down this writer on his writing ... And I'll tell you why, too: it hurts, that's why.... People try to understand why writers commit suicide by jumping off boats or by alcoholism or by being heroic continuously or by rope or gun or drug or knife or water, and ... I can tell you straight out, ... it is reading slurring remarks about their writing that drives writers to the grave. Dirty remarks passed by ... dirty but damned nicely educated and very highly-paid ladies and gentlemen have the effect of killing writers. Yes, that's right. Dirty words ... in slick paper magazines read by smart people do assassinate writers. ... And boy let me tell you I am all for it, even when by some ... misunderstanding the dirty words are directed to me rather than to the party really deserving them. Accidents happen, dear clever reviewer or critic, and let it not be said that William Saroyan is one not to see a situation from the point of view of the other party, ... and I shall be the first to defend your right to be critical and even sarcastic, knowing full well that it is not about me and my writing, although my name is by mistake taken in vain by you. ... But go on, go on, do your good clever writing, every one of you, I am home, your are home, and we are each of us not yet on Variety's Necrology list, so if we can't take it, who can?

A stone thrown into a pond sets in motion concentric waves that spread out on the surface of the water, and their reverberation has an effect on the water lilies and reeds, the paper boat, and the buoys of the fishermen at various distances. All these objects are just there for themselves, enjoying their tranquility, when they are wakened to life, as it were, and are compelled to react and to enter into contact with one another. Other invisible vibrations spread into the depths, in all directions, as the stone falls and brushes the algae, scaring the fish and continually causing new molecular movements. When it then touches the bottom, it stirs up the mud and bumps into things that have rested there forgotten, some of which are dislodged, others buried once again in the sand.

Homesickness Standing under a million stars screaming up at them, PLEASE JUST TAKE ME HOME, with a voice rusty like the underside of boats, feeling it scratch at a throat like swallowed fish-bones. Making petitions to get the universe to care more, signing our names on any scrap of paper passed along like a single name could change the whole wide world. Could change galaxies. Tearing clothes, ripping skin, pleading, TAKE ME BACK, JUST TAKE ME BACK, I’m not willing to be a person any more. Science says I was part of a star once and I just— I want to be back there, always burning. These atoms could have been a lioness but here I am instead, these fragile limbs, and I never found out the returns policy. Take me back, take me back, I want to go home. Broken glass catching at my feet and the air too hot in my lungs. If I could have been anything why am I this?

There is much to do, pulling people away, right up until the Coast Guard comes and orders us to stop. Scott is dead. My cell phone is dead. My mother must think me dead. So it goes. I pick up the papers that have drifted down on the boat and have become plastered there, these relics from great buildings that no longer stand. The first one I grab is an insurance document. Listen: What I tell you here is true. The first line on the first page I pick up, it begins: In the event of damage to the building… So it goes.

I was Pittsburgh Young, Black, and Successful. Pittsburgh Young, Black, and Successful meant Friday evenings downstairs at Savoy in the Strip District, and perhaps a table upstairs if it was your birthday. It meant Alpha and Que boat rides, NEED Scholarship dinners, and Ronald H. Brown Leadership Awards galas. It meant a stint on the Urban League Young Professionals executive board. It meant brunches at the LeMont on Mother’s Day and the Grand Concourse when you wanted to stunt. It meant frequent pictures in the Post-Gazette and the City Paper

A couple of minutes later, and the tram started to climb up from Alfama, the streets widened, heavy traffic and Lisboetas about their normal hum-drum business. We skipped off at a busy triangle where three roads converged. A handful of shoppers and workers waited in the small yellow bus shelters, or smoked against the trees that would fringe the diamond with shade when summer came again. Taxi drivers drank coffee from paper cups and ribbed an old guy shaving in his cab. Just another normal day rolling around; no problem, and life trips along no matter who dies in the night.

The Nurse's Song This mighty man of whom I sing, The greatest of them all, Was once a teeny little thing, Just eighteen inches tall. I knew him as a tiny tot, I nursed him on my knee. I used to sit him on the pot And wait for him to wee. I always washed between his toes, And cut his little nails. I brushed his hair and wiped his nose And weighed him on the scales. Through happy childhood days he strayed, As all nice children should. I smacked him when he disobeyed, And stopped when he was good. It soon began to dawn on me He wasn't very bright, Because when he was twenty-three He couldn't read or write. "What shall we do?" his parents sob. "The boy has got the vapors! He couldn't even get a job Delivering the papers!" "Ah-ha," I said, "this little clot Could be a politician." "Nanny," he cried, "Oh Nanny, what A super proposition!" "Okay," I said, "let's learn and note The art of politics. Let's teach you how to miss the boat And how to drop some bricks, And how to win the people's vote And lots of other tricks. Let's learn to make a speech a day Upon the T.V. screen, In which you never never say Exactly what you mean. And most important, by the way, In not to let your teeth decay, And keep your fingers clean." And now that I am eighty nine, It's too late to repent. The fault was mine the little swine Became the President.

He sat down and picked up a pen. He looked at the photograph of him and his brother just after they’d joined up, and words that had so long evaded his mouth now gathered at the nib of his pen, and he wrote down everything he felt and everything he could see. He wrote to Peace once a week between their courting, and what he couldn’t get down on paper that first week he continued into the second week, then the third. He wrote sitting on a harbour bench, he wrote at the tiller of his boat. Peace got to know her fisherman through his letters. And when they met up she made him read them out loud, so that the words that had gathered at the nib of his pen found their rightful place upon his tongue. 47

Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad’s broad brim, clean across the ship’s decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight. “Now,” said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, “spos-ee him whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead.” “Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway. “Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship’s papers. We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we’ll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that’s more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket.

