Piercing Ears Quotes

When you love someone, they become a part of who you are. They're in everything you do. They're in the air you breathe and the water you drink and the blood in your veins. Their touch stays on your skin and their voice stays in your ears and their thoughts stay in your mind. You know their dreams because their nightmares pierce your heart and their good dreams are your dreams too. And you don't think they're perfect, but you know their flaws, the deep-down truth of them, and the shadows of all their secrets, and they don't frighten you away; in fact you love them more for it, because you don't want perfect. You want them. You want—" He broke off then, as if realizing everyone was looking at him again. "You want what?" said Dru with enormous eyes. "Nothing," Julian said. "I'm just talking.

If you have insight, you use your inner eye, your inner ear, to pierce to the heart of things, and have no need of intellectual knowledge.

When you love someone, they become a part of who you are. They’re in everything you do. They’re in the air you breathe and the water you drink and the blood in your veins. Their touch stays on your skin and their voice stays in your ears and their thoughts stay in your mind. You know their dreams because their nightmares pierce your heart and their good dreams are your dreams too. And you don’t think they’re perfect, but you know their flaws, the deep-down truth of them, and the shadows of all their secrets, and they don’t frighten you away; in fact you love them more for it, because you don’t want perfect. You want them.

WE do try to eat," Raoul called back to her [Kel]. I go all faint if I don't get fed regularly. Only think of the disgrace to the King's Own if I fell from the saddle." "But there was that time in Fanwood," a voice behind them said. "That wedding in Tameran," added the blonde Sergeant Osbern, riding a horse-length behind Kel. "Don't forget when what's-his-name, with the army, retired," yelled a third. "Silence, insubordinate curs!" cried Raoul. "Do not sully my new squire's ears with your profane tales!" "Even if they're TRUE?" That was Dom. It seemed Neal wasn't the only family member versed in irony.

You are but a mortal," Roque whispers in my ear, riding his horse alongside the chariot, as per tradition. "And a whorefart," Servo calls from the other side. "Yes," Roque agrees solemnly. "That too.

I have loved in life and I have been loved. I have drunk the bowl of poison from the hands of love as nectar, and have been raised above life's joy and sorrow. My heart, aflame in love, set afire every heart that came in touch with it. My heart has been rent and joined again; My heart has been broken and again made whole; My heart has been wounded and healed again; A thousand deaths my heart has died, and thanks be to love, it lives yet. I went through hell and saw there love's raging fire, and I entered heaven illumined with the light of love. I wept in love and made all weep with me; I mourned in love and pierced the hearts of men; And when my fiery glance fell on the rocks, the rocks burst forth as volcanoes. The whole world sank in the flood caused by my one tear; With my deep sigh the earth trembled, and when I cried aloud the name of my beloved, I shook the throne of God in heaven. I bowed my head low in humility, and on my knees I begged of love, "Disclose to me, I pray thee, O love, thy secret." She took me gently by my arms and lifted me above the earth, and spoke softly in my ear, "My dear one, thou thyself art love, art lover, and thyself art the beloved whom thou hast adored.

She shrugged and flipped her glossy hair behind her shoulders. "What else do you have to do with your time besides think about stuff like this? It's not like you're real heavy into extracurriculars. Besides, you're all, like, goth and into the dead, right?" Alona Dare, queen of the insult-compliment. "Wow. Thanks. Anyone ever tell you you're good with people?" She frowned. "No." "Good. I'm not goth." "Your hair is black, you have piercings, you wear black all the time and act all freaky-" "My hair is naturally this color. I have three earings in one ear, that's it. This shirt" -I tugged at the fabric across my chest- "is navy blue, and if I act weird all the time, it's because of ghosts like you.

A slow smile curved over my face, and I leaned down over him. "No," I said. "Wishes are lies. Tell me you're going to leave. Tell me you're not going to stay. Tell me that it's only for a while so I can enjoy today," I whispered in his ear, as if saying it louder would break me. "And when you go, don't think me cold when I don't cry. I can't cry anymore, Pierce. It hurts too much.

God...this was who he loved, he thought. And always would. It was the thrust of that stubborn jaw, and the dark, slashing eyebrows, and those piercings up his ear and in his full lower lip. It was that thick, glossy black hair and the golden skin and that heavily muscled body. It was the way he laughed and the fact that he never, ever cried. It was the scars on his inside no one knew about and the conviction that he would always be the first to run into a burning building or a bloody fight or a car wreck. It was all the things Qhuinn had been and was ever going to be.

When you love someone, they become a part of who you are. They’re in everything you do. They’re in the air you breathe and the water you drink and the blood in your veins. Their touch stays on your skin and their voice stays in your ears and their thoughts stay in your mind. You know their dreams because their nightmares pierce your heart and their good dreams are your dreams too. And you don’t think they’re perfect, but you know their flaws, the deep-down truth of them, and the shadows of all their secrets, and they don’t frighten you away; in fact you love them more for it, because you don’t want perfect. You want them. You want-

Speak and they will listen," she urges. "It is that bloody simple. All ears yearn for a voice to lead them through darkness.

For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied.

what love looks like what does love look like the therapist asks one week after the breakup and i’m not sure how to answer her question except for the fact that i thought love looked so much like you that’s when it hit me and i realized how naive i had been to place an idea so beautiful on the image of a person as if anybody on this entire earth could encompass all love represented as if this emotion seven billion people tremble for would look like a five foot eleven medium-sized brown-skinned guy who likes eating frozen pizza for breakfast what does love look like the therapist asks again this time interrupting my thoughts midsentence and at this point i’m about to get up and walk right out the door except i paid too much money for this hour so instead i take a piercing look at her the way you look at someone when you’re about to hand it to them lips pursed tightly preparing to launch into conversation eyes digging deeply into theirs searching for all the weak spots they have hidden somewhere hair being tucked behind the ears as if you have to physically prepare for a conversation on the philosophies or rather disappointments of what love looks like well i tell her i don’t think love is him anymore if love was him he would be here wouldn’t he if he was the one for me wouldn’t he be the one sitting across from me if love was him it would have been simple i don’t think love is him anymore i repeat i think love never was i think i just wanted something was ready to give myself to something i believed was bigger than myself and when i saw someone who probably fit the part i made it very much my intention to make him my counterpart and i lost myself to him he took and he took wrapped me in the word special until i was so convinced he had eyes only to see me hands only to feel me a body only to be with me oh how he emptied me how does that make you feel interrupts the therapist well i said it kind of makes me feel like shit maybe we’re looking at it wrong we think it’s something to search for out there something meant to crash into us on our way out of an elevator or slip into our chair at a cafe somewhere appear at the end of an aisle at the bookstore looking the right amount of sexy and intellectual but i think love starts here everything else is just desire and projection of all our wants needs and fantasies but those externalities could never work out if we didn’t turn inward and learn how to love ourselves in order to love other people love does not look like a person love is our actions love is giving all we can even if it’s just the bigger slice of cake love is understanding we have the power to hurt one another but we are going to do everything in our power to make sure we don’t love is figuring out all the kind sweetness we deserve and when someone shows up saying they will provide it as you do but their actions seem to break you rather than build you love is knowing who to choose

All ears yearn for a voice to lead them through darkness.

I never yet did hear, That the bruis'd heart was pierced through the ear

The only difference I ever found between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership is that one of them is skinning you from the ankle up and the other, from the ear down.

When you love someone, they become a part of who you are. They're in everything you do. They're in the air you breathe and the water you drink and the blood in your veins. Their touch stays on your skin and their voice stays in your ears and their thoughts stay in your mind. You know their dreams because their nightmares pierce your heart and their good dreams are your dreams too. And you don't think they're perfect, but you know their flaws, the deep-down truth of them, and the shadows of all their secrets, and they don't frighten you away; in fact you love them more for it, because you don't want perfect. You want them.

Men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage - they've experienced pain and bought jewelry.

Now I know why women get their ears pierced. Once they've survived this ordeal of mutilation, they can face the discomforts of childbirth with equanimity.

She did know that once tattooed one could no longer expect to lie for all eternity in an orthodox Jewish cemetery. They wouldn't even bury women with pierced ears. A strange theory of mutilation from the people who invented cutting the skin off the pee-pee.

I expected Abe to yell for everyone to shut up or something like that. Of course, Nathan had been trying that for a while with no results. So, I was quite shocked-as was everyone else- when Abe put a finger to his lips and let out the most ear-piercing whistle I had ever heard. A whistle like that through a microphone? Yeah. It hurt my ears. It had to be worse for the Moroi, and the screeching feedback in the speakers didn't help. The room quieted enough for him to be heard. "Now that you have some sense to keep your mouths shut," said Abe,"we have...some things to say.

When you love someone, they become a part of who you are. They're in everything you do. They're the air you breathe and the water you drink and the blood in your veins. Their touch stays on your skin and their voice stays in your ears and their thoughts stay in your mind. You know their dreams because their nightmares pierce your heart and their good dreams are your dreams too. And they don't think they're perfect, but you know their flaws, the deep-down truths of them, and the shadows of all their secrets, and they don't frighten you away; in fact, you love them more for it, because you don't want perfect. You want them.

I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatlalopeuh candle and copal incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body. The Writing is my whole life, it is my obsession. This vampire which is my talent does not suffer other suitors. Daily I court it, offer my neck to its teeth. This is the sacrifice that the act of creation requires, a blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body--flesh and bone--and from the Earth's body--stone, sky, liquid, soil. This work, these images, piercing tongue or ear lobes with cactus needle, are my offerings, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices.

Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken, I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair. Now I do not weep for my sins; I have learned to love them And to know that they are the wounds that make love real. His face illudes me; his voice, with its pity, does not ring in my ear. His maxims memorized in boyhood do not make fruitless and pointless my experience. I walk alone, but not so terrified as when he held my hand. I do not splash in the blood of his son nor hear the crunch of nails or thorns piercing protesting flesh. I am a boy again--I whose boyhood was turned to manhood in a brutal myth. Now wine is only wine with drops that do not taste of blood. The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation, I, too--and together the bread and I embrace, Each grateful to be what we are, each loving from our own reality.

Melisande blinked rapidly, then looked back to the little box with garnet earrings. Her ears weren't even pierced. She touched one of the garnets with a fingertip and wondered if he'd ever looked-really looked- at her at all.

The veil that clouds your eyes shall be lifted by the hands that wove it, And the clay that fills your ears shall be pierced by those fingers that kneaded it. And you shall see. And you shall hear.

Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day: It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear; Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree: Believe me, love, it was the nightingale. Rom. It was the lark, the herald of the morn, No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east: Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops: I must be gone and live, or stay and die. Jul. Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I: It is some meteor that the sun exhales, To be to thee this night a torch-bearer, And light thee on thy way to Mantua: Therefore stay yet; thou need'st not to be gone, Rom. Let me be ta'en,, let me be put to death; I am content, so thou wilt have it so. I'll say yon grey is not the morning's eye, 'T is but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow; Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat The vaulty heaven so high above our heads: I have more care to stay than will to go: Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so, How is't my soul? let's talk; it is not day. Jul. It is, it is; hie hence, be gone, away! It is the lark that sings so out of tune, Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps. Some say the lark makes sweet division; This doth not so, for she divideth us: Some say the lark and loathed toad change eyes; O! now I would they had changed voices too, Since arm from arm that voice doth us affray, Hunting thee hence with hunt's up to the day. O! now be gone; more light and light it grows. Rom. More light and light; more dark and dark our woes.

Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day: It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear; Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree: Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

When you love someone, they become a part of who you are. They're in everything you do. They're in the air you breathe and the water you drink and the blood in your veins. Their touch stays on your skin and their voice stays in your ears and their thoughts stay in your mind. You know their dreams because their nightmares pierce your heart and their good dreams are your drams too. And you don't think they're perfect, but you know their flaws, the deep-down truth of them, and the shadows of all their secrets, and they don't frighten you away; in fact you love them more for it, because you don't want perfect. You want them.

We never understood the tendency to underestimate us, we who had been baptized and delivered through pain, who grinned and bore agonies while managing to draw on wing-tipped eyeliner with a surgically steady hand. We plucked our eyebrows, waxed our upper lips, got razor burn on our crotches, held blades to the cups of our armpits. Shoes tore holes in the skin of our heels and crippled the balls of our feet. We endured labor and childbirth and C-sections, during which doctors literally set our intestines on a table next to our bodies while we were awake. We got acid facials. We punctured our foreheads with Botox and filled our lips and our breasts. We pierced our ears and wore pants that were too tight. We got too much sun. We punished our bodies in spin class. All these tiny sacrifices to make us appear more lithe and ladylike—the female of the species. The weaker sex. Secretly, they toughened our hides, sharpened our edges. We were tougher than we looked. The only difference was that now we were finally letting on.

He’s got five rings in his ear, eighteen gauge to ten gauge, but when I told him to get one in his nipple to match mine, and to get a Sailor Moon tattoo - because I like Sailor Moon? - or if not that, a skull, he stopped calling me.

Swift is her walk, more swift her winged haste: A monstrous phantom, horrible and vast. As many plumes as raise her lofty flight, So many piercing eyes inlarge her sight; Millions of opening mouths to Fame belong, And ev'ry mouth is furnish'd with a tongue, And round with list'ning ears the flying plague is hung. She fills the peaceful universe with cries; No slumbers ever close her wakeful eyes; By day, from lofty tow'rs her head she shews, And spreads thro' trembling crowds disastrous news; With court informers haunts, and royal spies; Things done relates, not done she feigns, and mingles truth with lies. Talk is her business, and her chief delight To tell of prodigies and cause affright.

I was in the fifth grade the first time I thought about turning thirty. My best friend Darcy and I came across a perpetual calendar in the back of the phone book, where you could look up any date in the future, and by using this little grid, determine what the day of the week would be. So we located our birthdays in the following year, mine in May and hers in September. I got Wednesday, a school night. She got a Friday. A small victory, but typical. Darcy was always the lucky one. Her skin tanned more quickly, her hair feathered more easily, and she didn't need braces. Her moonwalk was superior, as were her cart-wheels and her front handsprings (I couldn't handspring at all). She had a better sticker collection. More Michael Jackson pins. Forenze sweaters in turquoise, red, and peach (my mother allowed me none- said they were too trendy and expensive). And a pair of fifty-dollar Guess jeans with zippers at the ankles (ditto). Darcy had double-pierced ears and a sibling- even if it was just a brother, it was better than being an only child as I was. But at least I was a few months older and she would never quite catch up. That's when I decided to check out my thirtieth birthday- in a year so far away that it sounded like science fiction. It fell on a Sunday, which meant that my dashing husband and I would secure a responsible baby-sitter for our two (possibly three) children on that Saturday evening, dine at a fancy French restaurant with cloth napkins, and stay out past midnight, so technically we would be celebrating on my actual birthday. I would have just won a big case- somehow proven that an innocent man didn't do it. And my husband would toast me: "To Rachel, my beautiful wife, the mother of my chidren and the finest lawyer in Indy." I shared my fantasy with Darcy as we discovered that her thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday. Bummer for her. I watched her purse her lips as she processed this information. "You know, Rachel, who cares what day of the week we turn thirty?" she said, shrugging a smooth, olive shoulder. "We'll be old by then. Birthdays don't matter when you get that old." I thought of my parents, who were in their thirties, and their lackluster approach to their own birthdays. My dad had just given my mom a toaster for her birthday because ours broke the week before. The new one toasted four slices at a time instead of just two. It wasn't much of a gift. But my mom had seemed pleased enough with her new appliance; nowhere did I detect the disappointment that I felt when my Christmas stash didn't quite meet expectations. So Darcy was probably right. Fun stuff like birthdays wouldn't matter as much by the time we reached thirty. The next time I really thought about being thirty was our senior year in high school, when Darcy and I started watching ths show Thirty Something together. It wasn't our favorite- we preferred cheerful sit-coms like Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains- but we watched it anyway. My big problem with Thirty Something was the whiny characters and their depressing issues that they seemed to bring upon themselves. I remember thinking that they should grow up, suck it up. Stop pondering the meaning of life and start making grocery lists. That was back when I thought my teenage years were dragging and my twenties would surealy last forever. Then I reached my twenties. And the early twenties did seem to last forever. When I heard acquaintances a few years older lament the end of their youth, I felt smug, not yet in the danger zone myself. I had plenty of time..

Because honor still matters. Honor is what echoes." His father's words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This was has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. how terribly hard he is trying to be his father's son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn't clean the blood from either of our hands.

The reach of vibrations is according to the fineness of the plane of their starting-point. To speak more plainly, the word uttered by the lips can only reach the ears of the hearer; but the thought proceeding from the mind reaches far, shooting from mind to mind. The vibrations of mind are much stronger than those of words. The earnest feelings of one heart can pierce the heart of another; they speak in the silence, spreading out into the sphere, so that the very atmosphere of a person's presence proclaims his thoughts and emotions. The vibrations of the soul are the most powerful and far-reaching, they run like an electric current from soul to soul.

The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if pretty soon I start wearing ripped-up fishnet stockings and dyeing my hair black. Maybe I'll even start smoking and get my ears double-pierced or something. And then they'll make a TV movie about me and call it Royal Scandal. It will show me going up to Prince William and saying,'Who's the most popular young royal now, huh, punk?' and then headbutting him or something.

Eve woke, violently aroused. It was Roarke’s hands on her. She knew their texture, their rhythm. Her heart tripped against her ribs, then bounded into her throat as his mouth covered hers. His was greedy, hot, giving her no choice, really no choice at all but to respond in kind. Even as she fumbled for him, those long, clever fingers pierced her, diving into her so that she bowed up into the frenzy of orgasm. His mouth on her breast, sucking, teeth scraping. His elegant hands relentless so that her cries came out in whimpers of shock and gratitude. Another staggering climax to layer thick over the first. Her hands sought purchase in the tangled sheets, but nothing could anchor her. As she flew up again, she gripped him, nails scraping down his back, up to grab handfuls of his hair. “God!” It was the single coherent word she managed as he plunged into her, so hard, so deep she was amazed she didn’t die from the pleasure of it. Her body bucked helplessly, frantically, continued to shudder even after he’d collapsed on her. He let out a long, satisfied sigh and lazily nuzzled her ear. “Sorry to wake you.

Their love was equal; on the hills they roamed together, and together they would go back to their cave; and this time too they went into the Lapith's palace side by side and side by side were fighting in the fray. A javelin (no knowing from whose hand) came from the left and wounded Cyllarus, landing below the place where the chest joins neck--slight wound, but when the point was pulled away, cold grew his damaged heart and cold his limbs. Hylonome embraced him as he died, caressed the wound and, putting lips to lips, she tried to stay his spirit as it fled. And when she saw him lifeless, she moaned words that in that uproar failed to reach my ears; and fell upon the spear that pierced her love, and, dying, held her husband in her arms.

