Seam Of The Dead Quotes

You see I thought love got easier over, the years so it didn’t hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash. She loved him. She was jealous. She mourned him like the dead. And he just smiled into the air, trapped in the seams of his mind.

His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls....

Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation. In school classrooms children are shown anatomical charts, each depicting different aspects of the human body. One chart reveals the body as a skeleton, another the body as a network of blood vessels, another the nerves, another the muscles. If we made equivalent sets of diagrams to portray ecosystems, one of the layers would show the fungal mycelium that runs through them. We would see sprawling, interlaced webs strung through the soil, through sulfurous sediments hundreds of meters below the surface of the ocean, along coral reefs, through plant and animal bodies both alive and dead, in

What had I intuited at last? Namely this: while nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom! These two slogans are almost the same, but not quite. The first inspiring slogan was Ho Chi Min’s empty suit, which he no longer wore. How could he? He was dead. The second slogan was the tricky one, the joke. It was Uncle Ho’s empty suit turned inside out, a sartorial sensation that only a man of two minds, or a man with no face, dared to wear. This odd suit suited me, for it was of a cutting-edge cut. Wearing this inside-out suit, my seams exposed in an unseemly way, I understood, at last, how our revolution had gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power. In this transformation, we were not unusual. Hadn’t the French and the Americans done exactly the same? Once revolutionaries themselves, they had become imperialists, colonizing and occupying our defiant little land, taking away our freedom in the name of saving us. Our revolution took considerably longer than theirs, and was considerably bloodier, but we made up for lost time. When it came to learning the worst habits of our French masters and their American replacements, we quickly proved ourselves the best. We, too, could abuse grand ideals! Having liberated ourselves in the name of independence and freedom—I was so tired of saying these words!—we then deprived our defeated brethren of the same.

The epitome of our life force turns on the seam where our tempered idealistic expectations meet the annealed exigencies fueling the cataclysm of a pressing personal crisis. Many of us do not decipher who we are and what we truly cherish until we experience the terror of an inconsolable loss. Failure and suffering lead to self-scrutiny.

One thing I’d realized in the last year was that there were some things no one could give you permission to do. All the same, it didn’t mean you couldn’t or shouldn’t do them— particularly when it came to the big things, like saving the world, or journeying to a supernatural seam between realities, or bringing your boyfriend back from the dead.

Misery develops in the insidious seams created by imprecision and faulty human thinking. The cure for unhappiness is finding joy by embracing human nature.

His hands were in his lap, spear-callused but beautiful still. No hands had ever been so gentle, or so deadly. Overhead, the stars were veiled. I could feel the air’s heaviness. There would be a storm tonight. The rain would be soaking, filling up the earth till she burst her seams. It would gush down from the mountaintops, gathering strength to sweep away what stood in its path: animals and houses and men. He is such a flood, I thought.

Cash I made it on the bevel. 1. There is more surface for the nails to grip. 2. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam. 3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant. Water moves easiest up and down or straight across. 4. In a house people are upright two thirds of the time. So the seams and joints are made up-and-down. Because the stress is up-and-down. 5. In a bed where people lie down all the time, the joints and seams are made sideways, because the stress is sideways. 6. Except. 7. A body is not square like a crosstie. 8. Animal magnetism. 9. The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress come slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel. 10. You can see by an old grave that the earth sinks down on the bevel. 11. While in a natural hole it sinks by the center, the stress being up-and- down. 12. So I made it on the bevel. 13. It makes a neater job.

