Pose Girl Quotes

Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.

This is all quite fascinating," Grimalkin said, his voice slurring in my ears, "but instead of posing and scratching the ground like rutting peacocks, perhaps you should look to the girl.

The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.

I'm so glad you're okay." "So, how do we celebrate my okayness? It's my day off. Let's go crazy. Glow-in-the-dark bowling?" "No" "I'll let you use the kiddie ball." "Shut up. I do NOT need the kiddie ball." "The way you bowl, I think you might." He grabbed her in an exaggerated formal dance pose and whirled her around, backpack and all, which didn't make her any more graceful. "Ballroom dancing?" "Are you INSANE?" "Hey, girls who tango are hot." "You think I'm not hot because I don't tango?" He dropped the act. Shane was a smart boy. "I think you are too hot for ballroom or bowling. So you tell me. What do you want to do? And don't say study.

Last year I kissed this freshman girl at a pool party and she wouldn’t get off my nuts for six months. Which is why my policy is now no psychotics, and no freshmen. The freshmen thing is obviously easy to avoid, while the psychotics pose a bit more of a problem. It’s not like girls walk around with “I’m crazy” stamped on their chests.

Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray. When I tried to stand again, I couldn't move, my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that? Through the birches, I could see the pond. The sun was cutting small white holes in the water. I got up finally; I walked down to the pond. I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself, like a girl after her first lover turning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked, looking for a sign. But nakedness in women is always a pose. I was not transfigured. I would never be free.

Dad says there are more than three thousand letters in the Japanese alphabet, which could pose a problem. There are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, and I get into enough trouble with them as it is.

Griffin had to get to the bottom of these automaton attacks. He couldn’t ignore them just because Finley Jayne posed such an intriguing problem in such a pretty package. And she was pretty—even when off her rocker. In that respect, she was every bit as dangerous as Aunt Cordelia seemed to think. It was a good thing, then, that he enjoyed a little danger now and again.

I s'pose, I can't have it all my own way, can I? You can't drown in a person unless they let you.

Baby steps for your nerdy girl, she writes. The girl clearly underestimates the power of her bum and a seductively minimal pose. Nerdy my arse, I type back. All the cold showers in the world can't cure what u've done to me. Cruel wife.

You don't understand. (...). When I think about myself with them (girls), I can just... see it, y'know? I know how it's going to play out. I know what i'm s'posed to do. When i think abut me and you... you know, the real me and you. It's just... I can't see how it ends. I just tried not to think about it. So, I know I was a bit of a dick, I could have handled it better, but I swear, I didn't want it to end like that.

The yoga pose is not the goal. Becoming flexible is not the goal. Standing on your hands is not the goal. The goal is serenity. Balance. Truly finding peace in your own skin.

Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.

So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s where Ah wuz’s s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So ah ast, ‘where is me? Ah don’t see me.’ … ‘Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!’ Den dey all laughed real hard. But before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like the rest.

Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark -- why not kill myself? Missed the bus -- better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie -- maybe I shouldn't kill myself.

He came over in long pur­pose­ful strides, sat at the edge of her bed, and in a ten­der, pos­ses­sive ges­ture wiped the lip­stick off her lips. “What is that?” he asked. “All the other girls wear it,” Ta­tiana said, quickly wip­ing her mouth, breath­less at the sight of him. “In­clud­ing Dasha.” “Well, I don’t want you to have any­thing on your lovely face,” he said, stroking her cheeks. “God knows, you don’t need it.

Woman and children behind the lines!' he yelled, and all the girls jumped. Henry froze with his mouth open. 'Bang the drum slowly and ask not for whom the bell's ringing, for the answer's unfriendly!' He threw a fist in the air. 'Two years have my black ships sat before Troy, and today its gate shall open before the strength of my arm.' Dotty was laughing from the kitchen. Frank looked at his nephew. 'Henry, we play baseball tomorrow. Today we sack cities. Dots! Fetch me my tools! Down with the French! Once more into the breach, and fill the wall with our coward dead! Half a league! Half a league! Hey, batter, batter!' Frank brought his fist down onto the table, spilling Anastasia's milk, and then he struck a pose with both arms above his head and his chin on his chest. The girls cheered and applauded. Aunt Dotty stepped back into the dining room carrying a red metal toolbox.

I’m terrified to pose this next question, but I need to know. “Do you feel differently about me now?” His face softens. “You’re still you. The same girl I fell in love with. Nothing has changed.

In fact, the mothers of all her girl friends impressed on their daughters the necessity of being helpless, clinging, doe-eyed creatures. Really, it took a lot of sense to cultivate and hold such a pose.

I found another girl to pose for Myrto and then I didn't think about Rafaela much, not until a spring day years later. Or rather, I thought about her with an occasional, impersonal pang. Have you ever had a favorite cafe close? It was like that.

Who're you writing the novel to anyway?" Ron asked Hermione, trying to read the bit of parchment now trailing on the floor. Hermione hitched it up out of sight. "Viktor." "Krum?" "How many other Viktors do we know?" Ron said nothing, but looked disgruntled. They sat in silence for another twenty minutes, Ron finishing his Transfiguration essay with many snorts of impatience, rolling in up carefully and sealing it, and Harry staring into the fire, wishing more than anything that Sirius's head would appear there and give him some advice about girls. But the fire merely crackled lower and lower, until the red-hot embers crumbled into ash and, looking around, Harry saw that they were, yet again, the last in the common room. "Well, 'night," said Hermione, yawning widely, and she set off up the girls' staircase. "What does she see in Krum?" Ron demanded as he and Harry climbed the boys' stairs. "Well," said Harry, considering the matter, "I s'pose he's older, isn't he...and he's an international Quidditch player...." "Yeah, but apart from that," said Ron, sounding aggravated. "I mean he's a grouchy git, isn't he?

To avoid reproach, I learned how to pose as a Good Girl, but even that persona couldn't completely shield me. It seemed that, for girls, there was no such thing as "good" enough.

Aah, woodpecker! Help!” Cedar shouted. “Woodpecker! Girl made of wood! Not a good combo!” “I’ll help you!” Hunter cried. “Here we go,” Cupid said, rubbing her hands together. “It’s shirt-ripping time.” Sure enough, Hunter ripped off his shirt and posed. Invisible horns played a heroic fanfare. Hunter lifted his ax and chased the woodpecker. Which was chasing Cedar. “Aah, ax!” Cedar said, still running. “A woodpecker! And an ax! Aah!

Yet there is one experience which most sincere ex-Communists share, whether or not they go only part way to the end of the question it poses. The daughter of a former German diplomat in Moscow was trying to explain to me why her father, who, as an enlightened modern man, had been extremely pro-Communist, had become an implacable anti-Communist. It was hard for her because, as an enlightened modern girl, she shared the Communist vision without being a Communist. But she loved her father and the irrationality of his defection embarrassed her. 'He was immensely pro-Soviet,' she said,' and then -- you will laugh at me -- but you must not laugh at my father -- and then -- one night -- in Moscow -- he heard screams. That's all. Simply one night he heard screams.' A child of Reason and the 20th century, she knew that there is a logic of the mind. She did not know that the soul has a logic that may be more compelling than the mind's. She did not know at all that she had swept away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, the myth of the 20th century, with five annihilating words: one night he heard screams.

That’s the problem with social media. It’s not designed for negatives. It’s all about people showing their best side. Posing with filters, creating some sort of fake perfect life. But what do you do when life isn’t perfect? When everything feels shit. When you feel like you’re sinking into a deep black hole and you can’t crawl your way out. LOFL

You might not see it now, but you are stronger than you can ever imagine. You cannot become comfortable in your pain. You have to let the pain that you feel turn you into a rose without thorns. There are sixteen pieces on the chess board. The king is the most important piece, but the difference is that the queen is the most powerful piece! You are a queen, you can maneuver around your opponents; they do not have the power over your life, your mind or soul. You might think you’ve been a prisoner, but that is your past’ Look in the now and work your way to how you want your future to be. Exercise your thoughts into a pattern of letting go, and think positively about more of what you want than what you do not want. Queen! You are a queen! As a matter of fact, you are the queen! Act as if you know it! You are powerful, determined, strong, and you can make the biggest and most extravagant move and put it into action. Lights, camera, strike a pose and own it! It is yours to own!

Compared with that of a great artist, the friendliness of a great nobleman, however charming it may be, seems like play-acting, like simulation. Saint-Loup sought to please; Elstir loved to give, to give himself. Everything he possessed, ideas, works, and the rest which he counted for far less, he would have given gladly to anyone who understood him. But, for lack of congenial company, he lived in an unsociable isolation which fashionable people call pose and ill-breeding, the authorities a recalcitrant spirit, his neighbours madness, his family selfishness and pride.

Now, I would say to myself, you are feeling alienated from people and unlike other people, therefore you are projecting your discomfort onto them. When you look at a face, you see a blob of rubber because you are worried that your face is a blob of rubber. This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren’t? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn’t see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.

Dash it all, she’s an actress! Don’t take her so seriously. Actors don’t have opinions, my dear chap, still less do actresses. They have moods. Fads. Poses. Twenty-four-hour passions. There’s a lot wrong with the world, dammit. Actors are absolute suckers for dramatic solutions. For all I know, by the time you get her out there, she’ll be Born Again!

There’s only one hopeful chord in this cacophony, and it’s this girl I’m following. I know I could tell her to get a cab—I have a feeling she can more than afford it—but I like the idea of leaving with her and staying with her. She says good-bye to the club manager as we reach the door and are released onto the street. The sidewalk is full of smokers, talking or posing their way to ash. I get the nod from a couple of people I vaguely know. Ordinarily if I left with two hot girls, there’d also be some looks of admiration. Maybe it’s because of the clear anger between Norah and Caroline, or maybe it’s because they all think I’m gay—whatever the case, I get no more congratulations than a cabdriver does for picking up a fare.

You have to learn which pose works best to enhance your bodies in your lingerie." My blank expression only pissed her off further. "It adds to the seduction process!" Taran sighed when the rest of us exchanged what-the-hell glances."Watch and learn." She folded her arms and leaned over her dresser. Emme jumped when Taran threw out her butt like some sort of weapon.

I don't need to critique things, or have an opinion, or pose, with John - we just go around being alive, and pointing at things. We're just, simply, in the world. It had never occurred to me what a wonderful thing this was. Or perhaps it did, a long time ago - but I had forgotten. I am full of how great life is. I am so happy to be alive. That point of life is joy - to make it, to receive it. That the Earth is a treasure box of people and places and song, and that every day you can plunge your arms in and find a new, ridiculous, perfect delight.

I opened the other envelope. It contained a photograph of a girl. The pose suggested a natural ease, or a lot of experience in being photographed. It showed darkish hair which might possibly have been red, a wide clear forehead, serious eyes, high cheekbones, nervous nostrils and a mouth which was not giving anything away. It was a fine-drawn, almost a taut face, and not a happy one

You make out with a boy because he’s cute, but he has no substance, no words to offer you. His mouth tastes like stale beer and false promises. When he touches your chin, you offer your mouth up like a flower to to be plucked, all covered in red lipstick to attract his eye. When he reaches his hand down your shirt, he stops, hand on boob, and squeezes, like you’re a fruit he’s trying to juice. He doesn’t touch anything but skin, does not feel what’s within. In the morning, he texts you only to say, “I think I left the rest of my beer at your place, but it’s cool, you can drink it. Last night was fun.” You kiss a girl because she’s new. Because she’s different and you’re twenty two, trying something else out because it’s all failed before. After spending six weekends together, you call her, only to be answered by a harsh beep informing you that her number has been disconnected. You learn that success doesn’t come through experimenting with your sexuality, and you’re left with a mouth full of ruin and more evidence that you are out of tune. You fall for a boy who is so nice, you don’t think he can do any harm. When he mentions marriage and murder in the same sentence, you say, “Okay, okay, okay.” When you make a joke he does not laugh, but tilts his head and asks you how many drinks you’ve had in such a loving tone that you sober up immediately. He leaves bullet in your blood and disappears, saying, “Who wants a girl that’s filled with holes?” You find out that a med student does. He spots you reading in a bar and compliments you on the dust spilling from your mouth. When you see his black doctor’s bag posed loyally at his side, you ask him if he’s got the tools to fix a mangled nervous system. He smiles at you, all teeth, and tells you to come with him. In the back of his car, he covers you in teethmarks and says, “There, now don’t you feel whole again.” But all the incisions do is let more cold air into your bones. You wonder how many times you will collapse into ruins before you give up on rebuilding. You wonder if maybe you’d have more luck living amongst your rubble instead of looking for someone to repair it. The next time someone promises to flood you with light to erase your dark, you insist them you’re fine the way you are. They tell you there’s hope, that they had holes in their chest too, that they know how to patch them up. When they offer you a bottle in exchange for your mouth, you tell them you’re not looking for a way out. No, thank you, you tell them. Even though you are filled with ruins and rubble, you are as much your light as you are your dark.

It’s one thing to explain to an eleven-year-old that there’s no way to know if Anne Frank went to heaven or hell, quite another to explain why such a question might have been an inappropriate one to pose at a bridal shower in front of the church ladies. But such was the nature of my small talk. Had I inherited more of my mother’s beauty and charm or shared some of my sister’s virtue, I might have gotten away with it, but instead I struggled through the trappings of Southern religious culture where a good Christian girl is expected to at least talk about the weather or football before getting to eternal damnation.

Good-girl-gone-queer Lindsay Lohan, divorced single mother Britney Spears, Caitlyn Jenner with her sultry poses, Kim Kardashian having the gall to show up on the cover of Vogue with her black husband: All of them are tied to the tracks and gleefully run over, less for what they've done than for the threat they pose to the idea that female sexuality fits within a familiar and safe pattern. If control over women's bodies were the sole point of the trainwreck, that would be terrifying enough. But it's only the beginning: Shame and fear are used to police pretty much every aspect of being female. After you've told someone what to do with her body, you need to tell her what to do with her mind.

He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful — then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess we’re going to a party.”Her mood suddenly lifts and she grins impishly. “What gave it away?”I eye her outfit and count down on my fingers.“Four things: leather shorts, pink highheels,knee high socks,and a sparkling top. ”She sticks out her hip and pops up her foot, striking a pose. “Come on, admit it,I look hot.”“You look like a—”She tosses a pillow at me.“Watch that dirty mouth of yours, Death Girl.

You’re a badass, hot-as-hell, fucking brilliant doctor, not some insecure high school girl. Man up!” “Do you know how rife with toxic masculinity the phrase man up is?” I challenged, mirroring her pose. “It implies that to be courageous is to be a man.” “Do you know how annoying it is when you change the subject?” Her tone was smug. “I’m just saying, we don’t need to insert men into every aspect of our language.” “Okay, ovary up. Fallopian forward. Vulva with a vengeance.

Posing girl, you are so Godawful ugly. Did you let an elephant sit on your face or what?

Under her restlessness and licentious pose is a repressed wholesomeness that will always make her regret devaluing herself, which, even in these strange times, he believes is true of more people than not. “Veronica,” she says, referring to another waitress, “says you look dangerous. But the girl has zero spirit of adventure.” “Good for her,” Nameless says. “Girls who

Die young, stay pretty. Blondie, right? We think of it as a modern phenomenon, the whole youth thing, but really, consider all those great portraits, some of them centuries old. Those goddesses of Botticelli and Rubens, Goya's Maja, Madame X. Consider Manet's Olympia, which shocked at the time, he having painted his mistress with the same voluptuous adulation generally reserved for the aristocratic good girls who posed for depictions of goddesses. Hardly anyone knows anymore, and no one cares, that Olympia was Manet's whore; although there's every reason to imagine that, in life, she was foolish and vulgar and not entirely hygienic (Paris in the 1860s being what it was). She's immortal now, she's a great historic beauty, having been scrubbed clean by the attention of a great artist. And okay, we can't help but notice that Manet did not choose to paint her twenty years later, when time had started doing its work. The world has always worshipped nascence. Goddamn the world.

Why would a girl like you have scars? Cut yourself shaving?” “More like slicing and dicing,” and making demonic julienne flesh fries. It should be noted that those who dared mark me no longer posed a threat.

He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful – then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.

I Not my best side, I'm afraid. The artist didn't give me a chance to Pose properly, and as you can see, Poor chap, he had this obsession with Triangles, so he left off two of my Feet. I didn't comment at the time (What, after all, are two feet To a monster?) but afterwards I was sorry for the bad publicity. Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs? Why should my victim be so Unattractive as to be inedible, And why should she have me literally On a string? I don't mind dying Ritually, since I always rise again, But I should have liked a little more blood To show they were taking me seriously. II It's hard for a girl to be sure if She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite Took to the dragon. It's nice to be Liked, if you know what I mean. He was So nicely physical, with his claws And lovely green skin, and that sexy tail, And the way he looked at me, He made me feel he was all ready to Eat me. And any girl enjoys that. So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery, On a really dangerous horse, to be honest I didn't much fancy him. I mean, What was he like underneath the hardware? He might have acne, blackheads or even Bad breath for all I could tell, but the dragon-- Well, you could see all his equipment At a glance. Still, what could I do? The dragon got himself beaten by the boy, And a girl's got to think of her future. III I have diplomas in Dragon Management and Virgin Reclamation. My horse is the latest model, with Automatic transmission and built-in Obsolescence. My spear is custom-built, And my prototype armour Still on the secret list. You can't Do better than me at the moment. I'm qualified and equipped to the Eyebrow. So why be difficult? Don't you want to be killed and/or rescued In the most contemporary way? Don't You want to carry out the roles That sociology and myth have designed for you? Don't you realize that, by being choosy, You are endangering job prospects In the spear- and horse-building industries? What, in any case, does it matter what You want? You're in my way. - Not My Best Side

Just for a moment it reminded not-Triss of drawings she had seen in magazines and on book jackets, of pastel-colored parties where languid, fashionable women slunk and posed, slim and elegant as fish, and gentlemen passed them flutes of fat-bubbled champagne. The impression did not last long, however. The scene around her was too jarringly and robustly real. The accents were all too Ellchester, and some of the girls had knobbly ankles.

Who're them?" says he to the curate. "Them are the fallen angels," says the curate. They had a human form, no wings. God took the wings off of 'em after Lucifer rebelled - that way they couldn't go back, d'you see. They had no wings. But there was so many of 'em that you couldn't drive a knife down between 'em. They were as thick as hair on a dog's back. They were the finest people he ever seen. And whatever way he looked at 'em, some o' the finest girls he ever seen was in it, he said. They had to be good-looking, you know! 'Twas the sin o' pride put Lucifer down, d'you see. The best-looking angel in Heaven, 'twas the sin o' pride put him down. I s'pose they were nearly all as good-looking.