I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins, eyes and ears full of marijuana, eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman; rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun; rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati; rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies; rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver, pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain, come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage, streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions, with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp, screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality, screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world, blood streaming from my belly and shoulders flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.

My ears were once pierced, but the tiny holes have since resealed through lack of penetration. And yes, there’s another analogy in there, but let’s not get off topic.

When you love someone, they become a part of who you are. They’re in everything you do. They’re in the air you breathe and the water you drink and the blood in your veins. Their touch stays on your skin and their voice stays in your ears and their thoughts stay in your mind. You know their dreams because their nightmares pierce your heart and their good dreams are your dreams too. And you don’t think they’re perfect, but you know their flaws, the deep-down truth of them, and the shadows of all their secrets, and they don’t frighten you away; in fact you love them more for it, because you don’t want perfect. You want them. You want—” He

The housekeeper and her husband were both of that decent phlegmatic order of people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having one’s ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation, and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment.

Darrow: "Does he really believe believe in magic?" I ask. Daxo Au Telemanus: "He says gnomes steals ear wax from him at night. Mother thinks he's been hit too many times in the head." Daxo backs away following his father. But he can't hide the his clever smile as he pops a jellybean into his mouth. And I see where the ones in my pocket came from. "I say he just lives in a more entertaining world than we do.

BREAVMAN KNOWS a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings. The punctures festered and now she has a tiny scar in each earlobe. He discovered them behind her hair.

It's such a hopeful, almost utopian word, that word "phase." As if any minute, "we" would suffer some sort of Joad overload, come to "our" senses, and for heaven's sake, do something about our godforsaken shoes. But the book phase never ended. The book phase would bloom and grow into a whole series of seasonal affiliations including our communist phase, our beatnik phase, our vegetarian phase, and the three-year period known as Please Don't Talk to Me. Now that we are finishing up the third decade of the book phase, we ask ourselves if we have changed. Sure, we still dress in the bruise palette of gray, black, and blue, and we still haven't gotten around to piercing our ears. But we wear lipstick now, we own high-heeled shoes. Concessions have been made.

I pierced my ear and it got infected for weeks my ear was red and swollen I knew that if I just took the earring out I could heal much faster but I thought the earring made me feel beautiful so I let it stay - toxic relationships

For a person accustomed to the multi ethnic commotion of Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, or even Denver, walking across the BYU campus can be a jarring experience. One sees no graffiti, not a speck of litter. More than 99 percent of the thirty thousand students are white. Each of the young Mormons one encounters is astonishingly well groomed and neatly dressed. Beards, tattoos, and pierced ears (or other body parts) are strictly forbidden for men. Immodest attire and more than a single piercing per ear are forbidden among women. Smoking, using profane language, and drinking alcohol or even coffee are likewise banned. Heeding the dictum "Cougars don't cut corners," students keep to the sidewalks as they hurry to make it to class on time; nobody would think of attempting to shave a few precious seconds by treading on the manicured grass. Everyone is cheerful, friendly, and unfailingly polite. Most non-Mormons think of Salt Lake City as the geographic heart of Mormonism, but in fact half the population of Salt Lake is Gentile, and many Mormons regard the city as a sinful, iniquitous place that's been corrupted by outsiders. To the Saints themselves, the true Mormon heartland is here in Provo and surrounding Utah County--the site of chaste little towns like Highland, American Fork, Orem, Payson and Salem--where the population is nearly 90 percent LDS. The Sabbath is taken seriously in these parts. Almost all businesses close on Sundays, as do public swimming pools, even on the hottest days of the summer months. This part of the state is demographically notable in other aspects, as well. The LDS Church forbids abortions, frowns on contraception, and teaches that Mormon couples have a sacred duty to give birth to as many children as they can support--which goes a long way toward explaining why Utah County has the highest birth rate in the United States; it is higher, in fact, than the birth rate in Bangladesh. This also happens to be the most Republican county in the most Republican state in the nation. Not coincidentally, Utah County is a stronghold not only of Mormonism but also Mormon Fundamentalism.

Everybody is giving birth to something - everybody but the lesbian in the upper tier. Her head is uptilted, her throat wide open; she is all alert and tingling with the shower of sparks that burst from the radium symphony. Jupiter is piercing her ears.

When you love someone, they become a part of who you are. They’re in everything you do. They’re in the air you breathe and the water you drink and the blood in your veins. Their touch stays on your skin and their voice stays in your ears and their thoughts stay in your mind. You know their dreams because their nightmares pierce your heart and their good dreams are your dreams too. And you don’t think they’re perfect, but you know their flaws, the deep-down truth of them, and the shadows of all their secrets, and they don’t frighten you away; in fact you love them more for it, because you don’t want perfect. You want them. You want—

That’s when it happened. So fast, in fact, that we didn’t even realize it had happened. All we knew was that one instant we were sitting at a lovely outdoor table toasting the beautiful day, and the next our table was on the move, crashing its way through the sea of other tables, banging into innocent bystanders, and making a horrible, ear-piercing, industrial-grade shriek as it scraped over the concrete pavers.

Let your mistress’s birthday be one of great terror to you: that’s a black day when anything has to be given. However much you avoid it, she’ll still win: it’s a woman’s skill, to strip wealth from an ardent lover. A loose-robed pedlar comes to your lady: she likes to buy: and explains his prices while you’re sitting there. She’ll ask you to look, because you know what to look for: then kiss you: then ask you to buy her something there. She swears that she’ll be happy with it, for years, but she needs it now, now the price is right. If you say you haven’t the money in the house, she’ll ask for a note of hand – and you’re sorry you learnt to write. Why - she asks doesn’t she for money as if it’s her birthday, just for the cake, and how often it is her birthday, if she’s in need? Why - she weeps doesn’t she, mournfully, for a sham loss, that imaginary gem that fell from her pierced ear? They many times ask for gifts, they never give in return: you lose, and you’ll get no thanks for your loss. And ten mouths with as many tongues wouldn’t be enough for me to describe the wicked tricks of whores.

My "do" now consisted of some really nifty spikes on top. I looked like a punker, but it was kind of fun, if you want to know the truth. Next thing I knew I'd be getting my ears pierced and chewing gum in public, social sins my auntie had always warned me about, along with red nail polish and dingy bra straps.

When you love someone, they becomes a part of who you are. They're in everything you do. They're in the air you breathe and the water you drink and the blood in your veins. Their touch stays on your skin and their voice stays in your ears and their thoughts stay in your mind. You know their dreams because their nightmares pierce your heart and their good dreams are your dreams too. And you don't think they're perfect, but you know their flaws, the deep-down truth of them, and the shadows of all their secrets, and they don't frighten you away; in fact you love them more for it, because you don’t want perfect. You want them.

He thinks this is all a game till Titus cuts off one of his ears. Then he cries for his mother like a young child. He will never command warships. The

Going somewhere?” Tamlin asked. His voice was not entirely of this world. I suppressed a shudder. “Midnight snack,” I said, and I was keenly aware of every movement, every breath I took as I neared him. His bare chest was painted with whorls of dark blue woad, and from the smudges in the paint, I knew exactly where he’d been touched. I tried not to notice that they descended past his muscled midriff. I was about to pass him when he grabbed me, so fast that I didn’t see anything until he had me pinned against the wall. The cookie dropped from my hand as he grasped my wrists. “I smelled you,” he breathed, his painted chest rising and falling so close to mine. “I searched for you, and you weren’t there.” He reeked of magic. When I looked into his eyes, remnants of power flickered there. No kindness, none of the wry humor and gentle reprimands. The Tamlin I knew was gone. “Let go,” I said as evenly as I could, but his claws punched out, imbedding in the wood above my hands. Still riding the magic, he was half-wild. “You drove me mad,” he growled, and the sound trembled down my neck, along my breasts until they ached. “I searched for you, and you weren’t there. When I didn’t find you,” he said, bringing his face closer to mine, until we shared breath, “it made me pick another.” I couldn’t escape. I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to. “She asked me not to be gentle with her, either,” he snarled, his teeth bright in the moonlight. He brought his lips to my ear. “I would have been gentle with you, though.” I shuddered as I closed my eyes. Every inch of my body went taut as his words echoed through me. “I would have had you moaning my name throughout it all. And I would have taken a very, very long time, Feyre.” He said my name like a caress, and his hot breath tickled my ear. My back arched slightly. He ripped his claws free from the wall, and my knees buckled as he let go. I grasped the wall to keep from sinking to the floor, to keep from grabbing him—to strike or caress, I didn’t know. I opened my eyes. He still smiled—smiled like an animal. “Why should I want someone’s leftovers?” I said, making to push him away. He grabbed my hands again and bit my neck. I cried out as his teeth clamped onto the tender spot where my neck met my shoulder. I couldn’t move—couldn’t think, and my world narrowed to the feeling of his lips and teeth against my skin. He didn’t pierce my flesh, but rather bit to keep me pinned. The push of his body against mine, the hard and the soft, made me see red—see lightning, made me grind my hips against his. I should hate him—hate him for his stupid ritual, for the female he’d been with tonight … His bite lightened, and his tongue caressed the places his teeth had been. He didn’t move—he just remained in that spot, kissing my neck. Intently, territorially, lazily. Heat pounded between my legs, and as he ground his body against me, against every aching spot, a moan slipped past my lips. He jerked away. The air was bitingly cold against my freed skin, and I panted as he stared at me. “Don’t ever disobey me again,” he said, his voice a deep purr that ricocheted through me, awakening everything and lulling it into complicity.