Emptiness was an index. It recorded the incomprehensible chronicle of the metropolis, the demographic realities, how money worked, the cobbled-together lifestyles and roosting habits. The population remained at a miraculous density, it seemed to him, for the empty rooms brimmed with evidence, in the stragglers they did or did not contain, in the busted barricades, in the expired relatives on the futon beds, arms crossed over their chests in ad hoc rites. The rooms stored anthropological clues re: kinship rituals and taboos. How they treated their dead. The rich tended to escape. Entire white-glove buildings were devoid, as Omega discovered after they worried the seams of and then shattered the glass doors to the lobby (no choice, despite the No-No Cards). The rich fled during the convulsions of the great evacuation, dragging their distilled possessions in wheeled luggage of European manufacture, leaving their thousand-dollar floor lamps to attract dust to their silver surfaces and recount luxury to later visitors, bowing like weeping willows over imported pile rugs. A larger percentage of the poor tended to stay, shoving layaway bureaus and media consoles up against the doors. There were those who decided to stay, willfully uncomprehending or stupid or incapacitated by the scope of the disaster, and those who could not leave for a hundred other reasons - because they were waiting for their girlfriend or mother or soul mate to make it home first, because their mobility was compromised or a relative was debilitated, crutched, too young. Because it was too impossible, the enormity of the thought: This is the end. He knew them all from their absences.

Last Night’s Moon," “When will we next walk together under last night’s moon?” - Tu Fu March aspens, mist forest. Green rain pins down the sea, early evening cyanotype. Silver saltlines, weedy toques of low tide, pillow lava’s black spill indelible in the sand. Unbroken broken sea. — Rain sharpens marsh-hair birth-green of the spring firs. In the bog where the dead never disappear, where river birch drown, the surface strewn with reflection. This is the acid-soaked moss that eats bones, keeps flesh; the fermented ground where time stops and doesn’t; dissolves the skull, preserves the brain, wrinkled pearl in black mud. — In the autumn that made love necessary, we stood in rubber boots on the sphagnum raft and learned love is soil–stronger than peat or sea– melting what it holds. The past is not our own. Mole’s ribbon of earth, termite house, soaked sponge. It rises, keloids of rain on wood; spreads, milkweed galaxy, broken pod scattering the debris of attention. Where you are while your body is here, remembering in the cold spring afternoon. The past is a long bone. — Time is like the painter’s lie, no line around apple or along thigh, though the apple aches to its sweet edge, strains to its skin, the seam of density. Invisible line closest to touch. Lines of wet grass on my arm, your tongue’s wet line across my back. All the history in the bone-embedded hills of your body. Everything your mouth remembers. Your hands manipullate in the darkness, silver bromide of desire darkening skin with light. — Disoriented at great depths, confused by the noise of shipping routes, whales hover, small eyes squinting as they consult the magnetic map of the ocean floor. They strain, a thousand miles through cold channels; clicking thrums of distant loneliness bounce off seamounts and abyssal plains. They look up from perpetual dusk to rods of sunlight, a solar forest at the surface. Transfixed in the dark summer kitchen: feet bare on humid linoleum, cilia listening. Feral as the infrared aura of the snake’s prey, the bees’ pointillism, the infrasonic hum of the desert heard by the birds. The nighthawk spans the ceiling; swoops. Hot kitchen air vibrates. I look up to the pattern of stars under its wings.

The golem is for Franz Kafka big headache.." The ache, he confided, grew in Kafka's head, spreading throughout his bones, his joints swelling until there was no longer room in the writer's skin for both himself and the golem; then his skin split at the seams, and the creature burst forth like the Incredible Hulk, thereby expelling Kafka from his own body. What do you have in common with Jews?" Svatopluk was whispering in my ear. "This, Kafka us asked at a crucial point in his life, and replies, 'I have nothing in common with myself, and should sit quietly in corner content that I can breathe.'" Highly suggestible, I saw the monster born from Kafka's brain not as a magical or supernatural creation but a behaimeh member of the community that trafficked in the impossible. I saw the creature lumbering gumby-like behind his plodding master just as I had followed Svat, or poor dead Billy or Aunt Keni Shendeldecker, the only woman I'd ever loved; I saw the citizens of the rabbi's courtyard gossiping, making lame jokes about the golem's marriageability and his alleged prowess in bed.

