Peel Off Wall Quotes

This is all you really need, isn’t it? Just one good friend. Somebody you can be stupid with. Somebody who’ll peel you up off the ground, prop you against the wall.

From the time I met him, he left me little clues of a man, a trail of bread crumbs to a gingerbread cottage. Inside the cottage were peeling pictures of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe that keep sliding to the floor because the walls were too sweet to hold the Blu-Tack. I tried to pick the posters off the floor and got so distracted, I ended up in an oven. So I climbed out of the oven and out of the house and I was saving myself, but it hurt so bad. I found the boy I loved, but he didn't want to hug me because I was blistered and spotted with bread crumbs. I looked up close because, up close, I could always see myself reflected in the surface of his shiny, iconic beauty. But suddenly he had pores, grey hairs, and chapped lips. And I couldn't see a damn thing.

The gray paint peels off the wall in odd and beautiful patterns, each cracked polygon of paint a snowflake of decay.

know, I know. I can't pull money out of thin air.” Chey peeled the paper off her door and fished her keys from a pocket. Letting herself inside, she set the camera case by the wall and put her purse down precisely in line with the edge of the couch. Exhaling a long breath,

For example, there is the matter of eating paint. The whales peel the paint off the pool’s inner walls with their teeth. To those who witness the behavior, it looks as if they are nibbling on the wall or the floor of the pool. They are trying to occupy themselves, stimulating their enormous jaws and great intelligences with obsessively meticulous work.

Kingbitter, as he did frequently nowadays, was standing at his window and looking out onto the street below. This street offered the most mundane and ordinary sights of Budapest's mundane and ordinary streets. The muck-, oil-, and dog-dirt-spattered sidewalk was lined with parked cars, and in the one-yard gaps between the cars and the leprotically peeling house walls the most mundane and ordinary passersby were attempting to go about their business, their hostile features an outward clue to their dark thoughts. Every now and then, perhaps in a hurry to overtake the single file inching along the front, one of them would step off the sidewalk, only for an entire chorus of rancorous car horns to give the lie to any groundless hope of breaking free from the line.

Now see the nasturtiums. The leaves are like tiny green parasols blown inside-out and the flowers are terrifically garish. In every village we pass through, see how they are everywhere, how they fill every gap in every wall, every crack in every path. The nasturtiums have it figured out, how survival’s just a matter of filling in the gaps between sun up and sun down. Boiling kettles, peeling potatoes, laundering towels, buying milk, changing light-bulbs, rooting wet mats of pubic hair out of the shower’s plughole. This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for the flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season’s out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life’s eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself.

Ehric frowned as he peeled a Post-It note off the package. "Preheat to three seventy-five." His brother went to the wall ovens and began pushing buttons. "Convection?" "Doesn't say." "Damn it." Under and other circumstances, Assail would have found it impossible to believe that Ecale was wasting his meager urge to speak on cooking. But Marisol and her grandmother had changed everything ... for the short time they had been here.

Gamache loved to see inside the homes of people involved in a case. To look at the choices they made for their most intimate space. The colors, the decorations. The aromas. Were there books? What sort? How did it feel? He'd been in shacks in the middle of nowhere, carpets worn, upholstery torn, wallpaper peeling off. But stepping in he'd also noticed the smell of fresh coffee and bread. Walls were taken up with immense smiling graduation photos and on rusty pocked TV trays stood modest chipped vases with cheery daffodils or pussy willows or some tiny wild flower picked by worn hands for eyes that would adore it. And he'd been in mansions that felt like mausoleums.

