Screen Broken Quotes

Who's with her?" Roarke asked, though he already knew. It was just like her. "With her? Oh, ah, hmmm. Webster." Silence fell, a clatter of broken bricks. Peabody folded her hands in her pockets and prepared for the explosion to follow. "I see." When Roarke simply turned back to the screen and continued, she didn't know whether to be relieved or scared to death.

Dead Butterflies I sometimes think about the fragility of glass — of broken shards tearing against soft skin.When in truth, it is the transparency that kills you. The pain of seeing through to something you can never quite touch. For years I’ve kept you in secret, behind a glass screen. I’ve watched helplessly as day after day, your new girlfriend becomes your wife and then later, the mother of your children. Then realizing their only in thinking you were the one under glass when in fact it has been me— a pinned butterfly static and unmoving, watching while your other life unfolds.

An incomplete list: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

I worry hope will crush me, the way love has so many times before. Are they so different, hope and love? O & E in the same place, half of the other in each word. Both swimming in unknowns. I’ve been through the big changes. These ones should seem easier in comparison, I should be more prepared, but they don’t and I’m not. Sometimes I feel like a broken-wing butterfly, clinging to a window screen. Afraid to let go. Afraid to stay. Wondering how much wing is enough to fly.

It was strange how in that moment of tragedy, it had seemed so unreal, like an old-fashioned movie reel playing on a screen for my eyes only. The pain and broken heart were blocked off for a little while, leaving me numb with disbelief. Shock is what Dad called it. But after a while, the cruel reality started to seep into my tissues, and my body became a sponge, just sucking it all up until, finally, there was so much grief inside, I couldn't help feeling it. That's how it happened for me. First, the numbness right after she died, next the agonising pain and then the place I was at now—the land of perpetual depression.

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without. To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Dear Hunger Games : Screw you for helping cowards pretend you have to be great with a bow to fight evil. You don't need to be drafted into a monkey-infested jungle to fight evil. You don't need your father's light sabre, or to be bitten by a radioactive spider. You don't need to be stalked by a creepy ancient vampire who is basically a pedophile if you're younger than a redwood. Screw you mainstream media for making it look like moral courage requires hair gel, thousands of sit ups and millions of dollars of fake ass CGI. Moral courage is the gritty, scary and mostly anonymous process of challenging friends, co-workers and family on issues like spanking, taxation, debt, circumcision and war. Moral courage is standing up to bullies when the audience is not cheering, but jeering. It is helping broken people out of abusive relationships, and promoting the inner peace of self knowledge in a shallow and empty pseudo-culture. Moral courage does not ask for - or receive - permission or the praise of the masses. If the masses praise you, it is because you are helping distract them from their own moral cowardice and conformity. Those who provoke discomfort create change - no one else. So forget your politics and vampires and magic wands and photon torpedoes. Forget passively waiting for the world to provoke and corner you into being virtuous. It never will. Stop watching fictional courage and go live some; it is harder and better than anything you will ever see on a screen. Let's make the world change the classification of courage from 'fantasy' to 'documentary.' You know there are people in your life who are doing wrong. Go talk to them, and encourage them to pursue philosophy, self-knowledge and virtue. Be your own hero; you are the One that your world has been waiting for.

They sat behind a screen, and grunted and wheezed over sheets of brown paper that looked as if ink-dipped and intoxicated spiders had danced across them.

A broken trust is like a broken mirror. You can't put the pieces together again.

He held his broken phone in his hands, feeling the cracks that Sang had made into the screen. It almost looked like a tree. He didn’t want to replace it. She could break all his things.

Kai held up the broken portscreen. "What would Cinder do? How would she fix it?" A crease formed across Torin's brow. "You want to comm for help?" "Sort of." He buried a hand in his hair, thinking, thinking. He pictured Cinder at her booth at the market. She would have known what to do. She would have - He hopped to his feet, his pulse racing, and whapped the corner of the portscreen hard on the top of the altar. Torin jerked back. Kai looked again and let out an excited whoop. Half the screen had cleared. He opened a comm. "How did you do that?" said Torin. "I don't know," he said, typing in a hasty message, "but you'd be surprised how often that works.

Occasionally you'll say "Excuse me" when I happen to stand in your way, and "Thank you" when your ball drifts into my court and I hurl it back to you. With these few words, I find comfort in false hopes and hope in false starts. I'll coddle anything instead of nothing. Even thinking that nothing can come of nothing gives me a leg to stand on, something to consider when I wake up in the middle of the night and can see nothing, not the blackout in my life, not the screen, not the cellar, not even hope and false comforts -just the joy of your imagined limb touching mine. I prefer the illusion of perpetual fasting to the certainty of famine. I have, I think, what's called a broken heart.

Though they were separated by two screens and vast amounts of empty space, she could feel the link being forged between them in that look. A bond that couldn’t be broken. Their eyes had met for the first time, and by the look of pure amazement on his face, she knew he felt it too. Heat crept up into her cheeks. Her hands began to shake. “Aces,” Carswell Thorne murmured. Dropping his feet to the ground, he leaned forward to inspect her closer. “Is that all hair?” The bond snapped, the fantasy of one perfect true-love moment disintegrating around her.

You were broken before I ever took you to the Everneath.Remember how you were when you showed up on my doorstep? That had nothing to do with me.You came broken and that was the fault of this world.Not mine." I nodded again,a little less aggressively. "Why do you care if I get hurt?" All he said was, "I hate to see it.Whether you go with me or not,I don't like you getting hurt." But his face seemed to say more.As if there were something he wasn't telling me. Before I could ask him about it,his iPhone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out,read the screen, and then walked over to the window. "We'll finish this later." "Tell me why you care," I said. He put his hands on the windowsill. "Because it's you. Despite what you think of me,your pain will always be my pain." "There has to be more to it than that. What aren't you telling me,Cole?" He grinned. "How are you so good at reading me when you can't read anyone else around you?" He sighed, and as he climbed out the window,he said, "I love it.

Three people stood close behind him, but all Cress could see were the blue eyes staring back at her, directly back at her, beginning to fill with the same breathless awe she felt. The same wonder. The same enchantment. Though they were separated by two screens and vast amounts of empty space, she could feel the link being forged between them in that look. A bond that couldn’t be broken. Their eyes had met for the first time, and by the look of pure amazement on his face, she knew he felt it too.

I let the front door slam shut behind me and the fly screen rattle. It was as if each door was kicking me out of the old life I'd lived in that house. I was being thrown out into the world, new. The broken, leaning gate creaked open, let me out, and I gently placed it shut. I was gone, and from down the street, maybe fifty yards away, I looked back for a second at the house where I lived. It wasn't the same any more. It never would be. I kept walking.

I could just as easily have taken the train.” He shut his eyes, just long enough for a movie of a Tess-induced train riot to screen on the backs of his eyelids. Fists flying, teeth broken, friendships destroyed as men vied to get closer to her lush body barely covered in that incendiary French maid outfit. And now he was turning hard again.

She likes the parts of me that are broken; she likes them the way a thief likes a loose screen.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. (...) To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves." To protest

Thank you," he said. "Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It's a long way from Forster Hollow, isn't it?" "So, yes, welcome," he said. "Welcome to the middle class! That's what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you don't like me. And I don't like you. But, you know, back when you were refusing to have anything to do with us, I respected that. I didn't like it, but I had respect for your position. For your independence. You see, because I actually came from a place a little bit like Forster Hollow myself, before I joined the middle class. And, now you're middle-class, too, and I want to welcome you all, because it's a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It's the mainstay of economies all around the globe!" "And now that you've got these jobs at this body-armor plant," he continued, "You're going to be able to participate in those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America! You, too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they're not turned on! But that's OK, because that's why we threw you out of your homes in the first places, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one cause of global warming and other excellent things like acid rain. It's a perfect world, isn't it? It's a perfect system, because as long as you've got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don't have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there's no more Indonesia!" "Just quickly, here," he continued, "because I want to keep my remarks brief. Just a few more remarks about this perfect world. I want to mention those big new eight-miles-per-gallon vehicles you're going to be able to buy and drive as much as you want, now that you've joined me as a member of the middle class. The reason this country needs so much body armor is that certain people in certain parts of the world don't want us stealing all their oil to run your vehicles. And so the more you drive your vehicles, the more secure your jobs at this body-armor plant are going to be! Isn't that perfect?" "Just a couple more things!" Walter cried, wresting the mike from its holder and dancing away with it. "I want to welcome you all to working for one of the most corrupt and savage corporations in the world! Do you hear me? LBI doesn't give a shit about your sons and daughters bleeding in Iraq, as long as they get their thousand-percent profit! I know this for a fact! I have the facts to prove it! That's part of the perfect middle-class world you're joining! Now that you're working for LBI, you can finally make enough money to keep your kids from joining the Army and dying in LBI's broken-down trucks and shoddy body armor!" The mike had gone dead, and Walter skittered backwards, away from the mob that was forming. "And MEANWHILE," he shouted, "WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES! AND WIPE OUT EVERY OTHER LIVING THING ALONG THE WAY! IT IS A PERFECT FUCKING WORLD AS LONG AS YOU DON'T COUNT EVERY OTHER SPECIES IN IT! WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANT! A CANCER ON THE PLANET!