Panicked, she pushed her hand against the front seam of his pants. “What’re you doing?” he whispered. “I’m cock-blocking you.” He banished a smile behind pursed lips, and as soft as a breath, said, “Cock-blocking isn’t a literal term, and I’m not here to molest you. Though if you’d like to keep your hand right where it is, I wouldn’t mind. It feels nice.” She jerked away and narrowed her eyes.

for the girl who survived the Seam and the Hunger Games, then turned a country of slaves into an army of freedom fighters. “Dead or alive, Katniss Everdeen will remain the face of this rebellion. If ever you waver in your resolve, think of the Mockingjay, and in her you will find the strength you need to rid Panem of its oppressors.” “I had no idea how much I meant to her,” I say, which brings a laugh

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!

A wicked look twinkled in her eye. "I'd say it's time to nut up or shut up. All this talking is gonna make me think you're all bark and no bite. "Wouldn't want to let you down." On a curse, he covered her eager mouth with his, and the world he knew ripped wide open. She tasted cool, sweet, and rich, like ice cream in the summertime, and in that instant Killian knew he would never, ever get enough of her. Laws of nature could be damned. This woman's taste was all he would ever crave. Were there other women? Who the hell cared? Sadie's soft, pliant lips opened to him as he ran his tongue along the seam of her mouth and she welcomed him in. Grasping her head with both hands, he groaned and took full control of the plundering kiss. He tangled his hands in her long, wet hair, which felt like ribbons of satin as it rushed through his fingers. Killian groaned when her tongue swept along his, seeking him out with the same desperation and urgency. This was what he needed. This woman. Her touch. Her taste. How on earth could this be wrong?

Some were encased in gold leaf hammered to an incredible thinness. We were supposed to eat these, gold and all. Some were still in their shells, and when cracked open these proved to contain the sort of party favors esteemed by wealthy hosts: perfumes, pearls, gems, golden chains, and so forth. While the ladies made delighted sounds I tried to figure out how they had gotten those items inside the shells, but to no avail. I could see no hole or seam in the complete shells. Maybe, I thought, they just fed the things to the chickens and ducks and this was the result.

CAPISTRUM MARITALE (The Matrimonial Halter) - Juvenal I Ripples in your watery skin, unseen beneath the volume of groans. I hover above the marital bed, the cat-gut seams of our mattress split. (3 courses, not 8, should suffice, mea delicia.) II Legs straight, you like me tight, it is your size (and shame), you tore me unformed, drew blood before eggs ripened. If I had a little girl... I would call her... Claudia. III I have known only this, a shiver, a million dreams expelled: 'Was I good?' Magnifico! I gasp, floating down, swim to the wash bowl, your dead sons trickling down my legs.

I pull out the blue spool of thread and the sharp needle I always keep in the left pocket of my dress--because old seams have a way of popping, thread unspooling, and you never know when you'll need it--and begin stitching my arm back into place. It takes longer than usual; some of the linen has begun to fray along the seam, and I need to gather a few spare dead leaves from the graveyard to fill my shoulder socket all the way. It's a ghastly thing to lose an arm--or any part of yourself, really--to feel disconnected from your body. Not quite whole. And I've always wished Dr. Finkelstein had stuffed my insides with something other than dried, shriveled leaves, tossed aside by the trees. Cotton perhaps, or rose petals. Something silken and ladylike.

It was a world in the process of falling apart, the seams tearing to let in strange, alien ideas of how life could be lived.