He put his ear to Pax's chest to listen to his heartbeat. He told me then what he felt when he declared this war within the Hives of Phobos. How he was not close enough to hear the fading beat of his father's heart, or Eo's. But how, in that moment, he could feel the hearts of his people beating across the darkness. How in the heartbeat of our son he could hear them all again.

I guess I should explain. I'm not exactly your typical sixteen-year-old girl. Oh, I seem normal enough, I guess. I don't do drugs, or drink, or smoke-well, okay, except for that one time Sleepy caught me. I don't have anything pierced, except my ears, and only once on each earlobe. I don't have any tattoos. I've never dyed my hair. Except for my boots and leather jacket, I don't wear an excessive amount of black. I don't even wear dark fingernail polish. All in all, I am a pretty normal, everyday, American teenage girl. Except, of course, for the fact that I can talk to the dead.

Piercings in his ears, nose and lip revealed his edgy nature. He was casual in faded blue jeans and a black t-shirt that hugged his well-muscled chest in all of the right places. His eyes were a deep, drowning blue. His hair was slightly spiky and bedroom messy with just a hint of the early Elvis style. To say that I found him attractive would be putting it lightly. He was absolutely gorgeous.

I will if you will,” she says, a line reminiscent of so many other days of our lives. Sledging down the hill behind the house on winter morning when we were kids, our backsides on Mum’s tea trays: I will if you will. Getting our ears pierced at the dodgy salon in the precinct when we were teenagers: I will if you will. Another drink at last orders, even though we’ve both had enough: I will if you will.

An idea once seized, I fell to work. "Human Justice" rushed before me in novel guise, a red, random beldame, with a rms akimbo. I saw her in her house, the den of confusion: servants called to her for orders or help which she did not give; beggars stood at her door waiting and starving unnoticed; a swarm of children, sick and quarrelsome, crawled round her feet, and yelled in her ears appeals for notice, sympathy, cure, redress. The honest woman cared for none of these things. She had a warm seat of her own by the fire, she had her own solace in a short black pipe, and a bottle of Mrs. Sweeny's soothing syrup; she smoked and she sipped, and she enjoyed her paradise; and whenever a cry of the suffering souls about her 'pierced her ears too keenly--my jolly dame seized the poker or the hearth-brush: if the offender was weak, wronged, and sickly, she effectually settled him: if he was strong, lively, and violent, she only menaced, then plunged her hand in her deep pouch, and flung a liberal shower of sugar-plums.

There was a small stone in her palm, a deep blue opal. I leaned a little closer, eyeing it. It was set on a silver stud—an earring. “It should suffice to contain the parasite for what time remains,” Mab said. “Put it on.” “My ears aren’t pierced,” I objected. Mab arched an eyebrow. “Are you the Winter Knight or some sort of puling child?” I scowled at her. “Come over here and say that.” At that, Mab calmly stepped onto the shore of Demonreach, until her toes were almost touching mine. She was several inches over six feet tall, and barely had to reach up to take my earlobe in her fingers. “Wait,” I said. “Wait.” She paused. “The left one.” Mab tilted her head. “Why?” “It’s . . . Look, it’s a mortal thing. Just do the left one, okay?” She exhaled briefly through her nose. Then she shook her head and changed ears.

Tancredi and Angelica were passing in front of them at that moment, his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other's. The black of his tail coat, the pink of her dress, combining formed a kind of strange jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowning actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die. . . For them death was purely an intellectual concept, a fact of knowledge as it were and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh yes, it existed of course, but it was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was ignorance of this supreme consolation that made the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit.

What do you think it takes to reinvent yourself as an all-new person, a person who makes sense, who belongs? Do you change your clothes, your hair, your face? Go on, then. Do it. Pierce your ears, trim your bangs, buy a new purse. They will still see past that, see you, the girl who is still too scared, still too smart for her own good, still a beat behind, still, always, wrong. Change all you want; you can't change that.

O, ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light: yet you see how this world goes. Ear; of Gloster, “I see it feelingly.” Lear, “What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? - Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a begger? Earl of Gloster, ‘Ay, sir. Lear, “And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obey’d in office. - Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Why dost though lash that whore? Strip thine own back; Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind For which thou whipst her. The usurer hangs the cozener. Through tattere’d clothes small vices to appear; Robes and furr’d gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it. None does offend, none, - I say, none; I’ll able ‘em to seal the accuser’s lips. Get thee glass eyes; To see the things thou dost not. - Now, now, now, now: Pull off my boots: - harder, harder: - so. Edgar (aside), “O, matter and impertinency mixt! Reason in madness!

He stood looking down at me with a white towel wrapped around his waist. I always imagined what he might look like after seven years, but even my wildest dreams couldn’t have conjured up what I was actually met with. His messy black hair had now been replaced by longish sexy waves that curled around his ears. He was wearing glasses. He looked even sexier in glasses. Even from here, I could see the piercing gray of his eyes through them. His inked body was bigger, even more built than before. He lifted a cigarette to his mouth and even amidst the shock of seeing him, disappointment set in that he was smoking again. Elec blew out the smoke as his eyes stayed fixed on mine. He wasn’t smiling. He just looked at me intently. His powerful stare alone had put all of my senses on high alert, throwing my body out of whack. My head was pounding, my eyes were teary, my ears were beating, my mouth was watering, my nipples were hard, my hands were trembling, my knees were shaking and my heart…I couldn’t describe what was going on inside my chest. Before I could process any of this, a woman with blonde hair came up from behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

Let sickness prostrate us, have we not seen hundreds of believers as happy in the weakness of disease as they would have been in the strength of hale and blooming health? Let death's arrows pierce us to the heart, our comfort dies not, for have not our ears full often heard the songs of saints as they have rejoiced because the living love of God was shed abroad in their hearts in dying moments? Yes, a sense of acceptance in the Beloved is an everlasting consolation.

You might think that in sixty-odd years I’d forget, lose the memory in my blood and in my bones of what that felt like, that the feeling would be lost, and my only recourse to invent a second-hand version or erase it altogether from the story. But you’d be wrong. Sometimes a moment pierces so perfectly the shields of our everyday it becomes part of you and enjoys the privilege of being immemorial. I remember it as though it were today. Honestly. I remember the canal of my throat closing, I remember riots breaking out, sea in my ears, sweat on my lip, fish-hooks floating in my eyes, and the reflex that was general and immediate, crawling beneath my skin and birthing in me the archetypal response to great beauty: the overwhelming sense of my own ugliness. I remember.

My rib cage clenched all of the organs and muscles within it. It pulsed, full of life and warmth and gummy bears and glitter. This was... I don't know how to explain it—it was like Christmas morning when you were a kid. It was everything I’d wanted. Each of his thumbs curved over the shells of my ears. "That's my girl." His girl. After all the crap that I'd gone through today, there couldn't have been three better words to hear. Well, there were three other words I'd like to hear but I'd take these from him. That didn't mean that he was the only one who knew how to give. He'd given enough. My bones and heart knew that there was nothing for me to fear. I loved him and sometimes there were consequences of it that were scary, but it—the emotion itself—wasn't. I knew that now. What kind of life was I living if I let my fears steer me? This was a gift I’d forgotten to appreciate lately. For so long I’d been happy to just be alive but now...now I had Dex. I had my entire life ahead of me, and I needed to quit being a wuss and grab life by the balls. In this case, I’d take his nipple piercings. “What’cha thinkin’, Ritz?” I held my hands out for him to see how badly they were shaking. “I’m thinking that I love you so much it scares me. See?” Dex's thumbs tipped my chin back so that I could look at his face—at his beautiful, scruffy face. "Baby." He said my name like a purr that reached the vertebrae of my spine. "And even though it really scares the living crap out of me, I love you, and I want you to know that. Everything you've done for me..." Oh hell. I had to let out a long gust of breath. "Thank you. You're the best thing that ever yelled at me." He murmured my name again, low and smooth. The pads of his thumbs dug a little deeper into the soft tissue on the underside of my jaw. "If all the shit I do for you, and all the shit I'd be willin' to do for you doesn't tell you how deep you've snuck into me, honey, then I'll tell you." He lowered his mouth right next to my ear, his teeth nipping at my lobe before he whispered, "Love you." The feeling that swamped me was indescribable. He gave me hope. This big, ex-felon with a temper, reminded me of how strong I was, and then made me stronger on top of it. "Dex," I exhaled his name. He nipped my ear again. "I love you, Ritz." The scruff of his jaw scraped my own before he bit it gently. "Love your fuckin' face, your that's what she said jokes, your dorky ass high-fives and your arm, but I really fuckin' love how much of a little shit you are. You got nuts bigger than your brother, baby." I choked out a laugh. Dex tipped my head back even further, holding the weight on his long fingers as he bit the curve of my chin. "And those are gonna be my nuts, you little bad ass." Fire shot straight through my chest. "Yeah?" I panted. "Yeah." He nodded, biting my chin even harder. "I already told you I keep what's mine.

