She Sits In Silence Quotes

Just to love! She did not ask to be loved. It was rapture enough just to sit there beside him in silence, alone in the summer night in the white splendor of moonshine, with the wind blowing down on them out of the pine woods.

This is the weird aftermath, when it is not exactly over, and yet you have given it up. You go back and forth in your head, often, about giving it up. It’s hard to understand, when you are sitting there in your chair, having breakfast or whatever, that giving it up is stronger than holding on, that “letting yourself go” could mean you have succeeded rather than failed. You eat your goddamn Cheerios and bicker with the bitch in your head that keeps telling you you’re fat and weak: Shut up, you say, I’m busy, leave me alone. When she leaves you alone, there’s a silence and a solitude that will take some getting used to. You will miss her sometimes...There is, in the end, the letting go.

The library smells like old books — a thousand leather doorways into other worlds. I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers. Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I'll say this is just a place where you can't play music or eat. She's gone. The library sucks.

The hardest lesson is Clare’s solitude. Sometimes I come home and Clare seems kind of irritated; I’ve interrupted some train of thought, broken into the dreary silence of her day. Sometimes I see an expression on Clare’s face that is like a closed door. She has gone inside the room of her mind and is sitting there knitting or something. I’ve discovered that Clare likes to be alone. But when I return from time traveling she is always relieved to see me.

And then there are the cravings.. Oh, la! A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows. She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. She may feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.

After all this time, she still had not found an end to her grief. It was a dark well, an echoing place into which she’d once cast a stone, sure that it would strike bottom and she would stop hurting. Instead, it just kept falling. She forgot about the stone, forgot about the well, sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. Then she would think Liliyana’s name, or her eye would pause on the little boat painted on her bedroom wall, its two-starred flag frozen in the wind. She’d sit down to write a letter and realize she had no one to write to, and the quiet that surrounded her became the silence of the well, of the stone still falling.

- I won't be able to think. I won't be able to work. - Nothing will interfere with your work like suicide. (Silence) - I dreamt that I went to the doctor's and she gave me eight minutes to live. I'd been sitting in the fucking waiting room for half an hour. (A long silence) - Okay, let's do it, let's do the drugs, let's do the chemical lobotomy, let's shut down the higher functions of my brain and perhaps I'll be a bit more fucking capable of living. Let's do it.

Then there are the simple things. The way she fits against my side when we’re sitting together. How she can silence my addled thoughts with one look. The sound of my name from her lips. The way she can make a moment, any moment, a thousands times better when she is there. How the simplest pleasures in life become exciting with the promise of sharing the experience with her.

Lachlain and Emma: 'So you expect us to sit in this enclosed compartment the entire way in silence?' 'Of course not.' She clicked on the radio.

Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible she tells me, not like you think, all darkness and silence. There are windchimes and the smell of lemons, some days it rains, but more often the air is dry and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase built from hair and bone and listen to the voices of the living. I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair, especially when they fight, and when they sing.

Kestrel's eyes slipped shut. She faded in and out of sleep. When Arin spoke again, she wasn't sure whether he expected her to to hear him. 'I remember sitting with my mother in a carriage.' There was a long pause. Then Arin's voice came again in that slow, fluid way that showed the singer in him. 'In my memory, I am small and sleepy, and she is doing something strange. Every time the carriage turns into the sun, she raises her hand as if reaching for something. The light lines her fingers with fire. Then the carriage passes through shadows, and her hand falls. Again sunlight beams through the window, and again her hand lifts. It becomes and eclipse.' Kestrel listened, and it was as if the story itself was an eclipse, drawing its darkness over her. 'Just before I fell asleep,' he said, 'I realized that she was shading my eyes from the sun.' She heard Arin shift, felt him look at her. 'Kestrel.' She imagined how he would sit, lean forward. How he would look in the glow of the carriage lantern. 'Survival isn't wrong. You can sell your honor in small ways, so long as you guard yourself. You can pour a glass of wine like it's meant to be poured, and watch a man drink, and plot your revenge.' Perhaps his head tilted slightly at this. 'You probably plot even in your sleep.' There was a silence as long as a smile. 'Plot away, Kestrel. Survive. If I hadn't lived, no one would remember my mother, not like I do.' Kestrel could no longer deny sleep. It pulled her under. 'And I would never have met you.

I'm sitting her thinking, -God, I swear I will take a vow of silence and move to a monastery and worship you for all my days if you just this once provide me with an invisibility cloak, come on, come on, please please invisibility cloak now now now-. It's very possible that Jane is thinking the same thing, I have no idea, because she's not talking either, and I can't look at her on account of how I'm blinded by embarrassment.

I Hear the sledges with the bells - Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells. II Hear the mellow wedding bells - Golden bells! What a world of happiness their harmony foretells! Through the balmy air of night How they ring out their delight! - From the molten - golden notes, And all in tune, What a liquid ditty floats To the turtle - dove that listens, while she gloats On the moon! Oh, from out the sounding cells, What a gush of euphony voluminously wells! How it swells! How it dwells On the Future! - how it tells Of the rapture that impels To the swinging and the ringing Of the bells, bells, bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells! III Hear the loud alarum bells - Brazen bells! What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells! In the startled ear of night How they scream out their affright! Too much horrified to speak, They can only shriek, shriek, Out of tune, In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire, Leaping higher, higher, higher, With a desperate desire, And a resolute endeavor Now - now to sit, or never, By the side of the pale - faced moon. Oh, the bells, bells, bells! What a tale their terror tells Of Despair! How they clang, and clash and roar! What a horror they outpour On the bosom of the palpitating air! Yet the ear, it fully knows, By the twanging, And the clanging, How the danger ebbs and flows; Yet the ear distinctly tells, In the jangling, And the wrangling, How the danger sinks and swells, By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells - Of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - In the clamor and the clanging of the bells! IV Hear the tolling of the bells - Iron bells! What a world of solemn thought their monody compels! In the silence of the night, How we shiver with affright At the melancholy menace of their tone! For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan. And the people - ah, the people - They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone - They are neither man nor woman - They are neither brute nor human - They are Ghouls: - And their king it is who tolls: - And he rolls, rolls, rolls, Rolls A paean from the bells! And his merry bosom swells With the paean of the bells! And he dances, and he yells; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the paean of the bells: - Of the bells: Keeping time, time, time In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the throbbing of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells: - To the sobbing of the bells: - Keeping time, time, time, As he knells, knells, knells, In a happy Runic rhyme, To the rolling of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells - To the tolling of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells, - To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

Quiet had a roof and it had walls around it, and you could sit inside it. She had never thought of silence as a place.One of the friends, Tom Williams told her,'the place is in your heart, Louise. Everything else is just clutter.

Where are you going?" I asked, as Frank swung his feet off the bed. "I'd hate the dear old thing to be disappointed in us," he answered. Sitting up on the side of the ancient bed, he bounced gently up and down, creating a piercing rhythmic squeak. The Hoovering in the hall stopped abruptly. After a minute or two of bouncing, he gave a loud, theatrical groan and collapsed backward with a twang of protesting springs. I giggled helplessly into a pillow, so as not to disturb the breathless silence outside. Frank waggled his eyebrows at me. "You're supposed to moan ecstatically, not giggle," he admonished in a whisper. "She'll think I'm not a good lover." "You'll have to keep it up for longer than that, if you expect ecstatic moans," I answered. "Two minutes doesn't deserve any more than a giggle." "Inconsiderate little wench. I came here for a rest, remember?" "Lazybones. You'll never manage the next branch on your family tree unless you show a bit more industry than that.

Even though I’m surrounded by pupils, there is this invisible screen between us, and behind the glass wall I am screaming – screaming in my own silence, screaming to be noticed, to be befriended, to be liked. And yet when a friendly looking girl from my maths class comes up to me in the canteen and says ‘Mind if I sit here?’ I just give a quick nod and turn away, hoping to God she won’t try to engage me in conversation.