John Vernall lifted up his head, the milk locks that had given him his nickname stirring in the third floor winds, and stared with pale grey eyes out over Lambeth, over London. Snowy's dad had once explained to him and his young sister Thursa how by altering one's altitude, one's level on the upright axis of this seemingly three-planed existence, it was possible to catch a glimpse of the elusive fourth plane, the fourth axis, which was time. Or was at any rate, at least in Snowy's understanding of their father's Bedlam lectures, what most people saw as time from the perspective of a world impermanent and fragile, vanished into nothingness and made anew from nothing with each passing instant, all its substance disappeared into a past that was invisible from their new angle and which thus appeared no longer to be there. For the majority of people, Snowy realised, the previous hour was gone forever and the next did not exist yet. They-were trapped in their thin, moving pane of Now: a filmy membrane that might fatally disintegrate at any moment, stretched between two dreadful absences. This view of life and being as frail, flimsy things that were soon ended did not match in any way with Snowy Vernall's own, especially not from a glorious vantage like his current one, mucky nativity below and only reefs of hurtling cloud above. His increased elevation had proportionately shrunken and reduced the landscape, squashing down the buildings so that if he were by some means to rise higher still, he knew that all the houses, churches and hotels would be eventually compressed in only two dimensions, flattened to a street map or a plan, a smouldering mosaic where the roads and lanes were cobbled silver lines binding factory-black ceramic chips in a Miltonic tableau. From the roof-ridge where he perched, soles angled inwards gripping the damp tiles, the rolling Thames was motionless, a seam of iron amongst the city's dusty strata. He could see from here a river, not just shifting liquid in a stupefying volume. He could see the watercourse's history bound in its form, its snaking path of least resistance through a valley made by the collapse of a great chalk fault somewhere to the south behind him, white scarps crashing in white billows a few hundred feet uphill and a few million years ago. The bulge of Waterloo, off to his north, was simply where the slide of rock and mud had stopped and hardened, mammoth-trodden to a pasture where a thousand chimneys had eventually blossomed, tarry-throated tubeworms gathering around the warm miasma of the railway station. Snowy saw the thumbprint of a giant mathematic power, untold generations caught up in the magnet-pattern of its loops and whorls. On the loose-shoelace stream's far side was banked the scorched metropolis, its edifices rising floor by floor into a different kind of time, the more enduring continuity of architecture, markedly distinct from the clock-governed scurry of humanity occurring on the ground. In London's variously styled and weathered spires or bridges there were interrupted conversations with the dead, with Trinovantes, Romans, Saxons, Normans, their forgotten and obscure agendas told in stone. In celebrated landmarks Snowy heard the lonely, self-infatuated monologues of kings and queens, fraught with anxieties concerning their significance, lives squandered in pursuit of legacy, an optical illusion of the temporary world which they inhabited. The avenues and monuments he overlooked were barricades' against oblivion, ornate breastwork flung up to defer a future in which both the glorious structures and the memories of those who'd founded them did not exist.

Perforation! ‍‍‍Shout it out!‍‍‍ The ‍‍‍‍deliberate punctuated ‍‍‍‍weakening of paperand cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired white pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped-wood fiber. Yet do we have national holidays to celebrate its development? Are‍‍‍‍‍ ‍‍festschrift volumes‍‍‍ pu‍‍‍blish‍‍‍ed honoring the dead greats in the field? People watch the news every night like robots thinking they are learning about their lives, never paying attention to the far more immediate developments that arrive unreported, on the zip-lock perforated top of the ice cream carton, in reply coupons bound in magazines and on the "Please Return This Portion" edging of bill stubs, on sheets of postage stamps and sheets of Publishers Clearing House magazine stamps, on paper towels, in rolls of plastic bags for produce at the supermarket, in strips of hanging file-folder labels. The lines dividing one year from another in your past are perforated, and the mental sensation of detaching a period of your life for closer scrutiny resembles the reluctant guided tearing of a perforated seam.