I can never say it, I can barely even think it, but I know that I am crying because I am afraid that when Aaron is gone, there will still be parts of him I do not know, little things like this that he forgot to share with me. I'd felt that from the moment I met him, before we knew he was sick, but I feel it more urgently now: like I want to just stick a little USB drive into his arm and download everything about him. I want every memory, every feeling, every thought from baby Aaron and child Aaron and punky teenage Aaron, who pierced his ears multiple times.

so evenly was strained their war and battle, till the moment when Zeus gave the greater renown to Hector, son of Priam, who was the first to leap within the wall of the Achaians. In a piercing voice he cried aloud to the Trojans: "Rise, ye horse-taming Trojans, break the wall of the Argives, and cast among the ships fierce blazing fire." So spake he, spurring them on, and they all heard him with their ears, and in one mass rushed straight against the wall, and with sharp spears in their hands climbed upon the machicolations of the towers. And Hector seized and carried a stone that lay in front of the gates, thick in the hinder part, but sharp at point: a stone that not the two best men of the people, such as mortals now are, could lightly lift from the ground on to a wain, but easily he wielded it alone, for the son of crooked-counselling Kronos made it light for him. And as when a shepherd lightly beareth the fleece of a ram, taking it in one hand, and little doth it burden him, so Hector lifted the stone, and bare it straight against the doors that closely guarded the stubborn-set portals, double gates and tall, and two cross bars held them within, and one bolt fastened them. And he came, and stood hard by, and firmly planted himself, and smote them in the midst, setting his legs well apart, that his cast might lack no strength. And he brake both the hinges, and the stone fell within by reason of its weight, and the gates rang loud around, and the bars held not, and the doors burst this way and that beneath the rush of the stone. Then glorious Hector leaped in, with face like the sudden night, shining in wondrous mail that was clad about his body, and with two spears in his hands. No man that met him could have held him back when once he leaped within the gates: none but the gods, and his eyes shone with fire. Turning towards the throng he cried to the Trojans to overleap the wall, and they obeyed his summons, and speedily some overleaped the wall, and some poured into the fair-wrought gateways, and the Danaans fled in fear among the hollow ships, and a ceaseless clamour arose.

I would like to turn in my skin and change it for a new epidermis. It feels as if I will never be able to rinse the sadness from my soul. All the while I am cognizant of the fact that I am trying to purge myself of my feelings. I start with my shell. I am in the water at least an hour. I immerse my head. My long, thick mane is so heavy, but I feel the lightness of my hair as it floats. I can hear my heart beating in my ears. I wonder what would happen if I died in this water. I drain the bathtub and refill it. I scrub my skin until it stings. I still don't feel clean. I close my eyes. I switch to lying on my back. I gaze at the heavens through the skylight on the ceiling above the tub. I am thinking about Isabella. I am struck by the feeling of uncleanness that I have been immersed in that day. I would imagine that this child feels unclean always, in body and in mind. I am hoping that the sheets in her foster home are snow white and fragrant. I am hoping that she felt safe. I am worried that she is so deeply alone and frightened. I know somewhere deep inside of me that the decisions and choices I made today were sound. I am praying, with eyes glued to the stars, that I will not awaken in the night with my heart beating out of my chest; that I will not be haunted by Francis's diseased body; that I will not perseverate on ever nuance of my day - the smells, the cockroaches, the piercing torment of Isabella's unseeing eye, her father's sore-ridden penis penetrating her tiny body. Yet in many ways this is an experience I hope never to forget. The pearls. I must not forget the pearls that I have promised her.

Max raised the mallet. He stared into her face and wished he could say he was sorry, that he didn't want to do it. When he slammed the mallet down, with an echoing bang, he heard a high, piercing scream and almost screamed himself, believing for an instant it was her, still somehow alive; then realized it was Rudy. Max was powerfully built, with his, deep water-buffalo chest and Dutch farmer's shoulders. With the first blow he had driven the stake over two-thirds of the way in. He only needed to bring the mallet down once more. The blood that squelched up around the wood was cold and had a sticky, viscous consistency. Max swayed, his head light. His father took his arm. 'Goot,' Abraham whispered into his ear, his arms around him, squeezing him so tightly his ribs creaked. Max felt a little thrill of pleasure - an automatic reaction to the intense, unmistakable affection of his father's embrace - and was sickened by it. 'To do offense to the house of the human spirit, even after its tenant depart, is no easy thing, I know.' ("Abraham's Boys")

Of course I remember. I remember my aching back and the drizzle, and the throb of my piercing in the top of my ear. I'd left university because of him. I'd learnt that I didn't want to be anywhere he wasn't, that I physically couldn't stand it. I was eighteen; he was in his early thirties. I came up the lane and found him standing there, under the limes, wearing blue.

The first change is a realization that I am no longer alone. Even when I'm lying in the dark by myself, I now sense other beings hovering near me. It isn't just me living in this house, but unfinished love and my dejection and anger and dead Paulie, and their miraculous presence feels as real as my fingernails digging into my hand. The second change is that I'm not more obsessed with cooking, like the Roman gourmets and their cherished chefs, who wanted to put all things wonderful or special or new or majestic or strange or scary-looking on the table. The cooks back then knew only how to bake or boil, but I understand how a few drops of pomegranate juice can transform a dish. The third change is that with these first two revelations, my sense of taste has become ever more sensitive and sharp, my imagination richer. When I got my ears pierced and walked into the street in the middle of winter, I become one large ear. All sensation and pain were concentrated in my ears. It's that same feeling. Everything about me disappears and I'm only a pink tongue. This is the time to grow into a truly good chef.

Their eyes, warm not only with human bond but with the shared enjoyment of the art objects he sold, their mutual tastes and satisfactions, remained fixed on him; they were thanking him for having things like these for them to see, pick up and examine, handle perhaps without even buying. Yes, he thought, they know what sort of store they are in; this is not tourist trash, not redwood plaques reading Muir Woods, Marin County, PSA, or funny signs or girly rings or postcards or views of the Bridge. The girl’s eyes especially, large, dark. How easily, Childan thought, I could fall in love with a girl like this. How tragic my life, then; as if it weren’t bad enough already. The stylish black hair, lacquered nails, pierced ears for the long dangling brass handmade earrings. “Your

Well, this girl, this Ashford or whatever her name was, looked like a hippie. She was wearing a very pretty pink flowered skirt that was full and so long, it touched the tops of her shoes, which I soon realized were not shoes, but sort of hiking boots. Her blouse, loose and lacy, was embroidered with pink flowers, and both her wrists were loaded with silver bangle bracelets. Her hair, which was almost as long as my friend Dawn's and was dirty blonde, was pulled into a big fat braid (which I might add, was not held in place with a rubber band or anything; it sort of trailed to an end). But the amazing thing was that because of her hair was pulled back, you could see her ears and she had three pierced earrings in each ear. They were all silver and all dangly, but none matched.

let not thy sword skip one: Pity not honour'd age for his white beard; He is an usurer: strike me the counterfeit matron; It is her habit only that is honest, Herself's a bawd: let not the virgin's cheek Make soft thy trenchant sword; for those milk-paps, That through the window-bars bore at men's eyes, Are not within the leaf of pity writ, But set them down horrible traitors: spare not the babe, Whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy; Think it a bastard, whom the oracle Hath doubtfully pronounced thy throat shall cut, And mince it sans remorse: swear against objects; Put armour on thine ears and on thine eyes; Whose proof, nor yells of mothers, maids, nor babes, Nor sight of priests in holy vestments bleeding, Shall pierce a jot. There's gold to pay soldiers: Make large confusion; and, thy fury spent, Confounded be thyself! Speak not, be gone.

There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement--which they shared with barbers plying their trade out of doors, fortune-tellers, flimsy tea-stalls, vegetable-stands, monkey-trainers, ear-cleaners, pickpockets, stray cattle, the odd sleepy policeman sauntering along in faded khaki, sweat-soaked men carrying impossible loads of copper, steel rods, glass or scrap paper on their backs as they yelled 'Look out! Look out!' in voices that somehow pierced though the din, shops of brassware and cloth (the owners attempting with shouts and gestures to entice uncertain shoppers in), the small carved stone entrance of the Tinny Tots (English Medium) School which opened out onto the courtyard of the reconverted haveli of a bankrupt aristocrat, and beggars--young and old, aggressive and meek, leprous, maimed or blinded--who would quietly invade Nabiganj as evening fell, attempting to avoid the police as they worked the queues in front of the cinema-halls. Crows cawed, small boys in rags rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a cheap tin tray as he weaved through the crowd) monkeys chattered in and bounded about a great shivering-leafed pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded fruit-stand, women shuffled along in anonymous burqas or bright saris, with or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging around a chaat-stand shouted at each other from a foot away either out of habit or in order to be heard, mangy dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal cats mewed and were stoned, and flies settled everywhere: on heaps of foetid, rotting rubbish, on the uncovered sweets at the sweetseller's in whose huge curved pans of ghee sizzled delicioius jalebis, on the faces of the sari-clad but not the burqa-clad women, and on the horse's nostrils as he shook his blinkered head and tried to forge his way through Old Brahmpur in the direction of the Barsaat Mahal.