I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, ignoring the bite of the frosty air on my bare skin. I launched myself in the direction of the door, fumbling around until I found it. I tried shaking the handle, jiggling it, still thinking, hoping, praying that this was some big birthday surprise, and that by the time I got back inside, there would be a plate of pancakes at the table and Dad would bring in the presents, and we could—we could—we could pretend like the night before had never happened, even with the evidence in the next room over. The door was locked. “I’m sorry!” I was screaming. Pounding my fists against it. “Mommy, I’m sorry! Please!” Dad appeared a moment later, his stocky shape outlined by the light from inside of the house. I saw Mom’s bright-red face over his shoulder; he turned to wave her off and then reached over to flip on the overhead lights. “Dad!” I said, throwing my arms around his waist. He let me keep them there, but all I got in return was a light pat on the back. “You’re safe,” he told me, in his usual soft, rumbling voice. “Dad—there’s something wrong with her,” I was babbling. The tears were burning my cheeks. “I didn’t mean to be bad! You have to fix her, okay? She’s…she’s…” “I know, I believe you.” At that, he carefully peeled my arms off his uniform and guided me down, so we were sitting on the step, facing Mom’s maroon sedan. He was fumbling in his pockets for something, listening to me as I told him everything that had happened since I walked into the kitchen. He pulled out a small pad of paper from his pocket. “Daddy,” I tried again, but he cut me off, putting down an arm between us. I understood—no touching. I had seen him do something like this before, on Take Your Child to Work Day at the station. The way he spoke, the way he wouldn’t let me touch him—I had watched him treat another kid this way, only that one had a black eye and a broken nose. That kid had been a stranger. Any hope I had felt bubbling up inside me burst into a thousand tiny pieces. “Did your parents tell you that you’d been bad?” he asked when he could get a word in. “Did you leave your house because you were afraid they would hurt you?” I pushed myself up off the ground. This is my house! I wanted to scream. You are my parents! My throat felt like it had closed up on itself. “You can talk to me,” he said, very gently. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. I just need your name, and then we can go down to the station and make some calls—” I don’t know what part of what he was saying finally broke me, but before I could stop myself I had launched my fists against him, hitting him over and over, like that would drive some sense back into him. “I am your kid!” I screamed. “I’m Ruby!” “You’ve got to calm down, Ruby,” he told me, catching my wrists. “It’ll be okay. I’ll call ahead to the station, and then we’ll go.” “No!” I shrieked. “No!” He pulled me off him again and stood, making his way to the door. My nails caught the back of his hand, and I heard him grunt in pain. He didn’t turn back around as he shut the door. I stood alone in the garage, less than ten feet away from my blue bike. From the tent that we had used to camp in dozens of times, from the sled I’d almost broken my arm on. All around the garage and house were pieces of me, but Mom and Dad—they couldn’t put them together. They didn’t see the completed puzzle standing in front of them. But eventually they must have seen the pictures of me in the living room, or gone up to my mess of the room. “—that’s not my child!” I could hear my mom yelling through the walls. She was talking to Grams, she had to be. Grams would set her straight. “I have no child! She’s not mine—I already called them, don’t—stop it! I’m not crazy!

He waked up late next day after a broken sleep. But his sleep had not refreshed him; he waked up bilious, irritable, ill-tempered, and looked with hatred at his room. It was a tiny cupboard of a room about six paces in length. It had a poverty-stricken appearance with its dusty yellow paper peeling off the walls, and it was so low-pitched that a man of more than average height was ill at ease in it and felt every moment that he would knock his head against the ceiling. The furniture was in keeping with the room: there were three old chairs, rather rickety; a painted table in the corner on which lay a few manuscripts and books; the dust that lay thick upon them showed that they had been long untouched. A big clumsy sofa occupied almost the whole of one wall and half the floor space of the room; it was once covered with chintz, but was now in rags and served Raskolnikov as a bed. Often he went to sleep on it, as he was, without undressing, without sheets, wrapped in his old student's overcoat, with his head on one little pillow, under which he heaped up all the linen he had, clean and dirty, by way of a bolster. A little table stood in front of the sofa.

I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than any sometime-later. I also like birds, mushrooms, the blues, peacock feathers, black cats, blue-eyed people, heraldry, astrology, criminal stories with lots of blood, and ancient epic poems where human heads can hold conversations with former friends and generally have a great time for years after they’ve been cut off. I like good food and good drink, sitting in a hot bath and lounging in a snowbank, wearing everything I own at once, and having everything I need close at hand. I like speed and that special ache in the pit of the stomach when you accelerate to the point of no return. I like to frighten and to be frightened, to amuse and to confound. I like writing on the walls so that no one can guess who did it, and drawing so that no one can guess what it is. I like doing my writing using a ladder or not using it, with a spray can or squeezing the paint from a tube. I like painting with a brush, with a sponge, and with my fingers. I like drawing the outline first and then filling it in completely, so that there’s no empty space left. I like letters as big as myself, but I like very small ones as well. I like directing those who read them here and there by means of arrows, to other places where I also wrote something, but I also like to leave false trails and false signs. I like to tell fortunes with runes, bones, beans, lentils, and I Ching. Hot climates I like in the books and movies; in real life, rain and wind. Generally rain is what I like most of all. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. Any rain, anytime. I like rereading things I’ve read a hundred times over. I like the sound of the harmonica, provided I’m the one playing it. I like lots of pockets, and clothes so worn that they become a kind of second skin instead of something that can be taken off. I like guardian amulets, but specific ones, so that each is responsible for something separate, not the all-inclusive kind. I like drying nettles and garlic and then adding them to anything and everything. I like covering my fingers with rubber cement and then peeling it off in front of everybody. I like sunglasses. Masks, umbrellas, old carved furniture, copper basins, checkered tablecloths, walnut shells, walnuts themselves, wicker chairs, yellowed postcards, gramophones, beads, the faces on triceratopses, yellow dandelions that are orange in the middle, melting snowmen whose carrot noses have fallen off, secret passages, fire-evacuation-route placards; I like fretting when in line at the doctor’s office, and screaming all of a sudden so that everyone around feels bad, and putting my arm or leg on someone when asleep, and scratching mosquito bites, and predicting the weather, keeping small objects behind my ears, receiving letters, playing solitaire, smoking someone else’s cigarettes, and rummaging in old papers and photographs. I like finding something lost so long ago that I’ve forgotten why I needed it in the first place. I like being really loved and being everyone’s last hope, I like my own hands—they are beautiful, I like driving somewhere in the dark using a flashlight, and turning something into something completely different, gluing and attaching things to each other and then being amazed that it actually worked. I like preparing things both edible and not, mixing drinks, tastes, and scents, curing friends of the hiccups by scaring them. There’s an awful lot of stuff I like.