Life didn't come until Ezekiel spoke to the breath." "What does that mean?" Harper hesitated. She had the strangest sensation of breathlessness, like after a long hike into high altitude just before cresting a mountain. "Well, it's resurrection. From the ashes. From the dust. From the dead things. Your problem is, you're looking at the bones instead of breathing." Daddy sighed. "Maybe your dream was never about a shop at all. Maybe there's a second command, Harper Girl. Another place where you're supposed to breathe life." Harper looked down to the blouse in her lap. To the thread and the needle. She thought of Millie's buttons. And then hope---glorious and beautiful hope---filled the landscape of her heart as the sunrise scatters new light over the mountaintops. Of course! Why hadn't she seen it before? All this time, she had been focused on the store. But her gifting, her dream, was so much more than that. Her gifting was repairing the broken places. Mending forgotten tears and weak seams. Breathing life back into the fabrics that told stories, into the buttons that bind them.

She sat on the wall, opened her book, and paid him no mind. After a few minutes the sounds of clipping stopped, and she felt his gaze on her. She turned a page. “Jane,” he said with a touch of exasperation. “Shh, I’m reading,” she said. “Jane, listen, someone warned me that another fellow heard my telly playing and told Mrs. Wattlesbrook, and I had to toss it out this morning. If they spot me hanging around you..” “You’re not hanging around me, I’m reading.” “Bugger, Jane…” “Martin, please, I’m sorry about your TV but you can’t cast me away now. I’ll go raving mad if I have to sit in that house again all afternoon. I haven’t sewn a thing since junior high Home Ec when I made a pair of gray shorts that ripped at the butt seam the first time I sat down, and I haven’t played pianoforte since I quit from boredom at age twelve, and I haven’t read a book in the middle of the day since college, so you see what a mess I’m in.” “So,” Martin said, digging in his spade. “You’ve come to find me again when there is no one else to flirt with.” Huh! thought Jane. He snapped a dead branch off the trunk. Huh! she thought again. She stood and started to walk away. “Wait.” Martin hopped after her, grabbing her elbow. “I saw you with those actors, parading around the grounds this morning. I hadn’t seen you with them before. In the context. And it bothered me. I mean, you don’t really go in for this stuff, do you?” Jane shrugged. “You do?” “More than I want to, though you’ve been making it seem unnecessary lately.” Martin squinted up at a cloud. “I’ve never understood the women who come here, and you’re one of them. I can’t make sense of it.” “I don’t think I could explain it to a man. If you were a woman, all I’d have to say is ‘Colin Firth in a wet shirt’ and you’d say, ‘Ah.’” “Ah. I mean, aha! is what I mean.” Crap. She’d hoped he would laugh at the Colin Firth thing. And he didn’t. And now the silence made her feel as though she were standing on a seesaw, waiting for the weight to drop on the other side. Then she smelled it. The musty, acrid, sour, curdled, metallic, decaying odor of ending. This wasn’t just a first fight. She’d been in this position too many times not to recognize the signs. “Are you breaking up with me?” she asked. “Were we ever together enough to require breaking up?” Oh. Ouch. She took a step back on that one. Perhaps it was her dress that allowed her to compose herself more quickly than normal. She curtsied. “Pardon the interruption, I mistook you for someone I knew.” She turned and left, wishing for a Victorian-type gown so she could have whipped the full skirts for a satisfying little cracking sound. She had to satisfy herself with emphatically tightening her bonnet ribbon as she marched. You stupid, stupid girl, she thought. You were fantasizing again. Stop it! It had all been going so well. She’d let herself have fun, unwind, not plague a new romance with constant questions such as, What if? And after? And will he love me forever? “Are you breaking up with me…?” she muttered to herself. He must think she was a lunatic. And really, he’d be right. Here she was in Pembrook Park, a place where women hand over scads of dough to hook up with men paid to adore them, but she finds the one man on campus who’s in a position to reject her and then leads him into it. Typical Jane.

Pam was looking especially Pammish tonight. Her blond hair was absolutely straight and shining, her pale blue suit looked like a vintage gem, and she was wearing hose with seams up the back, which she turned around to show me. “Wow,” I said, which was the only possible response. “You’re looking great.” She put my red skirt and red and white blouse to shame. “Yes,” she said with considerable satisfaction. “I am.