I had this dream, see, where I saw the whole world melt. I was standing on La Cienega and from there I could see the whole world and it was melting and it was just so strong and realistic like. And so I thought, Well, if this dream comes true, how can I stop it, you know? How can I change things, you know? So I thought if I, like pierced my ear or something, like alter my physical image, dye my hair, the world wouldn't melt. So I dyed my hair and this pink lasts. I like it. It lasts. I don't feel like the world is gonna melt anymore.

You don’t concern yourself much with being liked, do you?” Tristan asked, half amused. No, I don’t.” He was doubtful that Tristan would be capable of understanding that, but the sensation of being liked was extraordinarily dull. It was the closest thing to vanilla that Callum could think of, though nothing was truly comparable. Being feared was a bit like anise, like absinthe. A strange and arousing flavor. Being admired was golden, maple-sweet. Being despised was woodsy, sulfuric aroma, smoke in his nostrils, something to choke on, when done properly. Being envied was tart, a citrusy tang, like green apple. Being desired was Callum’s favorite. That was smoky, too, in a sense, but more sultry, cloaked and perfumed in precisely what it was. It smelled like tangled bedsheets. It tasted like a flicker of a candle flame. It felt like a sigh, a quiet one; concessionary and pleading. He could always feel it on his skin, sharp as a blade. Piercing, like the groan of a lover in his ear. “Being liked is fairly ordinary, I’m afraid,” Callum said. “Intensely commonplace.

Patty’s older sister, Diane, had pierced Patty’s ears in this bathroom two decades ago. Patty heated a safety pin with a cheap lighter and Diane sliced a potato in half and stuck its cold, wet face against the back of Patty’s ear. They froze her lobe with an ice cube, and Diane—hold still, hold stillllll—jabbed that pin into Patty’s rubbery flesh. Why did they need the potato? For aim or something. Patty had chickened out after the first ear, had plopped down on the side of the bathtub, the lancet of the pin still sticking out the lobe.

To the Nightingale On what secret night in England Or by the incalculable constant Rhine, Lost among all the nights of my nights, Carried to my unknowing ear Your voice, burdened with mythology, Nightingale of Virgil, of the Persians? Perhaps I never heard you, yet my life I bound to your life, inseparably. A wandering spirit is your symbol In a book of enigmas. El Marino Named you the siren of the woods And you sing through Juliet’s night And in the intricate Latin pages And from the pine-trees of that other, Nightingale of Germany and Judea, Heine, mocking, burning, mourning. Keats heard you for all, everywhere. There’s not one of the bright names The people of the earth have given you That does not yearn to match your music, Nightingale of shadows. The Muslim Dreamed you drunk with ecstasy His breast trans-pierced by the thorn Of the sung rose that you redden With your last blood. Assiduously I plot these lines in twilight emptiness, Nightingale of the shores and seas, Who in exaltation, memory and fable Burn with love and die melodiously.

When you love someone, they become a part of who you are. They're in everything you do. They're in the air you breathe & the water you drink & the blood in your veins. Their touch stays on your skin & their voices stays in your ears & their thoughts stay in your mind. You know their dreams because their nightmares pierce you heart & their good dreams are your dreams too. And you don't think they're perfect, but you know theri flaws, the deep-down truth of them & they don't frighten you away, in fact you love them more for it, because you don't want perfect. You want them. - Jules

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

As the kiss deepened, his tongue brushed against mine. Images blazed in my mind—of a night sky over a desert, the moon hanging like a jewel, and the rush of wind over my body. The feel of his soft lips was transporting me. With a nip of my lower lip, he let out a low noise from deep in his throat—a sound of pleasure and agony in one. Then, he pulled away from the kiss, his black eyes piercing me. I stared at him, catching my breath. “Tell me. Do angels have a weakness?” Specifically, how did an angel end up murdered in a river? “Of course we do. Everyone has a weakness.” He leaned down, his mouth close to my ear as he whispered, “mortal women.

You.” Hard thrust. “Go.” Another thrust directly to my spot, my pussy walls clenching and holding his fingers but he doesn’t let me. “When. I. Say. So.” He fucks me with his fingers so hard and I come just as hard, so loud with a scream that pierces my ears. I literally hear a buzz and see color behind my eyes. Maybe it’s the bitter taste of the truth on my tongue, or the answering silent, yet volcanic anger from Ace. Maybe it’s the grief that slices the room into uneven dimensions of breathless agony—but for whatever reason, my orgasm is hard and intense. It’s the type of climax that I knew Ace could easily give me, but we both knew it was heightened by misery and grief. A kind of grief that we both refused to face. Grief heightened by orgasm. Orgasm heightened by grief. . . My entire body shakes, Ace flips me over to my side and somehow in the darkness of my room, our gazes connect and I can see the blues like I do in my nightmares and my dreams. I see them as much as they see me. I know these eyes belong to the devil, the spawn of my hate. But they still see me. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. To be seen and he has, since the very first day we met. “You will fucking die when I say so.” He growls, like a solemn vow. “You will fade away like the kind of nothing that you think you are, when I say so. But for now, you fucking stay here and you fight that shit for me. I fucking need you to fight it.

I ceased the search to listen again, what the problem was. What’s going on at home? Why was Luccas calling out Jane’s name? What happened? Why could I hear him without connecting directly to him? I shook my head, but screams pierced through. I moved the shelf on its side, a loud crashing that startled the men outside. Falling to my knees, I covered my ears to them. My head banged against the metal and stayed there. “What in the name of Hera am I going to do?” I asked the air. The screams stopped but for how long? How long would silence be until they resumed? I raised my head, gently pulling my hands away and listened. Silence. Where were the men chasing me? Did they give in and go home? No, that would have been too easy. Saain would slay each man for leaving a traitor alive.

eagerness. The front man turned his head until his eyes met the eyes of the man behind. And then, across the narrow oblong box, each nodded to the other. A second cry arose, piercing the silence with needle-like shrillness. Both men located the sound. It was to the rear, somewhere in the snow expanse they had just traversed. A third and answering cry arose, also to the rear and to the left of the second cry. “They’re after us, Bill,” said the man at the front. His voice sounded hoarse and unreal, and he had spoken with apparent effort. “Meat is scarce,” answered his comrade. “I ain’t seen a rabbit sign for days.” Thereafter they spoke no more, though their ears were keen for the hunting-cries that continued to rise behind them. At the fall of darkness, they swung the dogs into a cluster of spruce trees on the edge of the

Pfeffernus flavored aspirin was found to be hideously dangerous, and babies the size of strawberries were being born to women who were known poppers, and these babies had enormous heads the size of spoiling watermelons, and they whispered obscene remarks in sibilant Levantine waterfront pigeon, and they had lidless eyes and leering flaccid mouths, and they were born with pierced ears, and some were even born with garish metallic paper carnival hats. Their mothers felt repugnance at the lewd comments they uttered at breastfeeding time, and their limbs were unsightly thin and curling tendrils, like withered asparagus bottoms, which were covered with the fine prickly hairs, and they coiled and uncoiled continuously like tendrils under the sea, and when these tendrils were fragile, and when they were pinched off they grew right back, clutching insulting greeting cards.

He looked her face over, loving the strong features and the short hair and the piercing forest green eyes. “I never would have asked you, you know…to blow everything you have here away for me.” “That’s only one of the reasons I love you.” “Will you tell me the others later?” “Maybe.” She slipped her hand between his legs, shocking the shit out of him and making him gasp. “Might show you, too.” He covered her mouth with his and pushed his tongue into her as he backed her up against the wall. He didn’t care if Rhage waited on the front lawn for an extra— His phone went off. And kept ringing. V lifted his head and looked through the window by the front door. Rhage was on the front lawn, phone to his ear, staring back. The brother made a show of checking his watch, then flashing his middle finger at V. Vishous pounded a fist into the Sheetrock and stepped off from Jane. “I’m coming back at the end of the night. Be naked.” “Wouldn’t you rather undress me?” “No, because I’d shred that shirt, and I want you sleeping in it every night until you’re in my bed with me. Be. Naked.” “We’ll see.” His whole body throbbed at the disobedience. And she knew it, her stare level and erotic. “God, I love you,” he said. “I know. Now run along and kill something. I’ll be waiting for you.” He smiled at her. “Couldn’t love you more if I tried.” “Ditto.” He kissed her and dematerialized out front to Rhage’s side, making sure some mhis was in place. Oh, great. It was raining. Man, he’d so much rather be cozied up with Jane than out with his brother, and he couldn’t help but shoot a short-stack glare at Rhage. “Like another five minutes would kill you?” “Please. You start down that road with your female and I’ll be here until summer.” -Vishous, Jane, & Rhage

That night, I took a while falling asleep and when I did, I had a strange dream. She was sitting in my rocking chair and rocking herself, her dead eyes fixed on me. I lay on my bed, paralysed with fear, unable to move, unable to scream, my limbs refusing to move to my command. The room was suddenly freezing cold, the heater had probably stopped working in the night because the electricity supply had been cut and the inverter too had run out. At one point, I was uncertain whether I was dreaming or awake, or in that strange space between dreaming and wakefulness, where the soul wanders out of the body and explores other dimensions. What I knew was that I was chilled to the bones, chilled in a way that made it impossible for me to move myself, to lever myself to a sitting position in order to switch the bedside lamp on and check whether this was really happening. I could hear her in my head. Her voice was faint, feathery, and sibilant, as if she was whispering through a curtain of rain. Her words were indistinct, she called my name, she said words that pierced through my ears, words that meshed into ice slivers in my brain and when I thought finally that I would freeze to death an ice cold tiny body climbed into the quilt with me, putting frigidly chilly arms around me, and whispered, ‘Mother, I’m cold.’ Icicles shot up my spine, and I sat up, bolt upright in my bed, feeling the covers fall from me and a small indent in the mattress where something had been, a moment ago. There was a sudden click, the red light of the heater lit up, the bed and blanket warmer began radiating life-giving heat again and I felt myself thaw out, emerge from the scary limbo which marks one’s descent into another dimension, and the shadow faded out from the rocking chair right in front of me into complete transparency and the icy presence in the bed faded away to nothingness.