Was it possible to love more than one person at the same time? I had always thought it just kind of a convenient notion that authors of novels and screen plays used to amp up intrigue in their stories. I could remember more than a few times while reading a book or watching a movie, I had laughed and rolled my eyes at the heroine for finding herself in such a situation. And yet . . . here I was . . .

But we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known star in our galaxy, Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years distant, 400 times the size of the sun and 4 million times as bright. We should punctuate our calendars with celebrations in honour of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major, 5,000 light years from earth and 2,100 times bigger than our sun. Nightly – perhaps after the main news bulletin – we might observe a moment of silence in order to contemplate the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the 100 billion galaxies and the 3 septillion stars in the universe. Whatever their value may be to science, the stars are in the end no less valuable to mankind as solutions to our megalomania, self-pity and anxiety. To answer our need to be repeatedly connected through our senses to ideas of transcendence, we should insist that a percentage of all prominently positioned television screens on public view be hooked up to live feeds from the transponders of our extraplanetary telescopes. We would then be able to ensure that our frustrations, our broken hearts, our hatred of those who haven’t called us and our regrets over opportunities that have passed us by would continuously be rubbed up against, and salved by, images of galaxies such as Messier 101, a spiral structure which sits towards the bottom left corner of the constellation Ursa Major, 23 million light years away, majestically unaware of everything we are and consolingly unaffected by all that tears us apart.

Now the evening's at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in. The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny's and Lindy's - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that's home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: 'New York, New York, it's a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground. Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it's a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There's a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again. Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It's an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get. This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys' nerves get tauter and women's fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the 'Late Show' title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There's a life that's happening here. ("New York Blues")

Nothing felt like mine anymore, not after you. All those little things that defined me; small sentimental trinkets, car keys, pin codes, and passwords. They all felt like you. And more than anything else, my number - the one you boldly asked for that night, amidst a sea of people, under a sky of talking satellites and glowing stars. You said no matter how many times you erased me from your phone, you would still recognize that number when it flashed on your screen. The series of sixes and nines, like the dip of my waist to the curves of my hips, your hands pressed into the small of my back. Nines and sixes that were reminiscent of two contented cats, curled together like a pair of speech marks. You said if you could never hold me or kiss me again, you could live with that. But you couldn't bear the thought of us not speaking and asked, at the very least, could I allow you that one thing? I wonder what went through your mind the day you dialed my number to find it had been disconnected. If your imagination had raced with thoughts of what new city I run to and who was sharing my bed. Isn't it strange how much of our lives are interchangeable, how little is truly ours. Someone else's ring tone, someone else's broken heart. These are the things we inherit by choice or by chance. And it wasn't my choice to love you but it was mine to leave. I don't think the moon ever meant to be a satellite, kept in loving orbit, locked in hopeless inertia, destined to repeat the same pattern over and over - to meet in eclipse with the sun - only when the numbers allowed.

Though they were separated by two screens and vast amounts of empty space, she could feel the link being forged between them in that look. A bond that couldn’t be broken. Their eyes had met for the first time, and by the look of pure amazement on his face, she knew he felt it too.

Mustafa is the reason I came here. He is the reason that Afra and I kept going until we got to the United Kingdom. But now all I can do is stare at the reflection of my face on the screen. I do not want Mustafa to know what has become of me. We are finally in the same country, but if we meet he will see a broken man. I do not believe he will recognize me.

You might wonder how those on the Other Side know to use my screen or my body, or even how they find me. My answer: they just know. We are tied to all those we’ve ever loved by cords of light. Those cords can never be broken. Think of them like a fishing line of love. If you tug on one end, the other end feels the tug. And those on the Other Side are always on the lookout for openings between the worlds. They can locate the portal they need. The most important thing for a sitter to know is that he or she doesn’t need a psychic medium to communicate with loved ones who have passed. If we open our minds and our hearts, we will begin to see the signs and messages they send for us to feel their presence in our everyday lives.

I’m not always as brave as I’d like to be. I falter and fail and give in to the screens in my life. And yet, sailing across vast oceans and into ports unknown taught me something vital: there is nothing out there as dark as our doubts, nor as dangerous as our inaction. Go out. See for yourselves. And if what you find there is broken, know that together we can fix it.

Close your eyes and stare into the dark. My father's advice when I couldn't sleep as a little girl. He wouldn't want me to do that now but I've set my mind to the task regardless. I'm staring beyond my closed eyelids. Though I lie still on the ground, I feel perched at the highest point I could possibly be; clutching at a star in the night sky with my legs dangling above cold black nothingness. I take one last look at my fingers wrapped around the light and let go. Down I go, falling, then floating, and, falling again, I wait for the land of my life. I know now, as I knew as that little girl fighting sleep, that behind her gauzed screen of shut-eye, lies colour. It taunts me, dares me to open my eyes and lose sleep. Flashes of red and amber, yellow and white speckle my darkness. I refuse to open them. I rebel and I squeeze my eyelids together tighter to block out the grains of light, mere distractions that keep us awake but a sign that there's life beyond. But there's no life in me. None that I can feel, from where I lie at the bottom of the staircase. My heart beats quicker now, the lone fighter left standing in the ring, a red boxing glove pumping victoriously into the air, refusing to give up. It's the only part of me that cares, the only part that ever cared. It fights to pump the blood around to heal, to replace what I'm losing. But it's all leaving my body as quickly as it's sent; forming a deep black ocean of its own around me where I've fallen. Rushing, rushing, rushing. We are always rushing. Never have enough time here, always trying to make our way there. Need to have left here five minutes ago, need to be there now. The phone rings again and I acknowledge the irony. I could have taken my time and answered it now. Now, not then. I could have taken all the time in the world on each of those steps. But we're always rushing. All, but my heart. That slows now. I don't mind so much. I place my hand on my belly. If my child is gone, and I suspect this is so, I'll join it there. There.....where? Wherever. It; a heartless word. He or she so young; who it was to become, still a question. But there, I will mother it. There, not here. I'll tell it; I'm sorry, sweetheart, I'm sorry I ruined your chances - our chances of a life together.But close your eyes and stare into the darkness now, like Mummy is doing, and we'll find our way together. There's a noise in the room and I feel a presence. 'Oh God, Joyce, oh God. Can you hear me, love? Oh God. Oh God, please no, Hold on love, I'm here. Dad is here.' I don't want to hold on and I feel like telling him so. I hear myself groan, an animal-like whimper and it shocks me, scares me. I have a plan, I want to tell him. I want to go, only then can I be with my baby. Then, not now. He's stopped me from falling but I haven't landed yet. Instead he helps me balance on nothing, hover while I'm forced to make the decision. I want to keep falling but he's calling the ambulance and he's gripping my hand with such ferocity it's as though I'm all he has. He's brushing the hair from my forehead and weeping loudly. I've never heard him weep. Not even when Mum died. He clings to my hand with all of his strength I never knew his old body had and I remember that I am all he has and that he, once again just like before, is my whole world. The blood continues to rush through me. Rushing, rushing, rushing. We are always rushing. Maybe I'm rushing again. Maybe it's not my time to go. I feel the rough skin of old hands squeezing mine, and their intensity and their familiarity force me to open my eyes. Lights fills them and I glimpse his face, a look I never want to see again. He clings to his baby. I know I lost mind; I can't let him lose his. In making my decision I already begin to grieve. I've landed now, the land of my life. And still my heart pumps on. Even when broken it still works.