My grandfather was troubled and fascinated by this alteration from the girl of ten days before. Had the flirtatious gamine in the Ingrid Bergman sunglasses been a pose adopted for the evening, while this shapely vessel leaking sadness approximated something closer to the truth of herself? Or was it the other way around? Maybe neither version was the "truth." Maybe "self" was a free variable with no bounded value. Maybe very time you met her, she would be somebody else.

Really, Nan could be very odious when she liked. Yet somehow she [Gay] didn't hate her as before. She felt very indifferent to her. She found herself looking at her with cool, appraising eyes, seeing her as she had never seen her before. An empty, selfish little creature, who had always to be amused like a child. ...A girl who posed as a sophisticate before her country cousins but who was really more provincial than they were, knowing nothing of real life or real love or real emotion of any kind. Gay wondered, as she looked, how she could ever have hated this girl—ever been jealous of her. She was not worth hating. Gay spoke at last. She stood up and looked levelly at Nan. There was contempt in her quiet voice. "I suppose you came here to hurt me, Nan. You haven't—you can never hurt me again. You've lost the power. I think I even feel a little sorry for you. You've always been a taker, Nan. All through your life you've taken whatever you wanted. But you've never been a giver—you couldn't be because you've nothing to give. Neither love nor truth nor understanding nor kindness nor loyalty. Just taking all the time and giving nothing—oh, it has made you very poor. So poor that nobody need envy you.

Books are more than just a prop to pose around with when you're trying to convince people you've got a bit of substance. Books are an escape route. A refuge. They can be a connection to a stranger, someone you've never met, who writes something that you hadn't considered anyone in the world to have felt but you. When you grow up feeling too big for a place, and you make that kind of connection with a book, it’s like a link; it’s a tunnel to the outside world. A glimmer of something beyond.

Russell lets out a frustrated sigh, probably wishing we were men because then he could communicate with us like adults, and he strides to the window, pausing dramatically by my blackout curtains, striking a pose known as Counselor Addressing the Jury.

Pretty; beautiful even; touchingly untouched. An advertisement for soap, all natural ingredients. The face looks deaf: it has that vacant, posed imperviousness of all well-brought-up girls of the time. A tabula rasa, not waiting to write, but to be written on.

There is no reason to expect that misogyny will typically manifest itself in violence or even violent tendencies, contra Steven Finker. From the perspective of enforcing patriarchal social relations, this is not necessary. It is not even desirable. Patriarchal social relations are supposed to be amicable and seamless, when all is going to plan. It is largely when things go awry that violence tends to bubble to the surface. There are numerous nonviolent and low-cost means of defusing the psychic threat posed by powerful women who are perceived as insufficiently oriented to serving dominant men's interests. For example, women may be taken down imaginatively, rather than literally, by vilifying, demonizing, belittling, humiliating, mocking, lampooning, shunning, and shaming them.

If I’m going to be a student here, treated on equal terms, then I have to be willing to do everything that they do,” I said. “There can’t be two sets of expectations, one for them and one for me, the only girl in the class. How will I earn their esteem if I don’t pose?

But I don't know, Wesley. This thing makes me think, too. S'pose we'd got Elnora when she was a baby, and we'd heaped on her all the love we can't on our own, and we'd coddled, petted, and shielded her, would she have made the woman that living alone, learning to think for herself, and taking all the knocks Kate Comstock could give, have made of her?" "You bet your life!" cried Wesley, warmly. "Loving anybody don't hurt them. We wouldn't have done anything but love her. You can't hurt a child loving it. She'd have learned to work, be sensible, study, and grown into a woman with us, without suffering like a poor homeless dog." "But you don't get the point, Wesley. She would have grown into a fine woman with us; just seems as if Elnora was born to be fine, but as we would have raised her, would her heart ever have known the world as it does now? Where's the anguish, Wesley, that child can't comprehend? Seeing what she's seen of her mother hasn't hardened her. She can understand any mother's sorrow. Living life from the rough side has only broadened her. Where's the girl or boy burning with shame, or struggling to find a way, that will cross Elnora's path and not get a lift from her? She's had the knocks, but there'll never be any of the thing you call 'false pride' in her. I guess we better keep out. Maybe Kate Comstock knows what she's doing. Sure as you live, Elnora has grown bigger on knocks than she would on love.

all friends of mine, were fond of saying “Do I look fat?” just like that girl had said. Sometimes they would pose the question to me, not seeing or caring that when they said “Do I look fat?” they were really saying “Do I look like you?” It was assumed that no one wanted to look like me,

Mary Lou suddenly realizes that Mack calls the temperature number because he is afraid to talk on the telephone, and by listening to a recording, he doesn’t have to reply. It’s his way of pretending that he’s involved. He wants it to snow so he won’t have to go outside. He is afraid of what might happen. But it occurs to her that what he must really be afraid of is women. Then Mary Lou feels so sick and heavy with her power over him that she wants to cry. She sees the way her husband is standing there in a frozen pose. Mack looks as though he could stand there all night with the telephone receiver against his ear.

In spite of this newly developed media literacy, however, I’ve also noticed that it is now an increasingly sexualized ideal that younger and younger girls are beginning to feel they must live up to. The notorious Calvin Klein ad campaigns eroticized sixteen-year-olds when I was a teenager, then eroticized fourteen-year-old models in the early nineties, then twelve-year-olds in the late nineties. GUESS Jeans ads now pose what look like nine-year-olds in provocative settings. And the latest fashions for seven- and eightyear- olds re-create the outfits of pop stars who dress like sex workers. Is this progress? I doubt it.

By eroding their sense of shame we've made immorality normal, not only in the world but also in the forbidden squadron. ...their new Christian friends recommended some of the movies Fletcher had been wondering if he should now avoid. I was delighted one of them said, "This is a great movie--only one sex scene, and the f-word's only used a few times." 'Titanic' is one of my favorites. How many Christian young people have watched it in their own homes? Think of it, Squaltaint. Suppose someone in the youth group said to the boys, 'There's an attractive girl down the street. Let's get together and go look through her window and watch her undress and lay back on a couch and pose naked from the waist up. Then this girl and her boyfriend will get in a car and have sex--let's get as close as we can and listen to them and watch the windows steam up.' The strategy would never work. They'd know immediately it was wrong. But you can get them to do exactly the same thing by using a television instead of a window. That's all is takes! Think of it, Squaltaint. Every day Christians across the country, including many squadron leaders, watch women and men undress and commit acts of fornication and adultery the Enemy calls an abomination. We've made them a bunch of voyeurs! Churches full of peeping toms.

Mesmerized with the video, I realized that the truth had been there all along. I’d known the girls had jerked the curtain. I’d known that anyone at any time could take a picture. But I could never see myself doing that wacky pose. So, instead of trying to figure out logically how it happened, I resisted believing it actually happened.

pink-haired girl on Etsy was selling shirts of a tweet you once wrote: Fuck demonizing immigrants. It was the millennial version of those cultures that exhumed a dead person’s corpse and paraded it through the streets, dressing it in new outfits, posing with it for photos. I wanted to forge something big enough to kill the whole world.

He said he enjoyed doing security work for Mr. Jimmerson, keeping nuts and gangsters out of grenade range of the Master, but that one day he hoped to marry a woman who owned a Jeep with raised white letters on the tires. He would take her home and ride around town some. “Look,” the people would say, “there goes Ed in four-wheel drive, with his pretty wife at his side.” The way to get women, he said, was with a camera. Chloroform was no good, at best a makeshift. But all the girls liked to pose for a camera and became immediately submissive to anyone carrying a great tangle of photographic equipment from his shoulders. You didn’t even need film. He said he had once killed a man when he was in the Great Berets by ramming a pencil up his nose and into his brain. Babcock said, “It’s the Green Berets.” "What did I say?" "You said the Great Berets. But you weren’t in the Green Berets or the Great Berets either one, Ed. I don’t know why you want to say things like that. I’ve seen your records." "I was in a ward with a guy named Danny who was a Green Beret." "Yes, but that’s not the same thing.

Posing as someone, or something, else is the story of many women and men who have experienced repression and made a bid for freedom. It is the story of a gay U.S. Marine who had to pretend he was straight. It is the story of a Jewish family in Nazi Germany posing as Protestants. It is the story of a black South African who tried to make his skin lighter under apartheid.

The girl was undeniably beautiful. She was tall, with a spectacular figure. Her white dress, shimmering with crystal beads, was cut low enough to prove the authenticity of her remarkable cleavage. Her long hair was almost white in its blondeness. But it was her face that held Anne’s attention, a face so naturally beautiful that it came as a startling contrast to the theatrical beauty of her hair and figure. It was a perfect face with a fine square jaw, high cheekbones and intelligent brow. The eyes seemed warm and friendly, and the short, straight nose belonged to a beautiful child, as did the even white teeth and little-girl dimples. It was an innocent face, a face that looked at everything with breathless excitement and trusting enthusiasm, seemingly unaware of the commotion the body was causing. A face that glowed with genuine interest in each person who demanded attention, rewarding each with a warm smile. The body and its accouterments continued to pose and undulate for the staring crowd and flashing cameras, but the face ignored the furor and greeted people with the intimacy of meeting a few new friends at a gathering.

Zero-tolerance discipline policies, specifically the controversial category of willful defiance, have become a routine way by which to punish and marginalize Black girls in learning spaces when they directly confront adults or indirectly complicate the teacher’s ability to manage the classroom—not necessarily actions that pose a threat to the physical safety of anyone on campus.

Colleges have now become privileged finishing schools for girls. Except rather than teaching manners, they teach women that men are the enemy and men are treated as such on campus, unless they go along with the program that keeps them cowed or striking a PC pose. Many men have just decided that they don’t belong in college and are going on strike, consciously or unconsciously. How will this affect their wages and lifestyles in the coming decades? If nothing changes and more and more men drop out of college or never attend, how will this change society? Will men continue to become the other, and be further relegated to second-class status where women and society are afraid of them and they are hesitant to participate fully in the public sphere? Is this already happening? The next chapter explores these questions.

Aren’t you going to look at it, Verity?” asked Miss Deane. Slowly, I unwrapped it. I saw a small, slim girl with serious eyes and a little pointed face, wearing her second-best dress and posed stiffly beside an artificial rosebush. Standing behind her, rising out of a sort of mist, was a fair-haired young man in a white shirt. There was no doubt as to who it was. It was my half-brother Alexander, and he was smiling.

The doctors would fix her head and everything would be OK. She began shoving things back into the backpack. As she picked up the leather-bound diary, a photo fell out. It was a photo of three children in school uniform. It was obviously a posed shot because they were sitting in a row on a step with their elbows on their knees and their chins in their hands. There were two girls and a boy. The boy was in the middle. He had

Seriously. I’ve never seen so many camera flashes. Speaking of which, I don’t suppose there’s any way you guys can be less attractive for the next few minutes?” Livvy asked. “You’re drawing almost as much attention as the efflorescence.” Fitz grinned—and a girl who’d been watching him tripped over her own feet. “You guys have plenty of admirers too,” Sophie had to point out, nudging her chin toward several adults who were snapping pictures of Grady and Livvy as if they thought they were celebrities. “I think Tam’s causing the biggest stir,” Biana said, tilting her head toward an entire busload of schoolgirls who were shamelessly gawking. “Great,” Tam grumbled, pulling his bangs lower over his eyes—which only seemed to make the group swoon more. “Be glad Keefe’s not here,” Fitz told him as they strode deeper into the field. “He’d be calling them over and making you pose for photos.

Something has changed about him, and it takes me a moment to discern what it is. He’s fully armed, from his long dagger to his throwing knives to the steel-lined bracers guarding his forearms. Grey hasn’t been fully armed in ages. We so rarely leave the castle grounds, and there’s certainly no one here to pose a threat. I smile as I pour. “Does this girl have you spooked, Commander?” “No, my lord.” His voice is even, unaffected. He never lets me bait him.

Everywhere we looked there was a duplicate, an identical. All girls. Sad girls, girls from faraway places, girls who could have been our neighborhood's girls. Some of these girls were quiet; they posed like birds on their straw mattresses and studied us. As we walked past them on their perches, I saw the chosen, the ones selected to suffer in certain ways while their other halves remained untouched. In nearly ever pair, one twin had a spine gone awry, a bad leg, a patched eye, a wound, a scar, a crutch.

My answer to Ona's question 'do boys of thirteen and fourteen pose a threat to the girls and women of Molotschna colony?' was yes. Possibly. Every one of us, male or female, poses a potential threat. Thirteen and fourteen-year-old boys are capable of causing great damage to girls and women and to each other. It is a brash age; these boys are possessed of wreckless urges, physical exuberance, an intense curiosity that often results in injury, unbridled emotion including deep tenderness and empathy and not quite enough experience or brain development to fully understand or appreciate the consequences of their actions or words. They are similar to the yearlings, young, awkward, gleeful, and powerful. They are tall, muscular, sexually inquisitive creatures with little to no impulse control. They are children. They are children and they can be taught. I'm a two-bit schoolteacher, a failed farmer, a "shinda", an effeminate man and above all a believer. I believe that with direction, firm love and patience these boys aged thirteen and fourteen are capable of relearning their roles as males in the Molotschna colony

You will come one day in a waver of love, Tender as dew, impetuous as rain, The tan of the sun will be on your skin, The purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech, You will pose with a hill-flower grace. You will come, with your slim, expressive arms, A poise of the head no sculptor has caught And nuances spoken with shoulder and neck, Your face in pass-and-repass of moods As many as skies in delicate change Of cloud and blue and flimmering sun. Yet, You may not come, O girl of a dream, We may but pass as the world goes by And take from a look of eyes into eyes, A film of hope and a memoried day.

Ah was wid dem white chillun so much till Ah didn’t know Ah wuzn’t white till Ah was round six years old. Wouldn’t have found it out then, but a man come long takin’ pictures and without askin’ anybody, Shelby, dat was de oldest boy, he told him to take us. Round a week later de man brought de picture for Mis’ Washburn to see and pay him which she did, then give us all a good lickin’. “So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s where Ah wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah ast, ‘where is me? Ah don’t see me.

CONFESSIONS OF A GANGSTER A former gang member talks about racial violence from way back in the eighties. “It started out innocently,” Jones, 39, tells me at a Starbucks on Chestnut Street near the group’s old stomping grounds. The posse walked to South Street seeking action. “They had a term, ‘clocking wigs,’ that meant hitting someone in the head,” he recalls with shame and disgust. “They preyed on women, whites, and Asians.” “They were selective,” driven less by hating whites than wanting to feel superior to weaker, vulnerable strangers, he explains. “If they saw anyone who could defend themselves or pose a threat, they wouldn’t do anything.”1 Any questions?

Grandma I’ve been writing in names that are missing, the ones I know, which is by no means all of them. That’s what happens, you see. First, there’s no need to write who they are, because everyone knows that’s Great-Aunt Sophia or Cousin Rudi, and then only some of us know, and already we’re asking, ‘Who’s that with Gertrude?’ and ‘I don’t remember this man with the little dog’, and you don’t realise how fast they’re disappearing from being remembered … Wilma It’s still an amazing thing to me, to know the faces of the dead! I can remember Grandpa Jakobovicz’s tobacco-stained whiskers, but his wife died giving birth to Poppa before there were photographs, so now no one knows what she looked like any more than if she’d been some kind of rumour. Grandma Everyone was mad to have a photograph when I was a girl, it was like a miracle and you had to go to a photographer’s to pose for him … wedding couples, soldiers in their first uniforms, children in front of painted scenery … and, always, women dressed up for the carnival ball, posing with a Greek pillar. Later, when we had a camera, there were too many pictures to keep in the album, holiday pictures with real scenery, swimming pictures, pictures of children in dirndl pinafores and lederhosen, like little Austrians. Here’s a couple waving goodbye from the train, but who are they? No idea! That’s why they’re waving goodbye. It’s like a second death, to lose your name in a family album.

A late arrival had the impression of lots of loud people unnecessarily grouped within a smoke-blue space between two mirrors gorged with reflections. Because, I suppose, Cynthia wished to be the youngest in the room, the women she used to invite, married or single, were, at the best, in their precarious forties; some of them would bring from their homes, in dark taxis, intact vestiges of good looks, which, however, they lost as the party progressed. It has always amazed me - the capacity sociable weekend revelers have of finding almost at once, by a purely empiric but very precise method, a common denominator of drunkenness, to which everybody loyally sticks before descending, all together, to the next level. The rich friendliness of the matrons was marked by tomboyish overtones, while the fixed inward look of amiably tight men was like a sacrilegious parody of pregnancy. Although some of the guests were connected in one way or another with the arts, there was no inspired talk, no wreathed, elbow-propped heads, and of course no flute girls. From some vantage point where she had been sitting in a stranded mermaid pose on the pale carpet with one or two younger fellows, Cynthia, her face varnished with a film of beaming sweat, would creep up on her knees, a proffered plate of nuts in one hand, and crisply tap with the other the athletic leg of Cochran or Corcoran, an art dealer, ensconced, on a pearl-grey sofa, between two flushed, happily disintegrating ladies. At a further stage there would come spurts of more riotous gaiety. Corcoran or Coransky would grab Cynthia or some other wandering woman by the shoulder and lead her into a corner to confront her with a grinning imbroglio of private jokes and rumors, whereupon, with a laugh and a toss of her head, he would break away. And still later there would be flurries of intersexual chumminess, jocular reconciliations, a bare fleshy arm flung around another woman's husband (he standing very upright in the midst of a swaying room), or a sudden rush of flirtatious anger, of clumsy pursuit-and the quiet half smile of Bob Wheeler picking up glasses that grew like mushrooms in the shade of chairs. ("The Vane Sisters")

how people who’ve been through serious, violent trauma often tend to discount the smaller abuses they face. Dylan compared this to people who literally can’t feel physical pain. It sounds like a blessing until you remember that pain is designed to protect, to save your skin from the flame, your bone from the pose that might snap it, and once it’s gone, you can do fatal damage to yourself without realizing it. He saw this as a metaphor for how people who’d been through extreme instances of abuse sometimes lost the ability to detect the smaller abuses, the signs that someone wasn’t truly loving or a good match. It’s why it could be so hard for them to build lives better than what they’d been through. So hard for them to move on.

Sassy had worked in El Paso, Texas as a waitress in a small café, a toll-booth cashier in Houston, Texas, posed nude for magazine photos in Reno, Nevada and even was a ski instructor in Granby, Colorado for a few years. Sassy was always looking. She was looking for something that she couldn’t find. Sassy wanted to go where the road led. She walked past other people’s dreams and security and followed the twisting snake through deserts and mountains, big cities and cow towns. Sassy was on a quest and she didn’t even know it. She would take her small earnings and saddle-up, following fate or hope or desire into new horizons with new promises--a skinny green-eyed girl carrying a backpack full of her life, down the roads of America.