Imitation nation by nation, the simple means of communication and conflict. Stranger than fiction, always has been this way. In the heart of Rome, I never wanted this Halloween season to end, sweet dreams of dark love and wild west wide nights the universe was inside all along. The mystic river beyond metaphysical questions, I can't believe these pink walls anymore, can't remember the names of every street corner I lost my mind to every kind of street art sensual experience. Sunrise rooftops, all the make-up in the world couldn't heal the wounds from the false words in the every day scene of the fiery red lips predicting a gone future puff by single breath. Seeing my skin peel off the city lights.

Where's Mason?” “Planting explosives.” Zinio did a double take. “You actually handed that man explosives?” “Damn it, Zinio. Let other people have some fun.” The explosion in the distance was followed by Mason yelling, “Yahoo!” Zinio and Delaney stared speechless as Mason flew by in the adjoining tunnel, riding the concussion wave of the blast. Finally, Zinio stomped after him. He peeled him off the floor in the adjoining tunnel. “You having fun yet?” “Hell yeah!” “Wanna go again?” “Hell yeah I wanta go again!” A short while later, Zinio watched Mason fly by on a concussion wave from the latest explosion, as Mason shouted, “Hot Diggity!” Zinio made his way over to the somewhat more charcoaled Mason. “You had enough yet?” Mason nodded shakily. “Good—because it'd be nice if we actually put a hole in the fricking wall! That is the object of this little exercise.

Now alongside Scovell, John eased preserved peaches out of galliot pots of syrup and picked husked walnuts from puncheons of salt. He clarified butter and poured it into rye-paste coffins. From the Master Cook, John learned to set creams with calves' feet, then isinglass, then hartshorn, pouring decoctions into egg-molds to set and be placed in nests of shredded lemon peel. To make cabbage cream he let the thick liquid clot, lifted off the top layer, folded it then repeated the process until the cabbage was sprinkled with rose water and dusted with sugar, ginger and nutmeg. He carved apples into animals and birds. The birds themselves he roasted, minced and folded into beaten egg whites in a foaming forcemeat of fowls. John boiled, coddled, simmered and warmed. He roasted, seared, fried and braised. He poached stock-fish and minced the meats of smoked herrings while Scovell's pans steamed with ancient sauces: black chawdron and bukkenade, sweet and sour egredouce, camelade and peppery gauncil. For the feasts above he cut castellations into pie-coffins and filled them with meats dyed in the colors of Sir William's titled guests. He fashioned palaces from wafers of spiced batter and paste royale, glazing their walls with panes of sugar. For the Bishop of Carrboro they concocted a cathedral. 'Sprinkle salt on the syrup,' Scovell told him, bent over the chafing dish in his chamber. A golden liquor swirled in the pan. 'Very slowly.' 'It will taint the sugar,' John objected. But Scovell shook his head. A day later they lifted off the cold clear crust and John split off a sharp-edged shard. 'Salt,' he said as it slid over his tongue. But little by little the crisp flake sweetened on his tongue. Sugary juices trickled down his throat. He turned to the Master Cook with a puzzled look. 'Brine floats,' Scovell said. 'Syrup sinks.' The Master Cook smiled. 'Patience, remember? Now, to the glaze...

So, a few years ago, while I was presenting at a conference in Europe, my wife called and insisted that the walls of our laundry room were throbbing. That was the word she used. Pulsing, like the wall itself was alive. She described a hum, an energy, that she could feel as soon as she walked into the room. I suggested it was a wiring problem. She became … let’s just say, agitated at that point. Three days later, just before I was due to come back, she called again. The problem was getting worse, she said. There was an audible hum now, from the wall. She couldn’t sleep. She could hear it as soon as she walked in the house. She could feel it, the vibration, like something unnatural was ready to burst forth into our world. So, I flew home the next day, and found her extremely upset. I understood immediately why my suggestion of a wiring problem was so insulting—this was the sound of something alive. Something massive. So, even though I was exhausted, jet-lagged and just completely dead on my feet, I had no other thought than to go out to the garage, get my tools and peel off the siding. Guess what I found.” I didn’t answer. “Guess!” “I’m not sure I want to know.” “Bees. They had built an entire hive in the wall, sprawling from floor to ceiling. Tens of thousands of them.” His face was lighting up with the telling of his amusing anecdote. Why not? He was getting paid to tell it. “So I went and put on a hat and gloves and wrapped my wife’s scarf around my face and sprayed the hive, I killed them by the thousands. Only later did I realize that the bees are quite valuable and a local beekeeper actually came and carefully removed the hive itself at no charge. I think he’d have actually paid me if I hadn’t killed so many of them at the start.” “Hmm.” “Do you understand?” “Yeah, your wife thought it was a monster. Turned out to just be bees. So my little problem, probably just bees. It’s all bees. Nothing to worry about.” “I’m afraid you misunderstood. That was the day that a very powerful, very dangerous monster turned out to be real. Just ask the bees.