One screen is labeled "Beetles." [...] The screen is broken into four quadrants, each one showing nearly the same thing. A little schematic and a bunch of text information. The schematics each show a bulbous, oblong shape with a pointed head and a trapezoid on the back. If you tilt your head just right and squint, I suppose it kind of looks like a beetle. Each beetle also hasa name up top: "John," "Paul," "George," and "Ringo." Yeah, I get it. I'm not laughing, but I get it.

One screen is labeled "Beetles." [...] The screen is broken into four quadrants, each one showing nearly the same thing. A little schematic and a bunch of text information. The schematics each show a bulbous, oblong shape with a pointed head and a trapezoid on the back. If you tilt your head just right and squint, I suppose it kind of looks like a beetle. Each beetle also has a name up top: "John," "Paul," "George," and "Ringo." Yeah, I get it. I'm not laughing, but I get it.

The graphic photographs of Emmett Till’s brutalized body after it was retrieved three days later, flashed across the screen,” says Baker. “I sprang off the couch and screamed ‘No!’ It was the immediate and universal anguish every mother feels at the sight of such cruelty to a child. My heart was broken wide open, and from that moment, I began reviewing how, decade by decade, I had unconsciously been consuming racism my whole life. I read and wrote and read and wrote. And that was the beginning of my journey.

Last Saturday he set out to fix a screen upstairs. He went to the basement to get some nails. Downstairs he saw that the workbench was a mess, so he started organizing the workbench. Then he needed some pegboard to hang up the tools, so he jumped into the car and went to buy the pegboard. At the lumber yard he saw a sale on spray paint, so he bought a can to paint the porch railing and came home totally unaware that he hadn't gotten the pegboard, that he had never finished sorting out the work bench, and that he had started out to fix the broken screen, which we really needed fixed.

0.1 second: This is the limit for perception of cause-and-effect between events. If software waits longer than 0.1 second to show a response to your action, cause-and-effect is broken: the software’s reaction will not seem to be a result of your action. Therefore, on-screen buttons have 0.1 second to show they’ve been clicked; otherwise users will click again. If an object the user is “dragging” lags more than 0.1 second behind the cursor, users will have trouble placing it. This 0.1-second deadline is what HCI researcher Stuart Card calls the perceptual “moment.” It is also close to the limit for perception of smooth animation: 0.063 second/frame (16 frames/second)

I got up to get another glass of water when Zac asked from his spot still at the stove, breaking up the two pounds of ground beef he’d added to the vegetables. “Vanny, were you gonna want me to help you with your draft list again this year?” I groaned. “I forgot. My brother just messaged me about it. I can’t let him win again this year, Zac. I can’t put up with his crap.” He raised his hand in a dismissive gesture. “I got you. Don’t worry about it.” “Thank—what?” Aiden had his glass halfway to his mouth and was frowning. “You play fantasy football?” he asked, referring to the online role-playing game that millions of people participated in. Participants got to build imaginary teams during a mock draft, made up of players throughout the league. I’d been wrangled into playing against my brother and some of our mutual friends about three years ago and had joined in ever since. Back then, I had no idea what the hell a cornerback was, much less a bye week, but I’d learned a lot since then. I nodded slowly at him, feeling like I’d done something wrong. The big guy’s brow furrowed. “Who was on your team last year?” I named the players I could remember, wondering where this was going and not having a good feeling about it. “What was your defensive team?” There it went. I slipped my hands under the counter and averted my eyes to the man at the stove, cursing him silently. “So you see…” The noise Zac tried to muffle was the most obvious snicker in the world. Asshole. “Was I not on your team?” I gulped. “So you see—” “Dallas wasn’t your team?” he accused me, sounding… well, I didn’t know if it was hurt or outraged, but it was definitely something. “Ahh…” I slid a look at the traitor who was by that point trying to muffle his laugh. “Zac helped me with it.” It was the thump that said Zac’s knees hit the floor. “Look, it isn’t that I didn’t choose you specifically. I would choose you if I could, but Zac said Minnesota—” “Minne-sota.” Jesus, he’d broken the state in two. The big guy, honest to God, shook his head. His eyes went from me to Zac in… yep, that was outrage. Aiden held out his hand, wiggling those incredibly long fingers. “Let me see it.” “See what?” “Your roster from last year.” I sighed and pulled my phone out of the fanny pack I still had around my waist, unlocking the screen and opening the app. Handing it over, I watched his face as he looked through my roster and felt guilty as hell. I’d been planning on choosing Dallas just because Aiden was on the team, but I really had let Zac steer me elsewhere. Apparently, just because you had the best defensive end in the country on your team, didn’t mean everyone else held up their end of the bargain. Plus, he’d missed almost the entire season. He didn’t have to take it so personally.

You are all talking a bit too much, said Armando, who had cautioned them from the beginning to stay out of popular culture and in their own interior worlds. When you are caught up in the world that you did not design as support for your life and the life of earth and people, it is like being caught in someone else's dream or nightmare. Many people exist in their lives in this way. I say exist because it is not really living. It is akin to being suspended in a dream one is having at night, a dream over which one has no control. You are going here and there, seeing this and that person; you do not know or care about them usually, they are just there, on your interior screen. Humankind will not survive if we continue in this way, most of us living lives in which our own life is not the center.

AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

This is the very basis of inspiration and friendship, both of which are, in essence, spiritual connections. No two people are exactly the same, though they may share fragments of each other’s personality. Some may feel so uncannily connected as to be kindred spirits, watching the world through different eyes but hearts aligned, the canvas of consciousness cast in common colors, struggling to express the same thoughts and gleefully snapping their fingers when the other puts it just right, finishing each other’s sentences on page, screen, or scroll—across the decades, centuries, millennia. Great men and women influence “a number of people,” even after they die. People will take up their mantle and continue the endless work of human progress. By giving new voice to the echoes fading in time, we elevate both ourselves and the person from whom we draw inspiration. Our souls interpenetrate through the broken chains of eternity, and through us, they live once again.

What blocks black women from getting the cancer care available to white women? One barrier is that black women do not have the same access to mammography. Black neighborhoods have fewer facilities that provide breast cancer screening. The sole mammogram machine in Englewood, a predominantly black area on Chicago’s South Side, was broken for months. Women were sent ten miles away to get screened. Even the state-of-the-art John H. Stroger Hospital, which replaced Chicago’s aging Cook County Hospital in 2002 and serves many of the city’s poor African Americans, ran up a backlog of more than ten thousand women seeking mammograms.5 Mammograms cost about $150, which can be prohibitive for a woman struggling to feed her children. Medicaid paid only about half of the cost, so many hospitals in Chicago didn’t offer mammograms to women on Medicaid. “What does it mean if you have to take three buses to get to a place that gives mammograms, and then when you get there, you say, ‘Here is my Medicaid card,’ and they say, ‘Sorry, we don’t take that’?” Whitman asks.

River was in his office, having spent the day staring at his screen, or else through the window, which had planted a square of sunlight onto the vacant desk he shared the room with. It had once been where Sid Baker sat, and that remained its chief significance even during JK Coe’s tenure, which hadn’t been fair on Coe, but Slough House wasn’t big on fairness. And now Sid was back. All this time, she’d been in the world, hidden away; partly erased but still breathing, waiting for the moment to appear to him, in his grandfather’s study. For months he’d been wondering what secrets might be preserved in that room, encrypted among a wealth of facts and fictions. Bringing them into the light would be a task for an archivist—a Molly Doran. He remembered sitting in the kitchen once, watching his grandmother prepare a Christmas goose: this had involved removing its organs, which Rose had set about with the same unhurried calm she had approached most things, explaining as she did so the word haruspicate. To divine the future from the entrails of birds or beasts. He’d planned the opposite: to unshelve those books, crack their spines, break their wings, and examine their innards for clues to the past. His grandfather’s past, he’d assumed. Instead, what he’d found in that room was something broken off from his own life. Now read on.