EVEN THOUGH I KNEW it was going to be what she would ask me, Graciela McCaleb’s request gave me pause. Terry McCaleb had died on his boat a month earlier. I had read about it in the Las Vegas Sun. It had made the papers because of the movie. FBI agent gets heart transplant and then tracks down his donor’s killer. It was a story that had Hollywood written all over it and Clint Eastwood played the part, even though he had a couple decades on Terry. The film was a modest success at best, but it still gave Terry the kind of notoriety that guaranteed an obituary notice in papers across the country. I had just gotten back to my apartment near the strip one morning and picked up the Sun. Terry’s death was a short story in the back of the A section.

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons. They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another, So it is impossible to tell how many there are. My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep. Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage—— My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head. I am a nun now, I have never been so pure. I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet. The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. Before they came the air was calm enough, Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine. They concentrate my attention, that was happy Playing and resting without committing itself. The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat, And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health. --"Tulips", written 18 March 1961

Harry had never in all his life had such a Christmas dinner. A hundred fat, roast turkeys; mountains of roast and boiled potatoes; platters of chipolatas; tureens of buttered peas, silver boats of thick, rich gravy and cranberry sauce — and stacks of wizard crackers every few feet along the table. These fantastic party favors were nothing like the feeble Muggle ones the Dursleys usually bought, with their little plastic toys and their flimsy paper hats inside. Harry pulled a wizard cracker with Fred and it didn’t just bang, it went off with a blast like a cannon and engulfed them all in a cloud of blue smoke, while from the inside exploded a rear admiral’s hat and several live, white mice. Up at the High Table, Dumbledore had swapped his pointed wizard’s hat for a flowered bonnet, and was chuckling merrily at a joke Professor Flitwick had just read him. Flaming

I took my solo and beat hell out of the skins. Then Spoof swiped at his mouth and let go with a blast and moved it up into that squeal and stopped and started playing. It was all headwork. All new to us. New to anybody. I saw Sonny get a look on his face, and we sat still and listened while Spoof made love to that horn. Now like a scream, now like a laugh - now we're swinging in the trees, now the white men are coming, now we're in the boat and chains are hanging from our ankles and we're rowing, rowing - Spoof, what is it? - now we're sawing wood and picking cotton and serving up those cool cool drinks to the Colonel in his chair - Well, blow, man! - now we're free, and we're struttin' down Lenox Avenue and State & Madison and Pirate's Alley, laughing, crying - Who said free? - and we want to go back and we don't want to go back - Play it, Spoof! God, God, tell us all about it! Talk to us! - and we're sitting in a cellar with a comb wrapped up in paper, with a skin-barrel and a tinklebox - Don't stop, Spoof! Oh Lord, please don't stop! - and we're making something, something, what is it? Is it jazz? Why, yes, Lord, it's jazz. Thank you, sir, and thank you, sir, we finally got it, something that is ours, something great that belongs to us and to us alone, that we made, and that's why it's important and that's what it's all about and - Spoof! Spoof, you can;t stop now -- But it was over, middle of the trip. And there was Spoof standing there facing us and tears streaming out of those eyes and down over that coaldust face, and his body shaking and shaking. It's the first we ever saw that. It's the first we ever heard him cough, too - like a shotgun going off every two seconds, big raking sounds that tore up from the bottom of his belly and spilled out wet and loud. ("Black Country")

When the day of our departure was approaching, we went to the regular passport control office to get permission to leave the country. Bengt stood first in the line as interpreter. “What is your name?” asked a ceremonious little clerk, looking suspiciously over his spectacles at Bengt’s huge beard. “Bengt Emmerik Danielsson,” Bengt answered respectfully. The man put a long form into his typewriter. “By what boat did you come to Peru?” “Well, you see,” Bengt explained, bending over the mild little man, “I didn’t come by boat. I came to Peru by canoe.” The man looked at Bengt dumb with astonishment and tapped out “canoe” in an open space on the form. “And by what boat are you leaving Peru?” “Well, you see, again,” said Bengt politely, “I’m not leaving Peru by boat. I’m leaving by raft.” “A likely story!” the clerk cried angrily and tore the paper out of the machine. “Will you please answer my questions properly?

When I finally calmed down, I saw how disappointed he was and how bad he felt. I decided to take a deep breath and try to think this thing through. “Maybe it’s not that bad,” I said. (I think I was trying to cheer myself up as much as I was trying to console Chip.) “If we fix up the interior and just get it to the point where we can get it onto the water, at least maybe then we can turn around, sell it, and get our money back.” Over the course of the next hour or so, I really started to come around. I took another walk through the boat and started to picture how we could make it livable--maybe even kind of cool. After all, we’d conquered worse. We tore a few things apart right then and there, and I grabbed some paper and sketched out a new layout for the tiny kitchen. I talked to him about potentially finishing an accent wall with shiplap--a kind of rough-textured pine paneling that fans of our show now know all too well. “Shiplap?” Chip laughed. “That seems a little ironic to use on a ship, doesn’t it?” “Ha-ha,” I replied. I was still not in the mood for his jokes, but this is how Chip backs me off the ledge--with his humor.