INEZ: To forget about the others? How utterly absurd! I feel you there, in every pore.Your silence clamours in my ears. You can nail up your mouth, cut your tongue out - but you can't prevent your being there. Can you stop your thoughts? I hear them ticking away like a clock, tick-tock, tick-tock, and I'm certain you hear mine. It's all very well skulking on your sofa, but you're everywhere, and every sound comes to me soiled because you've intercepted it on its way. Why, you've even stolen my face; you know it and I don't ! And what about her, about Estelle? You've stolen her from me, too; if she and I were alone do you suppose she'd treat me as she does? No, take your hands from your face, I won't leave you in peace - that would suit your book too well. You'd go on sitting there, in a sort of trance, like a yogi, and even if I didn't see her I'd feel it in my bones - that she was making every sound, even the rustle of her dress, for your benefit, throwing you smiles you didn't see... Well, I won't stand for that, I prefer to choose my hell; I prefer to look you in the eyes and fight it out face to face.

When she is crowned in jasmine, in needle-flower, in smoke and in fire, he will kneel before he and name her," repeated Rao, in common Zaban. And suddenly Malini was shivering, every inch of her afire with a mad elation that rose up, up in her blood. "He will give the princess of Parijat her fate: He will say..." He swallowed. Raised his eyes, which were fierce and wet. "Name who shall sit upon the throne, princess. Name the flower of empire. Name the head that shall reign beneath a crown of poison. Name the hand that lit the pyre." The silence was deep; a drumming tense silence, drawn taut as a bowstring. "He will name her thus," finished Rao. "And she will know.

She sat silently in her rocking chair. Some people are good at talking, but Granny Weatherwax was good at silence. She could sit so quiet and still that she faded. You forgot she was there. The room became empty. Tiffany thought of it as the I’m-not-here spell, if it was a spell. She reasoned that everyone had something inside them that told the world they were there. That was why you could often sense when someone was behind you, even if they were making no sound at all. You were receiving their I-am-here signal. Some people had a very strong one. They were the people who got served first in shops. Granny Weatherwax had an I-am-here signal that bounced off the mountains when she wanted it to; when she walked into a forest, all the wolves and bears ran out the other side. She could turn it off, too. She was doing that now. Tiffany was having to concentrate to see her. Most of her mind was telling her that there was no one there at all.

there's something about a woman with a load mind that sits in silence, smiling knowing she can crush you with the truth.

The ringtone was a dead giveaway, emphasis on dead . . . creepy organ music. She didn’t even have to glance at the image of fanged bunny slippers on the screen to know who was calling. She just sighed, thumbed it on, and held it to her ear. “Claire! I need you here immediately. Something’s wrong with Bob.” Myrnin, her mad-scientist, blood-addicted boss, sounded actually shaken. “I can’t get him to eat his insects, and I used his favorites. He just sits there.” “Bob,” she repeated, looking at Shane in wide-eyed disbelief. “Bob the spider.” “Just because he’s a spider doesn’t mean he deserves any less concern! Claire, you have a way with him. He likes you.” Just what she needed. Bob the spider liked her. “You do realize that he’s a year old, at least. And spiders don’t live that long.” “You think he’s dead?” Myrnin sounded horrified. So wrong. “Is he curled up?” “No. He’s just quiet.” “Well, maybe he’s not hungry.” “Will you come?” Myrnin asked. He sounded calmer now, but also oddly needy. “It’s been very lonely here these past few days. I’d like your company, at least for a little while.” When she hesitated, he used the pity card. “Please, Claire.” “Fine,” she sighed. “I’m bringing Shane.” After a second of silence, he said, flatly, “Goody,” and hung up.

Helen is one of those people who never say anything, not because she’s shy but because she’s learned—in a way I always mean to—that if you don’t say anything, you make people far more nervous and self-conscious and careful around you than if you do. People like me, we just rush into the vacuum of silence people like Helen float around in; we blather and dither and yakyakyak, and people like Helen just sit there and smile into the wind.

We aren't fighting right now." I blurted out. He gave me a sidelong look. "Do you want to fight?" "No. I hate fighting with you. Verbally, I mean. I don't mind in the gym." I thought I detected the hint of a smile. Always a half-smile for me. Rarely a full one. "I don't like fighting with you either." Sitting next to him there, I marveled at the warm and happy emotions springing up inside me. There was something about being around him that felt so good, that moved me in a way Mason couldn't. You can't force love, I realized, It's there or it isn't. If it's not there, you've got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you've got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love. The next words that came out of my mouth astonished me, both because they were completely unselfish and because I actually meant them. "You should take it." He flinched. "What?" "Tasha's offer. You should take her up on it. It's a really great chance." I remembered my mom's words about being ready for children. I wasn't. Maybe she hadn't been. But Tasha was. And I knew Dimitri was too. They got along really well. He could go be her guardian, have some kids with her...it would be a good deal for both of them. "I never expected to hear you say anything like that," he told me, voice tight. "Especially after-" "What a bitch I've been? Yeah." I tugged his coat tighter against the cold. It smelled like him. It was intoxicating, and I could half-imagine being wrapped in his embrace. Adrian might have been onto something about the power of scent. "Well. Like I said, I don't want to fight anymore. I don't want us to hate each other. And...well..." I squeezed my eyes shut and then opened them. "No matter how I feel about us...I want you to be happy." Silence yet again. I noticed then that my chest hurt. Dimitri reached out and put his arm around me. He pulled me to him, and I rested my head on his chest. "Roza," was all he said. It was the first time he'd really touched me since the night of the lust charm. The practice room had been something different...more animal. This wasn't even about sex. It was just about being close to someone you cared about, about the emotion that kind of connection flooded you with. Dimitri might run off with Tasha, but I would still love him. I would probably always love him. I cared about Mason. But I would probably never love him. I sighed into Dimitri, just wishing I could stay like that forever. It felt right being with him. And-no matter how much the thought of him and Tasha made me ache-doing what was best for him felt right. Now, I knew, it was time to stop being a coward and do something else that was right. Mason had said I needed to learn something about myself. I just had. Reluctantly, I pulled away and handed Dimitri his coat. I stood up. He regarded me curiously, sensing my unease. "Where you going?" he asked. "To break someone's heart," I replied. I admired Dimitri for a heartbeat more-the dark, knowing eyes and silken hair. The I headed inside. I had to apologize to Mason...and tell him there'd never be anything between us.

As writers we are always seeking support. First we should notice that we are already supported every moment. There is the earth below our feet and there is the air, filling our lungs and emptying them. We should begin from this when we need support. There is the sunlight coming through the window and the silence of the morning. Begin from these. Then turn to face a friend and feel how good it is when she says, “I love your work.” Believe her as you believe the floor will hold you up, the chair will let you sit.

Sitting in front of my fireplace, basking in it's warm glow gives me time to reflect upon the sacrifices that it has taken for me to enjoy the security of a good home, in a safe environment. I can hear the soft whisper of the snow as it caresses my window and covers the ground outside in a scintillating display of sparkling lights under the full moon. How many times have our service men and women watched this same scene from a foxhole, or camped in some remote part of the world. Thankful for the silence of that moment, knowing it won’t last long. Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He/she dresses in fatigues and patrols the world restlessly, ensuring that we can have this peaceful night. Every day they give us the gift of this lifestyle that we enjoy, and every night they watch over us. They are warriors, angels, guardians, friends, brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, forming a family that stretches back to the beginning of the country. So tonight when you go to bed say a prayer that God watch over those who watch over us, and thank them for their sacrifices, on and off the battlefield. Pray that they have a peaceful night, and will be home soon with their families who also share their burden. Without them we would not have this moment.

The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her mind contracting and expanding like the main-spring of a clock, and the small noises of midday, which one can ascribe to no definite cause, in a regular rhythm. It was all very real, very big, very impersonal, and after a moment or two she began to raise her first finger and to let it fall on the arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some consciousness of her own existence. She was next overcome by the unspeakable queerness of the fact that she should be sitting in an arm-chair, in the morning, in the middle of the world. Who were the people moving in the house--moving things from one place to another? And life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing, as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the room would remain. Her dissolution became so complete that she could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger. She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all. . . She forgot that she had any fingers to raise. . . The things that existed were so immense and so desolate. . . She continued to be conscious of these vast masses of substance for a long stretch of time, the clock still ticking in the midst of the universal silence.