It was as she remembered, a haven of comfort and serenity. With a glad sigh, she kicked off her shoes and sat down on the side of the bed.Smiling, she patted the mattress beside her. Her husband scowled. It seemed to have become his habit. "We aren't here to relax." "Wolscroft may not even be in the area. It could take days for this to be settled." "He's here," Dragon said with certainty. "He will know what happened at Winchester, and he will be looking for a way to stop us before we can threaten him further." Privately, Rycca believed the same but she saw no reason to stress it. Nothing would happen until dark. Of that she was confident. Which meant... "We have hours to fill.Any ideas?" When he realized her meaning,he looked startled. With a laugh,she scrambled off the bed and went to him. "Oh,Dragon,for heaven's sake, do you really want to mope around here all day? I certainly don't. I still haven't gotten over being afraid Magnus was going to kill you,and I simply don't want to think about death anymore. I want to celebrate life." "There are three hundred men out there-" "Which is why we're in here." She raised herself on tiptoe, bit the lobe of his ear, and whispered, "I promise not to yell too loudly." A shudder ran through him. Even as his big hands stroked her back,he said, "Warriors don't mope." "No,of course they don't.It was a poor choice of words.But you'll be pacing back and forth, looking out the windows, or you'll go get that whetstone I noticed in the stable and sharpen your sword endlessly, or you'll be staring off into space with that dangerous look you get when you're contemplating mayhem. You'll be totally oblivious to me and-" He laughed despite himself and drew her closer. "Enough! Heaven forbid I behave so churlishly." "Speaking of heaven..." With the covers kicked back,the bed was smooth and cool.They undressed each other slowly, relishing the wonder of discovery that still came to them fresh and pure as their very first time. "Remember?" Rycca murmured as she trailed her lips along his broad, powerfully muscled shoulder and down the solid wall of his chest. "I was so nervous..." "Really?" Fooled me....Ah..." "I'd never seen anything so beautiful as you." "Not...beautiful...you are..." "I can't believe how strong you are. Why am I never afraid with you?" "Know I'd die 'fore hurting you? Sweetheart..." "Ohhh! Dragon...please..." His hands and lips moved over her, sweetly tormenting. She clutched his shoulders, her hips rising, and welcomed him deep within her. Still he tantalized her, making her writhe and laughing when she squeezed him hard with her powerful inner muscles. But the laughter turned quickly to a moan of delight. She looked up into his perfectly formed face,more handsome than any man had a right to be, and into his tawny eyes that were the windows of a soul more beautiful than any physical form. A piercing sense of blessedness filled her that she should be so fortunate as to love and be loved by such a man. Her cresting cry was caught by him, hismouth hard against hers, the spur to his own completion that went on and on,seemingly without end.

By the end of the day, everyone was talking about my stupid drawing and how Henry was going to have to get a restraining order before I started showing up outside his window in the middle of the night. It was embarrassing. I wanted to melt into the floor just to stop people from looking at me. I guess Henry was embarrassed too, because he made his friend Anthony pull me aside to tell me that Henry wasn’t into girls who looked like me. I remember not understanding it. Girls who looked like me. Did he mean girls with dark hair? Girls who wore jeans instead of skirts? Girls who didn’t have their ears pierced? Or did he mean something else? For years I watched him hold hands with girls who didn’t look anything like me. And some of them had dark hair. Some of them wore jeans. Plenty of them didn’t have their ears pierced. But they all had one thing in common: None of them were Asian. Now when I have a crush on someone, I don’t wonder if they like the same music as me, or if they watch the same kind of movies, or if we’ll get along the way Jamie and I did. I wonder if they like Asian girls.

It isn't true about the lambs. They are not meek. They are curious and wild, full of the passion of spring. They are lovable, and they are not silent when hungry. Tonight the last of the triplet lambs is piercing the quiet with its need. Its siblings are stronger and will not let it eat. I am its keeper, the farmer, its mother. I will go down to it in the dark, in the cold barn, and hold it in my arms. But it will not lie still--it is not meek. I will stand in the open doorway under the weight of watching trees and moon, and care for it as one of my own. But it will not love me--it is not meek. Drink, little one. Take what I can give you. Tonight the whole world prowls the perimeters of your life. Your anger keeps you alive-- it's your only chance. So I know what I must do after I have fed you. I will shape my mouth to the shape of the sharpest words-- even those bred in silence. I will impale with words every ear pressed upon open air. I will not be meek. You remind me of the necessity of having more hope than fear and of sounding out terrible names. I am to cry out loud like a hungry lamb, cry loud enough to waken wolves in the night. No one can be allowed to sleep.

CUCHULAIN’S FIGHT WITH THE SEA A MAN came slowly from the setting sun, To Emer, raddling raiment in her dun, And said, ‘I am that swineherd whom you bid Go watch the road between the wood and tide, But now I have no need to watch it more.’ Then Emer cast the web upon the floor, And raising arms all raddled with the dye, Parted her lips with a loud sudden cry. That swineherd stared upon her face and said, ‘No man alive, no man among the dead, Has won the gold his cars of battle bring.’ ‘But if your master comes home triumphing Why must you blench and shake from foot to crown?’ Thereon he shook the more and cast him down Upon the web-heaped floor, and cried his word: ‘With him is one sweet-throated like a bird.’ ‘You dare me to my face,’ and thereupon She smote with raddled fist, and where her son Herded the cattle came with stumbling feet, And cried with angry voice, ’It is not meet To idle life away, a common herd.’ ‘I have long waited, mother, for that word: But wherefore now?’ ‘There is a man to die; You have the heaviest arm under the sky.’ ‘Whether under its daylight or its stars My father stands amid his battle-cars.’ ‘But you have grown to be the taller man.’ ‘Yet somewhere under starlight or the sun My father stands.’ ‘Aged, worn out with wars On foot, on horseback or in battle-cars.’ ‘I only ask what way my journey lies, For He who made you bitter made you wise.’ ‘The Red Branch camp in a great company Between wood’s rim and the horses of the sea. Go there, and light a camp-fire at wood’s rim; But tell your name and lineage to him Whose blade compels, and wait till they have found Some feasting man that the same oath has bound.’ Among those feasting men Cuchulain dwelt, And his young sweetheart close beside him knelt, Stared on the mournful wonder of his eyes, Even as Spring upon the ancient skies, And pondered on the glory of his days; And all around the harp-string told his praise, And Conchubar, the Red Branch king of kings, With his own fingers touched the brazen strings. At last Cuchulain spake, ‘Some man has made His evening fire amid the leafy shade. I have often heard him singing to and fro, I have often heard the sweet sound of his bow. Seek out what man he is.’ One went and came. ‘He bade me let all know he gives his name At the sword-point, and waits till we have found Some feasting man that the same oath has bound.’ Cuchulain cried, ‘I am the only man Of all this host so bound from childhood on. After short fighting in the leafy shade, He spake to the young man, ’Is there no maid Who loves you, no white arms to wrap you round, Or do you long for the dim sleepy ground, That you have come and dared me to my face?’ ‘The dooms of men are in God’s hidden place,’ ‘Your head a while seemed like a woman’s head That I loved once.’ Again the fighting sped, But now the war-rage in Cuchulain woke, And through that new blade’s guard the old blade broke, And pierced him. ‘Speak before your breath is done.’ ‘Cuchulain I, mighty Cuchulain’s son.’ ‘I put you from your pain. I can no more.’ While day its burden on to evening bore, With head bowed on his knees Cuchulain stayed; Then Conchubar sent that sweet-throated maid, And she, to win him, his grey hair caressed; In vain her arms, in vain her soft white breast. Then Conchubar, the subtlest of all men, Ranking his Druids round him ten by ten, Spake thus: ‘Cuchulain will dwell there and brood For three days more in dreadful quietude, And then arise, and raving slay us all. Chaunt in his ear delusions magical, That he may fight the horses of the sea.’ The Druids took them to their mystery, And chaunted for three days. Cuchulain stirred, Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard The cars of battle and his own name cried; And fought with the invulnerable tide.

WHEN YOU CROW UP IN KANSAS WEARING VERY LARGE SHORTS, thinking not very much of yourself, thinking mainly of your knees, looking mainly at your knees, your face a frisbee that cant fly, your teeth buck, your eyebrows rectangles, your forehead more than half of your face, your shirts shapeless, your shape shapeless, your Kansas shapeless, your lust absent, your legs bowed, your arches flat, your chest flat, your ears your only curves, your ears never pierced, your denim never dazzled, your sneakers white, your socks white, your teeth turquoise with rubber bands, your cheese orange, your milk whole, your bread wonder, your luxury a tuna casserole, your pale a neon pale, your fantasy to race a Mario Kart over the desert and into the final oasis, your earthly oasis a salted pretzel, your solitude total, your urges not even visible to you on the clearest days at the farthest horizons, your blank magnificent, your inertia wild and authentic, your nothing your preference, and then into it somebody walks, a Joan, this sudden hero can really take control. You’re susceptible first to idolatry, then to study, to apprenticeship, and finally to a kind of patient love that makes fun of itself and believes in itself without limit. Imagine being a pudding cup of a person and encountering a confident, elegant, powerful scholar who knows what to do with her shoulders. Imagine encountering you.