no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay. no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet hot blood in your belly it’s not something you ever thought of doing until the blade burnt threats into your neck and even then you carried the anthem under your breath only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back. you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled means something more than journey. no one crawls under fences no one wants to be beaten pitied no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire and one prison guard in the night is better than a truckload of men who look like your father no one could take it no one could stomach it no one skin would be tough enough the go home blacks refugees dirty immigrants asylum seekers sucking our country dry niggers with their hands out they smell strange savage messed up their country and now they want to mess ours up how do the words the dirty looks roll off your backs maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone than your child body in pieces. i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through the oceans drown save be hunger beg forget pride your survival is more important no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i dont know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here

His dark room now seemed cool and restfully confining. You could imagine maps in the wallpaper. The roses had faded into vague shells of pink. Only a few silver lines along the vanished stems and in the veins of leaves, indistinct patches of the palest green remained—the faint suggestion of mysterious geography. A grease spot was a marsh, a mountain or a treasure. Irabestis went boating down a crack on cool days, under the tree boughs, bending his head. He fished in a chip of plaster. The perch rose to the bait and were golden in the sunwater. Specks stood for cities; pencil marks were bridges; stains and shutter patterns laid out fields of wheat and oats and corn. In the shadow of a corner the crack issued into a great sea. There was a tear in the paper that looked exactly like a railway and another that signified a range of hills. Some tiny drops of ink formed a chain of lakes. A darker decorative strip of Grecian pediments and interlacing ivy at the ceiling’s edge kept the tribes of Gog and Magog from invasion. Once he had passed through it to the ceiling but it made him dizzy and afraid. Shadows moved quixotically over the whole wall, usually from left to right in tall thin bands, and sank behind the bureau or below the bed or disappeared suddenly in a corner.

On the train I had a lot of time to think. I thought how in the thirty years of my life I had seldom gotten on a train in America without being conscious of my color. In the South, there are Jim Crow cars and Negroes must ride separate from the whites, usually in a filthy antiquated coach next to the engine, getting all the smoke and bumps and dirt. In the South, we cannot buy sleeping car tickets. Such comforts are only for white folks. And in the North where segregated travel is not the law, colored people have, nevertheless, many difficulties. In auto buses they must take the seats in the rear, over the wheels. On the boats they must occupy the worst cabins. The ticket agents always say that all other accommodations are sold. On trains, if one sits down by a white person, the white person will sometimes get up, flinging back an insult at the Negro who has dared to take a seat beside him. Thus it is that in America, if you are yellow, brown, or black, you can never travel anywhere without being reminded of your color, and oft-times suffering great inconveniences. I sat in the comfortable sleeping car on my first day out of Moscow and remembered many things about trips I had taken in America. I remembered how, once as a youngster going alone to see my father who was working in Mexico, I went into the dining car of the train to eat. I sat down at a table with a white man. The man looked at me and said, "You're a nigger, ain't you?" and left the table. It was beneath his dignity to eat with a Negro child. At St. Louis I went onto the station platform to buy a glass of milk. The clerk behind the counter said, “We don't serve niggers," and refused to sell me anything. As I grew older I learned to expect this often when traveling. So when I went South to lecture on my poetry at Negro universities, I carried my own food because I knew I could not go into the dining cars. Once from Washington to New Orleans, I lived all the way on the train on cold food. I remembered this miserable trip as I sat eating a hot dinner on the diner of the Moscow-Tashkent express. Traveling South from New York, at Washington, the capital of our country, the official Jim Crow begins. There the conductor comes through the train and, if you are a Negro, touches you on the shoulder and says, "The last coach forward is the car for colored people." Then you must move your baggage and yourself up near the engine, because when the train crosses the Potomac River into Virginia, and the dome of the Capitol disappears, it is illegal any longer for white people and colored people to ride together. (Or to eat together, or sleep together, or in some places even to work together.) Now I am riding South from Moscow and am not Jim-Crowed, and none of the darker people on the train with me are Jim-Crowed, so I make a happy mental note in the back of my mind to write home to the Negro papers: "There is no Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union.

Why?” “Why? Blimey, Harry, everyone’d be wantin’ magic solutions to their problems. Nah, we’re best left alone.” At this moment the boat bumped gently into the harbor wall. Hagrid folded up his newspaper, and they clambered up the stone steps onto the street. Passersby stared a lot at Hagrid as they walked through the little town to the station. Harry couldn’t blame them. Not only was Hagrid twice as tall as anyone else, he kept pointing at perfectly ordinary things like parking meters and saying loudly, “See that, Harry? Things these Muggles dream up, eh?” “Hagrid,” said Harry, panting a bit as he ran to keep up, “did you say there are dragons at Gringotts?” “Well, so they say,” said Hagrid. “Crikey, I’d like a dragon.” “You’d like one?” “Wanted one ever since I was a kid — here we go.” They had reached the station. There was a train to London in five minutes’ time. Hagrid, who didn’t understand “Muggle money,” as he called it, gave the bills to Harry so he could buy their tickets. People stared more than ever on the train. Hagrid took up two seats and sat knitting what looked like a canary-yellow circus tent. “Still got yer letter, Harry?” he asked as he counted stitches. Harry took the parchment envelope out of his pocket. “Good,” said Hagrid. “There’s a list there of everything yeh need.” Harry unfolded a second piece of paper he hadn’t noticed the night before, and read: HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY UNIFORM First-year students will require: 1. Three sets of plain work robes (black) 2. One plain pointed hat (black) for day wear 3. One pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar) 4. One winter cloak (black, silver fastenings) Please note that all pupils’ clothes should carry name tags COURSE BOOKS All students should have a copy of each of the following: The Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1) by Miranda Goshawk A History of Magic by Bathilda Bagshot Magical Theory by Adalbert Waffling A