There is something in the pose of sleeping women. Something soft and slight and slenderly surreal. He understands why painters are so often challenged to attempt them, and why so seldom they succeed. It must exceed the scope of canvas - the implausibility of rendering motion within rest. She is deeply asleep, immovably asleep - and yet she moves. Tiny spasms quiver her legs and tug at her fingers. Lips purse to open, part, then softly close again. Dreaming eyes agitate the surface of their lids. Hands resting on the stomach, rise and fall in rhythm with the pulse that ticks along the valleys of her neck. Even bespeckled with bites like this, there is a beauty to this girl and in this pose well beyond the scope of two dimensions.

Sometimes, when I'm having a sort-through or a clear-out, I find photos of my youth, and it's a shock to see everything on black and white. I think my granddaughter believes we were actually grey-skinned, with dull hair, always posing in a shadowed landscape. But I remember the town as being almost too bright to look at when I was a girl. I remember the deep blue of the sky and the dark green of the pines cutting through it, the bright red of the local brick houses and the orange carpet of pine needles under our feet. Nowadays - though I'm not sure the sky is still occasionally blue and most of the houses are still there, and the trees still drop their needles - nowadays, the colours seem faded, as if I live in an old photograph.

Rauter, some German bigwig, recently gave a speech. “All Jews must be out of the German-occupied territories before July 1. The province of Utrecht will be cleansed of Jews [as if they were cockroaches] between April 1 and May 1, and the provinces of North and South Holland between May 1 and June 1.” These poor people are being shipped off to filthy slaughterhouses like a herd of sick and neglected cattle. But I’ll say no more on the subject. My own thoughts give me nightmares! One good piece of news is that the Labor Exchange was set on fire in an act of sabotage. A few days later the County Clerk’s Office also went up in flames. Men posing as German police bound and gagged the guards and managed to destroy some important documents.

The term "good girl" is a reward slapped onto women who do not pose a threat to the status quo. If it makes you feel nice to be called a "good girl", I want you to sit down and think hard. The women who stood up and voted when it was illegal for them to do so, when it was a "sin" for them to vote, were not "good girls". They were the bad girls. The women who ran in marathons disguised as men when women were an abomination to sports, were not "good girls". They were the bad girls. The first female pilot, the first female engineer, the first ever woman who wore red lipstick. All bad girls. Sit down and think hard. If you want to receive rewards from people for falling into their lines, then move out of the way for the women who blaze paths that you will one day walk on.

You walk in there and you don’t see a single girl, even in the booths, just a great mob of young men dressed in all varieties of hoodlum cloth, from red shirts to zoot suits. It is also the hustlers’ bar—the boys who make a living among the sad old homos of the Eighth Avenue night. Dean walked in there with his eyes slitted to see every single face. There were wild Negro queers, sullen guys with guns, shiv-packing seamen, thin, noncommittal junkies, and an occasional well-dressed middle-aged detective, posing as a bookie and hanging around half for interest and half for duty. It was the typical place for Dean to put down his request. All kinds of evil plans are hatched in Ritzy’s Bar—you can sense it in the air—and all kinds of mad sexual routines are initiated to go with them.

One model I met through Jerry had been a Playboy playmate. She was tall and gorgeous. Every girl in the world, looking at her, would have been jealous. However, she thought she was too tall. When she would come into a room, she’d be half stooped over. I tried to teach her, when she was posing, to please stand up, because she was so elegant and striking. I finally talked her into that. Then she had another worry: she’s got “dents” near her groin. I have to get out a book of anatomy to show her that it’s the attachment of the muscles to the ilium, and to explain to her that you can’t see these dents on everybody; to see them, everything must be just right, in perfect proportion, like she was. I learned from her that every woman is worried about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.

I'm here, Papa," she whispered, saying the words she had longed to say for her entire life. "I'm here, and I'm never going to leave you again." He made a sound of contentment and closed his eyes. Just as Evie thought he had fallen asleep, he murmured, "Where shall we walk first today, lovey? The biscuit baker, I s'pose..." Realizing that he imagined this was one of her long-ago childhood visits, Evie replied softly, "Oh, yes." Hastily she knuckled away the excess moisture from her eyes. "I want an iced bun... and a cone of broken biscuits... and then I want to come back here and play dice with you." A rusty chuckle came from his ravaged throat, and he coughed a little. "Let Papa take forty winks before we leaves... there's a good girl..." "Yes, sleep," Evie murmured, turning the cloth over on his forehead. "I can wait, Papa.

I tried to remember the first time I had heard of Congress’s plans for Japanese American internment. I recalled that my first impression had been one of approval, that certainly we couldn’t chance domestic disloyalty in the face of this terrible world war. But now, as I sat beside Rose and Lorelei and gazed out at this barn—this farm camp, as they called it—I wavered. Certainly these two girls posed no threat to our country. In fact, all the farmworkers seemed to be the most peaceful of people. They had volunteered to help with the harvest, tough physical labor at best, to leave the camp and stay here in conditions little better than those provided for our livestock, all to earn a measly nineteen dollars a month. This was temporary, I kept telling myself. At war’s end, they could return to the homes, businesses, and places in society where they had lived before. I found myself wishing I’d never seen this camp. Perhaps someday, we could all make it back to the places where we started. I didn’t believe it, but I tried to.

He lavished on me a friendliness which was as far above that of Saint-Loup as that was above the affability of a mere tradesman. Compared with that of a great artist, the friendliness of a great gentleman, charming as it may be, has the effect of an actor’s playing a part, of being feigned. Saint-Loup sought to please; Elstir loved to give, to give himself. Everything that he possessed, ideas, work, and the rest which he counted for far less, he would have given gladly to anyone who could understand him. But, failing society that was endurable, he lived in an isolation, with a savagery which fashionable people called pose and ill-breeding, public authorities a recalcitrant spirit, his neighbours madness, his family selfishness and pride. And no doubt at first he had thought, even in his solitude, with enjoyment that, thanks to his work, he was addressing, in spite of distance, he was giving a loftier idea of himself, to those who had misunderstood or hurt him. Perhaps, in those days, he lived alone not from indifference but from love of his fellows, and, just as I had renounced Gilberte to appear to her again one day in more attractive colours, dedicated his work to certain people as a way of approaching them again, by which without actually seeing him they would be made to love him, admire him, talk about him; a renunciation is not always complete from the start, when we decide upon it in our original frame of mind and before it has reacted upon us, whether it be the renunciation of an invalid, a monk, an artist or a hero. But if he had wished to produce with certain people in his mind, in producing he had lived for himself, remote from the society to which he had become indifferent; the practice of solitude had given him a love for it, as happens with every big thing which we have begun by fearing, because we knew it to be incompatible with smaller things to which we clung, and of which it does not so much deprive us as it detaches us from them. Before we experience it, our whole preoccupation is to know to what extent we can reconcile it with certain pleasures which cease to be pleasures as soon as we have experienced it.

There’s this girl…this woman I can’t get out of my mind.” He spilled the story of his seduction of sweet, innocent Amanda McCormick for Rufus’s examination. When he finished talking, there was another silence. “You did that?” Rufus’s voice was as deep and gravelly as a quarry. “Fucked some poor virgin while posing as her fiancé?” “Yeah.” “You got some balls. How’d you know you’d be a close enough match to this Baxter?” “Brown hair, blue eyes, that’s all she seemed to know about him.” Spence couldn’t explain his need for the rush of tempting fate. “I took a chance. It was a gamble.” “Jesus, you’re a mean son of a bitch.” “I didn’t want to hurt her. I was just having fun.” He sounded like a spoiled child even to himself. “And now you want to go see this woman and try to make it right?” Rufus said. “Just how the hell did you think you were going to fix it? By showing up and wrecking her marriage, if you haven’t done that already?” It was Spence’s turn to pause. “Haven’t you done enough to this lady? Where’s your head, boy? Leave her alone.” “I can’t. I have to see her again.” He didn’t want to share his dreams of the little girl. He’d sound crazy. Rufus laughed harshly. “So you can try and get another piece of tail?” “No. It’s not like that.” “What? You think you’re in love. Son, you don’t know the first thing about it. If you did, you’d be putting this woman’s needs above your own.” He thought of the little girl telling him to go to Amanda. “Maybe what she needs is me.” Rufus made a scoffing noise. “A woman needs a man who’ll stand by her, be there through hard times and good. From what you’ve told me these past months, this is the longest you’ve stayed put in one place in your life and that’s only ‘cause they won’t let you out.” “I just want to do the right thing.” “Then do like I say. Leave her be. You think she’s going to be happy to see you again?” Spence pulled his blanket tighter around his shoulders and watched a gray cloud puff from his mouth. “You still there, boy?” “Where else?” “Don’t take it too hard. Everybody does things they’re sorry for. Sometimes there’s just no way to make it right.” He leaned back against the wall and reviewed the stupid chain of events that had landed him in jail. Maybe Rufus was right and there was no way he could ever apologize for what he’d done to Amanda. He should let the whole thing slide and leave the woman in peace.

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

Dear Jon, A real Dear Jon let­ter, how per­fect is that?! Who knew you’d get dumped twice in the same amount of months. See, I’m one para­graph in and I’ve al­ready fucked this. I’m writ­ing this be­cause I can’t say any of this to you face-to-face. I’ve spent the last few months ques­tion­ing a lot of my friend­ships and won­der­ing what their pur­pose is, if not to work through big emo­tional things to­gether. But I now re­al­ize: I don’t want that. And I know you’ve all been there for me in other ways. Maybe not in the lit­eral sense, but I know you all would have done any­thing to fix me other than lis­ten­ing to me talk and al­low­ing me to be sad with­out so­lu­tions. And now I am writ­ing this let­ter rather than pick­ing up the phone and talk­ing to you be­cause, de­spite every thing I know, I just don’t want to, and I don’t think you want me to ei­ther. I lost my mind when Jen broke up with me. I’m pretty sure it’s been the sub­ject of a few of your What­sApp con­ver­sa­tions and more power to you, be­cause I would need to vent about me if I’d been friends with me for the last six months. I don’t want it to have been in vain, and I wanted to tell you what I’ve learnt. If you do a high-fat, high-pro­tein, low-carb diet and join a gym, it will be a good dis­trac­tion for a while and you will lose fat and gain mus­cle, but you will run out of steam and eat nor­mally again and put all the weight back on. So maybe don’t bother. Drunk­en­ness is an­other idea. I was in black­out for most of the first two months and I think that’s fine, it got me through the evenings (and the oc­ca­sional af­ter­noon). You’ll have to do a lot of it on your own, though, be­cause no one is free to meet up any more. I think that’s fine for a bit. It was for me un­til some­one walked past me drink­ing from a whisky minia­ture while I waited for a night bus, put five quid in my hand and told me to keep warm. You’re the only per­son I’ve ever told this story. None of your mates will be ex­cited that you’re sin­gle again. I’m prob­a­bly your only sin­gle mate and even I’m not that ex­cited. Gen­er­ally the ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing sin­gle at thirty-five will feel dif­fer­ent to any other time you’ve been sin­gle and that’s no bad thing. When your ex moves on, you might be­come ob­sessed with the bloke in a way that is al­most sex­ual. Don’t worry, you don’t want to fuck him, even though it will feel a bit like you do some­times. If you open up to me or one of the other boys, it will feel good in the mo­ment and then you’ll get an emo­tional hang­over the next day. You’ll wish you could take it all back. You may even feel like we’ve en­joyed see­ing you so low. Or that we feel smug be­cause we’re win­ning at some­thing and you’re los­ing. Re­member that none of us feel that. You may be­come ob­sessed with work­ing out why ex­actly she broke up with you and you are likely to go fully, fully nuts in your bid to find a sat­is­fy­ing an­swer. I can save you a lot of time by let­ting you know that you may well never work it out. And even if you did work it out, what’s the pur­pose of it? Soon enough, some girl is go­ing to be crazy about you for some un­de­fin­able rea­son and you’re not go­ing to be in­ter­ested in her for some un­de­fin­able rea­son. It’s all so ran­dom and un­fair – the peo­ple we want to be with don’t want to be with us and the peo­ple who want to be with us are not the peo­ple we want to be with. Re­ally, the thing that’s go­ing to hurt a lot is the fact that some­one doesn’t want to be with you any more. Feel­ing the ab­sence of some­one’s com­pany and the ab­sence of their love are two dif­fer­ent things. I wish I’d known that ear­lier. I wish I’d known that it isn’t any­body’s job to stay in a re­la­tion­ship they don’t want to be in just so some­one else doesn’t feel bad about them­selves. Any­way. That’s all. You’re go­ing to be okay, mate. Andy

You feel so overwritten you're like a palimpsest; the original girl almost lost under years of scrawling yet you nurture an illusion of beauty, brush your hair in the dark so when your reflection finally catches up with you you stare straight past that older woman to the skateboard dancers behind hitting the frosty air with exuberant grace. On the loose in the morning city reminds you of lovers, catching the tram to work in last night's laddered stockings, the sharp-edged day already intruding like a hangover. It's not the sex you miss or the hotel mornings but the reassurance of strangers and that wild card. Now everything's played out the same, no surprises in the pack except those dealt by disaster. Early this morning such certainty dragged on your thoughts they stumbled flat-footed through the breakfast silence and you knew neither the apples orchard fresh, crisp as snow nor the blue bowl they posed in were enough. People disappear all the time, emerge like summer snakes newly marked and glittering into a clean desert. Without the photo of a child you carry in your wallet which reminds you who you have become you'd catch a train to Musk or Mollymook, some place your fingers have strayed over. Even thinking that, you turn your face into the wind, keep walking that same old line in your new flamboyant shoes. Oh my treacherous heart.

I pull into the driveway outside of my father's house and shut off the engine. I sit behind the wheel for a moment, studying the house. He'd called me last night and demanded that I come over for dinner tonight. Didn't request. He demanded. What struck me though, was that he sounded a lot more stressed out and harried than he did when he interrupted my brunch with Gabby to demand my presence at a “family”dinner. Yeah, that had been a fun night filled with my father and Ian badgering me about my job. For whatever reason, they'd felt compelled to make a concerted effort to belittle what I do –more so than they usually do anyway -- try to undermine my confidence in my ability to teach, and all but demand that I quit and come to work for my father's company. That had been annoying, and although they were more insistent than normal, it's pretty par for the course with those two. They always think they know what's best for me and have no qualms about telling me how to live my life. When he'd called me last night though, and told me to come to dinner tonight, there was something in my father's voice that had rattled me. It took me a while to put a finger on what it was I heard in his voice, but when I figured it out, it really shook me. I heard fear. Outright fear. My father isn't a man who fears much or is easily intimidated. In fact, he's usually the one doing the intimidating. But, something has him really spooked and even though we don't always see eye-to-eye or get along, hearing that fear in his voice scared me. In all my years, I've never known him to sound so downright terrified. With a sigh and a deep sense of foreboding, I climb out of my car and head to the door, trying to steel myself more with each step. Call me psychic, but I have a feeling that this is going to be a long, miserable night. “Good evening, Miss Holly,”Gloria says as she opens the door before I even have a chance to knock. “Nice to see you again.”“It's nice to see you too, Gloria,”I say and smile with genuine affection. Gloria has been with our family for as far back as I can remember. Honestly, after my mother passed away from ovarian cancer, Gloria took a large role in raising me. My father had plunged himself into his work –and had taken Ian under his wing to help groom him to take over the empire one day –leaving me to more or less fend for myself. It was like I was a secondary consideration to them. Because I'm a girl and not part of the testosterone-rich world of construction, neither my father nor Ian took much interest in me or my life. Unless they needed something from me, of course. The only time they really paid any attention to me was when they needed me to pose for family pictures for company literature.

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.

When Surkov finds out about the Night Wolves he is delighted. The country needs new patriotic stars, the great Kremlin reality show is open for auditions, and the Night Wolves are just the type that’s needed, helping the Kremlin rewrite the narrative of protesters from political injustice and corruption to one of Holy Russia versus Foreign Devils, deflecting the conversation from the economic slide and how the rate of bribes that bureaucrats demand has shot up from 15 percent to 50 percent of any deal. They will receive Kremlin support for their annual bike show and rock concert in Crimea, the one-time jewel in the Tsarist Empire that ended up as part of Ukraine during Soviet times, and where the Night Wolves use their massive shows to call for retaking the peninsula from Ukraine and restoring the lands of Greater Russia; posing with the President in photo ops in which he wears Ray-Bans and leathers and rides a three-wheel Harley (he can’t quite handle a two-wheeler); playing mega-concerts to 250,000 cheering fans celebrating the victory at Stalingrad in World War II and the eternal Holy War Russia is destined to fight against the West, with Cirque du Soleil–like trapeze acts, Spielberg-scale battle reenactments, religious icons, and holy ecstasies—in the middle of which come speeches from Stalin, read aloud to the 250,000 and announcing the holiness of the Soviet warrior—after which come more dancing girls and then the Night Wolves’ anthem, “Slavic Skies”: We are being attacked by the yoke of the infidels: But the sky of the Slavs boils in our veins . . . Russian speech rings like chain-mail in the ears of the foreigners, And the white host rises from the coppice to the stars.

Then Strathcona discussed literature. He paid his tribute to the "Fleurs de Mal" and the "Songs before Sunrise"; but most, he said, he owed to "the divine Oscar." This English poet of many poses and some vices the law had seized and flung into jail; and since the law is a thing so brutal and wicked that whoever is touched by it is made thereby a martyr and a hero, there had grown up quite a cult about the memory of "Oscar." All up-to-date poets imitated his style and his attitude to life; and so the most revolting of vices had the cloak of romance flung about them—were given long Greek and Latin names, and discussed with parade of learning as revivals of Hellenic ideals. The young men in Strathcona's set referred to each other as their "lovers"; and if one showed any perplexity over this, he was regarded, not with contempt—for it was not aesthetic to feel contempt—but with a slight lifting of the eyebrows, intended to annihilate. One must not forget, of course, that these young people were poets, and to that extent were protected from their own doctrines. They were interested, not in life, but in making pretty verses about life; there were some among them who lived as cheerful ascetics in garret rooms, and gave melodious expression to devilish emotions. But, on the other hand, for every poet, there were thousands who were not poets, but people to whom life was real. And these lived out the creed, and wrecked their lives; and with the aid of the poet's magic, the glamour of melody and the fire divine, they wrecked the lives with which they came into contact. The new generation of boys and girls were deriving their spiritual sustenance from the poetry of Baudelaire and Wilde; and rushing with the hot impulsiveness of youth into the dreadful traps which the traders in vice prepared for them. One's heart bled to see them, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, pursuing the hem of the Muse's robe in brothels and dens of infamy!

Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.