One of the marks of our obliviousness, one of the countless signs that our thinking minds have grown estranged from the intelligence of our sensing bodies, is that today a great many people seem to believe that shadows are flat. If I am strolling along a street on a cloudless afternoon and I notice a shapeshifting patch of darkness accompanying me as I walk, splayed out on the road perpendicular to my upright self, its appendages stretching and shrinking with the swinging of my limbs, I instantly identify this horizontal swath as my shadow. As though a shadow was merely this flatness, this kinetic pancake, this creature of two dimensions whom one might peel off the street and drape over the nearest telephone wire. We identify our shadow, in other words, with that visible shape we see projected on the pavement or the whitewashed wall. Since what we glimpse there is a being without depth, we naturally assume that shadows themselves are basically flat—and if we are asked, by a curious child, about the life of shadows we are apt to reply that their lives exist only in two dimensions. Suppose,

Our supposed leader was Miss Joyce, who had been working as a civil servant in the department since its foundation forty-five years earlier in 1921. She was sixty-three years old and, like my late adoptive mother Maude, was a compulsive smoker, favouring Chesterfield Regulars (Red), which she imported from the United States in boxes of one hundred at a time and stored in an elegantly carved wooden box on her desk with an illustration of the King of Siam on the lid. Although our office was not much given to personal memorabilia, she kept two posters pinned to the wall beside her in defence of her addiction. The first showed Rita Hayworth in a pinstriped blazer and white blouse, her voluminous red hair tumbling down around her shoulders, professing that ‘ALL MY FRIENDS KNOW THAT CHESTERFIELD IS MY BRAND’ while holding an unlit cigarette in her left hand and staring off into the distance, where Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin were presumably pleasuring themselves in anticipation of erotic adventures to come. The second, slightly peeling at the edges and with a noticeable lipstick stain on the subject’s face, portrayed Ronald Reagan seated behind a desk that was covered in cigarette boxes, a Chesterfield hanging jauntily from the Gipper’s mouth. ‘I’M SENDING CHESTERFIELDS TO ALL MY FRIENDS. THAT’S THE MERRIEST CHRISTMAS ANY SMOKER CAN HAVE – CHESTERFIELD MILDNESS PLUS NO UNPLEASANT AFTER-TASTE’ it said, and sure enough he appeared to be wrapping boxes in festive paper for the likes of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, who, I’m sure, were only thrilled to receive them

Once I reached the door, I paused with my hand near the sensor, listening. At first, all I heard were heavy breaths that turned into sobs. Then Akos screamed, and there was a loud crash, followed by another one. He screamed again, and I pressed my ear to the door to listen, my lower lip trapped between my teeth. I bit down so hard I tasted blood when Akos’s screams turned to sobs. I touched the sensor, opening the door. He was sitting on the floor in the bathroom. There were pieces of shattered mirror all around him. He had ripped the shower curtain from the ceiling and the towel rack from the wall. He didn’t look up at me when I came in, or even when I walked carefully across the fragments of glass to reach him. I knelt among the shards, and reached over his shoulder to turn the shower on. I waited until the water warmed up, then tugged him by his arm toward the spray. I stood in the shower with him, fully clothed. His breaths came in sharp bursts against my cheek. I put my hand on the back of his neck and pulled his face toward the water. He closed his eyes and let it hit his cheeks. His trembling fingers sought mine, and he clutched my hand against his chest, against his armor. We stood together for a long time, until his tears subsided. Then I turned the water off, and led him into the kitchen, scattering mirror pieces with my toes as I walked. He was staring into middle distance. I wasn’t sure that he knew where he was, or what was happening to him. I undid the straps of his armor and guided it over his head; I pinched the hem of his shirt and peeled the wet fabric away from his body; I unbuttoned his pants and let them drop to the floor in a soaking-wet heap. I had daydreamed about seeing him this way, and even about one day undressing him, taking away some of the layers that separated us, but this was not a daydream. He was in pain. I wanted to help him.

I love you.” She ignored the burning in her eyes and plunged forward, a sailboat into the wind. “I don’t know when it started or how it happened. I only know that you captured my heart, and I don’t want it back. I want to stay here forever. I want to wake up to your stubbly, scratchy face and lie next to you in bed, even if you snore loudly enough to peel the paint off the walls. I want to— Lucas broke off her words with his kiss.