You have too many annoying opinions.” “Take it up with your mother,” she said cheerfully. “Why don’t we play a game where we sit in silence for the entire ride back?

Spring came early that year and the sweet warm nights made her restless. She walked up and down the streets and through the park. And wherever she went, she saw a boy and a girl together; walking arm-in-arm, sitting on a park bench with their arms around each other, standing closely and in silence in a vestibule. Everyone in the world but Francie had a sweetheart or a friend. She seemed to be the only lonely one in Brooklyn.

He turned his head. They were sitting close together, their shoulders nearly touching. Her eyes were so brown they were almost black, and for once her hair was down. She always wore it tied back in a ruthlessly tight coil. Even the idea of being this near someone should have set his skin crawling. Instead he thought, What happens if I move closer? “I don’t want your prayers,” he said. “What do you want, then?” The old answers came easily to mind. Money. Vengeance. Jordie’s voice in my head silenced forever. But a different reply roared to life inside him, loud, insistent, and unwelcome. You, Inej. You. He

She sees me sitting quietly and starts chatting to me, taking my silence as an indication of inactivity when it’s exactly the opposite; the stiller I seem on the surface, the deeper I’m diving inside myself for treasure.

This is the Death’s-head Moth,” he said. “That’s nightshade she’s sitting on—we’re hoping she’ll lay.” The moth was wonderful and terrible to see, its large brown-black wings tented like a cloak, and on its wide furry back, the signature device that has struck fear in men for as long as men have come upon it suddenly in their happy gardens. The domed skull, a skull that is both skull and face, watching from its dark eyes, the cheekbones, the zygomatic arch traced exquisitely beside the eyes. “Acherontia styx,” Pilcher said. “It’s named for two rivers in Hell. Your man, he drops the bodies in a river every time—did I read that?” “Yes,” Starling said. “Is it rare?” “In this part of the world it is. There aren’t any at all in nature.

As the native drum kept rhythm with the nighttime symphony of the African bush, the cry of a hyrax (a small, furry animal that sounded a lot scarier than it looked) pierced the night. A hyena howled. A warthog ran through our camp. What was he running from? Sitting in front of my tent, I tried to figure everything out. I wouldn’t have called what I did prayer but maybe wonder.    Night after night, I’d listened to the rush of a river or watched my own personal light show as lightning spider-webbed across the heavens, danced in the distance, and serenaded me with a muffled growl. Until a crash—so loud it seemed to break the sky—caused me to twitch as a shiver ran up my spine.    “You know how it is when you feel someone staring at you from across the room?” I said to Truth. “You turn to meet the gaze. It was like that, but I saw no one. I just felt a comforting presence as we sat together in silence.”    “You think it was God?” she asked.    “Yeah, but I called him Fred. Not so overwhelming, more personal.” 

This was the last time I ever saw my mother alive. Just the same, this picture gets all mixed up in my mind with pictures I had of her when she was younger. The way I always see her is the way she used to be on Sunday afternoon, say, when the old folks were talking after the big Sunday dinner. I always see her wearing pale blue. She'd be sitting on the sofa. And my father would be sitting in the easy chair, not far from her. And the living room would be full of church folks and relatives. There they sit, in chairs all around the living room, and the night is creeping up outside, but nobody knows it yet. You can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes and you hear the street noises every now and again, or maybe the jangling beat of a tambourine from one of the churches close by, but it's real quiet in the room. For a moment nobody's talking, but every face looks darkening, like the sky outside. And my mother rocks a little from the waist, and my father's eyes are closed. Everyone is looking at something a child can't see. For a minute they've forgotten the children. Maybe a kid is lying on the rug, half asleep. Maybe somebody's got a kid in his lap and is absent-mindedly stroking the kid's head. Maybe there's a kid, quiet and big-eyed, curled up in a big chair in the corner. The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frighten the child obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes his forehead will never stop-- will never die. He hopes that there will never come a time when the old folks won't be sitting around the living room, talking about where they've come from, and what they've seen, and what's happened to them and their kinfolk. But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won't talk anymore that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he's moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It's what they've come from. It's what they endure. The child knows that they won't talk anymore because if he knows too much about what's happened to them, he'll know too much too soon, about what's going to happen to him.

Margery," I blurted out in a passion of frustration. "I don't know what to make of you!" Nor I you, Mary. Frankly, I cannot begin to comprehend the motives of a person who dedicates a large portion of her life to the contemplation of a God in whom she only marginally believes." I felt stunned, as if she had struck me in the diaphragm. She looked down at me, trying to measure the effect of her words. Mary, you believe in the power that the idea of God has on the human mind. You believe in the way human beings talk about the unknowable, reach for the unattainable, pattern their imperfect lives and offer their paltry best up to the beingless being that created the universe and powers its continuation. What you balk as it believing the evidence of your eyes, that God can reach out and touch a single human life in a concrete way." She smiled a sad, sad smile. "You mustn't be so cold, Mary. If you are, all you will see is a cold God, cold friends, cold love. God is not cold-never cold. God sears with heat, not ice, the heat of a thousand suns, heat that inflames but does not consume. You need warmth, Mary-you, Mary, need it. You fear it, you flirt with it, you imagine that you can stand in its rays and retain your cold intellectual attitude towards it. You imagine that you can love with your brain. Mary, oh my dear Mary, you sit in the hall and listen to me like some wild beast staring at a campfire, unable to leave, fearful of losing your freedom if you come any closer. It won't consume you; I won't capture you. Love does not do either. It only brings life. Please, Mary, don't let yourself be tied up by the bonds of cold academia." Her words, the power of her conviction, broke over me like a great wave, inundating me, robbing me of breath, and, as they receded in the room, they pulled hard at me to folllow. I struggled to keep my footing against the wash of Margery's vision, and only when it began to lose its strength, dissipated against the silence in the room, was I seized by a sudden terror at the nearness of my escape.

She’s one of the few women I’ve met who can sit in silence.

Sit down,” his mother tells him, and Alex feels dread coil deep in his stomach. He has no clue what to expect—knowing your parent as the person who raised you isn’t the same as being able to guess their moves as a world leader. He sits, and the silence hovers over them, his mother’s hands folded in a considering pose against her lips. She looks exhausted. “Are you okay?” she says finally. When he looks up in surprise, there’s no anger in her eyes.

I would give anything not to have to spend the next twenty minutes sitting across from her, because she doesn't believe in letting silence go. No, she has to fill it up with talk. I want to tell her that's what the voices in your head are for, to get you through all the silent parts. But she doesn't want to be with her thoughts unless she's saying them out loud

There’s nothing to be scared of.” Instead of taking Charlie’s pulse – there was really no point – he took one of the old man’s hands in his. He saw Charlie’s wife pulling down a shade in the bedroom, wearing nothing but the slip of Belgian lace he’d bought her for their first anniversary; saw how the ponytail swung over one shoulder when she turned to look at him, her face lit in a smile that was all yes. He saw a Farmall tractor with a striped umbrella raised over the seat. He smelled bacon and heard Frank Sinatra singing ‘Come Fly with Me’ from a cracked Motorola radio sitting on a worktable littered with tools. He saw a hubcap full of rain reflecting a red barn. He tasted blueberries and gutted a deer and fished in some distant lake whose surface was dappled by steady autumn rain. He was sixty, dancing with his wife in the American Legion hall. He was thirty, splitting wood. He was five, wearing shorts and pulling a red wagon. Then the pictures blurred together, the way cards do when they’re shuffled in the hands of an expert, and the wind was blowing big snow down from the mountains, and in here was the silence and Azzie’s solemn watching eyes.

There's one thing I want you to do for me." "Anything." He pleaded. "When you're all alone, sitting in the silence behind bars, separated from your freedom. Ask yourself. Was it worth it?" She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.