Little Nicky heads to the Badlands to see the show for himself. The Western Roads are outside his remit as a U.S. Treasury agent, but he knows the men he wants are its denizens. Standing on the corner of the Great Western and Edinburgh Roads, a sideshow, a carnival of the doped, the beaten, and the crazed. He walks round to the Avenue Haig strip and encounters the playground of Shanghai’s crackpots, cranks, gondoos, and lunatics. He’s accosted constantly: casino touts, hustling pimps, dope dealers; monkeys on chains, dancing dogs, kids turning tumbles, Chinese ‘look see’ boys offering to watch your car. Their numbers rise as the Japs turn the screws on Shanghai ever tighter. Half-crazy American missionaries try to sell him Bibles printed on rice paper—saving souls in the Badlands is one tough beat. The Chinese hawkers do no better with their porno cards of naked dyed blondes, Disney characters in lewd poses, and bare-arsed Chinese girls, all underage. Barkers for the strip shows and porno flicks up the alleyways guarantee genuine French celluloid of the filthiest kind. Beggars abound, near the dealers and bootleggers in the shadows, selling fake heroin pills and bootleg samogon Russian vodka, distilled in alleyways, that just might leave you blind. Off the Avenue Haig, Nicky, making sure of his gun in its shoulder holster, ventures up the side streets and narrow laneways that buzz with the purveyors of cure-all tonics, hawkers of appetite suppressants, male pick-me-ups promising endless virility. Everything is for sale—back-street abortions and unwanted baby girls alongside corn and callus removers, street barbers, and earwax pickers. The stalls of the letter writers for the illiterate are next to the sellers of pills to cure opium addiction. He sees desperate refugees offered spurious Nansen passports, dubious visas for neutral Macao, well-forged letters of transit for Brazil. He could have his fortune told twenty times over (gypsy tarot cards or Chinese bone chuckers? Your choice). He could eat his fill—grilled meat and rice stalls—or he could start a whole new life: end-of-the-worlders and Korean propagandists offer cheap land in Mongolia and Manchukuo.

He'd found a sweet-water stream that I drank from, and for dinner we found winkles that we ate baked on stones. We watched the sun set like a peach on the sea, making plans on how we might live till a ship called by. Next we made a better camp beside a river and had ourselves a pretty bathing pool all bordered with ferns; lovely it was, with marvelous red parrots chasing through the trees. Our home was a hut made of branches thatched with flat leaves, a right cozy place to sleep in. We had fat birds that Jack snared for our dinner, and made fire using a shard of looking glass I found in my pocket. We had lost the compass in the water, but didn't lament it. I roasted fish and winkles in the embers. For entertainment we even had Jack's penny whistle. It was a paradise, it was." "You loved him," her mistress said softly, as her pencil resumed its hissing across the paper. Peg fought a choking feeling in her chest. Aye, she had loved him- a damned sight more than this woman could ever know. "He loved me like his own breath," she said, in a voice that was dangerously plaintive. "He said he thanked God for the day he met me." Peg's eyes brimmed full; she was as weak as water. The rest of her tale stuck in her throat like a fishbone. Mrs. Croxon murmured that Peg might be released from her pose. Peg stared into space, again seeing Jack's face, so fierce and true. He had looked down so gently on her pitiful self; on her bruises and her bony body dressed in salt-hard rags. His blue eyes had met hers like a beacon shining on her naked soul. "I see past your always acting the tough girl," he insisted with boyish stubbornness. "I'll be taking care of you now. So that's settled." And she'd thought to herself, so this is it, girl. All them love stories, all them ballads that you always thought were a load of old tripe- love has found you out, and here you are. Mrs. Croxon returned with a glass of water, and Peg drank greedily. She forced herself to continue with self-mocking gusto. "When we lay down together in our grass house we whispered vows to stay true for ever and a day. We took pleasure from each other's bodies, and I can tell you, mistress, he were no green youth, but all grown man. So we were man and wife before God- and that's the truth." She faced out Mrs. Croxon with a bold stare. "You probably think such as me don't love so strong and tender, but I loved Jack Pierce like we was both put on earth just to find each other. And that night I made a wish," Peg said, raising herself as if from a trance, "a foolish wish it were- that me and Jack might never be rescued. That the rotten world would just leave us be.

During the chaos of the Hundred Years’ War, when northern France was decimated by English troops and the French monarchy was in retreat, a young girl from Orléans claimed to have divine instructions to lead the French army to victory. With nothing to lose, Charles VII allowed her to command some of his troops. To everyone’s shock and wonder, she scored a series of triumphs over the English. News rapidly spread about this remarkable young girl. With each victory, her reputation began to grow, until she became a folk heroine, rallying the French around her. French troops, once on the verge of total collapse, scored decisive victories that paved the way for the coronation of the new king. However, she was betrayed and captured by the English. They realized what a threat she posed to them, since she was a potent symbol for the French and claimed guidance directly from God Himself, so they subjected her to a show trial. After an elaborate interrogation, she was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake at the age of nineteen in 1431. In the centuries that followed, hundreds of attempts have been made to understand this remarkable teenager. Was she a prophet, a saint, or a madwoman? More recently, scientists have tried to use modern psychiatry and neuroscience to explain the lives of historical figures such as Joan of Arc. Few question her sincerity about claims of divine inspiration. But many scientists have written that she might have suffered from schizophrenia, since she heard voices. Others have disputed this fact, since the surviving records of her trial reveal a person of rational thought and speech. The English laid several theological traps for her. They asked, for example, if she was in God’s grace. If she answered yes, then she would be a heretic, since no one can know for certain if they are in God’s grace. If she said no, then she was confessing her guilt, and that she was a fraud. Either way, she would lose. In a response that stunned the audience, she answered, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” The court notary, in the records, wrote, “Those who were interrogating her were stupefied.” In fact, the transcripts of her interrogation are so remarkable that George Bernard Shaw put literal translations of the court record in his play Saint Joan. More recently, another theory has emerged about this exceptional woman: perhaps she actually suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. People who have this condition sometimes experience seizures, but some of them also experience a curious side effect that may shed some light on the structure of human beliefs. These patients suffer from “hyperreligiosity,” and can’t help thinking that there is a spirit or presence behind everything. Random events are never random, but have some deep religious significance. Some psychologists have speculated that a number of history’s prophets suffered from these temporal lobe epileptic lesions, since they were convinced they talked to God.

A woman paralyzed by her own selfishness and triviality, a woman who knew she should love her life more than she did but couldn’t seem to love her life beyond a few odd inconsequential incidents. It is, in fact, time to start dating again. But Dan has no idea what that means for a gay man well into his thirties who has neither money nor abs. - if you’re delivering a song, there are instances when the veil of the ordinary falls away and you are, fleetingly, a supernatural being, with music rampaging through you and soaring out into a crowd. You connect, you’re giving it, you’re the living sweat-slicked manifestation of music itself, the crowd feels it as piercingly as you do. Always, almost always, you “spot a girl. She doesn’t need to be pretty. She’s the love of somebody’s life (you hope she is), and for those few seconds she’s the love of yours, you’re singing to her and she’s singing back to you, by raising her arms over her head and swinging her hips, adoring you or, rather, adoring some being who is you and the song combined, able to touch her everywhere. It’s the briefest of love affairs. - Isabel is embarrassed about her sadness. She’s embarrassed about being embarrassed about her sadness, she who has love and money. She tries looking discreetly into her bag for a Kleenex, without anything that could be called frantic rummaging. She ponders the prospect that decadent unhappiness might, in its way, be worse than genuine, legitimate despair. Which is, as she knows, a decadent question to pose at all. - members of a biological aristocracy - Dan is taken by a tremor of scorn twisted up with painful affection, as if they were two names for the same emotion - but that’s my narcissism speaking ive been working on the idea that there are other people in the world - Beyond lust there’s a purity, you know? Does it ever get to be too late? If neither of you abuses the dog (should they finally get a dog?) or leaves the children in the car on a hot day. Does it ever become irreparable? If so, when? How do you, how does any“one, know when they cross over from working through this to it’s too late? Is there (she suspects there must be) an interlude during which you’re so bored or disappointed or ambushed by regret that it is, truly, too late? Or, more to the point, do we arrive at it’s too late over and over again, only to return to working through this before it’s too late arrives, yet again? Do you think we ever really survive our childhoods? Most mothers think their children are amazing and singular people. Most mothers are wrong about that. You’re beautiful in your own skin. You brought with you into the world some kind of human amazingness, and you can depend on it, always. Please try not to ever let anybody talk you out of that. She says, “You’re not in love with me.” “Trust me. I’ve had a lot of experience at not being in love with people. I’ve been not in love with pretty much everybody, all my life.” She wonders how many women think more kindly and, all right, more lustfully toward their husbands after they’ve left them. Maybe someone’s done a study. “If you’re determined to be insulted.

The masses of dense foliage all round became prison walls, impassable circular green ice-walls, surging towards her; just before they closed in, I caught the terrified glint of her eyes. On a winter day she was in the studio, posing for him in the nude, her arms raised in a graceful position. To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; until I saw the cords attached to her wrists and ankles. Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world. Fear was the climate she lived in; if she had ever known kindness it would have been different. The trees seemed to obstruct her with deliberate malice. All her life she had thought of herself as a foredoomed victim, and now the forest had become the malign force that would destroy her. In desperation she tried to run, but a hidden root tripped her, she almost fell. Branches caught in her hair, tugged her back, lashed out viciously when they were disentangled. The silver hairs torn from her head glittered among black needles; they were the clues her pursuers would follow, leading them to their victim. She escaped from the forest at length only to see the fjord waiting for her. An evil effluence rose from the water, something primitive, savage, demanding victims, hungry for a human victim. It had been night overhead all along, but below it was still daylight. There were no clouds. I saw islands scattered over the sea, a normal aerial view. Then something extraordinary, out of this world: a wall of rainbow ice jutting up from the sea, cutting right across, pushing a ridge of water ahead of it as it moved, as if the flat pale surface of sea was a carpet being rolled up. It was a sinister, fascinating sight, which did not seem intended for human eyes. I stared down at it, seeing other things at the same time. The ice world spreading over our world. Mountainous walls of ice surrounding the girl. Her moonwhite skin, her hair sparkling with diamond prisms under the moon. The moon’s dead eye watching the death of our world.

Martha would come over every week and check on Mia and work with her on relaxation and breathing exercises to prepare for the natural labor. Jenny was on board with the natural thing too, so of course she and Mia dragged Tyler and me to the Bradley Birthing Method classes. It was hysterical; we had to get in all kinds of weird poses with the girls while they mimicked being in labor. We would massage their backs while they were perched on all fours, moaning. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done is contain my laughter during those classes. Mia was the freakin’ teacher’s pet because she was taking it so seriously. Right around the third class, they showed us a video of a live birth. I had nightmares for a week after that. Tyler and I agreed that we had to find a way to get out of going to the classes. We hadn’t mutually agreed on a plan, so during the fifth class, Tyler took it upon himself and used his own bodily gifts to get us into a heap of trouble. Tyler is lactose intolerant, and he has to take these little white tablets every time he eats cheese. The morning of the class, he stopped by the studio with a half-eaten pizza. I didn’t even think twice about it until that night in class during our visualization exercises when this god-awful, horrendous odor overtook our senses. At first everyone kept quiet and just looked around for the source. There wasn’t a sound to accompany the lethal attack, so everyone went into investigation mode, staring each other down. Mia began to gag. I heard Jenny cry a little behind us. Finally when I turned toward Tyler, I noticed he had the most triumphant glimmer in his eyes. I completely lost my shit. I was rolling around, laughing hysterically. Mia grabbed the hood of my sweatshirt and pulled me to my feet. “Outside, now!” She was scowling as she dragged me along. When we passed Tyler, she pointed to him angrily. “You too, joker.” Mia and Jenny pressed us up against the brick wall outside and then gave us the death stare, both of them with their arms crossed over their blooming bellies. They whispered something to each other and then turned and walked off, arm in arm. We followed. “Come on, you guys, it was funny.” Jenny stopped dead in her tracks and turned. She jabbed her index finger into my chest and said, “Yes, it is funny. When you’re five! Not when you’re in a room full of pregnant women. Do you know how sensitive our noses are?” I shrugged. “It wasn’t me.” “Oh, I know he’s a child,” she said but wouldn’t even look at Tyler. “And you are too, Will, for encouraging it.” Mia was glaring at me with a disappointed look, and then she shook her head and turned to continue down the street. Jenny caught up and walked away with her. “God, they’re so sensitive,” I whispered to Tyler. “Yeah, I kinda feel bad.” Without turning around, Mia yelled to us, “You guys don’t have to come anymore. Jenny and I can be each other’s partners.” I turned to Tyler and mouthed, “It worked!” I had a huge smile on my face. Tyler and I high-fived. “Why don’t you guys go celebrate? I know that’s what you wanted,” Jenny yelled back as they made a sharp turn down the sidewalk and down the stairs to the subway. “Nothing gets past them,” Tyler said

From an essay on early reading by Robert Pinsky: My favorite reading for many years was the "Alice" books. The sentences had the same somber, drugged conviction as Sir John Tenniel's illustrations, an inexplicable, shadowy dignity that reminded me of the portraits and symbols engraved on paper money. The books were not made of words and sentences but of that smoky assurance, the insistent solidity of folded, textured, Victorian interiors elaborately barricaded against the doubt and ennui of a dreadfully God-forsaken vision. The drama of resisting some corrosive, enervating loss, some menacing boredom, made itself clear in the matter-of-fact reality of the story. Behind the drawings I felt not merely a tissue of words and sentences but an unquestioned, definite reality. I read the books over and over. Inevitably, at some point, I began trying to see how it was done, to unravel the making--to read the words as words, to peek behind the reality. The loss entailed by such knowledge is immense. Is the romance of "being a writer"--a romance perhaps even created to compensate for this catastrophic loss--worth the price? The process can be epitomized by the episode that goes with one of my favorite illustrations. Alice has entered a dark wood--"much darker than the last wood": [S]he reached the wood: It looked very cool and shady. "Well, at any rate it's a great comfort," she said as she stepped under the trees, "after being so hot, to get into the--into the--into what?" she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. "I mean to get under the--under the--under this, you know!" putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. "What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name--why to be sure it hasn't!" This is the wood where things have no names, which Alice has been warned about. As she tries to remember her own name ("I know it begins with L!"), a Fawn comes wandering by. In its soft, sweet voice, the Fawn asks Alice, "What do you call yourself?" Alice returns the question, the creature replies, "I'll tell you, if you'll come a little further on . . . . I can't remember here". The Tenniel picture that I still find affecting illustrates the first part of the next sentence: So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm. "I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight. "And dear me! you're a human child!" A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed. In the illustration, the little girl and the animal walk together with a slightly awkward intimacy, Alice's right arm circled over the Fawn's neck and back so that the fingers of her two hands meet in front of her waist, barely close enough to mesh a little, a space between the thumbs. They both look forward, and the affecting clumsiness of the pose suggests that they are tripping one another. The great-eyed Fawn's legs are breathtakingly thin. Alice's expression is calm, a little melancholy or spaced-out. What an allegory of the fall into language. To imagine a child crossing over from the jubilant, passive experience of such a passage in its physical reality, over into the phrase-by-phrase, conscious analysis of how it is done--all that movement and reversal and feeling and texture in a handful of sentences--is somewhat like imagining a parallel masking of life itself, as if I were to discover, on reflection, that this room where I am writing, the keyboard, the jar of pens, the lamp, the rain outside, were all made out of words. From "Some Notes on Reading," in The Most Wonderful Books (Milkweed Editions)

In Campo San Casiano, because he felt no need to hurry, he decided to have a look at the Tintoretto Crucifixion. Brunetti had always been struck by how bored this Christ looked, stuck artfully up there on his cross, posed in front of the hedge of perpendicular spears that divided the painting in half. Christ seemed finally to have come to accept the truth of those warnings that all this business about becoming human would come to no good; He seemed eager to get back to the job of being God.

Stieg Larsson’s three books—known as the Millennium Trilogy or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series—have sold more than eighty million copies, but his greatest achievement wasn’t writing thrillers. He devoted his entire adult life to fighting right-wing extremism. By the early 1990s, he was already warning about the threat posed by the newly started Sweden Democrats party, the very party that upended the status quo by garnering over 17 percent of the vote in the recent 2018 parliamentary elections, plunging parliamentary balance and the selection of a new prime minister into a period of months-long chaos.

The Kai-lao girls were arrayed in a triangular formation, but they did not hold themselves as any warriors I knew. Each young woman was posed in strange, exaggerated ways, some balancing on one foot with arms raised, others crouched low and back with hands scrunched up in imitation of animal claws… I think. More so, they all dressed in identical uniforms save for the color, a literal rainbow. Each uniform… or maybe the girls themselves?... sported ears like a Terran feline with tails to match. Considering they twitched and moved, I could only guess they were natural. “Andrea Baker,” I said into the comms, “I misunderstand. You said when you spoke of ‘a cat fight,’ that it was a figure of speech? Perhaps you misspoke?” “Oh my God, Aylin,” Andrea laughed into the comms, “I really thought it was a joke, but I guess I was wrong. It really will be a cat fight!

There were lots of poses behind the shrubs and a thousand blown kisses, and Celeste showed us all how to “find the light”.

From Contrell the links go to all sorts of men with unorthodox tastes. Austrian industrialists. Sheikhs. Three brothers in Detroit with a padlocked metal shed. Online they can peruse the merchandise discreetly and, if need be, ask for more product information—different photographic angles, specific poses. They make their selections. Given immigration confusion, gang influence, and splintered family trees, disappearances aren’t rare when you’re dealing with broke ethnic girls. They’re a renewable resource. Hector Contrell comes in the black of night, and another girl vanishes off the streets and wakes up in a stupor in Islamabad or Birmingham or São Paulo. Some of the girls are kept. Some are designated for onetime use.

For example, I learned that it was my right under international law to be told why I was being arrested, but the night the military took me from my home, I wasn’t told why. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel also ratified in 1991, says that all persons, including children, should be given reasons for their arrest at the time of their arrest. Another violation occurred when the soldiers posed with me, a minor, while taking my picture before leading me into the police station. They had no right to humiliate me like that, nor to film my arrest and publish the video without my parents’ permission. And then there was the interrogation. Banning my parents and my lawyer from being with me and putting me in a room alone with men and no female officers were all clear violations. The way the interrogators shouted at me, threatened me, and sexually harassed me by commenting on my appearance in order to coerce a confession were all breaches of the Convention Against Torture. The fact that I was held so long in pretrial detention was another violation.

When I meet the parents of someone close to me, I can’t help but imagine the boy or girl they once were, bring them onstage to pose beside their older incarnation. Something about that picture oppresses me. Parents are the peephole you look through to spy on childhood.