Ywa was neither man nor woman, and was not in a human form. Ywa was the creator of the world and a force for good. To balance Ywa there was also a force for evil, called Mu Kaw Lee. Ywa created three sons in human form. The eldest was a Karen, the second a Burman, and the youngest was a white man. To the Karen son Ywa gave a golden book, to the Burman a silver book, and to the white man Ywa gave a book bound in normal paper. When the rains began and the Karen son went to plant his rice field, he placed the golden book nearby, on a tree stump. But his youngest brother, the white man, had grown jealous and coveted his beautiful golden book. When the Karen man wasn’t looking the white man came along and took it, replacing it with his own. Then the white man built a boat and escaped to a far-off country. He carried his prize with him–the golden book that contained the teachings Ywa had given to his eldest son. After a long day working under the heavy rain, the Karen man went to fetch his golden book. The book that the white man had left in its place had fallen apart in the rain, and there was nothing left. A chicken had been scratching around the stump searching for food, and all the Karen man found was chicken scratch marks. He concluded that the golden book had been replaced by the scratch marks, and that those must embody the message that Ywa had left him. And so the Karen man taught himself to read and write in chicken scratch. Over time, he learned the truth about the golden book being stolen, but by then it was too late–chicken scratch had become the official language of the Karen. The Karen man wrote down the story of how the golden book was stolen, and the word of Ywa lost, in a new book. He called this book Li Hsaw Weh–‘the book of chicken scratch teachings’. Centuries later the first white missionaries came to Burma. Many Karen believed that this was the younger brother returning, bringing the golden book in the form of the Bible, and so they welcomed them. Many Karen believe this story absolutely, and that one day the younger brother–a white man–will come again to help save our people.

When I finally calmed down, I saw how disappointed he was and how bad he felt. I decided to take a deep breath and try to think this thing through. “Maybe it’s not that bad,” I said. (I think I was trying to cheer myself up as much as I was trying to console Chip.) “If we fix up the interior and just get it to the point where we can get it onto the water, at least maybe then we can turn around, sell it, and get our money back.” Over the course of the next hour or so, I really started to come around. I took another walk through the boat and started to picture how we could make it livable--maybe even kind of cool. After all, we’d conquered worse. We tore a few things apart right then and there, and I grabbed some paper and sketched out a new layout for the tiny kitchen. I talked to him about potentially finishing an accent wall with shiplap--a kind of rough-textured pine paneling that fans of our show now know all too well. “Shiplap?” Chip laughed. “That seems a little ironic to use on a ship, doesn’t it?” “Ha-ha,” I replied. I was still not in the mood for his jokes, but this is how Chip backs me off the ledge--with his humor. Then I asked him to help me lift something on the deck, and he said, “Aye, aye, matey!” in his best pirate voice, and slowly but surely I came around. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but by the end of that afternoon I was actually a little bit excited about taking on such a big challenge. Chip was still deflated that he’d allowed himself to get duped, but he put his arm around me as we started walking back to the truck. I put my head on his shoulder. And the camera captured the whole thing--just an average, roller-coaster afternoon in the lives of Chip and Joanna Gaines. The head cameraman came jogging over to us before we drove away. Chip rolled down his window and said sarcastically, “How’s that for reality TV?” We were both feeling embarrassed that this is how we had spent our last day of trying to get this stinkin’ television show. “Well,” the guy said, breaking into a great big smile, “if I do my job, you two just landed yourself a reality TV show.” What? We were floored. We couldn’t believe it. How was that a show? But lo and behold, he was right. That rotten houseboat turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

45 Mercy Street In my dream, drilling into the marrow of my entire bone, my real dream, I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill searching for a street sign - namely MERCY STREET. Not there. I try the Back Bay. Not there. Not there. And yet I know the number. 45 Mercy Street. I know the stained-glass window of the foyer, the three flights of the house with its parquet floors. I know the furniture and mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, the servants. I know the cupboard of Spode the boat of ice, solid silver, where the butter sits in neat squares like strange giant's teeth on the big mahogany table. I know it well. Not there. Where did you go? 45 Mercy Street, with great-grandmother kneeling in her whale-bone corset and praying gently but fiercely to the wash basin, at five A.M. at noon dozing in her wiggy rocker, grandfather taking a nap in the pantry, grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid, and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower on her forehead to cover the curl of when she was good and when she was... And where she was begat and in a generation the third she will beget, me, with the stranger's seed blooming into the flower called Horrid. I walk in a yellow dress and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes, enough pills, my wallet, my keys, and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five? I walk. I walk. I hold matches at street signs for it is dark, as dark as the leathery dead and I have lost my green Ford, my house in the suburbs, two little kids sucked up like pollen by the bee in me and a husband who has wiped off his eyes in order not to see my inside out and I am walking and looking and this is no dream just my oily life where the people are alibis and the street is unfindable for an entire lifetime. Pull the shades down - I don't care! Bolt the door, mercy, erase the number, rip down the street sign, what can it matter, what can it matter to this cheapskate who wants to own the past that went out on a dead ship and left me only with paper? Not there. I open my pocketbook, as women do, and fish swim back and forth between the dollars and the lipstick. I pick them out, one by one and throw them at the street signs, and shoot my pocketbook into the Charles River. Next I pull the dream off and slam into the cement wall of the clumsy calendar I live in, my life, and its hauled up notebooks.