She's barely gained consciousness and when she sees me standing over her naked, I can imagine my virtual absence of humanity fills her with mind-bending horror. I've situated the body in front of the new Toshiba Television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I'm wearing: a Joseph Abboud suit, tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I'm kneeing on the floor beside a corpse eating the girl's brain gobbling it down spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink fleshy meat. "Can you see?" I asked the girl not on the Television set. "Can you see this, are you watching?" I whisper. I try using the power drill on her, forcing it into her mouth but she's conscious enough, has strength to close her teeth clamping them down and even though the drill goes through the teeth quickly it fails to interest me. So I hold her head up, blood dribbling from her mouth and make her watch the rest of the tape. While she's looking at the girl on the screen bleed from almost every possible orifice I'm hoping she realizes that this would've happened to her no matter what. That she would've ended up here lying on the floor in my apartment hands nailed to posts, cheese and broken glass pushed up into her cunt. Her head cracked and bleeding purple no matter what other choice she might have made.

He opened his eyes to the real world. Everything was moving with the slowness of a broken pict screen. Around him the Exiles of the Thousand Sons stood in the ruins of Tizca. Above him lights swelled within the storm cloud as the shells fell from the heavens. He reached up to his chest. The cracked back of a jade scarab found his fingers. His mind was suddenly empty, suddenly still. He felt the stone of the jade scarab. It was warm to his touch, just as it had been before, when Prospero had died under the axes of the Wolves. He knew that perhaps he alone of his brothers had kept that broken memento of their first flight from Prospero. Then it had unified the Legion, as Magnus had given the last of his power to save those who survived. Now, Ahriman did not need it to draw his brothers together. They were him and he was them. But the scarab mattered. It was not a connection to his brothers. It was a connection to the past, a connection to that first journey across space and time, a connection to the bridge that Magnus had created between Prospero and their refuge in the Eye. A key to opening that way again. You cannot step in the same river twice, he thought, the ancient words rising unbidden to his mind. Above him tears of flame fell from the frozen sky. For it is not the same river. He gripped the scarab and closed his eyes. And you are not the same man.

Reading a screenful of information is quite a different thing from looking. It is a digital form of exploration in which the eye moves along an endless broken line. The relationship to the interlocutor in communication, like the relationship to knowledge in data-handling, is similar: tactile and exploratory. A computer-generated voice, even a voice over the telephone, is a tactile voice, neutral and functional. It is no longer in fact exactly a voice, any more than looking at a screen is exactly looking. The whole paradigm of the sensory has changed. The tactility here is not the organic sense of touch: it implies merely an epidermal contiguity of eye and image, the collapse of the aesthetic distance involved in looking. We draw ever closer to the surface of the screen; our gaze is, as it were, strewn across the image. We no longer have the spectator's distance from the stage - all theatrical conventions are gone. That we fall so easily into the screen's coma of the imagination is due to the fact that the screen presents a perpetual void that we are invited to fill. Proxemics of images: promiscuity of images: tactile pornography of images. Yet the image is always light years away. It is invariably a tele-image - an image located at a very special kind of distance which can only be described as unbridgeable by the body. The body can cross the distance that separates it from language, from the stage, or from the mirror - this is what keeps it human and allows it to partake in exchange. But the screen is merely virtual - and hence unbridgeable. This is why it partakes only of that abstract - definitively abstract - form known as communication.

I probably won’t be seeing you again, will I? I mean, I know the others might come back, but you…” He trails off, but picks up the thought again a moment later. “Just seems like you’ll be happy to leave it behind, that’s all.” “Yeah, you’re probably right.” I look at my shoes. “You sure you won’t come?” “Can’t. Shauna can’t wheel around where you guys are going, and it’s not like I’m gonna leave her, you know?” He touches his jaw, lightly, testing the skin. “Make sure Uri doesn’t drink too much, okay?” “Yeah,” I say. “No, I mean it,” he says, and his voice dips down the way it always does when he’s being serious, for once. “Promise you’ll look out for him?” It’s always been clear to me, since I met them, that Zeke and Uriah were closer than most brothers. They lost their father when they were young, and I suspect Zeke began to walk the line between parent and sibling after that. I can’t imagine what it feels like for Zeke to watch him leave the city now, especially as broken by grief as Uriah is by Marlene’s death. “I promise,” I say. I know I should leave, but I have to stay in this moment for a little while, feeling its significance. Zeke was one of the first friends I made in Dauntless, after I survived initiation. Then he worked in the control room with me, watching the cameras and writing stupid programs that spelled out words on the screen or played guessing games with numbers. He never asked me for my real name, or why a first-ranked initiate ended up in security and instruction instead of leadership. He demanded nothing from me. “Let’s just hug already,” he says. Keeping one hand firm on Caleb’s arm, I wrap my free arm around Zeke, and he does the same. When we break apart, I pull Caleb down the alley, and can’t resist calling back, “I’ll miss you.” “You too, sweetie!” He grins, and his teeth are white in the twilight. They are the last thing I see of him before I have to turn and set out at a trot for the train.

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea's was anything very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to "find their feet" among them, while their elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

There is no word to describe exactly what the High Line is to the non-architects among us, nor the collective reframing process required to see beyond its dingy path. 24 The promenade’s landscaping and minimal architectural interference is meant to find a balance between “melancholia and exuberance,” Diller told me. “Whatever that intermediate thing is, it’s ineffable and is kind of what makes the High Line so popular.” “Part of what is so successful about the High Line is that it looks like it’s about nothing,” Diller said. Everything is prohibited on the promenade but the act of moving forward or stopping to look at the vistas from that vantage point. A dedicated place for strolling, where there are no dogs, no bicycles, or wheeled objects of any kind, it is “radically old fashioned,” designed to let us do what we ordinarily don’t, like taking time to linger and gaze at passing traffic. There is even a “sunken overlook” viewing station with movie-theater-style rows of descending seats and a window instead of a screen to see Tenth Avenue’s traffic instead of a featured film. Looking at the path beneath our feet and the view before us are the High Line’s activities. The High Line’s path will extend up the island in nearly interminable stages, “perpetually unfinished.” 25 As if to underscore it, on the west-facing side of the High Line, with views of the skyline and the Hudson River, sculptor Anatsui erected a monumental mural, Broken Bridge II, a three-dimensional painting the size of a city block made of flattened, dull-finish tin and mirrors with expert placement and hours of scaling. The vista in its upper reaches blends sky and land “in such a way that you do not know where mirrors end and sky begins.” 26 Anatsui, known for his radiant, monumental murals with a unique luster, fashioned as they are out of recycled metal bottle caps from his studio in Nigeria, starts his work from an approximate center with exquisite discards. He then builds outward, unscrolling the once-scattered shards so that they shine in their new form, as if they could unfurl to the full extent of vision.

I wrote once in a prayer, “Dear God, your work in the world is always done by sinners, or else it would never get done; help us to realize this and practice the grace and forgiveness you first gave us.” But when I was talking about sinners in that case, it was just the broken beautiful people like myself and the others in my community, not my theological “other.

None of the books or movies in my room appealed to me now; I was well and truly sick of staring at a page or a screen.

Sometimes restoring the balance takes more insidious forms, as with P.J.K., a stockbroker: “I saw all the money those people were stealing, and I thought, ‘I want a slice.’” One day he realized he could execute large trades by using a shared phone on the trading floor. “I picked up some phones, pressed a bunch of buttons and then ran to a Telerate screen to watch the market plunge. . . .

What in the—? My begonias!” he heard someone say behind him. Nick looked over his shoulder. A small but muscular woman in sweaty workout clothes was stepping out of a big shiny car in the neighbor’s driveway. She was gaping in horror at the chewed-up flowerbed and the smoking lawn mower. Scowling, she turned toward Uncle Newt’s house. And the scowl didn’t go away when she noticed Nick looking back at her. In fact, it got scowlier. Nick smiled weakly, waved, and hurried into the house. He closed the door behind him. “Whoa,” he said when his eyes adjusted to the gloom inside. Cluttering the long hall in front of him were dozens of old computers, a telescope, a metal detector connected to a pair of bulky earphones, an old-fashioned diving suit complete with brass helmet, a stuffed polar bear (the real, dead kind), a chainsaw, something that looked like a flamethrower (but couldn’t be … right?), a box marked KEEP REFRIGERATED, another marked THIS END UP (upside down), and a fully lit Christmas tree decorated with ornaments made from broken beakers and test tubes (it was June). Exposed wires and power cables poked out of the plaster and veered off around every corner, and there were so many diplomas and science prizes and patents hanging (all of them earned by Newton Galileo Holt, a.k.a. Uncle Newt) that barely an inch of wall was left uncovered. Off to the left was a living room lined with enough books to put some libraries to shame, a semitransparent couch made of inflated plastic bags, and a wide-screen TV connected by frayed cords to a small trampoline.