With my father overseeing my theological development, my poor mother was left to steer me through the social nuances of church life, a task I made considerably more difficult for her by taking the former far more seriously than the latter. It’s one thing to explain to an eleven-year-old that there’s no way to know if Anne Frank went to heaven or hell, quite another to explain why such a question might have been an inappropriate one to pose at a bridal shower in front of the church ladies. But such was the nature of my small talk. Had I inherited more of my mother’s beauty and charm or shared some of my sister’s virtue, I might have gotten away with it, but instead I struggled through the trappings of Southern religious culture where a good Christian girl is expected to at least talk about the weather or football before getting to eternal damnation. A lifelong introvert, I never mastered the art of the schmooze.

So ingrained in the Parisian psyche was the connection between posing and prostitution that artist’s models were frequently referred to as grisettes, the name also used to designate working-class girls who supplemented their income through prostitution

Suzanne’s pictures of children flew in the face of those idealised images of social harmony. Her youngsters were not nude, but unashamedly naked. They were not posed, but awkward, their scrawny limbs contracted into clumsy postures, ungainly, unaesthetic, but utterly natural. Self-aware but not self-conscious, Suzanne Valadon, Nude Girl Sitting, 1894, black

BABY FASHION TRENDS 2021 AND BEYOND Fashion for babies is fun - dressing up the babies in the tiniest adorable attires. Relished with excitement, all mommies want to keep their little ones on top of the fashion trends. Even before they're born, their wardrobe is well stocked, with piles of new onesies, dungarees, dresses for little girls, and a range of shorts for boys. Well, before you know, these adorable munchkins grow up within a blink of an eye, as you're stunned how quickly they grew out of their wardrobe. Whether you're soon to become a new mommy or already have your little one playing around, you've come to the right place to find all sorts of options to endearingly dress up the tiny souls. With the fascinating boom in baby apparel in the last few decades, new and adorable trends are revealed each year. Passionate as ever, you would want to try out the styles on your baby. Though your little one might not know what they're wearing, but just a few years - actually months – later, the way you dress them will reflect in the fashion sense and personality they develop! While you would want the trendiest closet for your newborn and toddlers, keep in mind that children feel the most comfortable when their clothes do not pose an obstacle in their flexibility and freedom. Dressed up in stylish yet practical clothes would give your little one freedom of self-expression as they indulge in their innocence. Therefore, when dressing up your kids, keeping a tonal mixture of style and comfort is vital. At Motheringo, we understand your mommy concerns to buy chic yet affordable clothing for your little ones. Stocked with a range of collections offering greater value of money, our clothes are aligned with your budget while ensuring we provide premium quality outfits made with the finest fabrics for your young fashionista.

Hit it, girls!” yelled the team leader in an unnaturally high voice. At that, the squad turned to face the audience. There was a moment of stunned silence. “Ye gods!” the goddessgirls shouted in unison. The squad was all boys! As Heracles, Hades, Actaeon, Ares, and Apollo began their comic routine, the girls and everyone else in the audience burst out laughing. The routine was full of hilariously clumsy leaps and strikingly awkward poses. But the chant the five boys had made up was actually pretty good: “Clap your hands, Stomp your feet. Those MOA girls can’t be beat! Go, blue. Go, gold. You’re a wonder to behold!” The boys tripped over one another, lost their wigs, and fell down a lot. At the end of their routine the pyramid they tried to form collapsed as badly as their cake had. They wound up sprawled on the floor. Making the best of it, they came up grinning.

Travel Bucket List 1. Have a torrid affair with a foreigner. Country: TBD. 2. Stay for a night in Le Grotte della Civita. Matera, Italy. 3. Go scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef. Queensland, Australia. 4. Watch a burlesque show. Paris, France. 5. Toss a coin and make an epic wish at the Trevi Fountain. Rome, Italy. 6. Get a selfie with a guard at Buckingham Palace. London, England. 7. Go horseback riding in the mountains. Banff, Alberta, Canada. 8. Spend a day in the Grand Bazaar. Istanbul, Turkey. 9. Kiss the Blarney Stone. Cork, Ireland. 10. Tour vineyards on a bicycle. Bordeaux, France. 11. Sleep on a beach. Phuket, Thailand. 12. Take a picture of a Laundromat. Country: All. 13. Stare into Medusa’s eyes in the Basilica Cistern. Istanbul, Turkey. 14. Do NOT get eaten by a lion. The Serengeti, Tanzania. 15. Take a train through the Canadian Rockies. British Columbia, Canada. 16. Dress like a Bond Girl and play a round of poker at a casino. Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 17. Make a wish on a floating lantern. Thailand. 18. Cuddle a koala at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. Queensland, Australia. 19. Float through the grottos. Capri, Italy. 20. Pose with a stranger in front of the Eiffel Tower. Paris, France. 21. Buy Alex a bracelet. Country: All. 22. Pick sprigs of lavender from a lavender field. Provence, France. 23. Have afternoon tea in the real Downton Abbey. Newberry, England. 24. Spend a day on a nude beach. Athens, Greece. 25. Go to the opera. Prague, Czech Republic. 26. Skinny dip in the Rhine River. Cologne, Germany. 27. Take a selfie with sheep. Cotswolds, England. 28. Take a selfie in the Bone Church. Sedlec, Czech Republic. 29. Have a pint of beer in Dublin’s oldest bar. Dublin, Ireland. 30. Take a picture from the tallest building. Country: All. 31. Climb Mount Fuji. Japan. 32. Listen to an Irish storyteller. Ireland. 33. Hike through the Bohemian Paradise. Czech Republic. 34. Take a selfie with the snow monkeys. Yamanouchi, Japan. 35. Find the penis. Pompeii, Italy. 36. Walk through the war tunnels. Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. 37. Sail around Ha long Bay on a junk boat. Vietnam. 38. Stay overnight in a trulli. Alberobello, Italy. 39. Take a Tai Chi lesson at Hoan Kiem Lake. Hanoi, Vietnam. 40. Zip line over Eagle Canyon. Thunderbay, Ontario, Canada.

He stood to the side, arms crossed over his chest as he watched Ashanti pose in an airy, soft peach dress with a crown of colorful flowers propped on her head. Duchess looked as if she had been made for the camera in her matching peach tutu. Even a non-dog lover like him couldn't deny that she was cute with her flower crown askew on her head and her stubby tail wagging like a flag in a windstorm.

As my family and I were preparing to embark on our European trip, we got word from a Palestinian Authority committee that liaises with Israeli counterparts that Israel planned to ban me from traveling. There was no legal basis for it to ban me; this was just its latest method of political harassment, an attempt to suppress me and to keep me from continuing to tell my story—their story. A large international media campaign blasting Israel for banning me from travel became just the latest public relations nightmare for the Zionist state. After a heavy backlash and the threat of my family suing, Israel eventually announced that it had not banned us from traveling abroad, but that I was banned from entering the 1948 territories because I posed a security threat to the state. As soon as we heard this news, my father told us all to hurry up and pack what we could, because he wanted to put their statement to the test immediately.

No matter how many painters I’d posed for before with suggestions on my true nature, most seemed to like the idea of a small boy, not a grown man. Imagine the god of desire, a cherub…

Why do teenagers move on to risky business when they don’t meet resistance on the small stuff? Because teens want to know where the lines are and that they’ll be called out of bounds if they cross them. It’s daunting to be a teenager and have access to tempting but dangerous attractions; it’s terrifying to think that no one is watching. As one of my clinical colleagues commented, when teens like Veronica act out, they are posing the question, “So what does a girl have to do around here to get the grown-ups to act like grown-ups?

Lincoln was sent a letter by an eleven-year-old girl called Grace Bedell, in which she’d dissed his weird face and suggested he grow some whiskers if he wanted people’s votes. Lincoln did as he was told, and met her in her hometown a few months later, whispering: ‘Gracie, look at my whiskers. I have been growing them for you.’ It’s extraordinary that his iconic look was the result of a hilariously blunt child stylist.* However, though news of Lincoln’s new beard quickly spread, he didn’t immediately pose for an updated portrait, so newspaper artists were initially forced to improvise what they thought his bearded face looked like, making him a sort of e-fit president better suited to a ‘Wanted!’ poster.40

And if the fear of terrorism does not sell Israeli militarism, then sexual allure will. The Alpha Gun Girls (AGA) were founded in 2018 by former IDF veteran Orin Julie. A group of scantily-dressed women caressing Israeli military hardware and wearing camouflage, they mirrored a similar gun culture in the US but with a strongly Zionist agenda. Julie’s social media posts were peppered with pro-gun rhetoric and lines like this: “No matter how hard it’ll be WE WILL DEFEND OUR LAND!” At the 2019 Defense, Homeland Security and Cyber Exhibition (ISDEF) in Tel Aviv, the AGA fondled rifles, posed for photos with the adoring crowd, and passed out brochures with their Instagram handles listing bust measurements, shoe and clothing size, and number of followers. A long line of people waited to get autographs. The women are regularly seen posing in deserts, their clothes covered in fake blood.

I took a black and white photograph, which I also posted on Instagram. Her New Balance shoes and her feet crossed, hanging as she sat atop the pile of aluminum chairs, against the backdrop of the many legs of the chairs shining in the street lights in contrast to her dark shoes and leggings, were so captivating. There was a lightness in the way she sat there with her crossed legs dangling, as if she was perched on a cloud and it was the most natural thing as she was my angel. I was still unsure if she really existed or if I had only made her up with Pinto cat one night. It was all like a lucid dream. I was so glad for us and for us becoming rich soon too. I was so glad I could provide her with a future in Europe. I was so glad we would be rich and happy and we would be able to make all our dreams come true and travel the world freely together. I can show her Italy and Hungary and Europe. We can pick where do we want to live or make family. I knew all my life, all my work had led to this girl, this moment, and this future. Ours. She started to rap in Spanish in the Rioplatense dialect as I started to record her. „Loco, loco…” - she was so cute, it sounded like she had learned it on the streets of Buenos Aires, skipping school. She was amazing - so young, so true, so natural and pure and cute. I couldn't get enough of her. I wanted to make kids with her. With only her. Nobody else. By the wall of the church and the bar tables, there were a bunch of metal mobile railings with the Ajuntamiento de Barcelona logo in the middle of each of them. I told Martina to squat down to the level of the Ajuntamiento sign, and before I could finish my sentence, she was already doing it. She posed with the mobile railings, making a funny, cool and happy face while squeezing the Ajuntamiento logo between two of her fingers and pointing at it with her other hand, as if we were mocking the authorities of the Ajuntamiento. She was reading my mind. Like she knew magic. She was such a good girl. She was so pretty, smart and sexy. She was smiling, biting her lower lip, excited, turned on, and in love, I thought, looking like a bunny, or like Whitney Houston on the Brazilian live concert video, so I began to call her “Bunny”. I showed her how Whitney was smiling the same way. I was so blind to see the connection. (“The Cocaine Queen”) I was so much in love with her, so under her spell, I just really wanted her to be the One, I guess. I explained to her that the Camorra was one of my costumers and they had a club close by too and they were taking away other people's coffeeshops, menacing their lives and their families'. I explained to her that we were going to do all demolition and remodeling without any permit, without telling a word to anyone. I told her that we would lie to the residents of the building above us about what we were going to do there for months and months. I told her that she must keep it as our secret. She was nodding happily and she seemed happy that I trusted her. I explained everything to her, I told her about Rachel and Tom and I signing the founding document at Amina's office at the beginning of the same year, 2013. She seemed to understand the weight of all I told her and the reasons why I told her about it all, so she would know, so she wouldn't make a mistake saying the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. I asked her to pay attention to her surroundings in Barcelona from then on, as there were a lot of criminals, and she was a very pretty girl - not only my girlfriend. She seemed to take it as a privilege to be my girlfriend, and she seemed eternally happy, as was I. I told her that she was the only person I fully trusted. I wanted to send the video of Martina rapping on WhatsApp to Adam, but Martina told me I shouldn't because it was late and, at the end, Adam was my boss. “Yeah but he is not really my boss, in Spain, I am the boss.

When I meet the parents of someone close to me, I can't help but imagine the boy or girl they once were, bring them onstage to pose beside their older incarnation. Something about that picture oppresses me. Parents are the peephole you look through to spy on childhood.

They used my name and permit to grow the weed and earn money to repay their debts and compensate their investors. To keep my girlfriend. To take her. I am uncertain if any of them have ever spent a minute in jail for any of these activities. Adam proudly showcases his new motorcycles on Instagram, posing on a hill above Barcelona. He also displays his brand new electric camper van, which they use to travel and transport drugs across Europe and Iberia, as well as his gigantic marijuana cultivation located in Portugal. People like Ruan and Martina admire his public images. I came across a picture of Ruan and Martina together in Berlin, where their mother Fernanda visited them. Martina became member of the Evil Eye Cult, and the custom made mafia group in Spain, which used her as a pawn in their porn and drug-related activities. She now operates as their representative in Berlin. Martina and I have lost the ability to genuinely smile. Her social media posts only show disinterest or a malicious demeanor. ‘A boot stomping on a human face.’ In a picture with her brother and mother, she puts on a forced fake “good vibe” and “happy” smile, revealing her flawless teeth and the subtle lines of aging. With each passing day, she bears a greater resemblance to her rich and so happy mother, the bad person. As far as I know, none of these individuals have faced consequences for their actions, such as having their teeth broken. As I had. Innocently. Taking care of business and their lives. With love. I find this to be incredibly unjust. In the 21st century. In Europe. On planet Earth. By non-EU criminals. “Matando – ganando” – “killing and gaining” like there were no Laws at all. Nowadays, you can observe Sabrina flaunting her fake lips and altered face, just like Martina her enhanced breasts. Guess who was paying for it? It seems that both girls now sustain themselves through their bodies and drug involvement, to this day, influencing criminals to gain friends in harming Tomas and having a lavish lifestyle filled with fun and mischief. Making a living. Enjoying Spain. Enjoying Life. My money. My tears. This is the situation as it stands. I was wondering what Salvador Dali was trying to tell me. I stood in front of the Lincoln portrait for a long time, but I couldn't grasp the point or the moral behind it. I can listen to Abraham Lincoln and ‘trust people. To see. If I can trust them.’ But he ultimately suffered a tragic fate, with his life being taken. (Got his head popped.) I believe there may have also been a female or two involved in that situation, too, possibly leading to his guards being let down. While he was watching: Acting performances, he was facing a: Stage. Theater. It is disheartening, considering he was a good person. Like Jesus, John Lennon and so on. Shows a pattern Machiavelli was talking about. Some individuals are too bright for those in darkness; they feel compelled to suppress those brighter minds simply because they think and act differently. Popping their heads. Reptilian lower brain-based culture, the concept of the Evil Eye, Homo erectus. He couldn't even stand up properly when I was shouting at him, urging him to stand up from the stairs. ‘Homo seditus reptilis.’ But what else was there in the Lincoln image that I didn't see? What was Dali trying to convey or express or tell me? Besides the fact that the woman is in his mind, on his mind, in the image, exactly, his head got popped open. Perhaps because he was focusing on a woman, trusting her for a split second, or turning his head away for a moment.

Robyn told him she would let him know, then she glanced at me. We smiled at each other, tight-lipped smiles, and I understood that this girl might be cute as a pixie but she wasn't stupid, and I knew Robyn the Waitress at The Wooden Nickel would be posing for Andrew on the twelfth of never, and it's not just me. It's him. Other girls feel it, too. Andrew Boyle is most definitely a pervert.

Heightened emotion potentially posed another threat more serious than bad skin: hysteria. Doctors diagnosed the condition as a woman’s disease, believed to originate in the womb and to demonstrate female frailty and fallibility. Girls around puberty were particularly susceptible, doctors worried, to the fits and seizures hysteria could induce. How important it was, then, for a young woman to exercise self-restraint and to remain in a limited arena: the home.

After Rahul graduated from high school their parents celebrated, having in their opinion now successfully raised two children in America. Rahul was going to Cornell, and Sudha was still in Philadephia, getting a master's in international relations. Their parents threw a party, inviting nearly two hundred people, and bought Rahul a car, justifying it as a necessity for his life in Ithaca. They bragged about the school, more impressed by it than they'd been with Penn. "Our job is done," her father declared at the end of the party, posing for pictures with Rahul and Sudha on either side. For years they had been compared to other Bengali children, told about gold medals brought back from science fairs, colleges that offered full scholarships. Sometimes Sudha's father would clip newspaper articles about unusually gifted adolescents - the boy who finished his PhD at twenty, the girl who went to Stanford at twelve - and tape them on the refrigerator. When Sudha was fourteen, her father had written to Harvard Medical School, requested an application, and placed it on her desk.

I asked you if we could move her.” It wasn’t a statement but a challenge. “Tell me something, Sergeant,” Baldwin said quietly. The man glared at him as if Baldwin had murdered the girl at their feet. “Was she posed, or was she dropped here?” The man scratched his head. “Weel, it’s pretty obvious that she was posed. Don’t they teach you that kind of stuff where you come from, Mr. F BEE EYE agent?” Baldwin

ONCE, IN A HOUSE ON EGYPT STREET, there lived a rabbit who was made almost entirely of china. He had china arms and china legs, china paws and a china head, a china torso and a china nose. His arms and legs were jointed and joined by wire so that his china elbows and china knees could be bent, giving him much freedom of movement. His ears were made of real rabbit fur, and beneath the fur, there were strong, bendable wires, which allowed the ears to be arranged into poses that reflected the rabbit’s mood — jaunty, tired, full of ennui. His tail, too, was made of real rabbit fur and was fluffy and soft and well shaped. The rabbit’s name was Edward Tulane, and he was tall. He measured almost three feet from the tip of his ears to the tip of his feet; his eyes were painted a penetrating and intelligent blue. In all, Edward Tulane felt himself to be an exceptional specimen. Only his whiskers gave him pause. They were long and elegant (as they should be), but they were of uncertain origin. Edward felt quite strongly that they were not the whiskers of a rabbit. Whom the whiskers had belonged to initially — what unsavory animal — was a question that Edward could not bear to consider for too long. And so he did not. He preferred, as a rule, not to think unpleasant thoughts. Edward’s mistress was a ten-year-old, dark-haired girl named Abilene Tulane, who thought almost as highly of Edward as Edward thought of himself. Each morning after she dressed herself for school, Abilene dressed Edward. The china rabbit was in possession of an extraordinary wardrobe composed of handmade silk suits, custom shoes fashioned from the finest leather and designed specifically for his rabbit feet, and a wide array of hats equipped with holes so that they could easily fit over Edward’s large and expressive ears. Each pair of well-cut pants had a small pocket for Edward’s gold pocket watch. Abilene wound this watch for him each morning.

O still miraculous May!O shining girl of time untarnished!O small intimate gently primeval hands,frivolous feet divine!O singular and breathless pearl! O indefinable frail ultimate pose! O visible beatitude sweet sweet intolerable!silence immaculate of god’s evasive audible great rose!

The harem could not be supervised by men because they posed a potential threat to the women’s chastity and the king’s bloodline. These women dressed as men solved the dilemma, indicating that such solutions may have been used historically in the highest echelons of Afghan society as well.