He turned his head. They were sitting close together, their shoulders nearly touching. Her eyes were so brown they were almost black, and for once her hair was down. She always wore it tied back in a ruthlessly tight coil. Even the idea of being this near someone should have set his skin crawling. Instead he thought, What happens if I move closer? “I don’t want your prayers,” he said. “What do you want, then?” The old answers came easily to mind. Money. Vengeance. Jordie’s voice in my head silenced forever. But a different reply roared to life inside him, loud, insistent, and unwelcome. You, Inej. You.

Gideon and I sit there in the dark, wordless for a while, only our ragged breaths disturbing the silence. Memories of my sister overwhelm me—I see her impish grin as she leans over me at the orphanage, tugging on my hair until I wake up. I remember us climbing up to the roof as kids, sitting cross-legged next to the herbs and vegetables our caretakers were growing while we read the English books Rose had “borrowed” from her class at school. And then there was L.A.—all of our hope for a better life so quickly crushed, but Rose never let despair overtake her. She was there after every single night to hold me until the pain went away. And later, when I got numb to it all, she still made a point of holding me, of promising me that one day things would be different.

I just want them to be happy. Or content, at least.” “Are you?” “Am I?” “Content?” he says. “Me?” She laughs, surprised by the frankness of his question. “I don’t know that I’ve stopped to think about it.” They sit in silence as the water spills down the guttering outside. “I feel,” she says finally, “as though I have a purpose. And I guess there’s a contentment in that. Of knowing who I am, what I’m meant to be doing on this earth.

Do you even feel anything, Chad? Will you for once stop walking around, all in control and f'ing calm? Do you have any idea what you all have done. I lost everything, Chad. Everything, when Kyle died. I lost myself. I had finally begun to build a new life with new friends. With people I thought cared about me. I have started to be just a little bit happy again. Was it too much to ask? Did I ask for too much by just wanting to have a little bit of a life again? Now, it’s all screwed up again and you walk around here like you don’t feel anything about what’s happened.” Chad spun around, and for only the second time since she’d known him, she saw the flash of anger so fierce her breath caught in her throat and she took an involuntary step back, away from him. Jennie knew Chad would never hurt her on purpose, but the anger rolling off of him was palpable. It seemed to force her backwards as if it had a life of its own, a power of its own. “Not feel anything, Jennie? Are you f'ing kidding me? I walk around here every day and I ache every f'ing minute I’m with you. I’m so twisted up with loving you and hating you, I can’t breathe. I can’t keep my hands off you, but I can’t let myself kiss you because I might lose myself in you. I can’t make love to you because I’m afraid you’ll pretend I’m him. I know you want his arms around you, not mine. I know you want it to be his baby inside you, not mine. And I know you can’t love me back, no matter what I do, because you’re still so in love with your husband, you can’t even begin to see me.” Chad didn’t stop and Jennie didn’t try to stop him. “And every day, I have to sit here and wonder how I’ll be a part of my baby’s life. I wonder if you’ll let me be in the delivery room, if you’ll let me help you name the baby. I wonder how much money I’d have to offer the people who live across the street from you to get them to sell me their house, just so I can see my child grow up. If you’ll let me...” Chad stopped as if he’d run out of steam. They stood in uneasy silence for a long time before Chad spoke again. He sounded worn out and bitter and angry, mirroring Jennie’s chaos of emotions. “Am I feeling anything? Yeah. I’m feeling some f'ing sh**, Jen.

She scrubs me until I spit soapy water. Pig, she smiles. A man should smell better than his country— such is the silence of a woman who speaks against silence, knowing silence moves us to speak. She throws my shoes and glasses in the air, I am of deaf people and I have no country but a bathtub and an infant and a marriage bed! Soaping together is sacred to us. Washing each other’s shoulders. You can fuck anyone—but with whom can you sit in water?

As he observed her in musing silence, a novel thought occurred to him. It slipped through his mind so subtly that it seemed to mingle like smoke with his physical perceptions, with the way the dim light through the stained-glass window fell across her hair in little iridescent rainbows, and the scent of old tobacco and dust lingered in the room. He wondered — absurdly — if this was what she had come for — simply to sit in the stillness and be alive and share it with him. Something inside, something tiny he hadn’t even known was there, seemed to unfold, to spread tentative petals open like a desert flower sensing rain. She turned and looked up at him, her great unblinking eyes full of forest wisdom. He thought foolishly: Let me stay here. I need this.

Sort of?” she says, but there’s a gap between the way she’s responding and the way this concept of queer indispensability gutted me that day in the theater, still guts me to this day. And I know, I know why she doesn’t get it—it’s because I’m intellectualizing, I’m not telling her how I cried that night, quiet hot tears that I hid from the friends I was sitting next to. How my entire being seemed to implode, how I held every muscle tight to silence my sobs. How shocking and overwhelming this recognition felt.

The stranger held her. It was pleasant to feel the warmth of another and sit in silence, without haste, even as she thought of a different man.

Those clothes are Susie's,' my father said calmly when he reached him. Buckley looked down at my blackwatch dress that he held in his hand. My father stepped closer, took the dress from my brother, and then, without speaking, he gathered the rest of my clothes, which Buckley had piled on the lawn. As he turned in silence toward the house, hardly breathing, clutching my clothes to him, it sparked. I was the only one to see the colors. Just near Buckley's ears and on the tips of his cheeks and chin he was a little orange somehow, a little red. Why can't I use them?' he asked. It landed in my father's back like a fist. Why can't I use those clothes to stake my tomatoes?' My father turned around. He saw his son standing there, behind him the perfect plot of muddy, churned-up earth spotted with tiny seedlings. 'How can you ask me that question?' You have to choose. It's not fair,' my brother said. Buck?' My father held my clothes against his chest. I watched Buckley flare and light. Behind him was the sun of the goldenrod hedge, twice as tall as it had been at my death. I'm tired of it!' Buckley blared. 'Keesha's dad died and she's okay?' Is Keesha a girl at school?' Yes!' My father was frozen. He could feel the dew that had gathered on his bare ankles and feet, could feel the ground underneath him, cold and moist and stirring with possibility. I'm sorry. When did this happen?' That's not the point, Dad! You don't get it.' Buckley turned around on his heel and started stomping the tender tomato shoots with his foot. Buck, stop!' my father cried. My brother turned. You don't get it, Dad,' he said. I'm sorry,' my father said. These are Susie's clothes and I just... It may not make sense, but they're hers-something she wore.' ... You act like she was yours only!' Tell me what you want to say. What's this about your friend Keesha's dad?' Put the clothes down.' My father laid them gently on the ground. It isn't about Keesha's dad.' Tell me what it is about.' My father was now all immediacy. He went back to the place he had been after his knee surgery, coming up out of the druggie sleep of painkillers to see his then-five-year-old son sitting near him, waiting for his eyes to flicker open so he could say, 'Peek-a-boo, Daddy.' She's dead.' It never ceased to hurt. 'I know that.' But you don't act that way.' Keesha's dad died when she was six. Keesha said she barely even thinks of him.' She will,' my father said. But what about us?' Who?' Us, Dad. Me and Lindsey. Mom left becasue she couldn't take it.' Calm down, Buck,' my father said. He was being as generous as he could as the air from his lungs evaporated out into his chest. Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go. 'What?' my father said. I didn't say anything.' Let go. Let go. Let go. I'm sorry,' my father said. 'I'm not feeling very well.' His feet had grown unbelievably cold in the damp grass. His chest felt hollow, bugs flying around an excavated cavity. There was an echo in there, and it drummed up into his ears. Let go. My father dropped down to his knees. His arm began to tingle on and off as if it had fallen asleep. Pins and needles up and down. My brother rushed to him. Dad?' Son.' There was a quaver in his voice and a grasping outward toward my brother. I'll get Grandma.' And Buckley ran. My father whispered faintly as he lay on his side with his face twisted in the direction of my old clothes: 'You can never choose. I've loved all three of you.