These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. There are hundreds of data-mining companies that sell landlords tenant screening reports listing past evictions and court filings.2 These days, housing courts swell, forcing commissioners to settle cases in hallways or makeshift offices crammed with old desks and broken file cabinets—and most tenants don’t even show up. Low-income families have grown used to the rumble of moving trucks, the early-morning knocks at the door, the belongings lining the curb. Families

Love demands you lie down and die in the small moments, the moments not scripted for screens, but written into the inner hem of a heart that can change how someone breathes.

When I look at this world I feel a deep pain. A burden in my soul. This overwhelming sadness threatens to engulf me, to crush me with waves of despair. Who can I trust but you? Our Western civilization has fallen foul to false idols. Community is replaced by screen's of various sizes. Friendship is reduced to a virtual status. Yet in You I find community. In you I find friendship. The wife you provided, the baby on the way. The love of this world is enmity with you. The world's love blows hot and cold. A politics of hate, a muffled church, neighbourhoods of fear and pain - Broken, All Broken! But, Your light still shines. Pockets of hope, sparkles in the night. The Sunrise is coming!

Once gave up meat for 6 months, but was broken by the smell of turkey bacon.

I feel like a fool.” “You aren’t.” “I don’t want to be this person. God! I feel like you’ve been trying to pick me up off the floor for weeks!” “You’ve had a string of really shitty luck, honey.” I laughed. And it turned to tears again. My phone buzzed on the coffee table where I’d set it down. I don’t think I can handle more of Jonathan wanting to talk. What more was there to say? When I didn’t move toward the phone, Logek picked it up and looked at the screen. She turned it toward me so that I could see. Adam. “Shall we read it?” I shrugged and started crying again. Who gives a shit what he has to say? Logek looked at the screen and frowned. She read it aloud. “The tragic marble fortress is going to bed. See you tomorrow, yes?” Logek just looked at me with lowered brows, waiting to see if I would explain. I sniffed, then straightened my shoulders. Time to pull yourself up, Kate. This fragile, damaged girl is not you. I blew out a long sigh. “Let’s see. We got into it a little after work when he followed me out of the building. I sort of gave him my ‘you’re a broken toy and I’m not the least bit interested in a cold fish like you’ speech. I guess he was wondering if it would be enough to make me quit.” Logek, god love her, dropped her head back onto the couch and started laughing

Tendrils of jarring orange tainted the heavens, warped into tattered remnants of distorted nebulas, the antithetical sunset thrown into macabre shadows of disarray until it became whole, but always broken, a growing mass that rushed sickeningly nearer, as I stared in horrified disbelief through the screen glass door in our living room.

The deepest form of self-love is not centering your happiness around others. It's accepting you’ll disappoint a few along your journey. It's not earning the world's approval, but feeling at peace in your own skin, unmoved by how others perceive you. It’s not feeling unsettled until you reach all your goals, but finding joy in how far you made it. It's not regretting past decisions, experiences, or relationships, but unwrapping silver linings and letting aha moments be your closure. The deepest form of self-love is not doubting yourself when honest love shows up, but welcoming it with confidence because you know every cell in your body is deserving of it. It's not convincing yourself that the world has turned its back on you when a situation arises, but having faith that you will rise again and settle into your beautiful self as the glorious sun does for the sky every morning. The deepest form of self-love is feeling proud of the life you're living despite how it may look on someone's screen, despite not capturing a sacred moment and uploading it in time. It's understanding that happiness is always in your hands, that it always starts with you.

Place Message Here" I knew that somewhere Jesus wept. --Larry Brown, Dirty Work That was when our love began for me, though late, the way a flock of darkness settles over your shoulders. I remember the muted reflections that smudged the water prowling among the lingering rocks, a snail crawling out of its shell, the drizzle of light, the blackened windows. It was when that the sun peeled away the dark from the air, the surface of the water, then the soul. It was only then that I could read the shadows that followed our words. It seemed that the whole planet was taking aim at our future. I thought, then, that I could see your own soul in the constant waves tearing unconcerned at the impenetrable dunes. I wanted, then, to believe the moon is a flower, fragrant, its stem tossed across the water. It was then that I entered some other world, the way your life wakes suddenly in the middle of the night to find your own worn-out dreams lying in sheets around you, an empty bottle on the table, and yet some voice stumbling down the hallway of the wind trying the locked doors of the heart, calling out your name. It was then on that shore after I heard the news of my friend's heart tearing open like a wet paper bag. I was standing where Marconi sent his messages which seemed to fill the air, still, like swallows. There is always another life in the corner of our eyes, one that begins because our poor words have never said what we meant at the time. Today, here, ladybugs fill my porch screen trying to reach the early sun that radiates through the fine mesh. They halt there like messages never received, empty husks of some abandoned future we can never know. Why is it we love so fully what has washed up on the beaches of our hearts, those lost messages, lost friends, the daylight stars we never get to see? Bad luck never takes a vacation, my friend once wrote. It lies there among the broken shells and stones we collect, a story he would say begins with you, with me, a story that is forever lost among the backwaters of our lives, our endless fear of ourselves, and our endless need for hope, a story, perhaps an answer, a word suddenly on wing, the simple sound of a torn heart, or the unmistakable scent of the morning's fading moon. Richard Jackson, The Cortland Review. Spring 2005.

Stacey's trailer looks exactly as I remember it, only it may be painted a different color. The whole place is tidy, €”standing in stark contrast to the neighbors on both sides. At the trailer to the left, a broken screen door flaps in the breeze, banging against the paneling every few seconds. At the place on the right, there are several giant stacks of tires, overgrown with weeds that obscure the steps leading up to the door.

It was hard to invest in a person when one saw how things passed. Take the ball player, for example, who dedicates his life, gets injured, and then watches the sport proceed without him. He sits on his leather couch, watching better athletes run across his television screen, younger ones on renovated fields. And he, who sacrificed his sweat, youth, and sanity to the sport and knew coaches, teammates, and even janitors at the stadium like brothers—is forced to still live afterward. His teammates said kind words before a match, hugged him after a goal, but now seem to be focused on new seasons and new goals. He gets left behind. Did none of it mean anything? He cries for the fast world to stop and says, “Slow down. This pains me. We were just here. I used to joke with you. We said we loved each other. Wait for me. Will you just wait for me?” Those hands he shook after a victory could not care for the weeping, broken-footed man hiding in the shadows of his home, once lit by the sun, once the life of the party. When Andrei walked into a job now, or even met someone for the first time, he thought: How long will it take you to forget me?

As Gen stares at the screen with wide eyes, in that moment, I know I’ll do anything for her and the baby. Whatever they need—whatever they want. I’ll give it to them.

I could see [my mother] through the walls of the doctor's office--she'd be clutching a Tupperware of sliced fruit as a surprise and consolation for the loss of my birth-control virginity as she sat in the waiting room on a broken vinyl chair, magazine covers showing glamorous white movie stars with hair-sprayed ponytails stacked next to her, American soap operas depicting fake amnesia on the television screen above--for them, amnesia was a plot point, and for me, amnesia was a method of tolerance, a method for getting through every headache, through every medical procedure, through each doctor's office visit.