On the other stage, there was a girl who looked like a mix of Japanese and something Mediterranean or Latin. A good mix. She had that silky, almost shimmering black hair so many modern Japanese women like to ruin with chapatsu dye, worn short and swept over from the side. The shape of the eyes was also Japanese, and she was on the petite side. But her skin, a smooth gold like melted caramel, spoke of something else, something tropical. Her breasts and hips, too, appealingly full and slightly incongruous on her Japanese-sized frame, suggested some foreign origin. She was using the pole skillfully, grabbing it high, posing with her body held rigid and parallel to the floor, then spiraling down in time to the music. There was real vitality in her moves and she didn’t seem to mind that most of the patrons were focused on the blonde. Mr. Ruddy held out a chair for me at an empty table in the center of the room. After a routine glance to ensure the seat afforded a proper view of the entrance, I sat. I wasn’t displeased to see that I also had a good view of the stage where the dark-haired girl was dancing. “Wow,” I said in English, looking at her. “Yes, she is beautiful,” he replied, also in English. “Would you like to meet her?” I watched her for another moment before answering. I didn’t want to wind up with one of the Japanese girls here. I would have a better chance of creating rapport, and therefore of eliciting information, by chatting with a foreigner while playing the role of foreigner. I nodded.

Knocking on the Ellises’ door ten minutes later with the pink horn and streamers in hand, I try to put on the I-am-a-cool-motherfucker pose. When Brittany opens the door wearing a baggy T-shirt and shorts, I’m floored. Her pale blue eyes open wide. “Alex, what are you doing here?” I hold out the horn and streamers. She snatches them from my hand. “I can’t believe you came here because of some prank.” “We’ve got some things to discuss. Besides pranks.” She swallows nervously. “I’m not feeling great, okay? Let’s just talk at school.” She tries to close the door. Shit, I can’t believe I’m going to do this like a stalker guy in the movies. I push open the door. ¡Que mierdaǃ “Alex, don’t.” “Let me in. For a minute. Please.” She shakes her head, those angelic curls swaying back and forth across her face. “My parents don’t like when I have people over.” “Are they home?” “No.” She sighs, then opens the door hesitantly. I step inside. The house is even bigger than it looks from the outside. The walls are painted bright white, reminding me of a hospital. I swear dust wouldn’t have the nerve to land on their floors or counters. The two-story foyer boasts a staircase that rivals the one I saw in The Sound of Music, which we were forced to watch in junior high, and the floor is as shiny as water. Brittany was right. I don’t belong here. It doesn’t matter, because even if I don’t belong in this place, she’s here and I want to be where she is. “Well, what did you want to talk about?” she asks. I wish her long, lean legs weren’t sticking out from her shorts. They’re a distraction. I look away from them, desperate to keep my wits. So what if she has sexy legs? So what if she has eyes as clear as glass marbles? So what if she can take a prank like a man and give it right back? Who am I kidding? I have no reason for being here other than the fact that I want to be near her. Screw the bet. I want to know how to make this girl laugh. I want to know what makes her cry. I want to know what it feels like to have her look at me as if I’m her knight in shining armor.

I’m going to focus on your hands, Mr. Harrison. Hands can be complicated.” He smiled as if she’d just explained to the Archbishop of Canterbury that Christmas often fell on the twenty-fifth of December. “I like hands,” he said, taking his seat. “They can be windows to the soul too. What shall I do with these hands you intend to immortalize?” She hadn’t thought that far ahead, it being sufficient challenge to choose a single aspect of him to sketch. Fleur and Amanda came skipping back into the room, each clutching a sketch pad. “You will sketch the girls, and I will sketch you, while the girls sketch whomever they please.” The plan was brilliant; everybody had an assigned task. Amanda’s little brows drew down. “I want to watch Mr. Harrison. Fleur can sketch you, Aunt Jen. You have to sit very still, though.” “An unbroken chain of artistic indulgence,” Mr. Harrison said, accepting a sketch pad and pencil from Fleur. “Miss Fleur, please seat yourself on the hearth, though you might want a pillow to make the ordeal more comfortable.” Amanda grabbed two burgundy brocade pillows off the settee, tossed one at Fleur, and dropped the other beside Elijah’s rocker. Jenny took the second rocking chair and flipped open her sketch pad. Her subject sat with the morning sun slanting over his shoulder, one knee crossed over the other, the sketch pad on his lap. Amanda watched from where she knelt at his elbow, and Fleur… Fleur crossed one knee over the other—an unladylike pose, but effective for balancing a sketch pad—and glowered at Jenny as if to will Jenny’s image onto the page by visual imperative. “Your sister has beautiful eyebrows,” Mr. Harrison said to his audience. “They have the most graceful curve. It’s a family trait, I believe.” Amanda crouched closer. “Does that mean I have them too?” He glanced over at her, his expression utterly serious. “You do, though yours are a touch more dramatic. When you make your bows, gentlemen will write sonnets to the Carrington sisters’ eyebrows.” “Papa’s

From the smoothness of their skin, the length of their hemlines, the banality of their song lyrics and sitcom plots, these young stars embody an ideal of teenage innocence that adults are grateful to embrace. For as many seasons as the illusion can be maintained they remain, at least on screen, uncomplicated, untroubled good girls on the verge of, but never actually awakening to, their sexuality. There is a lot of money to be made and a lot of parental anxiety to be tapped by walking that line. There is also a lot of fury unleashed at those who step across it. When young stars pose semi-nude or get caught drinking they threaten the notion that our own daughter's coming of age could be effortless. Suddenly the role models, who perpetuated that myth, become the vector of our fears. The betrayal feels personal and cuts deep.

Sir Graham walked to the window, very aware of two worshipful pairs of young eyes on his back. He knew well how to make himself noticed; he knew well how to draw a lady’s eye, and with this in mind—and despite the heat—he had purposely and cunningly exchanged his seagoing frock coat for his finest full-dress uniform. The dark blue coat was carefully brushed, with bright gold bars of lace at sleeve and lapel, more lace at collar, cuffs, and pockets, and the epaulets with the single star winking proudly from each shoulder; the waistcoat and breeches were snowy white, and a cocked hat was framed with even more gold trim. Uniforms—especially full-dress ones usually reserved for formal occasions—were a sure bet for winning female hearts and with this in mind, the admiral turned just so, knowing that the sunlight would—move a little more to starboard, Gray—he heard one of the girls gasp—yes, that's it—touch upon the gold fringe of his epaulets with blinding brilliance. With a private, wicked smile, he struck a deliberate pose, relaxed yet commanding all at once;

salivating wolf was in hot pursuit of Lizzie Hearts, who kept shouting, “Off with its head! Off with its head!” “I’ll help you!” Hunter rushed toward Lizzie Hearts, pausing first to rip off his shirt, place his fists on his hips, and strike a bold pose. Out of nowhere, trumpets played a heroic fanfare. “Oh!” Cupid said in surprise. The winged, pink-haired girl had transferred to the school just that year. “I didn’t realize there would be so much trumpeting and tearing of shirts at Ever After High.” “Hunter does that,” Raven whispered to Cupid. “The shirt thing. We’re not really sure why.

As a self-confessed Pre-Raphaelite - a term that by the 1880s was interchangeable with ‘Aesthete’ - Constance was carrying a torch whose flame had ben lit in the 1850s by a group of women associated with the founding Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters. Women such as Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris, the wives respectively of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet, designer and socialist William Morris, had modelled for the Pre-Raphaelite artists, wearing loose, flowing gowns. But it was not just their depiction on canvas that sparked a new fashion among an intellectual elite. Off canvas these women also establised new liberties for women that some twenty years later were still only just being taken up by a wider female population. They pioneered new kinds of dresses, with sleeves either sewn on at the shoulder, rather than below it, or puffed and loose. While the rest of the female Victorian populace had to go about with their arms pinned to their bodies in tight, unmoving sheaths, the Pre-Raphaelite women could move their arms freely, to paint or pose or simply be comfortable. The Pre-Raphaelite girls also did away with the huge, bell-shaped crinoline skirts, held out by hoops and cages strapped on to the female undercarriage. They dispensed with tight corsets that pinched waists into hourglasses, as well as the bonnets and intricate hairstyles that added layer upon layer to a lady’s daily toilette. Their ‘Aesthetic’ dress, as it became known, was more than just a fashion; it was a statement. In seeking comfort for women it also spoke of a desire for liberation that went beyond physical ease. It was also a statement about female creative expression, which in itself was aligned to broader feminist issues. The original Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood lived unconventionally with artists, worked at their own artistic projects and became famous in the process. Those women who were Aesthetic dress in their wake tended to believe that women should have the right to a career and ultimately be enfranchised with the vote. […] And so Constance, with ‘her ugly dresses’, her schooling and her college friends, was already in some small degree a young woman going her own way. Moving away from the middle-class conventions of the past, where women were schooled by governesses at home, would dress in a particular manner and be chaperoned, Constance was already modern.

She was so cool, as she knew, ankles crossed at the puckered hem of granite gray sweatpants, and she also knew I was watching from the open door of the B train—watching her pose in apparent comfort at the girder of this city thoroughfare.

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Something welled inside at her fearful tone. Jake darted forward, his feet digging into the sand. The shadows clarified. Meridith went down hard; the guy came down on her. Jake honed in on him. As he neared, he heard Meridith struggling. He grabbed the guy’s shirt, hauled him up. He heard a ripping sound, and then his fist found its mark. The loud pop was gratifying. Sean hit the sand, moaning. Jake braced his feet, ready—eager—to have another go at him. The kid only rolled to his other side. A sound at his feet drew his attention. “Meridith.” He dove to his knees beside her. “I’m okay.” He helped her sit up. She looked impossibly small. Behind him, Sean was standing, staggering. Jake stood, placing his body between them. Sean held up his hands, surrendering. “Hey, man, didn’t mean nothin’ . . . just flirting with the girl.” Jake took a step, ready to plant his fist in the guy’s face. A hand, surprisingly firm, on his leg stopped him. “Don’t, Jake.” He took a breath. Tried to calm himself. He wanted to plow the guy down and show him what it felt like to be powerless. Make him feel as powerless as Meridith had. Jake had no doubt he could do it. Apparently, neither did Sean. He was backing away toward the house. “Sorry, Meridith. Swear I didn’t mean nothin’.” The words meant squat to Jake. He clenched his fists at his side. Dirtbag. “Let him go.” Meridith’s voice, all tired and shaky, was the only thing that stopped him. He should call the cops and have the guy hauled off. Then he thought of the squad car pulling up to Summer Place, lights spinning. Summer Place didn’t need the bad publicity. The kids didn’t need the distress. He looked down at Meridith, huddled in the sand. She didn’t either. Jake glared at Sean. “Pack your things and get out of here. Now.” Sean stopped and turned. “What am I s’posed to tell my friends?” “Couldn’t care less.” Sean shifted in the sand, grabbed the railing. Finally he turned and stumbled up the beach steps and across the yard. Jake turned to Meridith. She’d pulled her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around them. He extended his hands and she took them. They were icy cold. He pulled her to her feet, then took her chin and turned her face into the moonlight. He scanned her face for damage and found none. Just dazed eyes and chattering teeth. “You okay? He hurt you?” She shook her head. He could feel her trembling. He remembered feeling something on the sand and stooped to collect a bulky robe. Downwind, he shook out the sand, then draped the robe over her shoulders. The weight of it buckled her knees. He caught her around the waist. She came into his arms willingly. Jake tucked the robe around her, freed her hair, and the wind stole it from his fingers. She shivered. He could feel her cold fists through his shirt, tucked into his stomach. “You’re cold.” He wrapped his arms around her, turned his back to the wind. Shallow puffs of breath hit his chest, warm and quick. He cradled her head in his palm. She was so small. Helpless. What would’ve happened if he hadn’t come? And where was Lover Boy when Meri needed him? Halfway across the country. He ground his teeth together, fighting the anger that had barely begun to simmer. “The

From where I stood it was a pose that collapsed many periods in her life into one: mother and lover, big sister, best friend, superstar and diplomat, billionaire and street kid, foolish girl and woman of substance.

You have the freedom not to provide an answer to every question that comes your way. Jesus didn’t answer every question posed to him, and you don’t have to either.

I think back to the girl I was when he first posed that question—scared, confused, falling in love with a boy I thought I could never have, unsure who I was underneath the facade my family forced upon me. I’m still scared sometimes, but I know who I am now. I’ve been birthed through pain and sacrifice, through joy and unconditional love. I am stronger than I once was, able to make difficult choices without flinching, but I am not hard. My hands are not clean. But my soul is light. I love deeper than I ever thought possible, know the lengths I will go to in order to protect those I care about. I can survive out here, but I can really live as well. I can kill a deer for our dinner and appreciate the beauty of a lone eagle soaring through a brilliant blue sky. I can hold off a stranger with my knife and share laughter with my friends around the warmth of a fire. I can live with the fear of losing Bishop and love him fiercely anyway. “This is who I want to be,” I say. “The girl I am right now.

The photograph had to be reasonably interesting. Country Life girls did not simply sit for the camera against some featureless backdrop but were pictured striking a pose in surroundings that gave an indication of their normal social milieu or talents. The daughters of major gentry—those with stately homes—might be photographed leaning against a stone pillar, the clear inference being that this was just one of the many stone pillars owned by her father; those who had no stone pillars but who had, say, a small ornamental lake, would be photographed standing in front of this. Those who worked with horses—and this was a large group—might have a hunter in the background, or at least a saddle. Dogs were a popular accoutrement, usually Labradors, who would be at the young woman’s side, ready to retrieve or flush birds, enthusiasts all, and given the same appraising scrutiny by the readers, in many cases, as the young woman herself.

That’s the problem with social media. It’s not designed for negatives. It’s all about people showing their best side. Posing with filters, creating some sort of fake perfect life. But what do you do when life isn’t perfect? When everything feels shit. When you feel like you’re sinking into a deep, black hole and you can’t crawl your way out. LOFL.

She cleared her throat, let go of the rail, and stood up straighter. “Because I have come here today to ask you to marry me.” His lips twitched. “It is not funny,” she cried. It was, of course, but she did not wish to be laughed at. Particularly when he had not answered. “You must admit, it is a little funny. To an outside party, we must be exceedingly comical.” “Yes, well, it is the worry of an outside party that is the reason we are here in the first place,” she muttered, looking down at her feet. A finger was placed gently under her chin, lifting her head up. “Pray, continue.” His dark eyes were serious, his lips playful. It was an irresistible combination. “It is the first time I have been proposed to and I must admit I find the experience intriguing.” Her eyes flashed. “I have already asked. It is now your turn to answer.” His amused expression deepened. “Oh, no. You have not asked. You merely announced your intention to ask. There is a large difference between stating the purpose of your visit and posing the question. Wouldn’t you say?

The girl who asked me the time lights yet another cigarette. I’m sure it’s not so much the pleasure of the nicotine that makes these girls smoke so much – they hardly puff at their cigarettes – it’s having the thing in their hand to complete the pose. They all smoke with practised ease and naturalism, yet this girl has the gestures off more perfectly than most. How to define it? Some equation of extended fingers and wrist bend, lip-pout and head-tilted exhalation. She smokes with great sexual grace: her body is brown and lean and she’s pretty with long milk-chocolate brown hair. And somehow she knows that her perfect manipulation of that perfect white cylinder of packed tobacco sends a subliminal signal to the boys – all their eyes are flicking like lizards’ – that she is ready.

Even I," went on Spiro, "denounced blasphemers and thought it holy that each should yield a little of his blood to the Almighty Ones. Then I woke from darkness to find myself—a Head. At first I could not understand, for I was in love with Ah-eeda—and can a machine mate? But it is true that love is largely desire, and desire of the body. With the death of the body, desire died; and it may be that pride and ambition took its place. But, for all that, there were moments when I remembered my lost manhood and dreamed of Ah-eeda. Yes, though the laboratory of the Heads revealed wonders of which I had never dreamed, though I looked into your world and studied its languages and history, though I was worshipped as a god and endless life stretched ahead of me—nevertheless, I could see that the strength of my race was being sapped, its virility lost!" His voice broke. "In the face of such knowledge what were immortality and power? Could they compensate for one hour of life and love as humanity lived it? So I brooded. Then one day in the temple I looked into the face of a girl about to be bled and recognized Ah-eeda. In that moment, hatred of the fiends posing as gods and draining the vitality of deluded worshippers, crystallized and drove me to action. So it was I who denounced the Heads, aroused the people!" Spiro's voice broke; died. Miles and Ward stared at him, horrified; and after a while Miles exclaimed, "We never suspected! We would never have fought to maintain such a thing had we known!" "Nonetheless," said Spiro inflexibly, "you fought for it, and many people died and more are afraid. Superstition is a hard thing to kill. Already there are those who murmur that truly the Heads are gods and have called up demons from the underworld, as they threatened they would, to smite them with thunder until once more they yield blood in the temple. But I know that without blood the Heads must die miserably and the people be freed from their vampire existence. It is true that I too shall die, but that is nothing. I die gladly. Therefore, to keep the people from sacrificing blood, to show them that you are mortal and the Heads powerless to save the demons they have raised, you must be slain in front of the great palace. "Yes; you, too, must die for the people!

They were nice pictures—good lighting, but not posed; maybe her parents had a knack for photographic timing, or maybe Nona was a girl who knew when to look away in order to look like herself.

The vehicles all turned left onto Conwell Street, opposite Race Point Road. The street was narrow, and the convoy travelled slowly. Sadie, Thumper, and Strawberry Blonde were straddling their bicycles and waiting at the corner of Old Ann Page Way as the Jeep carrying Costa motored passed. The trio pedaled hard to catch up with the vehicle, and they rode alongside, acting as escorts for the murder suspect’s homecoming. “Should we be concerned?” Elwood Mills asked as he tightened his grip on the rifle. “Nah, they’re just girls,” the driver said. “They don’t pose a threat to us.