There’s a book here in which I read about the trial of a Jew, who took a child of four years old and cut off the fingers from both hands, and then crucified him on the wall, hammered nails into him and crucified him, and afterwards, when he was tried, he said that the child died soon, within four hours. That was ‘soon’! He said the child moaned, kept on moaning and he stood admiring it. That’s nice!” “Nice?” “Nice; I sometimes imagine that it was I who crucified him. He would hang there moaning and I would sit opposite him eating pineapple compote. I am awfully fond of pineapple compote. Do you like it?” Alyosha looked at her in silence. Her pale, sallow face was suddenly contorted, her eyes burned. “You know, when I read about that Jew I shook with sobs all night. I kept fancying how the little thing cried and moaned (a child of four years old understands, you know), and all the while the thought of pineapple compote haunted me. In the morning I wrote a letter to a certain person, begging him particularly to come and see me. He came and I suddenly told him all about the child and the pineapple compote. All about it, all, and said that it was nice. He laughed and said it really was nice. Then he got up and went away. He was only here five minutes. Did he despise me? Did he despise me? Tell me, tell me, Alyosha, did he despise me or not?” She sat up on the couch, with flashing eyes.

he grabbed her around the waist and threw her over his shoulder. “This is for the caveman comment earlier,” he said. “Jordan! Let me go!” she squealed, laughing madly. “You’re molesting the princess!” “You say molesting, I say assisting,” Jordan corrected. “Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the scenic view.” “Of your backside?” D.C. said dryly. “Believe me, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” There was silence in the clearing for a moment before all four of them burst out laughing. Jordan had to set D.C. back on her feet because he was laughing so hard. “I didn’t mean…” D.C. tried to explain, but she couldn’t get the words out amid her own laughter. She inhaled deeply and tried again. “I didn’t mean for it to come out like that!” Jordan’s eyes were sparkling. “I think we’ve underestimated you, Princess.

Tsunami spotted Snail and Herring among the guards. Their eyes darted anxiously from side to side, as if they were wondering how they were still alive. Because Mother wants to make a spectacle of them, Tsunami guessed. Coral was probably waiting for the right moment to punish them in public, the way she’d punished Tortoise. Well, two can play the spectacle game, Your Majesty. “MOTHER!” Tsunami declared dramatically as the waitstaff set bowls of soup in front of each dragon. Beside her, Whirlpool jumped and nearly tipped his bowl onto himself. Even Queen Coral looked startled. “I have something DREADFULLY SHOCKING to tell you!” Tsunami announced. She wanted this to be loud, so every dragon could witness it. “Oh?” said Coral. “Could we discuss it after breakfast? In a civilized fashion?” “NO,” Tsunami said, louder than before. “This is TOO SHOCKING.” Even SeaWings not invited to the feast were starting to peer out of their caves and poke their heads out of the lake to hear what was going on. “Well, perhaps —” Coral started. “WOULD YOU BELIEVE,” Tsunami said, “that my friends — the DRAGONETS OF DESTINY, remember — were CHAINED UP? And STARVED? In YOUR CAVES? By YOUR DRAGONS?” “What?” Coral said, flapping her wings. She looked thoroughly alarmed, but Tsunami couldn’t tell whether that was because the news actually surprised her or because she was being confronted openly with what she’d done. “I KNOW!” Tsunami practically bellowed. “It’s UNBELIEVABLE. I’m sure you didn’t know anything about it, of course.” “Of course,” Coral said in a hurry. “I would never treat any dragonets that way! Especially my dearest daughter’s dearest friends. Who are part of the prophecy and everything.” “And I’m sure you’ll want to punish the dragons who disobeyed you by treating my friends so terribly,” Tsunami said. “Right? Like, for instance, the one who lied to you about keeping them well fed?” She shot a glare at Lagoon, who froze with a sea snail halfway to her mouth, suddenly realizing what was going on. “Absolutely,” said the queen. “Guards! Throw Lagoon in one of the underwater dungeons!” “But —” Lagoon said. “But I was only —” “Next time you’ll obey my orders,” said the queen. A stripe quickly flashed under her wings, but Tsunami spotted it, and it was one Riptide had taught her. Silence. Oh, Mother, Tsunami thought sadly. “Can’t I even —” Lagoon said, reaching wistfully for her cauldron of soup as the guards pulled her away. “No breakfast for you,” the queen ordered. “Think about how that feels as you sit in my dungeon.” Tsunami was fairly sure Lagoon wouldn’t actually suffer very much. Queen Coral would have her back at Council meetings before long. But Tsunami wasn’t done. “And

She was aware only of his silent figure, sitting like a shadow there on the log, with an enamel cup in his hand, drinking his coffee in silence. Her will had departed from her limbs, he had power over her: his shadow was on her.

first started therapy, I found it very hard to cry. I feared I’d be carried away by the flood, overwhelmed. Perhaps that’s what it feels like for you. That’s why it’s important to take your time to feel safe, and trust that you won’t be alone in this flood – that I’m treading water here with you.’ Silence. ‘I think of myself as a relational therapist,’ I said. ‘Do you know what that means?’ Silence. ‘It means I think Freud was wrong about a couple of things. I don’t believe a therapist can ever really be a blank slate, as he intended. We leak all kinds of information about ourselves unintentionally – by the colour of my socks, or how I sit or the way I talk – just by sitting here with you, I reveal a great deal about myself. Despite my best efforts at invisibility, I’m showing you who I am.’ Alicia looked up. She stared at me, her chin slightly tilted – was there a challenge in that look? At last I had her attention. I shifted in my seat. ‘The point is, what can we do about this? We can ignore it, and deny it, and pretend this therapy is all about you. Or we can acknowledge that this is a two-way street, and work with that. And then we can really start to get somewhere.’ I held up my hand. I nodded at my wedding ring. ‘This ring tells you something, doesn’t it?’ Alicia’s eyes ever-so-slowly moved in the direction of the ring. ‘It tells you I’m a married man. It tells you I have a

Silencing Alicia wasn’t so easy. Injecting her with morphine was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. That she didn’t die, but is asleep, is better—this way, I can still visit her every day and sit by her bed and hold her hand. I haven’t lost her.

But I'll tell you a terrible secret- Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know who the Fat Lady really is?...Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy." For joy apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands. For a fullish minute or so, there were no other words, no further speech. Then: "I can't talk any more, buddy." The sound of a phone being replaced in its catch followed. Franny took in her breath slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers. When she replaced the phone, she seemed to know just what to do next, too. She cleared away the smoking things, then drew back the cotton bedspread from the bed she had been sitting on, took off her slippers, and got into the bed. For some minutes, before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.

With a strange smile and slightly bending her face she looked up at the sky and noticed the birds sitting in silence and a horse with the broken legs and the strange part was that she saw herself in a tigress that is lonely and lost with a sly sheep

This place is amazing. The views alone are breathtaking,” she murmured after a second of silence. He chuckled and traced her throat with his mouth. “You’re breathtaking. And sneaky when you don’t want to talk about something.” “I don’t know what you mean.” “Yeah right! Just a hint; if you didn’t want to speak about the future, sex would’ve been a much better distraction than mentioning the views. Come on, baby, distract me; turn around and come sit on my face. I want to lick your pretty pussy.

Oh for Christ’s sake, give the ass-kissing a rest, Julian.” K.T. knocked back a slug of wine, then slapped her glass on the table. She actually snapped her fingers at one of the servers so he would deal with the refill. “Even your mouth ought to be tired of puckering up by now.” “We’re having a conversation,” Julian began. “Is that what you call it? You act like you and Marlo are the only ones in this goddamn vid, and the two people you’re trying so hard to mimic are the only ones who count. It’s insulting. So why don’t you give it a fucking rest, set up your threesome with Marlo and Dallas on your own time? Some of us are trying to eat.” In the beat of horrified silence, Eve studied K.T. down the length of the table. “Peabody?” “Yes, sir,” Peabody said, shoulders hunched. “You know how I occasionally mention the possibility of kicking your ass?” “I’d term that as regularly, but yes, sir, I do.” “You may get the chance to watch me kick your fake ass while you sit comfortably on your own. That’s an opportunity that doesn’t come around every day.