Milton took out his Sig and went inside. The first room used to be a kitchen. Old appliances had been left to rot, with anything that could be easily removed long since sold for scrap. The walls were partially stripped and scabbed with lead paint, and the remnants of a twee wallpaper that depicted an Alpine scene had been left to peel away like patches of dead, flaking skin. Empty cardboard boxes and fast-food wrappers were scattered on the floor. A single man, strung out and emaciated, was slumped against the wall. He was unconscious, and Milton would not have been able to say whether he was dead or alive. He heard low conversation from the front of the house and set off towards it. The junkie’s arm swept around sharply and his eyes swam with drunken stupor, but he paid Milton no heed as he passed through the room.

firmly by the shoulders. Jon says, ‘How the hell did you ever get keys for this place?’ I chuckle, though there is really nothing to laugh about. It is the irony, I suppose. ‘The first summer I was here, I landed one day to find that the Lighthouse Board had sent in decorators to paint the place. Everything was opened up. The guys were okay with me taking a look around and we got chatting. The forecast was good, and they expected to be here for a few days. So I spun them the story about writing a book and said I would probably be back tomorrow. And I was. Only this time with a pack of Blu-tack. When they were having their lunch, I took the keys from the inner and outer doors and made impressions. Dead simple. Had keys cut, and access to the place whenever I wanted thereafter.’ The final panel falls away in my hands, and I reach in to retrieve a black plastic bag. I hand it up to Jon, and he peels back the plastic to look inside. As I stand up, I lift one of the wooden panels. I know that this is the one chance I will get, while he is distracted, and I swing the panel at his head as hard as I can. The force with which it hits him sends a judder back up my arms to my shoulders, and I actually hear it snap. He falls to his knees, dropping the hard drive, and his gun skids away across the floor. Sally is so startled, she barely has time to move before I punch her hard in the face. I feel teeth breaking beneath the force of my knuckles, behind lips I once kissed with tenderness and lust. Blood bubbles at her mouth. I grab Karen by the arm and hustle her fast down the corridor, kicking open the door and dragging her out into the night. The storm hits us with a force that assails all the senses. The wind is deafening, driving stinging rain horizontally into our faces. The cold wraps icy fingers around us, instantly numbing. Beyond the protection of the walls, it is worse, and I find it nearly impossible to keep my feet as I pull my daughter off into the dark. Only the relentless turning of the lamp in the light room above us provides any illumination. We turn right, and I know that almost immediately the island drops away into a chasm that must be two or three hundred feet deep. I can hear the ocean rushing into it. Snarling, snapping at the rocks below and sending an amplified roar almost straight up into the air. I guide Karen away from it, half-dragging her, until we reach a small cluster of rocks and I push her flat into the ground behind them. I tear away the tape that binds her wrists, then roll her on to her back to peel away the strip of it over her mouth. She gasps, almost choking, and I feel her body next to mine, racked by sobs, as she

He kept digging, kept scratching — every finger, both hands, until he could feel the wood scraping on raw flesh. His wrists throbbed, the plastic cutting into them. He called out as one of his nails peeled back off the bed, screaming with a voice barely his own. But he couldn’t give up. And after who knows how long, he could get his fingers around the tip. Now he needed to get it out. He didn’t really wear man-jewellery, but he had a ring he wore around his index finger. A ring she’d given him — stolen for him. For them. Grace. He had to get back to her. Tell her he was okay. He got the flat side against the point and pushed, wedging himself under it.  Whether it took an hour or five, he didn’t know. He could feel blood in his palms as the steel stabbed at his skin with every slip.  But slowly he made progress, a millimetre at a time, forcing it upwards. And then it landed softly in the dirt next to the box. He managed to fold himself up under the new hole and shove his heel against it.  With what little strength he had left he pushed upwards, feeling the wood bow in the absence of the nail. He kicked at it, then kicked at it again. And again. And again. Until the pain in his foot was unbearable. And then he kept kicking, not feeling it moving, but knowing that staying inside meant death. People didn’t get nailed into boxes if they were going to survive.  The fuzz of whatever was in his system was still lingering. He didn’t seem to be able to concentrate on more than one thing at a time — but Grace was always there. Thin, brown hair, pretty in all the right ways. She was all he had now. He had to get back to her. The lid came loose, nails creaking in the wood, and in a blur he was out. Sweat-soaked, filthy, crying, he flopped out and into the dirt.  The room smelled like a swimming pool and polythene sheets hung from the ceiling. He didn’t wait to see what else there was. At the far side of the room, he could make out a door, outlined in the dim red glow of a tiny bulb above the frame. Next to it there was a crowbar, rusted and rough, silhouetted in the half-light. He limped over, his legs numb from the box and the drugs, and pulled it open, grabbing the bar. The light blinked off, the little plastic control unit next to it clicking, but he didn’t care. He had to get out.  The stairs beyond creaked under his weight as he dragged himself up on bloody fingers, the crowbar clanging against the mouldy stonework walls.