My lord!” someone cries. The man straddling me only holds up his hand to silence them. “Go!” he screams. I don’t know what I expect of the God Knife’s damage. This killer already morphed into smoke before my eyes, but I half imagine he might rupture like the villagers he and his men killed with whatever evil magick on which they thrive. Wait. My lord. He and his men. He’s a leader. But…gods. This is no normal Eastlander. Not a commander. Not even one of their sorcerers. I’ve just destroyed the face of their prince. Maybe even killed him if the God Knife is as deadly as Father claimed. It has to be. The prince presses his hand to his bleeding cheek, holding his face together at the seam. Dark eyes lit with violence, he glances at the God Knife, the blade slick with his blood. Everything about him changes, the deep red of his entire being blackening.

On the night of All Hallow's Eve party, I sew my own black gown using the Witch Sisters' chiffon fabric, and a crown made of forged iron and dove feathers from Valentine's Town. I stand at the mirror, pressing down the silky fabric along my ribs, still feeling like myself--like a rag doll, who is also a queen. Instinctively, I tug at the thread on my wrist, but beneath the seam, I feel the softness of cotton, not the crunch of dead leaves. When I was born, my insides were filled with air-puffed cotton--Dream Town cotton. But when Dr. Finkelstein kidnapped me, he replaced the cotton with dead leaves; he wanted no reminders of where I was really from. But now I have filled myself with both: cotton and dead leaves. Because although I am the queen of Halloween Town, I am also a daughter of Dream Town. Made of nightmares and dreams. A little of both.

She rolled a stocking up her leg, careful to keep the seam straight. ‘I don’t want my mind concentrated, I want it receptive to what’s around me. Does that seem odd or dishonourable? I’m trying to find out what I have to do to live like a person. I read books, I read philosophical novels like Camus and Sartre, and I read dead poets like Emily Dickinson and Edna St Vincent Millay, and I also…

The alligator was very dead and had been that way a long time and was dried up and cracked and coming apart at the seams. Nobody wanted to take pictures of the dead alligator since it already had enough problems.

As she hovered over me in the morning light, I watched her finger trace a line from my face down the naked center of my body. “Where’s your seam?” Finger tickling, searching. “Where do you crawl out?” I put her hand where I wanted. We kissed and she searched for the place where I’d break open. When she finally found it, my insides shook and all my skin felt replaced with something new.

This is Northumbria, spanning Durham, Yorkshire, and Northumberland, the northernmost county in England. Here was once the frontier, the last place, where, in the second century, the Romans built their vast fortifications to hold back the Scots and the Picts: first Hadrian’s Wall, running from the banks of the Tyne in the east to the Solway Firth in the west; and later, in a fit of optimism – or arrogance – the more northerly Antonine Wall, from the Firth of Forth in the east to the Firth of Clyde in the west, before abandoning it in favor of a consolidation of the southern defenses. In time, the remains of the Antonine Wall will come to be referred to as the Devil’s Dyke, but by then the Romans will be long gone, their fortresses already falling into ruin, leaving the blood to dry, and the land to bear their scars. Because the land remembers. So the Romans depart, and chaos descends. The Angles invade from Germania, battling the natives and one another, before eventually forging two kingdoms, Northumbria and Mercia, only to see them fall to the Norsemen in the ninth century, who will themselves be defeated by the kings of Wessex. More blood, more scars. In 927 AD, Northumbria becomes part of Athelstan’s united England. In 1066 William the Conqueror lands with his Normans, and crushes the Northumbrian resistance to Norman rule. The Norman castles rise, but they, like the Romans and the Angles before, are forced to defend themselves against the Scots. They leave their dead at Alnwick and Redesdale, Tyndale and Otterburn. The land has a taste for blood now. More conflicts follow – the Wars of the Roses, the Rising in the North, the Civil War, the Jacobite rebellions – and the ground makes way for new bones, but the blood never really dries. Dig deep enough, expose the depths, and one might almost glimpse seams of red and white, like the strata of rock: blood and bone, over and over, the landscape infused by them, forever altered and forever changing. Because the killing never stops.