Once a little boy went to school. One morning, when the little boy had been in school a while, his teacher said: “Today we are going to make a picture.” “Good!” thought the little boy. He liked to make pictures. He could make all kinds. Lions and tigers, Chickens and cows, trains and boats, and he took out his box of crayons and began to draw. But the teacher said: “Wait! It is not time to begin!” And she waited until everyone looked ready. “Now,” said the teacher, “We are going to make flowers.” “Good!” thought the little boy, he liked to make flowers, and he began to make beautiful ones with his pink and orange and blue crayons. But the teacher said “Wait! And I will show you how.” And it was red with a green stem. “There,” said the teacher, “Now you may begin.” The little boy looked at the teacher’s. Then he looked at this own flower. He liked his flower better than the teacher’s. But he did not say this. He just turned his paper over. And made a flower like the teacher’s. It was red with a green stem. On another day, when the little boy had opened the door from the outside all by himself, the teacher said: “Today we are going to make something with clay.” “Good!” thought the little boy. Snakes and snowmen, elephants and mice, cars, and trucks, and he began to pull and pinch his ball of clay. But the teacher said: “Wait!” It is not time to begin!” And she waited until everyone looked ready. “Now,” said the teacher, “We are going to make a dish.” He liked to make dishes. And he began to make some that were all shapes and sizes. But the teacher said, “Wait! And I will show you how.” And she showed everyone how to make a deep dish. “There,” said the teacher. “Now you may begin.” The little boy looked at the teacher’s dish, then he looked at his own. He liked his dish better than the teacher’s. But he did not say this. He just rolled his clay into a big ball again. And made a dish like the teacher’s. It was a deep dish. And pretty soon the little boy learned to wait, and to watch and to make things just like the teacher. And pretty soon he didn’t make things of his own anymore. Then it happened that the little boy and his family moved to another house, in another city, and the little boy had to go to another school. And the very first day he was there the teacher said: “Today we are going to make a picture.” “Good!” Thought the little boy and he waited for the teacher to tell him what to do. But the teacher didn’t say anything. She just walked around the room. When she came to the little boy she said, “Don’t you want to make a picture?” “Yes,” said the little boy. “What are we going to make?” “I don’t know until you make it,” said the teacher. “How shall I make it?” asked the little boy. “Why, any way you like,” said the teacher. “Any color?” asked the little boy. “Any color,” said the teacher. “If everyone made the same picture, and the used the same colors, how would I know who made what?” “I don’t know,” said the little boy. And he began to make a red flower with a green stem.

3 INCIDENT IN THE ENGLISH CHANNEL Not long afterwards, a Belgian ferry, the Oudenbourg, was steaming its way from Ostende to Ramsgate. In the straits of Dover the duty officer noticed that half a mile south of its usual course there was something going on in the water. He could not be sure that there was no-one drowning there and so he ordered a change of course down to where the perturbance was taking place. Two hundred passengers on the windward side of the ship were shown a very strange spectacle: in some places a vertical jet of water shot out from the surface, and in some of those vertical jets there could be seen something like a black body thrown up with it; the surface of the sea for one or two hundred yards all around was tossing and seething wildly while, from the depths, a loud rattling and humming could be heard. "It was as if there was a small volcano erupting under the sea." As the Oudenbourg slowly approached the place an enormous wave rose about ten yards ahead of it and a terrible noise thundered out like an explosion. The entire ship was lifted violently and the deck was showered with a rain of water that was nearly boiling hot; and landing on the deck with the water was a strong black body which writhed and let out a sharp loud scream; it was a newt that had been injured and burnt. The captain ordered the ship full steam astern so that the ship would not steam straight into the middle of this turbulent Hell; but the water all around had also begun to erupt and the surface of the sea was strewn with pieces of dismembered newts. The ship was finally able to turn around and it fled northwards as fast as possible. Then there was a terrible explosion about six hundred yards to the stern and a gigantic column of water and steam, perhaps a hundred yards high, shot out of the sea. The Oudenbourg set course for Harwich and sent out a radio warning in all directions: "Attention all shipping, attention all shipping! Severe danger on Ostende-Ramsgate lane. Underwater explosion. Cause unknown. All shipping advised avoid area!" All this time the sea was thundering and boiling, almost as if military manoeuvres had been taking place under the water; but apart from the erupting water and steam there was nothing to see. From both Dover and Calais, destroyers and torpedo boats set out at full steam and squadrons of military aircraft flew to the site of the disturbance; but by the time they got there all they found was that the surface was discoloured with something like a yellow mud and covered with startled fish and newts that had been torn to pieces. At first it was thought that a mine in the channel must have exploded; but once the shores on both sides of the Straits of Dover had been ringed off with a chain of soldiers and the English prime-minister had, for the fourth time in the history of the world, interrupted his Saturday evening and hurried back to London, there were those who thought the incident must be of extremely serious international importance. The papers carried some highly alarming rumours, but, oddly enough, this time remained far from the truth; nobody had any idea that Europe, and the whole world with it, stood for a few days on the brink of a major war. It was only several years later that a member of the then British cabinet, Sir Thomas Mulberry, failed to be re-elected in a general election and published his memoirs setting out just what had actually happened; but by then, though, nobody was interested.