His fingers cupped my face, cradling my cheek and jaw as if I was made of glass. I found a handful of his soft hair and wound my fingers into it, while curling my other hand into the shoulder of his leather coat. My heart hadn’t even stopped thundering from the Foul Woman’s presence. Now it was thrumming against my ribs again, too fast to count the beats. I did something I’d always secretly wanted to and bit down, very gently, on his beautiful bottom lip. Shinobu’s breath shivered into my mouth, and he pulled me closer.   I was taller now, but not tall enough. Tiptoes didn’t bring me where I wanted to be either. I jumped and hauled myself up the steel pillar of his body, wrapping one leg around his hip. The big, warm hand on my waist slid slowly down the thin fabric of my trousers to cup my thigh, supporting my weight. His other hand was clenched in my hair. A wave of almost painful excitement and yearning crashed through me, and sent me into a full-body shudder that I had no chance of hiding. A tiny moan popped from my lips straight into his.   “Mio. Oh, Mio…” His shaking voice echoed in my ears, mixing with words in Japanese. I recognized some of them. My beloved. My Mio. He pressed his mouth to my eyelid, my cheek, the edge of my jaw, the skin beneath my ear.   There was a loud tearing noise. We both froze.   Abruptly I was aware of the wall against my back, and the tremble in my thigh from hanging onto him like a demented spider monkey. I swallowed and blinked as Shinobu eased back, letting my feet drop to the pavement again. Our eyes met.   “What just…?” I asked.   He cleared his throat. “I think – my shirt.”   I looked down and saw that at some point I’d traded my grip on his hair for a handful of the T-shirt and jumper under his jacket. My fingers had gone straight through the thin wool and made a nice tear in the cotton beneath that too.   “Darn super-strength,” I muttered.   Shinobu’s lip twitched up at the corner again. I snatched my hand away from his ruined clothes and clapped it over his mouth. “No laughing at me,” I said, only half joking. “Not at a moment like this. Romance will die forever and it’ll be your fault.” He peeled my hand off and pressed a kiss to my palm. “Where are we now? What is this place?” “Um … Remnant Street, I think.”   “No. From now on it will be Paradise Street. Heaven Road. Happiness Avenue.”   “You big cheese-ball…” I muttered, putting my arms around his waist and hugging him tightly.   “What?”   “Never mind!” I grumped, then sighed. “I wish we could stay on Happiness Avenue a bit longer…”   “But we can’t,” he finished. “It is all right. I promise we will come back whenever you want.

The nasturtiums have it figured out, how survival's just a a manner of filling in the gaps between sun up and sun down, Boiling kettles, peeling potatoes, laundering towels, buying milk, changing lightbulbs, rooting wet mats of pubic hair out of the shower's plughole. This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season's out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life's eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself.

As I look at it now, I was peeling off layer after layer of defenses. I’d build them up, try them, and then discard them when you remained the same. I didn’t know what was at the bottom and I was very much afraid to find out, but I had to keep on trying. At first I felt there was nothing within me—just a great emptiness where I needed and wanted a solid core. Then I began to feel that I was facing a solid brick wall, too high to get over and too thick to go through. One day the wall became translucent, rather than solid. After this, the wall seemed to disappear but beyond it I discovered a dam holding back violent, churning waters. I felt as if I were holding back the force of these waters and if I opened even a tiny hole I and all about me would be destroyed in the ensuing torrent of feelings represented by the water. Finally I could stand the strain no longer and I let go. All I did, actually, was to succumb to complete and utter self pity, then hate, then love. After this experience, I felt as if I had leaped a brink and was safely on the other side, though still tottering a bit on the edge. I don’t know what I was searching for or where I was going, but I felt then as I have always felt whenever I really lived, that I was moving forward.

As the museum’s head of security, I order you to open that door!” “I can’t.” “What do you mean, you can’t?” “Me hands have gone all floppy.” “What do you mean your hands ‘have gone all floppy’?” “Too much mopping!” “Well, I’ll open it, then.” “I wouldn’t if I was you.” “Why?” “I just blew off in there.” “You did what?” “I did a bottom burp in the cupboard so all the stuffed animals wouldn’t have to smell it. It’s a really stinky one. It would have peeled the paint off the walls.” “That doesn’t explain why you were talking.” “I was talking to my own bottom.” “You were talking to your bottom?” “Giving it a jolly good telling-off, Mr Clout, sir.

What finally fills my vessel, nurtures what always lined its inner walls. Each morsel of true nourishment enlivens something that was already present, but dormant. It sensitizes the essence which was once implanted there. My true essence was hidden under layers of dirt. I am still peeling off these layers, and as I do, with a wonder distilled from childhood, I can recognize my true self.