Social networks like Facebook seem impelled by a similar aspiration. Through the statistical "discovery" of potential friends, the provision of "Like" buttons and other clickable tokens of affection, and the automated management of many of the time-consuming aspects of personal relations, they seek to streamline the messy process of affiliation. Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, celebrates all of this as "frictionless sharing"--the removal of conscious effort from socializing. But there's something repugnant about applying the bureaucratic ideals of speed, productivity, and standardization to our relations with others. The most meaningful bonds aren't forged through transactions in a marketplace or other routinized exchanges of data. People aren't notes on a network grid. The bonds require trust and courtesy and sacrifice, all of which, at least to a technocrat's mind, are sources of inefficiency and inconvenience. Removing the friction from social attachments doesn't strengthen them; it weakens them. It makes them more like the attachments between consumers and products--easily formed and just as easily broken. Like meddlesome parents who never let their kids do anything on their own, Google, Facebook, and other makers of personal software end up demeaning and diminishing qualities of character that, at least in the past, have been seen as essential to a full and vigorous life: ingenuity, curiosity, independence, perseverance, daring. It may be that in the future we'll only experience such virtues vicariously, though the exploits of action figures like John Marston in the fantasy worlds we enter through screens.

Mimi took off at a dead run across the yard.  She took the stairs in a running leap, and shot through her dog door. From inside, I heard a scream.  Panicked shouting.  Through the screen, and my multiple broken windows, I heard clattering.  Glass breaking.  There was heavy thumping as if someone were running up my stairs.  Another shriek.  The plastic taped over my windows billowed.

My teeth clatter in my mouth as everything ripples and shudders in the storm of shells, whining, whizzing. The kid on the bicycle rolls out of sight. Untouched. A miracle. A dream. The shells abruptly cease and there is only the settling creak of the car seat, a scatter of twittering birds in the shrubs and trees. I could use some gum. Where do you buy gum so early besides the service station? It seems wrong to go there since we don't need any gasoline. We don't drive enough. A tank of gas lasts us forever. I get behind the wheel and in the mirror I can see my eyelids fluttering. I sit squeezing the steering wheel until I realize I haven't started the engine. The garage conceals me. I don't want to go out into the open. A horse whinnys – are they bringing up the artillery? It's the farm field where old Wallam tills a little garden, his yard is the biggest and runs alongside the back of ours to the farm where his family has their orchards. What's wrong with me? Sounds of explosions, bullets, voices of men. Volleys. I smell smoke. Burning things, festering ruptured corpses with maggots pulsing under horrible skin and the shells, the horse, it's hit, it shrieks, explodes apart – can we pull the gun by hand? The crew is dead too, bullets are making their bodies jump even after they have broken apart like smashed holiday nuts. I want to scream. Maybe I am? I begin breathing rapidly. I don't know how long I am there but I hear the screen door open and I key the ignition. “Car troubles?” Mr. Kincaid calls out to me from the front porch. “No troubles,” I say setting my arm out the window and holding the mirror to keep my hand steady. “Lovely day.” The sun was really rising, taking the temperature up with it, hot shards of searing light coming over the treetops to stab at everything that couldn't find the shade. I couldn't find the shade.

Bianca swallowed past the biter chunks of broken heart clogging her throat. “I’m not going to kill him.” From her listening post, Vivi shot her a wicked grin. “Would have been my first plan of action.” “Whacking someone is always your first idea,” Lexie said, her laptop screen giving her green highlights an otherworldly glow. “True.” Vivi shrugged her deceptively small shoulders, a snarky grin curling her blood-red lips. “That’s what makes me so damn charming.

These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. There are hundreds of data-mining companies that sell landlords tenant screening reports listing past evictions and court filings.2 These days, housing courts swell, forcing commissioners to settle cases in hallways or makeshift offices crammed with old desks and broken file cabinets—and most tenants don’t even show up. Low-income families have grown used to the rumble of moving trucks, the early-morning knocks at the door, the belongings lining the curb.

Marty could see Angie had to be standing on her broken foot, banging herself against the window quite forcefully. The interior screen frame was already ripped and bent, but Marty’s greatest concern was how much pain poor Angie must be suffering with that injured foot.

Miss Gail yanked open the screen door and charged straight into her room, immediately to the left of the front entrance. He jumped to his feet, the cord of the earpiece pulling him up short like a dog on a leash. She slapped the door shut behind her. In the brief seconds he had, he catalogued mussed hair, pale face, red nose, and fresh tears. “Would you like to join my family for supper, Mr. Palmer?” Miss Honnkernamp asked. “Now that we know what your favorite is, I’m sure—” Throwing off the earpiece, he yanked the cable from the jack and rushed to her bedroom door. “Miss Gail? Are you all right? Are you hurt? What’s happened?” No answer. He cocked his ear and held himself still. The sound of suppressed sobs came from the direction of the veranda. Pushing open the screen, he stuck his head out. The crying was louder. He looked toward the swing, then remembered. Her window. It was open. Easing onto the porch, he stood and listened. Whatever happened had been catastrophic. She took deep, broken breaths, followed by a long series of quiet, staccato sobs. He rubbed his mouth. What in tarnation?

Walking through the inert office that night, the dark broken only by the flicker of a screen saver dancing alone, I thought that if I could ever do a background check on myself, I knew exactly what I'd do with it. I wouldn't even read it, just take it somewhere sacred and set it on fire.

Chaotic or disordered distributions are symmetrical on the average. An observer cannot conclude anything about his location from looking around him. An example is the chaotic disposition of sand grains at the beach, or of flecks of light on a television screen when the station closes down. In the chaotic distribution, no location or direction is preferred. Only when there is structure appearing in a chaotic distribution does orientation become possible, as the overall symmetry is broken.

The world is condensing, attention spans narrowing to tiny screens, and there are people who are wittier and smarter, who know how to write for those nanospaces.

Hannah wanted to take things slowly and not to rush into a relationship again. She wanted to restore the trust between them. Ryan understood. And deep down, he couldn’t deny he felt a little relieved. * * * They didn’t have sex. They didn’t kiss. They went on friendly dates. More often than not, they watched movies. They sat next to each other, their eyes glued to the TV screen, their bodies inches apart. It should have felt familiar, but it didn’t. A month ago, he would have taken her hand. A month ago, she would have put her head on his shoulder. Now there was something awkward in the air, something hard and broken. One evening, he tried, anyway. He took her hand. Her fingers were slim and dainty. Four minutes later, he let go and curled his hand by his thigh. He cleared his throat and said, “You want a drink?” “No,” Hannah said, her tone very neutral. “And you shouldn’t either.” His jaw tightened. He said nothing. They barely looked at each other for the rest of the evening. After she finally left, he grabbed a beer out of the fridge, threw himself on the couch and brought the bottle to his lips.

She’d sent a screenshot of a Stories poll. A picture of me, back turned and phone to my ear, took up the left side of the screen; a familiar purple unicorn dominated the right side. The question was simple: Who would you rather cuddle with? Mr. Harper or Mr. Unicorn? “You’re losing, by the way,” Stella said. “Mr. Unicorn is beating you fifty-three to forty-seven percent.” I stared at her, sure I was hearing wrong and that she didn’t have the fucking audacity to pit me against a raggedy stuffed animal with a crooked eye in some absurd social media poll. I was also sure I couldn’t be losing to said stuffed animal. “The poll must be broken because that’s ridiculous.” I tried not to sound as insulted as I felt. “It’s not, but you have twenty-three hours and fifty-one minutes to catch up.” Stella’s smile dimmed, and a touch of nerves resurfaced in her eyes. “Draw him out with more posts, right?

I ain't the man in the silver screen, Got more scars than what can be seen. I walk a line that's thin and frayed, With every step, a price is paid. 'Cause I'm not perfect, I've got my demons, They dance in the shadows, they fight for reasons. But I stand tall, through the trials I roam, I'm not perfect, but I'm finding home. In the mirror, the truth stares back, A life of color in a world of black. I've made mistakes, I've told some lies, But redemption's song is my reprise. 'Cause I'm not perfect, I've got my demons, They whisper doubts, and plot their treasons. But I stand strong, in the light I bask, I'm not perfect, but I'm up to the task. The road is long, the night is deep, But I've got promises to keep. For every demon that I face, There's a grace that I embrace. So here's to the fighters, the broken hearts, To the dreamers playing their parts. We're all just trying to find our way, In the story of our own play. Yeah, I'm not perfect, I've got my demons, They rage like storms, through all the seasons. But I stand brave, with hope in my soul, I'm not perfect, but I'm on a roll. So let the music play, let the chorus ring, In the heart of the imperfect, let the truth sing. We've all got demons, but we've got love too, I'm not perfect, but I'm here with you.