History records that there was only one Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo — and that he was too small for his job. The fact is there were two Napoleons at Waterloo, and the second one was big enough for his job, with some to spare. The second Napoleon was Nathan Rothschild — the emperor of finance. During the trying months that came before the crash Nathan Rothschild had plunged on England until his own fortunes, no less than those of the warring nations, were staked on the issue. He had lent money direct. He had discounted Wellington's paper. He had risked millions by sending chests of gold through war-swept territory where the slightest failure of plans might have caused its capture. He was extended to the limit when the fateful hour struck, and the future seemed none too certain. The English, in characteristic fashion, believed that all had been lost before anything was lost -— before the first gun bellowed out its challenge over the Belgian plains. The London stock market was in a panic. Consols were falling, slipping, sliding, tumbling. If the telegraph had been invented, the suspense would have been less, even if the wires had told that all was lost. But there was no telegraph. There were only rumors and fears. As the armies drew toward Waterloo Nathan Rothschild was like a man aflame. All of his instincts were crying out for news — good news, bad news, any kind of news, but news — something to end his suspense. News could be had immediately only by going to the front. He did not want to go to the front. A biographer of the family, Mr. Ignatius Balla, 1 declares that Nathan had " always shrunk from the sight of blood." From this it may be presumed that, to put it delicately, he was not a martial figure. But, as events came to a focus, his mingled hopes and fears overcame his inborn instincts. He must know the best or the worst and that at once. So he posted off for Belgium. He drew near to the gathering armies. From a safe post on a hill he saw the puffs of smoke from the opening guns. He saw Napoleon hurl his human missiles at Wellington's advancing walls of red. He did not see the final crash of the French, because he saw enough to convince him that it was coming, and therefore did not wait to witness the actual event. He had no time to wait. He hungered and thirsted for London as a few days before he had hungered and thirsted for the sight of Waterloo. Wellington having saved the day for him as well as for England, Nathan Rothschild saw an opportunity to reap colossal gains by beating the news of Napoleon's 1 The Romance of the Rothschilds, p. 88. 126 OUR DISHONEST CONSTITUTION defeat to London and buying the depressed securities of his adopted country before the news of victory should send them skyward with the hats of those whose brains were still whirling with fear. So he left the field of Waterloo while the guns were still booming out the requiem of all of Napoleon's great hopes of empire. He raced to Brussels upon the back of a horse whose sides were dripping with spur-drawn blood. At Brussels he paid an exorbitant price to be whirled in a carriage to Ostend. At Ostend he found the sea in the grip of a storm that shook the shores even as Wellington was still shaking the luck-worn hope of France. " He was certainly no hero," says Balla, " but at the present moment he feared nothing." Who would take him in a boat and row him to England? Not a boatman spoke. No one likes to speak when Death calls his name, and Rothschild's words were like words from Death. But Rothschild continued to speak. He must have a boatman and a boat. He must beat the news of Waterloo to England. Who would make the trip for 500 francs? Who would go for 800, 1,000? Who would go for 2,000? A courageous sailor would go. His name should be here if it had not been lost to the world. His name should be here and wherever this story is printed, because he said he would go if Rothschild would pay the 2,000 francs to the sailor's wife before

Dreamy tosspots, they stand all afternoon in a 2nd Avenue bar looking at the sun-patterns under the L or their own faces in the mirror; they do good but not good enough work on the paper and dream of the novel they're certainly going to get around to someday; they stand behind a desk on the lecture-platform lecturing with loving and fruitless persuasion to students watching the clock; throughout whole evenings with sinking heart they sit watching their wives over the edge of a book and wondering how, how, how had it ever come about; they live in and search the past not to discover where and at what point they missed the boat but only to revel in the fancied and fanciful pleasures of a better happier and easier day; they see not wisely but too well and what they see isn't worth it; they eat of and are eaten by ennui, with no relief from boredom even in their periodic plunges from euphoria to despair or their rapid rise back to the top again. They wake up mornings such as this, all but out of their minds with remorse, enduring what others call and can call a hangover—that funny word Americans will joke about forever, even when the morning-after is their own.

The Hotel Maillot, where they resided for four months, had French personnel and Jewish customers: Polish, Hungarian, Romanian refugees. Everybody was waiting for a visa - all displaced persons, everybody clinging to a hope, a piece of paper. In the yard of the hotel, red-cheeked peasant girls from Bretagne washed the hotel laundry. They also cleaned the rooms, scrubbed with rags and brooms. When the cleaning girl would come in and see Father in bed, she would say: "Monsieur shlooft" (Monsieur is sleeping, in Yiddish) and would come later. The only pleasant aspect of that time was the proximity of the Bois de Boulogne, which reminded my parents of home, of the Habsburgshohe. They watched children playing and the boats on the lake and there they spent hours upon hours. They hoped that one of their children would come to rescue them from that exile - Bernie or Pearl.

I suddenly realized that converting to white wouldn’t be easy, but still, that toilet paper was like silk.