Why can’t I have an ordinary footman like the other ladies have?” “Because you won’t always be going to the places other ladies go.” Gabriel sat on a chair to remove his shoes and stockings. “You’ll be looking for factory space, and meeting with suppliers, retailers, and wholesale traders, and so forth. If you take Drago with you, it will ease my mind about your safety.” As he saw the mulish set of Pandora’s jaw, Gabriel decided to take another tack. “Of course, we’ll replace him if you wish,” he said with a casual shrug. He began to unfasten the buttons of his braces. “But it would be a pity. Drago grew up in an orphanage and has no family. He’s always lived in a small room at the club. He was looking forward to living in a real household for the first time in his life, and seeing what family life was like.” That last sentence was pure conjecture, but it did the trick. Pandora sent him a long-suffering glance and heaved a sigh. “Oh, all right. I suppose I’ll have to keep him. And train him not to scare people.” Dramatically she fell backward on the bed, arms and legs akimbo. Her small, glum voice floated up to the ceiling. “My very own footmonster.” Gabriel regarded the small, splayed figure on the bed, feeling a rush of mingled amusement and lust that made his breath catch. Before another second had passed, he’d climbed over her, crushing her mouth with his. “What are you doing?” Pandora asked with a spluttering laugh, twisting beneath him. “Accepting your invitation.” “What invitation?” “The one you gave me by reclining on the bed in that seductive pose.” “I flopped backward like a dying trout,” she protested, squirming as he began to hike up her skirts. “You knew I wouldn’t be able to resist.” “Take a bath first,” she implored. “You’re not fit for the house. I should take you out to the stables and scrub you like one of the horses, with carbolic soap and a birch brush.” “Oh, you naughty girl . . . yes, let’s do that.” His hand wandered lecherously under her skirts. Pandora yelped with laughter and wrestled him. “Stop, you’re contaminated! Come to the bathroom and I’ll wash you.” He pinned her down. “You’ll be my bath handmaiden?” he asked provocatively. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” “I would,” he whispered, touching his tongue to the center of her lower lip. Her dark blue eyes were bright with mischief. “I’ll bathe you, my lord,” she offered, “but only if you agree to keep your hands to yourself, and remain as still and stiff as a statue.” “I’m already as stiff as a statue.” He nudged her to demonstrate. Pandora rolled out from under him with a grin and headed toward the bathroom, while he followed readily.

When I was 18 I gifted my 11-year-old step cousin a copy of Rancid's "...And Out Come the Wolves." Because of this her side of the family blamed me for many things. Caught her smoking at 15? Rancid. Disappeared for a long weekend? The Girl's a Time Bomb. Posed nude for a magazine 3 days after turning 18? They just disowned me. I'm a bad influence it seems. I've been a bad influence for a long time.

That never could have happened if he hadn’t been a guy. For one, girls aren’t allowed to wear onesies to school. They’re deemed immodest. Because, you know, distracting female bodies pose a huge educational barrier for the poor boys. And if a girl had done that zany dance, either it’d have been sexualized or it’d have been stupid, depending on the girl. “She’s hot,” people would say. Or “She’s weird.” That morning, leaving Town Meeting, everyone was jostling one another, still in high spirits. “Andy is so out there.” Voices dripping with admiration. “He’s such a…” They couldn’t even finish. No words. Shake head. Smile, smile, smile. What they meant, of course, was this: Andy Monroe is so, so freaking cool. Right after that dance—still in the onesie!—he tapped the mike and said, “Next announcement. The Service Club is hosting a winter-coat drive on behalf of the Coalition for the Homeless.” A girl wouldn’t be allowed to bridge both worlds, the silly and the sober. To be taken seriously, she’d have to act serious, and her seriousness would make her unelectable—just as a lack of seriousness would. It was a quintessential catch-22, and we couldn’t even call it out, because it sounded like an excuse. Well, I could be that cool, if I were a guy…. We couldn’t say it, but we felt it. We felt it as surely as we felt the weight of our bodies, because, like gravity, it was a truth about how it worked, this world we knew. Girls didn’t even consider running for Chawton School chairman because, as girls, we knew, we knew deep in our bones, that we would always lose.

You don’t remember me, I’m not – I’m Lou, we met at Army Cadets, ten years ago – you don’t remember, that’s fine – I don’t cry, uh. Ever. Doctor said I was hard as fuck, so – as a baby – so, yeah, don’t feel anything, at all, never have, ’cept this one night, with you. You don’t remember, that’s – It was last night of cadets. Camp. The boys sneak into our dorm, cos the girls want to play this game thing, where you have to guess where our nipples are. Guess our nipples and belly buttons. With our pyjamas on. Which is erotic, and challenging, cos we’re all different aren’t we? Some people have really, like, low, nipples, or whatever – And anyway, you’re paired with me, cos no one else – I guess maybe we’re getting bullied, you seem upset, you don’t want to do it, you look at the floor, and you just sort of jab your finger at me, and turn to go, but you… You get it. You get me. Bang on. My left one. I think you feel it. And I say ‘wowza’. Like that. Breathy. ‘Wowza.’ And people cheer, cos – Maybe they’re bullying still, but I don’t care cos it feels real, like in a romcom, and you have this. Smile. I notice it. And then you guess my right one. And you get that too and – I s’pose that’s easier after the first, cos you sort of line ’em up, don’t you, I wouldn’t know – and then I nod, and then your hand moves down, to my stomach. And you look me in the eye, for the first time… and I didn’t mind looking in yours, uh… sorry… hang on… Uh… ‘Bomb… sound effect…’ No, that’s not yet, sorry. Sorry. Uh… So… She looks back to her notes. Oh yeah… so… Then, really gently this time, your hand reaches – Your finger just (moves), like that, and, like, slowly dis-disappears into me, into my stomach, my belly. Only up to about there, and with a pyjama. Sheath. Over it – shouldn’t – don’t say sheath – but, it feels like you’ve reached right in. Your whole hand. And touched something, right in the core of – Freezing cold in the core of me… and, just for a second… lit it up. And, it’s like…

A throat cleared. “Earth to Arik. Come in, boss.” With brows drawn, Arik glared at his beta. “What?” “I was asking what had your boxers in a knot.” “You know I go commando.” “Usually, but something obviously has your panties in a twist. Spill.” Oh, he spilled all right. Arik yanked off the hat and flung it against the wall and then swiveled his chair to get it over with. Indrawn breath. A snicker. A full-on guffaw. Arik swirled again and tossed deadly visual daggers at his second. “I fail to see the humor in my butchered mane.” “Dude. Have you seen it? It is bad. What did you do to piss Dominic off? Seduce one of his daughters?” “Actually one of his granddaughters did this to me!” He couldn’t help the incredulous note. The effrontery of the act still got to him. A thump and a shake of the wall as Hayder hit it, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “A girl did that to you?” His beta convulsed with mirth, not at all daunted by Arik’s glower and tapping fingers. “This is not amusing.” “Oh, come on, dude. Of all the people to have a hair mishap, you are the worst.” “I look like an idiot.” “Only because you didn’t let her finish hacking the rest off.” His fingers froze as he took his gaze off the screen for a moment to address the travesty. “Cut off my mane?” Was his beta delusional? “Well, yeah. You know, to even it out so it doesn’t show.” A growl rumbled forth, more beast than man, his lion not at all on board with any more trimming. “Okay, if you’re not keen on that, then what about a hair weave? Maybe we could get you a platinum one, or pink for contrast since you’re being such a prissy princess about it.” That did it. A lion could take only so much. Arik dove over his desk and tackled his beta. Over they went with a thump and a tangle of limbs. As he was slamming Hayder’s head off the floor, snarling, “Take it back!” to his beta’s chortled, “We’ll get your nails done while they’re weaving,” Leo strode in. A giant of a man, he didn’t even have to strain as he grabbed them each by a shoulder and yanked them apart. But he didn’t stop there. He slammed their heads together before shoving them down. Arik and Hayder sat on the carpeted floor, nursing robin’s eggs, united in their glare for the pride’s omega, also known as the peacemaker. Of course, Leo’s version of peace wasn’t always gentle, which was why he was perfect for the pride. The behemoth with the mellow outlook on life took a seat in a chair, which groaned ominously. “You do know that the staff two floors down can hear the pair of you acting like ill-behaved cubs.” “He started it!” Arik stabbed a finger at his beta. He had no problem assigning blame. Delegation was something an alpha did well. Hayder didn’t even deny his guilt. “I did. But can you blame me? He was pissing and moaning about this precious mane. All I did was offer a solution, and he took offense.” “I assume we’re talking about the missing chunk of hair on our esteemed leader’s head?” Leo shook his neatly trimmed dark crown. “I keep telling you that vanity is your weakness.” “And chocolate chip ice cream is yours. We all have our vices,” Arik grumbled as he heaved himself off the floor and into his leather-padded seat— with built-in heating pad and massager because a man in his position did enjoy his luxuries. “My vice is beautiful women,” Hayder announced with a grin, adopting a lounging pose on the floor. Felines were king when it came to acting as if embarrassing positions weren’t accidental at all. “Don’t talk to me about women right now. I’m still angry at the one who did this.” “I think I’m missing a key point,” Leo stated. It didn’t take long to bring Leo up to speed. To his credit, the pride omega didn’t laugh— long.

After the races had ended, the faire wound down, and Grayden tugged me toward a stand where the vendor’s wares were rapidly depleting. “Come!” he exclaimed. “I want to get you something--a remembrance.” I laughed, for he was pulling me toward a display of headpieces made of woven flowers and ribbons, but he was not to be deterred. He worked toward the front of the stand, extracted a coin from his money pouch and flipped it at the woman in charge. “I’d like your best one for the girl I’m courting,” he proclaimed, and I suspected the real truth was that he wanted to say the words. “They are all finely made, young sir. Which one is best is a matter of the color you desire.” Grayden studied me, trying to choose. I struck a pose to help. “Green,” he decided. “For she has the loveliest hazel eyes.” His words shocked me into silence, and a strange notion flashed in my brain. He had said my eyes were lovely. Could he possibly think I was beautiful? “Shaselle?” he faltered, probably afraid he had offended me. “Would you prefer a different color?” “Not at all! I adore green!” His grin resurfaced and he nestled the chosen crown into my hair, which fell in a simple braid down my back. I beamed at him, the world seeming brighter, less tainted and revitalized, for somehow my uncle Cannan had come through--he had found me a young man that Papa would have been proud to know.

March 8: Love Happy is released. Marilyn’s total screen time is thirty-eight seconds—long enough for Groucho to respond to her slinking into his detective agency office with the question, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He promptly responds, “What a ridiculous statement.” Marilyn tells him that men keep following her and sways out of camera range as Groucho comments, “Really? I can’t understand why.” Marilyn later recalled, “There were three girls there and Groucho had us each walk away from him. . . . I was the only one he asked to do it twice. Then he whispered in my ear, ‘You have the prettiest ass in the business.’ I’m sure he meant it in the nicest way.” Groucho later said Marilyn was “Mae West, Theda Bara and Bo Peep rolled into one.” Marilyn received $500 for her appearance and another three hundred to pose for promotional photographs. Marilyn is sent on a promotional tour for a fee of one hundred dollars a week. She meets dress manufacturer Henry Rosenfeld in New York City, and they become lifelong friends. During this period she also does her famous Jones Beach photo sessions with Andre de Dienes. The tour takes her to Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Rockford, Illinois. Marilyn attends a party at the Chicago nightclub Ricketts with Roddy McDowell. Marilyn appears in print advertisement for Kyron diet pills, with accompanying text: “If you want slim youthful lines like Miss Monroe and other stars, start the KYRON Way to slenderness—today!

An hour later Tianna was walking toward Planet Bang, wearing a sweater shell with sequins and an ankle-grazing skirt slit up the sides to the top of her thighs. She glanced at the waning moon and stopped. There was something important she had to do before the moon turned dark and it was in some way connected to Justin and Mason, but what? She stared at the sky as she continued, hoping the memory would come to her the way soccer and skateboarding had. When she rounded the corner, the music grew louder. A neon sign throbbed pink, blue, green, and orange lights over the kids waiting to go inside. She recognized some of them. It seemed as if everyone had come with a friend or friends. Their heads turned and watched her as she walked to the end of the line. She spread her hands through her hair and arched her back. As long as they were going to stare, she might as well give them a show. She twisted her body and stuck one long leg out from the slit in her skirt. Guys smiled back at her as she stretched her arms in a sexy pose. The girls mostly turned away, pretending they hadn't been checking out their competition.

The bacha posh parallels throughout countries where women lack rights are neither Western nor Eastern, neither Islamic nor un-Islamic. It is a human phenomenon, and it exists throughout our history, in vastly different places, with different religions and in many languages. Posing as someone or something else is the story of many women and men who have experienced repression and made a bid for freedom. It is the story of a gay U.S. Marine who had to pretend he was straight. It is the story of a Jewish family in Nazi Germany posing as Protestants. It is the story of a black South African who tried to make his skin lighter under apartheid. Disguising oneself as a member of the recognized and approved group is at the same time a subversive act of infiltration and a concession to an impossible racist, sexist, or otherwise segregating system.

briefly how she had managed to unlock the back door and why she should have seemed so resentful of him. She had, he decided, been musing and had made her way to this particular room for that purpose. Her pose over there by the window had betrayed as much and his sudden appearance breaking into her reflections, had startled her, so that, in a sense, her anger had been counterfeit. He remained standing where she had stood, wondering if she would circle the west wing and appear at the crest of the drive, but when he heard or saw something of her he fell to thinking about women in general and his relations with them in the past. His experience with women had been limited but although technically still a virgin he was not altogether innocent. There had been a very forward fourteen-year-old called Cherry, who had lived in an adjoining house in Croydon, when he came home for school holidays and Cherry had succeeded in bewitching but ultimately terrifying him, for one day when they were larking about in the stable behind her house, she had hinted at the mysterious differences between the sexes and when, blushing, he had encouraged her to elaborate, she had promptly hoisted her skirt and pulled down her long cotton drawers, whereupon he had fled as though the Devil was after him and had never sought her company again, although he watched her closely in church on successive Sundays, expecting any moment to see forked lightning descend on her in the middle of ‘For all the Saints’. Then there had been a little clumsy cuddling at Christmas parties, and after that a flaxen-haired girl called Daphne whom he had mooned over as an adolescent and had thought of a good deal in the Transvaal but now he had almost forgotten what Daphne looked like and had not recalled her name until now. Finally there had been an abortive foray

Looking at Loh’s photographs, it is obvious that there is nothing simpler and richer than a face when stripped of all effects and affects, poses and postures, stances and pretences. The Singaporeans featured here are almost expressionless, as if the photographer wanted to leave us clueless about them. What do their faces tell us? Why are they so familiar? Why do we feel we know this auntie that we don’t know? And this guy with the nondescript look? And this girl with no distinguishing mark? Have we met before?

I take a deep breath to settle my nerves, but it does nothing to uncoil the anxiety wound inside me. Carefully, I open the folder, as if I’m afraid jostling it too much might trigger something. A picture of Rachel’s lifeless body lies on top, as though warning me about the other horrors waiting inside. It’s different seeing her laid out like this, her neck purple, her lips blue. She’s so pale that she’s nearly the color of the fresh blanket of snow beneath her. All at once, the breath goes out of me. I knew what had happened to her, but I’ve never seen the pictures—I’ve never had the evidence scattered across my lap. My stomach bottoms out, and a bolt of pain hits my heart. I look away and catch my breath. I’m not sure this is something I can compartmentalize, but I’ve got to try. Her body is laid—no, posed—exactly like Madeline and Emma. The folder is as heavy as it would be if her body were laid across me. I’ve seen pictures like this a thousand times, victims, cases I had to solve—but this is different. This is my sister.

Barkapalooza open house?” Dr. V. stood in the center of the group, as silent as any of the girls had seen him. “I am really going to miss you,” he said. “So before our guests arrive, I want to let you know that this is the last time you’ll ever see me in a polo shirt.” Everyone laughed. “Would you honor me with a group picture?” While Daisy corralled Atticus and Finch, the girls lined up to pose with a pet of their choice. Gaby held Feather. Alma took the new kitten Milagro. Secret nestled in Mrs. Kohler’s arms. Dr. Villalobos sat in the center with Snowflake

I haven't time to be always staring at my face in the glass," said Cousin Ernestine acidly. "What if my placket is open? I've got three petticoats on, haven't I? They tell me the girls nowadays only wear one. I'm afraid the world is gitting dreadful gay and giddy. I wonder if they ever think of the judgment day." "Do you s'pose they'll ask us at the judgment day how many petticoats we've got on?" asked Rebecca Dew, escaping to the kitchen before any one could register horror. Even Aunt Chatty thought Rebecca Dew really had gone a little too far.

Jack walked out front, all eyes on him. He focused on the door and kept walking, his jacket in hand. It was freezing out, but he let the cold wash over him. Never again, he vowed as he crossed to his car. He opened the envelope and looked down at the picture inside. A rat-faced guy was posing to show off his new tattoo. Kevin Arnold. He’d have to run his background when he got home. On the back of the picture Marisa had written, “I’ll wait.” Next to it, she’d written the number 2614 and had drawn a heart around it. He remembered the new tattoo on Marisa’s back: a heart with a gold combination lock. He hadn’t made the connection before, but he did now. The combination

Her whole body was racing with heat, and she felt about two touches away from spontaneous combustion. She was seized by a fleeting impulse to run away; at the same time, she wished he would touch her forever. The costume, the posing, the mysterious alcohol that was dissolving her inhibitions. Cass felt wild and alive, even more so than she had the night they went to the brothels. That night she had been someone else, but tonight she was posing as herself, and she loved it. Falco stepped back to consider his work. “Almost perfect.” “Almost?” Cass pretended to pout. “I know.” Falco rooted around in the armoire and returned with something folded inside his hand. He held it up for Cass to see--a necklace made of shining amethyst. It reminded her of something, but she wasn’t sure what. Probably one of Mada’s thousand necklaces. That girl had more jewelry than the Doge’s entire family. Cass shivered as Falco clasped the necklace around her throat. The stones felt like ice against her neck. “All right. How about a demure look? A stretch for you, I know.” Cass widened her eyes and pursed her lips, just slightly. She tilted her head to the left. Falco shook his head. “You look like you’ve swallowed a bee. Forget shy. Let’s try something that comes a little more naturally. How about disdain?” Her eyebrows instantly went up. “I am not disdainful!” “Perfect.” He downed the rest of his muddy liquor. His brush began to flow across the canvas. Cass felt a charge of excitement, but tried her best not to smile. As she held her position, Falco painted in frantic bursts, pausing occasionally to move the lamps or adjust ringlets of her damp hair. Each time he stopped, she would beg to see the progress and he would shake his head and tell her she had to wait.

Thus, in mid-January, Darcy sent Kitty, Lydia and Mary back to Meryton in one of his carriages – though ever-mindful of the potential risks posed on the highways, he had the girls escorted home by two of his footmen.