Bubba glared up at him, and August responded with one of those smiles that somehow managed to be both saccharine sweet and sarcastic enough to peel the paint off the walls. Well, what was left of the paint. He’d pointed that smile at Ricardo a few times, and Ricardo had contemplated pistol-whipping him, but he had to admit that when it was directed at someone else, it was hilarious. He didn’t dare laugh, though. He was not giving August that satisfaction.

I found my truck where I had left it, parked with the rear against a juniper. Water in the jugs had frozen. A mouse trap in the back still hadn’t caught the mouse who was living in my wool socks and eating holes in my plastic bags. I drove north. By the time the Milky Way was out I had reached the foot of the Book Cliffs and the remains of Thompson, Utah. The train comes through the town and was heading out for Christmas. I was an hour late. The train is customarily two hours late. I still had time to set pennies on the tracks. This was the only time I had seen another customer in the Silver Grill Cafe. Through the window he sat at one end of the counter gesturing toward the gray-haired woman who runs the place, sitting at the other end. I once ordered a cinnamon roll in there, and she peeled open a box she had gone all the way to Moab City Market a couple days earlier to purchase. By telling me this, she was emphasizing the fact that the cinnamon rolls were fresh. She put it in the microwave for me. Gave me an extra pat of butter, the kind with foil around it. I spent an hour once just up the street talking to the post mistress and her cat. I checked the WANTED bulletins, then ran when the train came through. If you are not standing at the tracks in Thompson, the Amtrak will not stop. They call it a whistle stop. One of the few left in the country. The gray-haired woman shut down the cafe, clicked off the front lights. Electricity was buzzing out of the single street light, so I opened the truck door and turned on the tape deck. After a while I shut it off because my battery has never proved itself to be resilient. A couple of freight trains tore through with the impact of sudden cataclysm, flattening my pennies. Then the buzzing of the street light. Then the coyotes. They were yelping and howling up Sego Canyon, where there are pre-Anasazi paintings on the walls—big, round eyes, huge and red, looking over the canyon. The train was three hours late. I stood nearly on the tracks so they couldn’t miss me with that blinding, drunken light. The conductor threw open the steel door. “Shoot,” he yelled. “It’s dark out here!” I dove through and tackled him with my backpacks, flashing a ticket in his face. He quickly announced that I had too many pieces, but the train was already moving. I looked back out. Utah was black. He pulled the door closed and the train began to rock along the tracks. When I came down the aisle I saw a few passengers who were still awake, on their way to San Francisco or Las Vegas. Overhead lights were trained on paperbacks in their laps. They were staring out their windows into absolute darkness. I knew what they were thinking; there is nothing out there.

The clouds and the shafts of skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of a motionless lightning, the length of ten stories. A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire, still holding the glow of the sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire, but a dying one which it is too late to stop.

Even the most intense aerial bombing leaves the walls and foundations of burned-out buildings, as well as parks and woods, roads and tracks, fields and cemeteries. The tsunami spared nothing, and achieved feats of surreal juxtaposition that no explosion could match. It plucked forests up by their roots, and scattered them miles inland. It peeled the macadam off the roads, and cast it hither and thither in buckled ribbons. It stripped houses to their foundations, and lifted cars, lorries, ships and corpses onto the top of tall buildings.

He can’t stay here.” I’m putting my foot down. I won’t allow this to happen. “I’ll leave, Dad. I swear to God, if you try to make me do this, I’ll disappear again.” Dad sits back, looking smug. “You know, I got a call from Matt’s doctor the other day.” Dad stares direct at Logan. “They said your brother is ready for phase two of the treatment. And they asked if I would be providing the funds.” Logan’s arm falls from around my waist, and he lumbers to his feet very slowly. He looks down at me and presses a finger to my lips. His finger trembles. “Mr. Madison,” he says. He nods at my dad, and then at my mom. “Mrs. Madison. It was wonderful to meet you. I will say good-bye now.” He starts toward the door. “And as far as the treatment is concerned, if Emily’s freedom is the price, you can take your money and shove it up your ass.” He stops at the door. I’m latched onto his arm like a Velcro monkey. “Please don’t walk out,” I beg. “Not like this. I can fix this.” He peels me off of his arm. “I know you can.” He kisses my forehead, his lips lingering there as he breathes in deeply, his eyes closed. Then he pushes me back from him. “I need to go,” he says. His voice is hoarse. “I’ll talk to you later.” “I’m going to deal with this, and then I’ll come find you. I promise.” He nods. Then he steps out the door and closes it softly behind him. There’s a thud on the other side of the wall and I know Logan waited until he got outside to smash something.