A new day. She will face it tomorrow, for Maya’s sake. Along with the awakening sea, along with the rest of Bombay—the street urchins and the stray dogs, the impoverished nut vendors and the woman selling six cauliflowers a day, the hollow-eyed slum dwellers and the chubby-cheeked residents of nearby skyscrapers, the office workers spilling out of the trains at Churchgate and the young children boarding creaky school buses, the old men groaning on their deathbeds and the babies tumbling forth from the dark wombs of their mothers—along with the entire gigantic metropolis, with all its residents crawling along their individual destinies like an army of ants pretending to be an army of giants—along with Banubai in her damp bed, and Serabai in her shattered world, and Viraf baba with his choking guilt, and Maya with her tentative, hesitant dreams, and yes, along with Gopal and Amit waking up in a distant land to the smell of loamy earth, like all of them, the millions of people she has not met and the few she has—she, too, will face a new day tomorrow. Tomorrow. The word hangs in the air for a moment, both a promise and a threat. Then it floats away like a paper boat, taken from her by the water licking her ankles. It is dark, but inside Bhima’s heart it is dawn.

He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The

A thousand thoughts circled a dark centre in my mind like a fleet of tiny paper boats caught in the vortex of a drain.

1. First, we admire people who work hard. We dislike passengers who don’t pull their weight in the boat. 2. We admire people with first-class brains, because you cannot run a great advertising agency without brainy people. 3. We admire people who avoid politics – office politics, I mean. 4. We despise toadies who suck up to their bosses; they are generally the same people who bully their subordinates. 5. We admire the great professionals, the craftsmen who do their jobs with superlative excellence. We notice that these people always respect the professional expertise of their colleagues in other departments. 6. We admire people who hire subordinates who are good enough to succeed them. We pity people who are so insecure that they feel compelled to hire inferior specimens as their subordinates. 7. We admire people who build up and develop their subordinates, because this is the only way we can promote from within the ranks. We detest having to go outside to fill important jobs, and I look forward to the day when that will never be necessary. 8. We admire people who practice delegation. The more you delegate, the more responsibility will be loaded upon you. 9. We admire kindly people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings – particularly the people who sell things to us. We abhor quarrelsome people. We abhor people who wage paper warfare. We abhor buck passers, and people who don’t tell the truth. 10. We admire well-organized people who keep their offices shipshape, and deliver their work on time. 11. We admire people who are good citizens in their communities – people who work for their local hospitals, their church, the PTA, the Community Chest and so on.

This room contained, as well as many books, several painted wooden models of boats, which had been mounted to the walls. They were very intricately and beautifully made, down to the miniature coils of rope and tiny brass instruments on their sanded decks, and the larger ones had white sails arranged in curving attitudes of such tension and complexity that it did indeed seem as though the wind was blowing in them. When you looked more closely, you saw that the sails were attached to countless tiny cords, so fine as to make them almost invisible, which had fixed them in these shapes. It required only a couple of steps to move from the impression of wind in the sails to the sight of the mesh of fine cords, a metaphor I felt sure Clelia had intended to illustrate the relationship between illusion and reality, though she did not perhaps expect her guests to go one step further, as I did, and reach out a hand to touch the white cloth, which was not cloth at all but paper, unexpectedly dry and brittle. Clelia’s

We will be stronger for this, But only if it forces us To reach out. Corona Barry Marks “…normally only visible during a solar eclipse” Of course I’m crazy there are no sharks in swimming pools, just like there were none in freshwater lakes and rivers all those years when boys and dogs and a horse or two disappeared and everyone knew it was a haint, not some biological U-Boat stalking Little Bear Creek for 400 million years. Yes, I watch for periscopes, dorsal fins, Indian signs whispering something is down there, beneath the surface tension: angle of reflection, angle of refraction, invisible geometry making you squint and not see, making you not see. Go ahead, tell me I’m crazy with my stock of masks and toilet paper, bottled water and ammo; I know this immigrant air is from Mexico, maybe Wuhan before that, and the things I can’t see are the ones trying to pry my ribs open to let the ghost-you-can’t-see out of its cage. I know things under the air, behind the darkness, within the water are real because so am I and I believe the myth of electricity and the fable of fluoridation, that the sun can be lethal and meds can mend a Stockholm Syndrome childhood. I believe my vote and my opinion count. I believe in germs and viruses, and not going out with a wet head, and the new normal and the old one, too. I believe it is the unseen things that kill us, the small things: a moment’s distraction, the hole a virus shoots through a body. I cannot believe the dead will forgive us for being too slow to believe in what we did not want to see.

I'm convinced that frats are the beginning of the end for most of the people who end up running the world. It teaches them to give up individuality, independence, and even their paper just for acceptance.

Paper made from the papyrus plant is a genuine product of Kemet. A roll of this material can be purchased for about 2 deben. Ask a local scribe or artist if they'll be willing to inscribe or decorate the paper with something characteristically Egyptian; perhaps a nice Nile scene with a boat. (You might want to check with a second scribe to make sure that the first one didn't write something to the effect of 'the superiority of the Egyptians is obvious everywhere', 'go home, vile foreigner', or 'I went to Egypt and all I brought back was a sheet of this paper'.