Noemy says, “I guess it’s just the idea of love I miss. And, well, it was a good kiss.” Her smile turns rueful. “At least I got some practice.” A wonderful idea occurs to Abel. “Do you need more practice?” “Huh?” “We could practice, if you wanted."He smiles as he starts to explain."Remember what I told you on Genesis? I’m programmed with a wide array of techniques for providing physical pleasure, via every activity from kissing to the more arcane positions for sexual intercourse. Although I’ve never performed any of them before, I’m confident I could do so very skillfully.” She stares at him, eyes wide. Since she is swift to voice objections if she has them, Abel takes her silence as an encouraging sign. So he sits up on the bed to explain the further compelling reasons now coming to mind. “Humans need a certain amount of physical release and comfort in order to be psychologicallly healthy. You’ve been away from your family and friends for some time, and have endured considerable trauma, suggesting you are in even greater need than usual. I have all the information and technique necessary to be an excellent partner, my body is designed to be appealing, and of course I can neither carry disease nor impregnate you. We have total privacy and many hours of spare time. Conditions for intercourse would seem to be ideal.

Honey’s Cottage Miss Honey joined Matilda outside the school gates and the two of them walked in silence through the village High Street. They passed the greengrocer with his window full of apples and oranges, and the butcher with bloody lumps of meat on display and naked chickens hanging up, and the small bank, and the grocery store and the electrical shop, and then they came out at the other side of the village on to the narrow country road where there were no people any more and very few motor-cars. And now that they were alone, Matilda all of a sudden became wildly animated. It seemed as though a valve had burst inside her and a great gush of energy was being released. She trotted beside Miss Honey with wild little hops and her fingers flew as if she would scatter them to the four winds and her words went off like fireworks, with terrific speed. It was Miss Honey this and Miss Honey that and Miss Honey I do honestly feel I could move almost anything in the world, not just tipping over glasses and little things like that . . . I feel I could topple tables and chairs, Miss Honey . . . Even when people are sitting in the chairs I think I could push them over, and bigger things too, much bigger things than chairs and tables . . . I only have to take a moment to get my eyes strong and then I can push it out, this strongness, at anything at all so long as I am staring at it hard enough . . . I have to stare at it very hard, Miss Honey, very very hard, and then I can feel it all happening behind my eyes, and my eyes get hot just as though they were burning but I don’t mind that in the least, and Miss Honey . . .

If she's not driving me up a wall she's driving me insane. Sometimes all she does is look at me. I never know what to do when she does this, so I just sit there as she stares, her eyes raking over every inch of me, wondering what the hell she's thinking and knowing she'll never tell me. Sometimes she won't speak for so long the silence begins to make me sweat. I wake up thinking about her. I fall asleep thinking about her. I accidentally brushed against her going through a doorway and the way my body reacted you'd think she'd pinned me the wall and offered to unzip my pants. I had to leave the building just to get some air. I've started dreaming about her. I wake up in the middle of the night overheated and out of my mind. I've had trouble sleeping all my life-but this might be the worst sleep I've had in years.

Pulling to a stop in front of Aly’s house, I take a deep breath. With a flick of my wrist, I cut the engine and listen to the silence. I’ve sat in this exact spot more times than I can count. In many ways, Aly’s house is like my sanctuary. A place I go when my own home feels like a graveyard. I glance up at the bedroom window of the girl who knows me better than anyone, the only person I let see me cry after Dad died. I won’t let this experiment take that or her away from me. Tonight, I’m going to prove that Aly and I can go back to our normal, easy friendship. Throwing open my door, I trudge up her sidewalk, plant my feet outside her front door, and ring the bell. “Coming!” I step back and see Aly stick her head out of her second-story window. “No problem,” I call back up. “Take your time.” More time to get my head on straight. Aly disappears behind a film of yellow curtain, and I turn to look out at the quiet neighborhood. Up and down the street, the lights blink on, filling the air with a low hum that matches the thrumming of my nerves. Across the street, old Mr. Lawson sits at his usual perch under a gigantic American flag, drinking beer and mumbling to himself. Two little girls ride their bikes around the cul-de-sac, smiling and waving. Just a normal, run-of-the-mill Friday night. Except not. I thrust my hands into my pockets, jiggling the loose change from my Taco Bell run earlier tonight, and grab my pack of Trident. I toss a stick into my mouth and chew furiously. Supposedly, the smell of peppermint can calm your nerves. I grab a second stick and shove it in, too. With the clacking sound of Aly’s shoes approaching the door behind me, I remind myself again about tonight’s mission. All I need is focus. I take another deep breath for good measure and rock back on my heels, ready to greet my best friend. She opens the door, wearing a black dress molded to her skin, and I let the air out in one big huff.

Wow.You two seem to be right as rain again," Cole said from behind us. I could hear the undercurrent of rage beneath his voice. "I hate to interrupt this sudden case of the touchy-feelies, but with the three of us standing here, it almost feels like that spring day so long ago.Almost as if Jack hand't left for camp.Almost as if Jack had nothing to do with you going under,Nik." Jack winced, but he kept his eyes on me. "You should've seen her.Did you know that when she left your dorm that night, she came straight to me? Begged to go with me. Barely able to breathe for the pain." He enunciated each word. I studied Jack's face and shook my head. Jack dropped his arm from my shoulders. "You never let me explain. I ran to you,but you drove off.You didn't trust me." There was silence for a few long moments. "Would either of you care to know my opinion?" Cole said. "Shut up," we replied at the same time. Cole shrugged. "You know where to find me." He turned and walked across the parking lot to the sidewalk that led around the corner of the post office. I watched him until he disappeared, than I faced Jack again. Jack rougly ran both of his hands through his hair. "This is a mess." It sounded like he was talking to himself, not to me. "I know how it looked, but you should've let me explain. I hated you for leaving." He looked up at the sky. "I hated you." Jack took a step backward, away from me, and as he did,a voice called out to us. "Don't let him drive you apart!" We both turned toward the sound. Mary was sitting on a bench under the shelter of the bus stop. I hadn t noticed her before.She'd been watching us. She stood and came over. "That's what he wants. He's scared of anchors. I told you I have a theory about anchors.

THE COUNCIL WAS NOTHING LIKE Jason imagined. For one thing, it was in the Big House rec room, around a Ping-Pong table, and one of the satyrs was serving nachos and sodas. Somebody had brought Seymour the leopard head in from the living room and hung him on the wall. Every once in a while, a counselor would toss him a Snausage. Jason looked around the room and tried to remember everyone’s name. Thankfully, Leo and Piper were sitting next to him—it was their first meeting as senior counselors. Clarisse, leader of the Ares cabin, had her boots on the table, but nobody seemed to care. Clovis from Hypnos cabin was snoring in the corner while Butch from Iris cabin was seeing how many pencils he could fit in Clovis’s nostrils. Travis Stoll from Hermes was holding a lighter under a Ping-Pong ball to see if it would burn, and Will Solace from Apollo was absently wrapping and unwrapping an Ace bandage around his wrist. The counselor from Hecate cabin, Lou Ellen something-or-other, was playing “got-your-nose” with Miranda Gardiner from Demeter, except that Lou Ellen really had magically disconnected Miranda’s nose, and Miranda was trying to get it back. Jason had hoped Thalia would show. She’d promised, after all—but she was nowhere to be seen. Chiron had told him not to worry about it. Thalia often got sidetracked fighting monsters or running quests for Artemis, and she would probably arrive soon. But still, Jason worried. Rachel Dare, the oracle, sat next to Chiron at the head of the table. She was wearing her Clarion Academy school uniform dress, which seemed a bit odd, but she smiled at Jason. Annabeth didn’t look so relaxed. She wore armor over her camp clothes, with her knife at her side and her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. As soon as Jason walked in, she fixed him with an expectant look, as if she were trying to extract information out of him by sheer willpower. “Let’s come to order,” Chiron said. “Lou Ellen, please give Miranda her nose back. Travis, if you’d kindly extinguish the flaming Ping-Pong ball, and Butch, I think twenty pencils is really too many for any human nostril. Thank you. Now, as you can see, Jason, Piper, and Leo have returned successfully…more or less. Some of you have heard parts of their story, but I will let them fill you in.” Everyone looked at Jason. He cleared his throat and began the story. Piper and Leo chimed in from time to time, filling in the details he forgot. It only took a few minutes, but it seemed like longer with everyone watching him. The silence was heavy, and for so many ADHD demigods to sit still listening for that long, Jason knew the story must have sounded pretty wild. He ended with Hera’s visit right before the meeting.

Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass. She says she doesn’t deprive herself, but I’ve learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork. In every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate. I’ve realized she only eats dinner when I suggest it. I wonder what she does when I’m not there to do so. Maybe this is why my house feels bigger each time I return; it’s proportional. As she shrinks the space around her seems increasingly vast. She wanes while my father waxes. His stomach has grown round with wine, late nights, oysters, poetry. A new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports that now she’s “crazy about fruit." It was the same with his parents; as my grandmother became frail and angular her husband swelled to red round cheeks, rotund stomach and I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking making space for the entrance of men into their lives not knowing how to fill it back up once they leave. I have been taught accommodation. My brother never thinks before he speaks. I have been taught to filter. “How can anyone have a relationship to food?" He asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs. I want to tell say: we come from difference, Jonas, you have been taught to grow out I have been taught to grow in you learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence, you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much I learned to absorb I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself I learned to read the knots in her forehead while the guys went out for oysters and I never meant to replicate her, but spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits that’s why women in my family have been shrinking for decades. We all learned it from each other, the way each generation taught the next how to knit weaving silence in between the threads which I can still feel as I walk through this ever-growing house, skin itching, picking up all the habits my mother has unwittingly dropped like bits of crumpled paper from her pocket on her countless trips from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom again, Nights I hear her creep down to eat plain yogurt in the dark, a fugitive stealing calories to which she does not feel entitled. Deciding how many bites is too many How much space she deserves to occupy. Watching the struggle I either mimic or hate her, And I don’t want to do either anymore but the burden of this house has followed me across the country I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word “sorry". I don’t know the requirements for the sociology major because I spent the entire meeting deciding whether or not I could have another piece of pizza a circular obsession I never wanted but inheritance is accidental still staring at me with wine-stained lips from across the kitchen table.

The silence stretched out, heartbeat after heartbeat – taut, excruciating. And then, finally, came the first sound: a slow, deliberate clapping. Startled, Maddy opened her eyes to see Harvir leaning back in his desk, his dark gaze steady on her as his hands came together, unhurried, almost leisurely, announcing his approval. A second later, from across the room, Kara joined in, followed by August, and Paul and Jeremy and Theresa. Ms. Mousumi got to her feet with a broad smile on her face, then Rhonda began to applaud, and Nikki. Not everyone followed suit – Ken continued to sit stonefaced, as did Julie and her retinue. David, too, remained motionless, staring at his desktop. Elliot gazed out the classroom windows; Sheng played with a pen. Still, the heartbeat clapping continued on, and Maddy realized she would never forget the gift of it. If it didn’t include everyone, it was enough. She had her soul back.

While filming season three of Stuck in the Middle, my schedule got much busier than usual. I wasn’t praying, and I felt disconnected from the world around me. My anxiety was getting worse. Finally, I sat down with my mom and broke down crying. I told her I didn’t feel like myself. She made me sit there for ten minutes doing nothing, just breathing. Then she asked what I’d done during those few minutes of silence, and I told her I was thinking about all the things I had to do. She asked, Why aren’t you praying? That shook me and made me realize that I was allowing myself to lose the solid ground beneath my feet.

She and his father had been at variance from his earliest remembrance. To sit speechless himself in the midst of rigid silence, glancing in dread from the one averted face to the other, had been the peacefullest occupation of his childhood. She gave him one glassy kiss, and four stiff fingers muffled in worsted.

She could not sit still. She talked profusely and continuously with a feverish breathlessness like one in fear of silence. She sat as if she could not bear to sit for long; and, when she rose to buy cigarettes, she was equally eager to return to her seat. Impatient, alert, watchful, as if in dread of being attacked, restless and keen, she drank hurriedly; she smiled so swiftly that he was not even certain it had been a smile; she listened only partially to what was being said to her; and, even when someone in the bar leaned over and shouted a name in her direction, she did not respond at first, as if it were not her own.

Ede had been pregnant not quite the full term: eight months, two weeks, four days. She had lapsed into an extended silence - partly because she was still in mourning - still enraged and afraid of speech. And partly, too, because the child itself had taken up dreaming in her belly - dreaming and, Ede was certain, singing. Not singing songs a person knew, of course. Nothing Ede could recognize. But songs for certain. Music - with a tune to it. Evocative. A song about self. A song about place. As if a bird had sung it, sitting in a tree at the edge of a field. Or high in the air above a field. A hovering song. Of recognition.

Some nights, I sit with the ghost of who I was meant to be. She doesn’t speak. Just traces the cracks on my skin like they were her inheritance. I let her braid my hair with all the things I never became the violin I quit, the apology I never gave, the summers I spent folding into silence when I should’ve screamed.

I feel a guard's hand close on my arm. Then Cardan's voice comes. 'Do not touch her.' A terrible silence follows. I wait for him to pronounce judgement on me. Whatever he commands will be done. His power is absolute. I don't even have the strength to fight back. 'Whatever can you mean?' Randalin says. 'She's-' 'She is my wife,' Cardan says, his voice carrying over the crowd. 'The rightful High Queen of Elfhame. And most definitely not in exile.' The shocked roar of the crowd rolls around me, but none of them are more shocked than I am. I try to open my eyes, try to sit up, but darkness crowds in at the edges of my vision and drags me under.

with large eyes full of tears, but said nothing. 'This here young lady,' said the Gryphon, 'she wants for to know your history, she do.' 'I'll tell it her,' said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: 'sit down, both of you, and don't speak a word till I've finished.' So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, 'I don't see how he can even finish, if he doesn't begin.' But she waited patiently. 'Once,' said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, 'I was a real Turtle.' These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional exclamation of 'Hjckrrh!' from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy sobbing

My colleague Maxine Williams, head of diversity at Facebook, told me that she believes many people succumb to the mum effect around race. 'Even after an unarmed black person is killed for reaching over to show a cop his license, white people who have seen the news, who live in these communities, and who sit at the desk next to us at work will often say nothing,' Maxine said. 'For the victim of racism, like the victim of loss, the silence is crippling. The two things we want to know when we're in pain are that we're not crazy to feel the way we do and that we have support. Acting like nothing significant is happening to people who look like us denies us all of that.

- Smoking in silence as she concentrated on navigating through the increasingly heavy morning traffic, Strike noted how much he liked making her laugh. He also recognized that he felt much happier, much more comfortable, sitting here in this ramshackle Land Rover talking inconsequential nonsense with Robin than he had felt last night at dinner with Elin.

i would give anything to not have to spend the next twenty minutes sitting across from her, because she doesn't believe in letting silence go. no, she has to fill it up with talk. i want to tell her that's what the voices in your head are for, to get you through all the silent parts, but she doesn't want to be with her thoughts unless she's saying them out loud.

Maggie sipped her drink with the cat draped across her lap and the dog curled at her feet. The only sounds in the room were the crackling of the fire and Dan Sean's shallow snores. There were no CD's to play, no radio, no television. There was nothing. She was just sitting there in silence, getting drunk. It occurred to her that a person's first drunken experience shoud be in the basement of a friend's house, in a forest preserve, behind the bleachers of a football field. Certainly not in the company of a sleeping ninety-nine-year-old man. She giggled a little and wondered what Uncle Kevin would make of it. "Hot port?" he would say. "Very impressive, Mags. I would have thought you'd be more of a wine cooler type of girl.