The McDonald brothers kept their potatoes—top quality Idaho spuds, about eight ounces apiece—piled in bins in their back warehouse building. Since rats and mice and other varmints like to eat potatoes, the walls of the bins were of two layers of small-mesh chicken wire. This kept the critters out and allowed fresh air to circulate among the potatoes. I watched the spuds being bagged up and followed their trip by four-wheeled cart to the octagonal drive-in building. There they were carefully peeled, leaving a tiny proportion of skin on, and then they were cut into long sections and dumped into large sinks of cold water. The french-fry man, with his sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, would plunge his arms into the floating schools of potatoes and gently stir them. I could see the water turning white with starch. This was drained off and the residual starch was rinsed from the glistening morsels with a flexible spray hose. Then the potatoes went into wire baskets, stacked in production-line fashion next to the deep-fry vats.

Do you need assistance with your dress?” “I do not.” She shifted, and Ben heard her draw in her breath at the sight of him peeled down to his breeches and boots. He sat on the bed, giving her his back so he could tug off his footwear. Maggie came around the bed and sat beside him. “This doesn’t feel right.” When he wanted to hurl his boots hard against the bedroom wall, Ben instead set them tidily beside the bed. “What doesn’t feel right about it?” “It’s broad daylight and we’re not married and we’re not marrying, either.” “This marriage business troubles you exceedingly,” he observed. “What is about to happen between us has happened before, Maggie, and at your instigation in even broader daylight than this. I believe you enjoyed yourself, and I most assuredly know I did. Do we need to complicate matters beyond that?” She turned green eyes on him, luminous with some emotion he could not name. “I suppose not.” Her busy, brilliant mind wanted to complicate it—he could see that much in her troubled expression—but his not-very-brilliant, lust-clouded mind was determined on simplicity. He took her hand and put it over the fall of his trousers. “It isn’t complicated at all. You want me, and I’m happy to oblige you. Take the dress off, Maggie, or I will tear it from your body.” And this—this sincere threat of sartorial violence—was what finally won him a small, impish smile. “You would not tear it off me, but you might ruck it up and wrinkle it beyond salvation.

They were climbing stone stairs. The wall on their right was draped with hideous papers that were peeling off and showed rotting surfaces of chill plaster behind. A mingling of many weird colours enlivened this nether surface, dark patches of which had a submarine and incredible beauty. In another dryer area, where a great sail of paper hung away from the wall, the plaster had cracked into a network of intricate fissures varying in depth and resembling a bird’s-eye view, or map of some fabulous delta. A thousand imaginary journeys might be made along the banks of these rivers of an unexplored world.

the school building had been comprehensively repaired two decades ago. ‘It was badly damaged in the rains and there was no place for our children to study. We all came together and repaired the building,’ he said. When I visited, the floors were all gone, the walls were cracked, the yellow paint long peeled off, the roof leaky, and the whole structure covered in dust.

It’s very interesting, and the old adage of finding out who your real friends are certainly rings true. Some are genuinely helping you clean all the shit off your fan, getting wet wipes out of their bags and checking the fan is switched off at the wall, while some peel away doing little retches in their hands. And your friends stay in your new formation – they don’t revert back to pre-shitstorm. I think when they slink away while you’re eating trifle with your hands, they know not to bother coming back. If you’re not there when I’m eating trifle with my hands, don’t come back when I’m eating it with a spoon. I

He cast a glance at the heavy-metal posters on the walls. One was peeling off at a corner and another had been torn and taped back together. “Norm said I could take those down,” Kenzie told him. “You don’t like them?” he asked dryly.

It's too hot to sit in the glebe. Let's sit over here." Now it was Michele's turn to look around for something she didn't know what was. Brian laughed. "That's the glebe," he said, pointing to the house next door to the library. The paint was peeling off the walls in big, ugly blotches. "Could have fooled me," Michele said, determined not to ask what she hoped he would volunteer. "A glebe was land set aside by the Lord Proprietors to encourage a minister to settle here," Brian explained.

He strolled through the store to the back room. Leah sat at a desk, staring at a computer screen that displayed a spreadsheet of some sort. “Give me two minutes,” she mumbled, her tone distracted, “then I’ll be done.” Seth leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. She wore glasses tonight. He had never seen her do so before and wondered if she needed them for reading and close-up work the way many humans did once they reached their forties. The frames were black, reminding him of those that had been popular in the sixties. Her long hair was pulled back in a slightly disheveled bun. The jeans and blazer she’d apparently changed into before going back to work hugged her beautiful figure. She had, as Sheldon would say, a real sexy-librarian thing going on that heated Seth’s blood. The longer he watched her, the more he wanted to touch her, to peel that blazer off, loosen her hair, and— “Finally,” she announced with a sigh. Closing the file, she removed her glasses and spun the chair around to face him. When she looked at him, her eyebrows flew up. “Hi.” “Hello.” She studied him for a moment. “Something on your mind?” Aside from a deep desire to strip her naked?