She read the route over and over, hoping it would suddenly change, and she wouldn’t have to make that stop. But every time she blinked her eyes, wishing it would be different, it stared back at her through the screen. Those eight letters and two syllables stirred up painful memories of the life she’d spent years running away from. Curesall.

Writing a clean, lean, simple story is one of the hardest things in the world to do. When stories are first born, they’re always big and complicated, but simple stories are more powerful and meaningful. Think of Blaise Pascal’s famous postscript: “I’m sorry for writing such a long letter, but I didn’t have the time to write a shorter one.” Writers are always inclined to make their stories bigger and more complicated than anyone else wants them to be. Luckily, there are gatekeepers to cut us off at the pass. Editors chop novels down to size. Theater directors chop out scenes that don’t work. Producers slice the fat out of screenplays. They take sprawling, complicated messes and find the lean, simple story hiding inside. Ghostbusters was sold to the studio in the form of a forty-page treatment. It was set in the future. New York had been under siege by ghosts for years. There were dozens of teams of competing ghostbusters. Our heroes were tired and bored with their job when the story began. The Marshmallow Man showed up on page 20. The budget would have been bigger than any movie ever made, and far more than anybody was willing to spend. So why did the studio buy it? Because it liked one image: a bunch of guys who live in a firehouse slide down a pole and hop in an old-fashioned ambulance, then go out to catch ghosts. So the studio stripped away all the other stuff, put that image in the middle of the story, spent the first half gradually moving us from a normal world gradually that moment, and spent the second half creating a heroic payoff to that situation. That’s it. That’s all they had time to do. A few years after the success of Ghostbusters, one of the writers/stars of that movie, Harold Ramis, found himself on the other side of the fence. He wanted to direct a script called Groundhog Day, written by first-time screenwriter Danny Rubin. This was a very similar situation: In the first draft of that movie, the weatherman had already repeated the same day 3,650,000 times before the movie began! Everybody loved the script, so Rubin had his pick of directors, but most of them told him up front they wanted him to rewrite the story to begin with the origin of the situation. Ramis won the bidding war by promising Rubin he would stick to the in medias res version. Guess what happened? By the time the movie made it to the screen, Ramis had broken his promise. The final movie spends the first half getting the weatherman into the situation and the second half creating the most heroic payoff.

Trevor pulled his phone out of his pocket and started typing. "What are you doing?" Wren asked. "Texting Jax. Telling him not to open his box." Trevor's phone buzzed in his hand. "Incoming," Trevor said. "Sorry. Gotta be quick. Lawyers not g-pa's lawyers. Don't trust them! Nick." Madly Trevor typed back and spoke out loud so Wren would know his message to Nick. "Hey Cuz, crazy thing. Got the puzzle box from weird lawyer lady. No gargoyle inside. No journal inside. Amulet broken. Box open and glowing. Ideas?" Wren stepped closer so they could both lean over the phone's display, willing it to respond with some wisdom to save them. Seconds ticked by and nothing appeared on the screen. Their heartbeats sped up as a minute went by and then another. Trevor licked his lips. "Did you get any blood on it?" "Ahh, shit!" "That's what he asks?" Wren wailed. "'Did you get any blood on it?' I knew you guys were different, but what kind of family do you have, Trev?

but not in the way it is intended to be.3 For an example of a chain of unintended uses, let us start with Phase One, the computer. The mathematical discipline of combinatorics, here basic science, derived from propositional knowledge, led to the building of computers, or so the story goes. (And, of course, to remind the reader of cherry-picking, we need to take into account the body of theoretical knowledge that went nowhere.) But at first, nobody had an idea what to do with these enormous boxes full of circuits as they were cumbersome, expensive, and their applications were not too widespread, outside of database management, only good to process quantities of data. It is as if one needed to invent an application for the thrill of technology. Baby boomers will remember those mysterious punch cards. Then someone introduced the console to input with the aid of a screen monitor, using a keyboard. This led, of course, to word processing, and the computer took off because of its fitness to word processing, particularly with the microcomputer in the early 1980s. It was convenient, but not much more than that until some other unintended consequence came to be mixed into it. Now Phase Two, the Internet. It had been set up as a resilient military communication network device, developed by a research unit of the Department of Defense called DARPA and got a boost in the days when Ronald Reagan was obsessed with the Soviets. It was meant to allow the United States to survive a generalized military attack. Great idea, but add the personal computer plus Internet and we get social networks, broken marriages, a rise in nerdiness, the ability for a post-Soviet person with social difficulties to find a matching spouse. All that thanks to initial U.S. tax dollars (or rather budget deficit) during Reagan’s anti-Soviet crusade.

Tell them you would like a functional movement screening, postural assessment, and written plan for optimizing your posture.

Colt’s meth business owed a lot to Walmart. Many addicts stole merchandise then redeemed it for gift cards. Colt got a lot of these from his customers, back when the chain gave gift cards for exchanged new items even without a receipt. One of his customers obtained a key to the Walmart laptop cage from a friend who worked at the store. Colt took in several stolen laptops, as well as flat-screen TVs that weren’t under lock and key at Walmart. Some of his customers piled the TVs into their cars so fast that the screens broke. Colt would give them next to nothing in dope. Then he’d buy the same TV from Walmart, return with the broken TV and his new receipt and get a refund.

One understands, then, why the Americans make such a show of their debt. The initiative is supposed to shame the State for its bad management and alert the citizens to an imminent collapse of the finances and public services. But the exorbitant scale of the figures robs them of all meaning. It is, in fact, just a massive advertising exercise and, indeed, the luminous billboard looks for all the world like a triumphant stock market index that has broken all records. The population contemplate it with the fascination they might accord to a world record (though few gather in front of the Beaubourg digital clock to see the run-in to the end of the century). At the same time, the people are collectively in the same situation as the Tupolev test pilot who right up to the last second could see his aircraft nose dive and crash into the ground on his internal video circuit. Did he, by some last-minute reflex, glance at the image as he died? He could have imagined himself living out his last moments in virtual reality. Did the image survive the man if only for a fraction of a second? Or was it the other way about? Does virtual reality survive the real world's catastrophic end?

When doing the property inspection, take note of the following things: • Mold and mildew • Undocumented pets • Broken window blinds •  Holes in doors or in walls •  Evidence of extra people living in the unit •  Smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors (if required)—make sure they exist, are up to code, and work •  Leaks under the kitchen and bathroom sinks •  Dripping water from the bathroom or kitchen sink • Dripping water from the bathtub •  Whether the toilet is continuously running • General cleanliness of the property •  Items piled against heaters or other fire dangers

Hunt held Rigelus’s dead stare on the central screen. A zap of icy wind through his body courtesy of Sandriel warned him to avert his eyes. He did not. He could have sworn the Head of the Asteri smiled. Hunt’s blood turned to ice, not just from Sandriel’s wind, and he lowered his eyes. This empire had been built to last for eternity. In more than fifteen thousand years, it had not broken. This war would not be the thing that ended it. The Asteri said together, “Farewell.” Another small smile from all of them—the worst being Rigelus’s, still directed at Hunt. The screens went dark.

I was not born into a world relatively unaffected by technology like you were. Rather, I was thrust into a world that had already succumbed to its disastrous effects! I have heard it said that the Internet was going to make the world a smaller place, and indeed it has. It has reduced the world from seven billion to just one! Just you, hiding behind your screen, interacting with others hiding behind theirs. The days of legitimate human interaction have been forever tainted by social media. The schedules of our workdays have been compressed tighter by the interventions of e-mails and cellphones. Our lives have been faker and faker, busier and busier and we have yet to realize that within, we are broken, weary and

I had become more interesting than whatever danced across those TV screens. I was the latest zoo exhibit, and I had to suffer this audience until I was through the hall. Part of me wanted to snarl or snap my jaws. I wanted to prove them right and turn into a beast before their eyes, one so feared and hated they wouldn't dare speak its name. I turned my eyes to the end of the hall and did not look away until I made it there.

When Victor asked why I had missed so much of the movie, I stared at the screen and just said, 'Diarrhea.' Because no one ever questions diarrhea. And it was easier than saying the toilet ate my shoe because I do all the things wrong.