New state decrees included provisions that the dead be unceremoniously disinfected, packed into double body bags, and hastily buried—normally in unmarked graves—by officially appointed gravediggers wearing protective equipment. This new regulation prevented family members and friends from honoring loved ones, and it negated religious observance. The discovery of a body by a search team thus furnished ample potential for physical confrontations, just as a similar decree had led to clashes in plague-stricken Bombay in 1897–1898. This tense atmosphere was inflamed by multiple conspiracy theories. One Canadian reporter wrote that people “tell me stories about witchcraft, Ebola witch guns, crazy nurses injecting neighbours with Ebola and government conspiracies.”29 Untori, or plague spreaders, were said to be at work, as in the days of the Black Death described by Alessandro Manzoni. Some regarded health-care workers as cannibals or harvesters of body parts for the black market in human organs. The state, rumor also held, had embarked on a secret plot to eliminate the poor. Ebola perhaps was not a disease but a mysterious and lethal chemical. Alternatively, the ongoing land grab was deemed to have found ingenious new methods. Perhaps whites were orchestrating a plan to kill African blacks, or mine owners had discovered a deep seam of ore nearby and wanted to clear the surrounding area.

Eric, clean up here. Make certain no one will find their bodies,” he added as he lent his large frame as a shelter from the wild storm over Raven. “She is not dead,” Mikhail hissed, seeing the compassion in his brother’s eyes. “She is dying, Mikhail.” Jacques’s chest hurt with the knowledge. Mikhail dragged her to him, bent his head until his cheek lay against hers. I know you can hear me; you must drink, Raven. Drink deeply. He felt the faint stirring in his mind. Warmth, regret. So much pain. Let me go. I’m sorry. No! Never, sivamet--my love, do not talk. Just drink. For me, if you love me, for me, for my life, drink what I offer. Before Jacques could guess his intent and try to stop him, Mikhail jabbed deeply into his own jugular. Dark blood spurted. Mikhail forced her mouth to him, using every considerable power he possessed to force compliance. Her will obeyed, her body was almost too weak to follow. She swallowed what poured into her but could not draw deeply on her own. Bolt after bolt of lightning slammed to earth. A tree exploded, and rained fiery sparks. The earth heaved again, rolled, came apart at the seams. Gregori loomed over them, the darkest of the Carpathians, his pale eyes ice cold and holding the stark promise of death. “The wolves did their job,” Eric reported grimly. “The lightning and earthquakes will do the rest.” Jacques ignored him, gripping Mikhail’s shoulder. “Enough, Mikhail. You grow too weak. She has lost too much blood. She has internal injuries.” Black rage filled Mikhail. He threw back his head and roared his denial, the sound exploding through the forest and mountains like the booming of the thunder. Trees burst into flames around them, exploding like sticks of dynamite. “Mikhail.” Jacques refused to relinquish his hold. “Stop her now.” “She has my blood; it will heal her. If we can keep blood in her, get her into the soil, and perform the healing ritual, then she will live.” “Kaćak--stars, Mikhail. It’s enough.” Jacques’s voice held very real fear. Gregori touched Mikhail to draw his attention. Those pale eyes held command. “If you die, my old friend, we have no chance of saving her. We must work together if we are to do this thing.