Mom sends me another text with pictures of cakes she found on Pinterest for a gender reveal party. “How do you feel about having a gender reveal party?” Iask. “What is that?” Archer gets up to make a pot of coffee. “Basically a party announcing if the baby is a boy or girl. You don’t tell anyone until the end, and you pop a balloon with pink or blue confetti in it or something.” “And it’s a thing people donow?” “Yeah. If you have a halfway decent Instagram following and you don’t do one, people will wonder what’s wrong withyou.” Archer chuckles. “I don’t really care either way. Any excuse to have a party is good in my book. Do you want to haveone?” “I know they’re a little lame, but yeah.” I bite my lip, looking at the photos my mom sent. I haven’t told anyone besides my family and Marissa about the baby. I’m a modern woman with a successful job, and shouldn’t worry about people judging me over having a baby when I’m not married. But I do, just abit. “Then let’s doit.” Archer’s words make me smile. “My mom is going to go crazy over this. She wants to know where to have the party?” It’s a simple question, but I know it raises the same concerns to Archer too. He turns on the coffee maker and comes back to the table. “If you’re going to take impressive Instagram pictures, your parents’ farm has the perfect setting.” “I’m glad you have your priorities in check.” He nods. “I gotcha, babe. We’ll make sure to have everything posed perfectly. I’ll even take pictures of all my food before I eat it. Actually, we could invest in some of that realistic-looking fake food. I hear it photographs better.” I look at Archer, a big smile on my face. He makes it so easy tofall. “Good idea. Anything for the likes.” “Exactly. The number of likes is a direct correlation to how loved this baby is. We really have to step itup.

I looked her in the eye, trying to see beyond the pose, trying to imagine what she as like when she was alone... but I couldn't see it. That sort of girl is never alone, because without other people they have to be themselves, and they can't stand themselves.

I looked her in the eye, trying to see beyond the pose, trying to imagine what she was like when she was alone... but I couldn't see it. That sort of girl is never alone, because without other people they have to be themselves, and they can't stand themselves.

Really… you two…” Jasmine sniffled a few times and wiped her eyes before she recovered and took what Alex liked to call her “traditional rich girl pose.” She placed one hand on her hip, thrust out her chest, and placed her other hand near her mouth. “Oh ho ho ho! Very well, Alexander, Alice, I shall grace you both with my magnificent presence. Come, let us travel to your abode.” “Sure,” Alice said. “By the way, we’re watching Titan Girls.” “Oh ho! So, you are still into that childish show, are you? Would it not be better if we watched something more mature, such as—” “Titan Girls.” “Oh ho ho ho! Alice, you are such a kidder!

Mistress Rafferty,” began the Sergeant in self-conscious formality of tone, “I am a much older man than the one we have just laid to rest, but I am sober, honest and mindful of the plight of those placed in the situation you find yourself facing. You must take another husband straightway, and there’s many’ll be lining up for the privilege. First, though, I wants to put a proposition before you. My age is forty-six, and I’m due for promotion again before too long passes. I drinks a spot of porter now and again, but no more than that. As a boy I was school-taught and I keeps my hand in by studying from books. I’m clean and tidy about the place, and mostly of a quiet disposition. As a sergeant I earns enough to be comfortable, and my quarters is shaded by trees so it don’t get too plaguey hot. I’ve watched you, Mistress Rafferty, and it seems to me you’re a hard-working girl with fingers that are nimble and a disposition that’s livelier than most. I wouldn’t ask nothing of you save housekeeping and a mite of companionship. In return, I offers you the quietness of my quarters, the use of my books, and a trusty protection. You can have a bed of your own behind a curtain, and the freedom to make the place suitable for a female to occupy.” He shifted from the stiff pose he had adopted and fingered his brown moustache nervously. “I’m a lonely sort of man, Mistress Rafferty, and I’d be a dutiful husband. Oh yes,” he added quickly, as if remembering something he had left out of the rehearsed speech, “I won’t fill the place with the smoke of my cigars to upset you, but step outside when I lights one.

I grinned back. In that instant all my misgivings about the Academy of Espionage flitted away. Sure, the place was poorly managed, run-down, and occasionally life-threatening, but I now felt like I belonged there. I’d proven myself, I’d made friends, I’d earned the respect of the most beautiful girl I’d ever met… and I’d thwarted the plot of a criminal mastermind to behead the entire intelligence community of the United States of America. Regular school couldn’t hold a candle to that. For the first time since I’d arrived on campus, I had a sense that everything was going to work out for me there. Across the quad Alexander Hale emerged from behind the chemistry building with his gun raised. He cautiously approached Murray’s prone body and nudged it with his foot a few times to make sure he was really unconscious. A door banged open, and a dozen men in three-piece suits and military uniforms poured out of the Hale Building. I recognized the principal’s red face among them. “Is that the kid who planted the bomb?” he asked. “Yes, but he won’t be causing us any more trouble.” Alexander set one foot upon Murray’s haunch and posed dramatically, as if Murray were a grizzly bear he’d downed. “I’ve neutralized him.” The espionage elite and military leaders reacted with awe. There were shouts of “Well done” and “Bravo!” A few actually applauded. Alexander bowed dramatically, soaking up their praise. I turned to Erica, stunned. “Did your father just steal all the credit for what I’ve done?” “Looks that way.” Erica put a friendly arm around my shoulders and smiled. “Welcome to the wonderful world of espionage.

I got took away from my mama, and the doctor say that I got brain damage from that brick. I don’t know. My mama was a crack ho, so I wasn’t gonna be too smart no how. People think when you in Special Ed that you s’posed to be sitting ’round drooling so they can pick you right out the crowd. That just shows they be dumber than they think we are. There’s folks in Special Ed get driver’s licenses. They go to school, hand you change at the store, take your order at the drive-through, and sack your groceries. We talk just like other folk. We — well, not me, but most — look just like other folk. We understand stuff. We just learn it slow. And most of what we understand is that people what ain’t Speddies think we too stupid to get out our own way. And that makes me mad.

WONDER WOMAN Standing at the swell of the muddy Mississippi after the urgent care doctor had just said, Well, sometimes shit happens, I fell fast and hard for New Orleans all over again. Pain pills swirled in the purse along with a spell for later. It’s taken a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle with my body, a spinal column thirty-five degrees bent, vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics villain nobody can kill. Invisible pain is both a blessing and a curse. You always look so happy, said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side grinning. But that day, alone on the riverbank, brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl, maybe half my age, dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman. She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible, eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have), she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth— a woman, by a river, indestructible.

I would pose the question of whether he hated women specifically, or was just a coward who liked his odds against a twenty-year-old girl better than against another man when the rage in him demanded a target.

We were careful to secure the garter just so. Too close to the nylon risked a run. You cannot imagine the troubles suggested, in those days, by a stocking with a run: the woman was drunk, careless, unhappy, indifferent (to her husband’s career, even to his affections), ready to go home. Slip, then sheath—small white dress shields pinned under each arm with tiny gold safety pins—then shoes, jewelry, a spray of perfume. I’d be faint with the heat in my column of clothes by the time I came downstairs. Peter, my husband, waiting, newly shaved, handsome in his tropical-weight suit, white shirt, and thin tie, having a first drink and looking a little wilted himself. And the girls we passed on the street or who met us at the door, or who only moved across my inner eye by then in their white ao dais, were like pale leaves stirring in the humid stillness, sunstruck indications of some unseen breeze: cool, weightless, beautiful. It was at a garden party on a Sunday afternoon, early in our first month in Saigon. The party was in the elegant courtyard of a villa not far from the Basilica. A lovely street lined with tamarind trees. We’d only been there a few minutes ourselves when I turned to see a young family paused at the entrance, posed as if for a pretty picture beneath a swag of scarlet bougainvillea. Baby boy in the arms of the slim mother, daughter at her side, tall father in a pale suit—another engineer, I learned later. It was much later still, decades later, that I suddenly wondered, laughing to think about it, why so many engineers were needed. I was twenty-three then, with a bachelor’s from Marymount. For a year before my marriage, I’d taught kindergarten at a parish school

So you’re both going in, maybe not exactly trading lines, but you’re both the leads. Like all of those girl rap duos that’ve been so big. You’re showing each other up, but you’re wanting the same thing…” He struck a pose. “Back to back at times, then facing each other, then one of you steps forward.” He did a confident walk across the room. “Push her behind with the fingers, a little bitchy, you know? But, you’re both there. You’re both killing it. You’re both showing the world how much fucking hotter it is to be 29 than it is to be 19

A FOOLISH MISTAKE, GIRL!” Alex landed and struck an epic ninja pose. “YOUR FACE IS THE ONLY FOOLISH MISTAKE AROUND HERE!

I’d never hungered for someone like I did for her. And it wasn’t just the way she looked, every time she bit at me or fought back against me, the beast inside me raised its head. She was more than just some girl who posed us a threat. She was a real challenge, unafraid of me no matter what I threw at her and capable of matching or even besting me in every way. I’d never met a girl like her before. She was my equal. She had no interest in my power or my name so every piece of attention she threw my way was earned by me. She actually cared about who I was over what I was. And even though she hated what she found most of the time, she still saw me. And the idea of that was as exhilarating as it was terrifying.

Radha, who was a village girl, was extremely attracted to Krishna, who was the Supreme Lord. She had extreme love for Him. She was always leaving her family and worldly life to go and be with Him. She was completely absorbed in His beauty and His love and was always wanted to serve Him. In His presence, she felt His divinity and was ecstatically happy. But one day she got some pride and vanity because of her own beauty and service to Him and because He would not submit to her wishes she became arrogant towards Him and told Him that He should go and she would remain without Him. So He left her. She soon began to long for Him and could not stop thinking about Him, always thinking He would return to her, but He did not return. She became dejected and sat under a tree and she could only think about Him, thinking He would soon return to her. She remained sitting for a very long period, constantly thinking of Him, expecting that He would return to her at any moment. But He did not return. Months passed. Some villagers came to see her and saw that she was not breathing. They went and told Lord Krishna that she had died, that she was not breathing. But He only laughed and said, “Radha can’t die. She is completely transformed into Krishna. If you go to her and chant the name ‘Krishna’ in her ear, then you would find the real Radha.” They did it and found that Radha slowly rose and stood in that very pose. So you see, Radha was completely transformed into Krishna.

Four or five hundred people, mostly between eighteen and twenty-five, but some as young as fifteen, were frozen in either the act of dancing or just hanging out. Because the disc jockeys at raves invariably played highly energized techno dance music with a rapidly pounding bass that could shake walls, many of the young celebrants had been Paused in bizarre poses of flailing and gyrating abandon, bodies contorted, hair flying. The men and boys were for the most part dressed in jeans or chinos with flannel shirts and baseball caps worn backward, or with preppy sportcoats over T-shirts, though some were decked out all in black. The girls and young women wore a wider variety of clothes, but every outfit was provocative-tight, short, low-cut, translucent, revealing; raves were, after all, celebrations of the carnal. The silence of graves had replaced the booming music, as well as the screams and shouts of the partiers; the eerie light combined with the stillness to impart an anti-erotic cadaverous quality to the exposed curves of calves, thighs, and breasts. As he and Connie moved through the crowd, Harry noticed the dancers' faces were stretched in grotesque expressions which probably had conveyed excitement and hopped-up gaiety when they were animated. In freeze-frame, however, they were eerily transformed into masks of rage, hatred, and agony.  In the fierce glow produced by the lasers and spots, and by the psychedelic images that film projectors beamed onto two huge walls, it was easy to imagine that this was no party, after all, but a diorama of Hell, with the damned writhing in pain and wailing for release from their excruciating torment.  By seining out the rave's noise and movement, the Pause might have captured the truth of the event in its net. Perhaps the ugly secret, beneath the flash and thunder, was that these revelers, in their obsessive search for sensation, were not truly having fun on any fundamental level, but were suffering private miseries from which they frantically sought relief that eluded them. 

This is my area,” I say. She stops at the bulletin board I’ve filled up with pictures of models posing with cars. All of them are women. She looks at me, a smirk on her face. “Nice pics.” “I just really like the cars?” I say with a fake wince. “Mm-hmm, yeah, all of these women have really, really nice . . . cars,” she says, then bursts out laughing so hard she snorts, and, oh my god, I love her. I mean, not really, but still.

The girl deserves it. I think we know too well that a woman’s fate often poses such complex problems that it requires other women to find the solution.

Dr. Alan Hart helped pioneer the use of chest X-rays to diagnose tuberculosis. Hart was married to a woman and practicing medicine in San Francisco in 1918 when he was outed as a trans man by a former colleague. Dr. Hart was chased out of town on the back of headlines like “Girl Poses as Male Doctor in Hospital” (he was not posing, of course) and spent much of his life moving from town to town to escape various forms of transphobia.

That summer Adam and I would play tennis in the early morning before the sun got high and hot, and she would come to the court with us and sit in the dappled shade of the mimosas and myrtles and watch Adam beat the tar out of me as usual and laugh like bird song and mountain brooks when I got my feet tangle up in my own racket. The she might play me some, for she was pretty good and I was pretty bad. She was pretty good, all right, for a light-built girl, and had a lot of power in those small round arms, which flashed in the morning sun like wings. She was fast on her feet, too, and there would be the whipping skirt like a dance's, and the flicker of white shoes. But of those mornings I chiefly remember her far over yonder across the court, tiptoe, poised to serve, at the moment when the racket is back of her ribbon-bound head, with the pull of the arm lifting the right breast, and the left hand, from which the ball has just risen, still up, as though to pluck something out of the air, the face lifted gravely and intensely to the bright light and the wide sky and the absolutely white ball hung there like the spinning world in the middle of brilliance. Well, that is the classic pose, and it is too bad the Greeks didn't play tennis, for if they had played tennis they would have put Anne Stanton on a Greek vase. But on second thoughts, I guess they would not have done it. That is the moment which, for all its poise, is too airy, too tiptoe, too keyed up. It is the moment just before the stroke, before the explosion, and the Greeks didn't put that kind of moment on a vase. So that moment is not on a vase in a museum, but is inside my head, where nobody else can see it but me. For it was the moment before the explosion, and it did explode. The racked smacked and the sheep gut whanged and the white ball came steaming across at me, and I missed it as like as not, and the game was over, and the set was over, and we all went home, through the motionless heat, for the dew was off the grass now and the morning land breeze had died.

How’d you get that scar?” A skinny girl with a pimply face and a Slytherin House tattoo on her forearm posed the question.

What is objectification? From Simone de Beauvoir to Martha Nussbaum to Catharine MacKinnon, feminist philosophers have long been interested in analysing the concept. Broadly speaking, to objectify a woman is to treat or represent her as a partly or wholly dehumanised, de-mentalised object. There are various ways to do that. Fashion and advertising offer several possibilities for doing so visually. You can represent her as a dazed, passive thing to be fucked, with a vacant expression and glazed eyes, as in many high-end fashion advertising campaigns. Extending this, you can represent her as sexually dominated, with her personal autonomy diminished or removed: bound or gagged, for instance. You can dress her up in animal skins or leopard print and represent her as a kind of wild, highly sexualised animal, something the fashion industry has been particularly fond of doing to black women over the years. You can dress and pose her as a stereotype: the Capable Housewife (in domestic setting, comfortable clothes, tolerant rueful smile), the Brainy Scientist (white coat, stern expression, glasses on end of nose), the Little Girl (kneesocks, pigtails, blowing bubblegum), the Sexy Vamp (cleavage, tongue on front teeth, wink). You can place her in a row with other similarly shaped, similarly adorned women, visually emphasising what they all have in common in looks and dress, so that individuality is rhetorically diminished, and one woman looks replaceable with any other. You can make her just a pair of legs, or breasts, or an arse, focusing the camera on body parts and even omitting the head and face. In all such cases, the thinking mind, personality, autonomy or particular individuality of the woman in the image is downplayed, diminished and ignored, to a greater or lesser extent. She’s ‘objectified’ in the sense she’s made more like an object and less like a fully individuated human being: less rational, less individual, less present, less important for who she actually is. In extreme cases, she can even be used as if or pictured as an inanimate object: a ‘table’ for men’s feet, or as a ‘plate’ for food– as in the Japanese practice of Nyotaimori, using a woman’s naked body as a receptacle for sushi in restaurants.

My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn't want to write and the question I'd asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn't have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question. The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn't kill myself. Actually it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.

Everybody wants to see me. Everybody insists on talking to me. People pester me and they pester others with inquiries about what I am doing. How am I? Am I quite well again? Do I still go for my walks in the country? Am I working? Have I finished my book? Will I begin another soon? "A skinny monkey of a German wants me to translate his works. A wild-eyed Russian girl wants me to write an account of my life for her. An American lady wants the very latest news about me. An American gentleman will send his carriage to take me to dinner -- just an intimate, confidential talk, you know. An old schoolmate and chum of mine, of ten years ago, wants me to read him all that I write as fast as I write it. A painter friend I know expects me to pose for him by the hour. A newspaper man wants my present address. An acquaintance, a mystic, inquires about the state of my soul; another, more practical, about the state of my pocketbook. The president of my club wonders if I will make a speech for the boys! A lady, spiritually inclined, hopes I will come to her house for tea as often as possible. She wants to have my opinion of Jesus Christ, and -- what do I think of that new medium?... "Great God! what have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know? Am I a wench in a brothel who is called upon to lift her skirts or take off her chemise at the bidding of the first man in a tailored suit who comes along?

The article was taken from the business page of a newspaper in Manhattan, and it said that Miss Faye Berns had been appointed fund-raising director of the New York office of the World Aid Committee, which would seek to assist Displaced Persons in returning to their homelands once the war ended. The article was brief, but it did give the address of the World Aid Committee, and he copied it out on a piece of paper. In the photograph, a three-quarter angle, he could see the changes. Her hair was shorter, there was a line to her jaw that hadn't been there before, and she had smiled for the photographer in a way that he didn't recognize. It was an artificial smile, posed and official. For a long time he stared at the photograph, shocked by the degree to which memory had betrayed him, deceived him. Because he had always remembered her as she was in Paris, on the afternoon they had met by accident in the bookstore. He had, unwittingly, frozen her in time, kept her as she had been on a June day in 1937. He remembered her as she cried for Andres, remembered her as someone who would dare to love a man like Andres, who did not desert him, who paid the price of that love, and then survived. He remembered her as a girl who had flung herself against the world without caution, without a care for her safety. Now she was a woman who had grown up to accept the artifice of a smile, poised and confident, for a newspaper. He remembered, particularly, both times they had touched: when she had slept on his shoulder in the car parked at the Bilbao docks, and when she had held his hands while they waited for the train to depart at the Gare du Nord. Did men and women ordinarily remember the times when they'd touched each other? He did not know. [...] He bore down on his work for the rest of the afternoon, then, since it was Thursday, went off to visit his woman friend. She was, as usual, responsive, falling in with his mood and treating him with a certain casual tenderness that he'd always found very comforting. Yet he was not his best self, distracted by the image of a woman with a professional smile in a grainy photograph. He imagined himself a great realist, and that passion without sentiment suited him perfectly. But at work on Friday morning he experienced a surge of emotion, more gratitude than love, and sent his friend a bouquet of flowers. For which she thanked him, with a certain casual tenderness, the following Thursday.

You all like one girl and because someone looked at her the wrong way, you want me to kill them? I'm a professional assassin for Christ's sake! I kill targets who pose a threat, not innocent guys who rubbed your girlfriend the wrong way. Must I remind you that when personal feelings get involved, people die?