We know nothing about how those earliest known surface glazes themselves were developed. Nevertheless, we can infer the methods of prehistoric invention by watching technologically “primitive” people today, such as the New Guineans with whom I work. I already mentioned their knowledge of hundreds of local plant and animal species and each species’ edibility, medical value, and other uses. New Guineans told me similarly about dozens of rock types in their environment and each type’s hardness, color, behavior when struck or flaked, and uses. All of that knowledge is acquired by observation and by trial and error. I see that process of “invention” going on whenever I take New Guineans to work with me in an area away from their homes. They constantly pick up unfamiliar things in the forest, tinker with them, and occasionally find them useful enough to bring home. I see the same process when I am abandoning a campsite, and local people come to scavenge what is left. They play with my discarded objects and try to figure out whether they might be useful in New Guinea society. Discarded tin cans are easy: they end up reused as containers. Other objects are tested for purposes very different from the one for which they were manufactured. How would that yellow number 2 pencil look as an ornament, inserted through a pierced ear-lobe or nasal septum? Is that piece of broken glass sufficiently sharp and strong to be useful as a knife? Eureka!

from the upcoming novel, Agent White: A figure dressed all in black ran across the rooftops in the rain. A black cloak fluttered behind him as he ran two and sometimes three stories above the sidewalk where Ezra Beckitt stood. Long silver hair tied back in a ponytail flew out behind him, exposing ears that came to sharp points. His left ear was pierced with a silver ring, high up in the cartilage. Like the old man, this black figure wore a sword; but this weapon was long and thin, slightly curved. The blade stuck out behind him for three and a half feet, almost seeming to glow against the grey backdrop of the rain-soaked cityscape. Suddenly, the figure in black looked down into the street and saw Ezra there. More, he saw Ezra seeing him. Startled, he lost his sure footing and slid down the steep incline of an older building’s metal roof, the busy street below waiting to catch him in an asphalt embrace. The figure in black got his feet under himself and pushed, flying out into space above the street. For an eternity Ezra watched him, suspended in the air and the rain with his cloak spread in midnight ripples around him, and then the figure in black flipped neatly and landed on the sidewalk half a block away. The pavement cracked, pushing up in twisted humps around the figure in black’s tall leather boots. Before the sound of this impact even reached Ezra the figure was up and gone, dashing through the morning throngs waiting for buses or headed to the ‘tram station. Ezra saw a girl’s hair blow back in the wind created by his passing, but she never noticed him. A young techie blinked his 20-20’s (Ezra’s own enhanced senses picked up the augmented eyes because of a strange, silvery glow in the pupils) and turned halfway around, almost seeing him. And then the figure in black darted into an alley, gone. Ezra drew his service weapon and ran after, pushing his way through the sidewalk traffic. Turning into the alley he skidded to a stop, stunned; the figure in black was still there. The alley was just wide enough to accommodate Ezra’s shoulders- he couldn’t have held his arms out at his sides. Dumpsters spilled their trash out onto the wet pavement. The alley ended in a fire door, the back exit of a store on the next street over. Even if it was locked, Ezra didn’t think it would pose a real problem for the figure in black. No, he was waiting for him. Ezra advanced with his gun out in front of him, and his eyes locked with the figure in black’s. His were completely black- no pupils, no corneas, only solid black that held no light. The figure in black smiled, exposing teeth that looked very sharp, and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. He wore leather gloves with the fingers cut off. His fingers were very long and very white. “Don’t even think about it,” Ezra said, clicking the safety off his weapon. “I am a Hatis City Guard, an if you move I will put you down.” This only seemed to amuse the figure in black, whose smiled widened as he drew his sword. Ezra opened fire.

That man,” she announced huffily, referring to their host, “can’t put two words together without losing his meaning!” Obviously she’d expected better of the quality during the time she was allowed to mix with them. “He’s afraid of us, I think,” Elizabeth replied, climbing out of bed. “Do you know the time? He desired me to accompany him fishing this morning at seven.” “Half past ten,” Berta replied, opening drawers and turning toward Elizabeth for her decision as to which gown to wear. “He waited until a few minutes ago, then went of without you. He was carrying two poles. Said you could join him when you arose.” “In that case, I think I’ll wear the pink muslin,” she decided with a mischievous smile. The Earl of Marchman could scarcely believe his eyes when he finally saw his intended making her way toward him. Decked out in a frothy pink gown with an equally frothy pink parasol and a delicate pink bonnet, she came tripping across the bank. Amazed at the vagaries of the female mind, he quickly turned his attention back to the grandfather trout he’d been trying to catch for five years. Ever so gently he jiggled his pole, trying to entice or else annoy the wily old fish into taking his fly. The giant fish swam around his hook as if he knew it might be a trick and then he suddenly charged it, nearly jerking the pole out of John’s hands. The fish hurtled out of the water, breaking the surface in a tremendous, thrilling arch at the same moment John’s intended bride deliberately chose to let out a piercing shriek: “Snake!” Startled, John jerked his head in her direction and saw her charging at him as if Lucifer himself was on her heels, screaming, “Snake! Snake! Snnnaaaake!” And in that instant his connection was broken; he let his line go slack, and the fish dislodged the hook, exactly as Elizabeth had hoped. “I saw a snake,” she lied, panting and stopping just short of the arms he’d stretched out to catch her-or strangle her, Elizabeth thought, smothering a smile. She stole a quick searching glance at the water, hoping for a glimpse of the magnificent trout he’d nearly caught, her hands itching to hold the pole and try her own luck. Lord Marchman’s disgruntled question snapped her attention back to him. “Would you like to fish, or would you rather sit and watch for a bit, until you recover from your flight from the serpent?” Elizabeth looked around in feigned shock. “Goodness, sir, I don’t fish!” “Do you sit?” he asked with what might have been sarcasm. Elizabeth lowered her lashes to hide her smile at the mounting impatience in his voice. “Of course I sit,” she proudly told him. “Sitting is an excessively ladylike occupation, but fishing, in my opinion, is not. I shall adore watching you do it, however.” For the next two hours she sat on the boulder beside him, complaining about its hardness, the brightness of the sun and the dampness of the air, and when she ran out of matters to complain about she proceeded to completely spoil his morning by chattering his ears off about every inane topic she could think of while occasionally tossing rocks into the stream to scare off his fish.

Dom rose from his kneeling position, a keen hunger shining in his eyes. “Was that wicked enough for you, sweeting?” he drawled as he used his cravat to wipe his mouth. With her heart thundering loudly in her ears and her breathing staggered, it took her a moment to answer. “Not quite,” she managed, then tugged at the waistband of his drawers. “You still have these on.” That seemed to startle him. Then one corner of his lips quirked up. “I never guessed you were such a greedy little--“ “Wanton?” she asked before he could accuse her of being one. But he just shot her a smoldering smile. “Siren.” “Oh.” She liked that word much better. Feeling her oats, she gestured to his drawers. “So take them off.” With a laugh, he did so. “There, my lusty beauty. You have your wish.” “Yes…yes, I do.” Now she could study him to her heart’s content. But the reality was rather sobering. His member, jutting from a nest of dark curls, couldn’t possibly be hidden behind a tiny fig leaf like the ones on statues. “Oh my. It’s even bigger and more…er…thrusting without the drawers.” “Are you rethinking your plan for seduction now?” he asked, with a decided tension in his voice. “No.” She cast him a game smile. “Just…reassessing the…er…fit.” “It’s not as fearsome as it looks.” “Good,” she said lightly, only half joking. She looped her arms about his neck. “Because I’m not as fearless as I look.” “You’re a great deal more fearless than you realize,” he murmured. “But this may cause you some pain.” She swallowed her apprehension. “I know. You can’t protect me from everything.” “No. But I can try to make it worth your trouble.” And before she could respond to that, he was kissing her so sweetly and caressing her so deftly that within moments he had her squirming and yearning for more. Only then did he attempt to breach her fortress by sliding into her. To her immense relief, there was only a piercing pop of discomfort before he was filling her flesh with his. All ten feet of it. Or that’s what it felt like, anyway. She gripped his arms. Hard. He didn’t seem to notice, for he inched farther in, his breath beating hot against her hair. “God, Jane, you’re exactly as I imagined. Only better.” “You’re exactly…as I imagined,” she said in a strained tone. “Only bigger.” That got his attention. He drew back to stare at her. “Are you all right?” She forced a smile. “Now I’m rethinking the seduction.” He brushed a kiss to her forehead. “Let’s see what I can do about that.” He grabbed her beneath her thighs. “Hook your legs around mine if you can.” When she did, the pressure eased some, and she let out a breath. “Better?” he rasped. She nodded. Covering her breast with his hand, he kneaded it gently as he pushed farther into her below. “It will feel even better if you can relax.” Relax? Might as well ask a tree to ignore the ax biting into it. “I’ll try,” she murmured. She forced herself to concentrate on other things than his very thick thing--like how he was touching her, how he was fondling her…how amazing it felt to be joined so intimately to the man she’d been waiting nearly half her life for.