are at least eighteen hundred Greg Myerses in this country and all have addresses, phone numbers, families, and jobs. Dubose won’t know where to start looking. Besides, if I see a shadow I can haul ass in my little boat and become a speck in the ocean. He’ll never find me. Why is the mole living in fear? His name will never be revealed.” “Gee, Greg, I don’t know. Maybe he or she is unsophisticated in the world of organized criminal violence. Maybe he or she is worried that divulging too much dirt on McDover might lead back to him or her.” “Well, it’s too late now,” Greg said. “The complaint has been filed and the wheels are turning.” “You gonna use this stuff anytime soon?” Cooley asked, waving some papers. “I don’t know. I need some time to think. Let’s say they can prove the judge likes to travel on private jets with her partner. Big deal. McDover’s lawyers will just say there’s no foul as long as Phyllis is footing the bill, and since Phyllis has no cases pending in McDover’s court, where’s the damage?” “Phyllis Turban runs a small shop in Mobile and her specialty is drawing up thick wills. I’ll bet she nets a hundred and fifty a year

You Loved a Woman Once" She told you of childhood summers, mayflies trembling beside the bridge of her nose, hunting frogs. Skinning them on a brick, the house smelling like their small, fried legs. All she wanted was for you to carry her home in a canoe with paddles, life vests, a flare. You promised to teach her how to swim when she was in your arms. Your own body, broken into so many times, became a clear lake for her to bathe in. Remember pulling the one tiny, suckering leech from below her neck, the pale collarbone Braille it left. You said the boat was her shoulder in your mouth, even when you couldn’t bear her epaulets of freckles, even when nothing but a body would do and there was no body but her own. Below her—lily pads, dragonflies, the worms dug up last summer and thrown from the dock to see fish rise in a boil—now all snapped raw in the frozen pond. And speaker, coded “you”—what about the light straining through her dampened hair, will you catch it in your jaws? There’s the smell of paper on her skin and you pressing her body like a flower in a book.

We’re learning about paper boats today!” Mg. Thane’s cheery voice said from the other side of the door. “Bright and early! Up we go!” Ceony’s pulse pounded in her neck. Pulling the top blanket off her bed and hiding her nightgown with it, she cracked open the door. Mg. Thane stood there just as he had left, fully dressed and wearing that indigo coat. “I . . . when did you get back?” she asked. He shrugged. “Just now. Where did you put Jonto?” “In the . . . ,” she began, but instead said, “How did things go? Did you see this friend of yours?” “Things went, at least,” he answered. “And thank you for doing my laundry, but you didn’t need to, as I wasn’t here to wear it. Library in ten minutes.” He clapped his hands once and strode down the hallway. Six days. The man had been gone six days, and that was all he had to say about it?

I was trying to apologize,” she said, relief and humor easing into her eyes and curving her lips. “You didn’t answer my question.” He thought he might snap off the end of the pier, he was gripping it so hard. In response, she ducked her hand into the pocket of her shorts and pulled out a folded and now somewhat crumpled piece of paper. “Here. Read for yourself.” He took the paper, realizing he was acting like a complete yobbo, and knew then that perhaps he wasn’t nearly so cool and levelheaded about this whole endeavor as he’d led her to believe. The truth of it being, he only really wanted her to figure out what would make her happy if what made her happy was him. Under her amused stare, he unfolded the paper and read: Dear Hook, I’m trying to be a good and supportive sister and help get Fiona and her ridiculously long veil down the aisle before I strangle her into submission with every hand-beaded, pearl-seeded foot of it. At the moment, sitting here knee-deep in crinolines and enough netting to outfit every member of Downton Abbey, I can’t safely predict a win in that ongoing effort. That said, I’d much rather be spending the time with you, sailing the high seas on our pirate ship. Especially that part where we stayed anchored in one spot for an afternoon and all the plundering was going on aboard our own boat. I’ve been thinking a lot about everything everyone has said and have come to the conclusion that the only thing I’m sure of is that I’m thinking too much. I’ve decided it was better when I was just feeling things and not thinking endlessly about them. I especially liked the things I was feeling on our picnic for two. So this is all to say I’d like to go, um, sailing again. Even if there’s no boat involved this time. I hope you won’t think less of me for the request, but please take seeing a whole lot more of me as a consolation prize if you do. Also? Save me. Or send bail money. Sincerely, Starfish, Queen of the High Seas, Plunderer of Pirates, especially those with a really clever right Hook. He was smiling and shaking his head as he folded the note closed and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “Well?” she said at length. “Apology accepted” was all he said. “And?” He slid a look her way. “And…what?” She’d made him wait three days, and punitive or not, he wasn’t in any hurry to put her out of her misery. Plus, when he did, it was likely to be that much more fun. “You’re going to make me spell it out, aren’t you? Don’t you realize it was hard enough just putting it in writing?” “I accept your lovely invitation,” he said, then added, “I only have one caveat.” Her relief turned to wary suspicion as she eyed him. “Oh? And that would be?” “Will you wear the crinolines?

He ain’t a Coot not really,” said Bill. “He ain’t got a head on him no better’n a squashed frog. I see him all right but he don’t know nothing. Fishing he were on the gravel reach.” “Catching anything?” asked Pete, who, detective or no detective, was still a fisherman. “Perch,” said Bill. “Oh, never mind the fish,” said Dorothea. “Had any boats been cast off?” “He tell me to keep my shadow off the water,” said Bill. “So I creep up and give him one of my sandwiches and when I ask if any boats been cast off, why Tommy he say ‘How do you know?’ “ “Go on. Go on,” said Dorothea, reaching out for one of the little black paper flags all ready on its pin. “I say I don’t know but I want to know and Tommy he say it weren’t his fault and I say when were it and what boat and Tommy he said it were his Dad’s row-boat and he give it Tommy to tie up and Tommy he tie it to a stick what broke and he have to go in swimming to catch it.