Her heart thundered away against the inside of her ribs, the sound loud in the relative silence of the room and the flutter pulsing against his skin between their clothes. Her breathing pushed her breasts against her shirt. Against him. Despite the fear pumping adrenaline through her system, she gazed at him with wide eyes that showed an inexplicable trust that grated against him like a sandpaper sponge bath. “What are you going to do to me?” she whispered. Almost like she was daring him. “You’re a mate,” he said. “So?” “Mates are like catnip to my kind—an obsession, a driving urge to find our own. What if I took you now, claimed you, pushed my fire into you?” Her lips fell open on a silent gasp, but fear didn’t reflect back at him even still. “You’d kill me if you aren’t my destined mate.” So, someone had at least warned her of the deadly consequences should the wrong man try to turn her. Had she listened? He squeezed her wrists a little harder, pressing into her so she couldn’t mistake the heavy cock pressing into her belly. “Yes.” “You’d lose a part of your soul as well,” she pointed out. He allowed his lips to tip up in what he fully intended to be a menacing smile. “Perhaps it’s worth it.” She stared back at him for a long minute. Then, suddenly, her heart quieted, her breathing slowed, her body relaxing under his. “Go ahead.” She was fucking daring him. Inside his head, his dragon growled, but not a warning, more like approval. The animal side of him liked this woman. That scared the hell out of him enough to have him fighting the foreign urge to scramble off her. When he said nothing, she tipped her head. “Just like I thought. All bark.” Bulls facing off against a matador in a ring dealt with less provocation than this woman was daring to throw at him. “You talk a good game,” she continued. “But you won’t hurt me.” Irritation spiked and swirled with a rushing need that had gripped him since the second she’d stepped in front of him in the hangar and he’d recognized her. Drake slammed his mouth over hers, his kiss both full of frustration, but also determined to frighten her into some semblance of self-preservation. He kissed her harshly, wildly, even as he continued to pin her to the bed. Except she didn’t whimper or turn away or struggle. Instead, Cami opened her mouth and licked the full seam of his lips, demanding entrance. Fuck. Gods help him, he opened, tangling his tongue with hers, reveling in the give and take. Her flavor melted across his tongue, sweet and tart at the same time, imprinting on his mind. A glow vaguely penetrated his senses behind his closed eyes, followed by a burst of heat that seemed to be originating from her. Almost as fast as it happened, Drake jerked back with a hiss, staring at a glowing spot under her white tank top. The source of the heat. Definitely a dragon mate. Which meant off-limits. Another shifter’s mate. With a groan he rolled away from her, flopping to his back, and flung an arm over his eyes, doing his damnedest to convince his dick to get its head out of the game. “You need to get out of here.

On December 1, 1930, as the Great Depression was raging, the cornflake magnate W. K. Kellogg decided to introduce a six-hour workday at his factory in Battle Creek, Michigan. It was an unmitigated success: Kellogg was able to hire an additional 300 employees and slashed the accident rate by 41%. Moreover, his employees became noticeably more productive. “This isn’t just a theory with us,” Kellogg proudly told a local newspaper. “The unit cost of production is so lowered that we can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.”30 For Kellogg, like Ford, a shorter workweek was simply a matter of good business.31 But for the residents of Battle Creek, it was much more than that. For the first time ever, a local paper reported, they had “real leisure.”32 Parents had time to spare for their children. They had more time to read, garden, and play sports. Suddenly, churches and community centers were bursting at the seams with citizens who now had time to spend on civic life.33 Nearly half a century later, British Prime Minister Edward Heath also discovered the benefits of cornflake capitalism, albeit inadvertently. It was late 1973 and he was at his wits’ end. Inflation was reaching record highs and government expenditures were skyrocketing, and labor unions were dead set against compromise of any kind. As if that weren’t enough, the miners decided to go on strike. With energy consequently in short supply, the Brits turned down their thermostats and donned their heaviest sweaters. December came, and even the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square remained unlit. Heath decided on a radical course of action. On January 1, 1974, he imposed a three-day workweek. Employers were not permitted to use more than three days’ electricity until energy reserves had recovered. Steel magnates predicted that industrial production would plunge 50%. Government ministers feared a catastrophe. When the five-day workweek was reinstated in March 1974, officials set about calculating the total extent of production losses. They had trouble believing their eyes: The grand total was 6%.34