Anxiety takes away your social life and your balance: you withdraw from all the social occasions, close into yourself because it is the easiest way. The idea of getting out sends your heart racing and you break out into sweats, secretly wishing that the appointment or meeting gets cancelled. Depression though, undermines deeply inside your body and mind, it creates a whirlwind of negativity and disturbing thoughts from which is hard to get out. It gives us a filter through which we see our reality as distorted, broken and hopeless. Physically your body aches from the inside, your hands gets tingly, you are always tired that it seems impossible to get out of bed daily.

The village in fact was like a deep-running cave still linked to its antic past, a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits and by laws still vaguely ancestral. This cave that we inhabited looked backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens. It was something we just had time to inherit, to inherit and dimly know - the blood and beliefs of generations who had been in this valley since the Stone Age. That continuous contact has at last been broken, the deeper caves sealed off forever. But arriving, as I did, at the end of that age, I caught whiffs of something old as the glaciers. There were ghosts in the stones, in the trees, and the walls, and each field and hill had several. The elder people knew about these things and would refer to them in personal terms, and there were certain landmarks about the valley - tree clumps, corners in the woods - that bore separate, antique, half-muttered names that were certainly older than Christian.

physical therapist, or other certified corrective exercise specialist. Tell them you would like a functional movement screening, postural assessment, and written plan for optimizing your posture.

It is a common occurrence to sit with a precious but struggling son or daughter of God who shares that while they have many friendly people in their life with whom they share a hobby, workspace, or the banter of small talk, they don’t feel they really have any core friends who regularly see and pursue them. They express restlessness at the lack of a place to belong. They are lonely. At the same time, these are almost always the same people who tell me they are “just too busy” to join a small group, ministry team, or even attend church regularly. Chalking their struggles up to God’s injustice, their brokenness, or a problem with the church, most don’t stop to consider a far more obvious truth. We’ve positioned our lives at a pace that is not conducive for building deep friendships. We spend 38 days a year staring at a screen in third person, but have lost the relational rhythms of building roots with actual people.

Writers are lost people. Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it. Writers want to belong to a place that is just beyond their reach, because if they were to reach the place they would have to do the hard work of being in it. Writers don’t belong anywhere, or to anyone, and they do not want to. They are driven by some severance and none of them understands it. Not just writers. Painters. Musicians. Artists. Art is the search for intact things in a world in which all things are broken. That paragraph was dishonest. I am going to rewrite it. Here goes. I am a lost person. I wouldn’t write books if I wasn’t lost. I wouldn’t write anything at all if I wasn’t in search of paradise, and I wouldn’t be in search of paradise if I didn’t need it; if I didn’t think I would be less lost if I were to find it. So I write to find it… but no, not that either, because I am nearing middle-age now and I know there is nothing to find. I know now that my paradise is not in a cave on a South Sea island or in the montane rainforests of Borneo where the gibbons call or in a finca in Patagonia or down the side streets of Mexico City, in a blue house with yellow doors and shutters that the sun comes through and wakes me, and orange trees. There is no paradise out there, so I write to create my paradise on paper or on this blank, flat screen, but something in me always sabotages it and turns it dark. So then I write to reorder the world so that paradise might look possible again even for a moment, for someone. I don’t belong anywhere, or to anyone. I am driven by some severance and I don’t understand it. That’s better.

Hunter smoked a cigarette, his eyes drifting to Spaced, a British comedy, on the huge, flat-screen TV in front of us while fucking her. And they say guys are not good at multitasking.

what was left of the head off-screen with it, leaving behind a perfectly framed Jackson Pollock, if the artist had used only reds and added texture with broken pottery and clumps of cauliflower. With no one to cut the feed, it kept going, streaming the same grisly static scene, animated only by the painfully slow sliding of those shards and clumps down the wall as they submitted to gravity. Deaths like it happened every day in America, enabled by the easy availability of firearms and the increasingly pointless search for anything that mattered

in the light of Hesse’s contribution, the implications of the Outsiders of the first two chapters are altogether clearer. Their problem is the unreality of their lives. They become acutely conscious of it when it begins to pain them, but they are not sure of the source of the pain. The ordinary world loses its values, as it does for a man who has been ill for a very long time. Life takes on the quality of a nightmare, or a cinema sheet when the screen goes blank. These men who had been projecting their hopes and desires into what was passing on the screen suddenly realize they are in a cinema. They ask: Who are we? What are we doing here? With the delusion of the screen identity gone, the causality of its events suddenly broken, they are confronted with a terrifying freedom. In Sartre’s phrase, they are ‘condemned to be free’. Completely new bearings are demanded; a new analysis of this real world of the cinema has to be undertaken. In the shadow world on the screen, every problem had an answer; this may not be true of the world in the cinema. The fact that the screen world has proved to be a delusion arouses the disturbing possibility that the cinema world may be unreal too. ‘When we dream that we dream, we are beginning to wake up,’ Novalis says. Chuang Tzu had once said that he had dreamed he was a butterfly, and now wasn’t sure if he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

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I read it and it is looking oddly former, yet I’m not one- hundred percent sure, I do receive and send out over six hundred texts a day, yet this almost seems like a copy of the same infect to one that I vaguely remember getting, what would be in my mind two days ago- ‘Don’t forget b*tches, it's love-o-grams day!’ Too- strange… this should be Sunday… right? I wanted to text back and say- this already happened, yet before I got a new message started, another one from Jenny popped up on the screen waiting to be opened. I look at the date and it’s the same too, I thought for sure my phone was broken, it has been dropped many times. Yet how could it be wrong? I have to be mistaken. Maybe the whole thing was a messed-up dream? I open it, and it’s not the same, so I thought maybe I am not crazy? It said- ‘B- there in 5 min.’ I knew by the way it was written she was driving fast.

A less than friendly email this morning... [from a booksop customer] After lunch I went to my parents' house to get my shotgun and shoot a kindle (broken screen, bought on eBay for £10)

A clocked minute of static—a long time to sit and watch nothing, I was all for fast-forwarding but Nakota glared me down—then a sip of absolute blackness, recorded blackness, rich and menacing as an X ray of a cancer. Nakota, lips parting to say something but the thought drowned in the flash of an image: something like bloody stalks, caressing the screen like hands behind the glass, so greedily intimate even Nakota gave a tiny backstepping whoop. Then as if a barrier shattered, ferocious fun, whatever provided the images warming to this game: a vast black grin like the Funhole itself become its namesake, black asshole-mouth studded with teeth or bones like broken glass and in that Pandora opening Nakota breathless and me with my mouth hanging wide open, village idiot at freak show, a vertiginous glide forward as upon the screen came things I didn’t want to know about, oh yes I’m quite sophisticated, quite the bent voyeur, I can laugh at stuff that would make you vomit but how would you like to see the ecstatic prance of self-evisceration, a figure carving itself, re-created in a harsh new form from what seemed to be its own hot guts, becoming no figure at all but the absence of one, a cookie-cutter shape and in but not contained by its outline a blackness, a vortex of nothing so final that beside it the Funhole was harmless, do you see what I’m saying, the Funhole was a goddamned carnival ride next to this nonfigure and all at once what I wanted least, least, far less than to be struck blind or any kind of petty death was to see the figure turn (as it did now) in slick almost pornographic slowness and show me, show me what there was to see

Not to diminish your accomplishments, but the Allegiant are still too insignificant to be any more than a small uprising,” Marcus says. “There are more factionless than any of us knew. You do need me. You know it.” My father has a way of persuading people without charm that has always confused me. He states his opinions as if they’re facts, and somehow his complete lack of doubt makes you believe him. That quality frightens me now, because I know what he told me: that I was broken, that I was worthless, that I was nothing. How many of those things did he make me believe? I can see Johanna beginning to believe him, thinking of the small cluster of people she has gathered to the Allegiant cause. Thinking of the group she sent outside the fence, with Cara, and never heard from again. Thinking of how alone she is, and how rich his history of leadership is. I want to scream at her through the screens not to trust him, to tell her that he only wants the factions back because he knows he can then take up his place as their leader again. But my voice can’t reach her, wouldn’t be able to even if I was standing right next to her.