The pastor went on. “For those of you who have not attended a Quaker service before, we will all sit in silence for the next hour, creating a community through our bodies and our breath. If you feel moved to speak, please stand up and do so. That is all. Thank you.” She bowed her head, and everyone else did too. Astrid came from a family—two families, really—for whom being lost in your own thoughts during a religious service was something you weren’t supposed to admit. She liked the pretense of paying attention to someone with a strong voice, an expert in the field of faith, telling a roomful of people what they should believe and why. This felt sort of like not getting one’s money’s worth, as a religious experience. Was it a religion? She should know this.

What is perfect is the way she looks at me, and the way she says my name. The way her hand strokes my hair, though I don't think she knows she's doing it. The way we lay together night after night. The way I feel: complete. What is perfect is the way she sometimes smiles and she sometimes laughs. The way we can say anything that comes to mind, or sit together for hours in absolute silence.

When it came to my turn in the super spelling bee everyone had already been given really easy words. “Ryan,” Mr H said, “I want you to spell the word icup.” “Icup?” I thought.  I clammed up and my face went all warm and prickly, that feeling you get when you know you’re going to get the answer wrong. It’s a bit like the feeling you get when you walk up on stage to collect an award and you trip going up the stairs in front of everyone, or worse still, your pants fall down. It’s called embarrassment and I was feeling it big time. Actually it was worse than big time. It was humongous, mammoth, big time. All those long, boring afternoons sitting with Mom on the couch spelling word after word meant nothing anymore. I’d never heard of the word ‘icup’. “Oh no,” I thought. If I got this wrong I might not make the necessary criteria to get a raffle ticket before the big draw. Panic stations set in. This was going to be disastrous. ​Mom always said that if you get nervous or frightened, just imagine everyone around you is only in their underwear. It will make you laugh and you’ll forget your nerves. So I did, but it wasn’t a pretty sight. ​ “Ok get a grip of yourself Rino,” I said in my head. “Think about it and just sound the word out.” I could hear my Mom’s words bleating in my head as she so often did when I got stuck on a word. I began slowly, deep in thought and not willing to put one foot wrong sounding out each letter, “I … c.. u .. pee.”  There was silence and then the whole class erupted into hysterics, laughing their heads off, followed by Mr Higginbottom. Then I realised what I had just said when I sounded out the word; “I see you pee,” and I burst out into an embarrassed sort of laughter too. Mr Higginbottom came over and gave me a friendly pat on my head and ruffled my hair. It didn’t worry me that I’d combed it just the right way and put gel in it that morning. It was ok for Mr H to mess it up, but if my sister ever did it, she’d be dead meat. “Well

An old Buddhist parable illustrates the challenge—and the value—of letting go of the past. Two monks were strolling by a stream on their way home to the monastery. They were startled by the sound of a young woman in a bridal gown, sitting by the stream, crying softly. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she gazed across the water. She needed to cross to get to her wedding, but she was fearful that doing so might ruin her beautiful handmade gown. In this particular sect, monks were prohibited from touching women. But one monk was filled with compassion for the bride. Ignoring the sanction, he hoisted the woman on his shoulders and carried her across the stream—assisting her journey and saving her gown. She smiled and bowed with gratitude as the monk splashed his way back across the stream to rejoin his companion. The second monk was livid. ‘How could you do that?’ he scolded. ‘You know we are forbidden to touch a woman, much less pick one up and carry her around!’ The offending monk listened in silence to a stern lecture that lasted all the way back to the monastery. His mind wandered as he felt the warm sunshine and listened to the singing birds. After returning to the monastery, he fell asleep for a few hours. He was jostled and awakened in the middle of the night by his fellow monk. ‘How could you carry that woman?’ his agitated friend cried out. ‘Someone else could have helped her across the stream. You were a bad monk.’ ‘What woman?’ the sleepy monk inquired. ‘Don’t you even remember? That woman you carried across the stream,’ his colleague snapped. ‘Oh, her,’ laughed the sleepy monk. ‘I only carried her across the stream. You carried her all the way back to the monastery.’ The learning point is simple: When it comes to our flawed past, leave it at the stream. I am not suggesting that we should always let go of the past. You need feedback to scour the past and identify room for improvement. But you can’t change the past. To change you need to be sharing ideas for the future.

The sun is high, the day hot, and she lays the dress out in the grass to dry, sinks onto the slope besides it in her shift. They sit, side by side in silence, one a ghost of the other. And she realizes, looking down, that this is all she has. A dress. A slip. A pair of stolen shoes. Restless, she takes up a stick and begins to draw absent patterns in the silt along the bank. But every stroke she makes dissolves, the change too quick to be the river's doing. She draws a line, watches it begin to wash away before she even finishes the mark. Tries to write her name, but her hand stills, pinned under the same rock that held her tongue. She carves a deeper line, gouges out the sand, but it makes no difference, soon that groove is gone, too, and an angry sob escapes her throat as she casts the stick away.

He sits in silence with his hands gripping the edge of the bench. She does the same, because she likes holding it while he's also holding it. She peers at him and wants to say that it's not his fault. That she's just too old to fall in love. She wants to tell him that he can find himself someone better. That he deserves something perfect. But she doesn't say anything, because she's afraid he'll say she is perfect.

It wants in and it’s not going to stop until it gets in.” Vig walked over to Jace. She was still sitting by that tree, holding on to Kera’s foster puppy. Vig had the feeling Kera would not be getting that puppy back . . . ever. But she would be helping to take care of it. Vig crouched by Jace, smiled at her. “What’s trying to get in, Jace?” “An ancient power. A very old god that is very pissed off. And if we don’t work together, and stop it . . . it’ll lay waste to everything.” The silence that followed Jace’s proclamation was brutal, but then she suddenly jumped up, startling them. “Okay. ’Night, guys!” She waved and walked off with her new dog. “She never speaks,” Rolf said, “but when she does, she’s absolutely horrifying.” “What do you dudes expect?” Stieg asked around a yawn, heading back to the main house. “She’s a Crow.

He ignored that and sat on her towel at her feet. She could see her reflection in his sunglasses as he stared at her. What was he doing? Why was he being so familiar? The eighteen years of silence while she was gone, along with the year and a half of a cold shoulder she'd given him since she'd been back should have been more than enough to discourage him from sitting on her towel on the beach, inches away from her bare legs.

when Goblin clutches me by the wrist, and lays, not her skinny finger, but the handle of a key, upon her lip.  She invites me, with a jerk, to follow her.  I do so.  She leads me out into a room adjoining - a rugged room, with a funnel-shaped, contracting roof, open at the top, to the bright day.  I ask her what it is.  She folds her arms, leers hideously, and stares.  I ask again.  She glances round, to see that all the little company are there; sits down upon a mound of stones; throws up her arms, and yells out, like a fiend, ‘La Salle de la Question!’ The Chamber of Torture!  And the roof was made of that shape to stifle the victim’s cries!  Oh Goblin, Goblin, let us think of this awhile, in silence.  Peace, Goblin!  Sit with your short arms crossed on your short legs, upon that heap of stones, for only five minutes, and then flame out again.

When Elizabeth finally descended the stairs on her way to the dining room she was two hours late. Deliberately. “Good heavens, you’re tardy, my dear!” Sir Francis said, shoving back his chair and rushing to the doorway where Elizabeth had been standing, trying to gather her courage to do what needed to be done. “Come and meet my guests,” he said, drawing her forward after a swift, disappointed look at her drab attire and severe coiffure. “We did as you suggested in your note and went ahead with supper. What kept you abovestairs so long?” “I was at prayer,” Elizabeth said, managing to look him straight in the eye. Sir Francis recovered from his surprise in time to introduce her to the three other people at the table-two men who resembled him in age and features and two women of perhaps five and thirty who were both attired in the most shockingly revealing gowns Elizabeth had ever seen. Elizabeth accepted a helping of cold meat to silence her protesting stomach while both women studied her with unhidden scorn. “That is a most unusual ensemble you’re wearing, I must say,” remarked the woman named Eloise. “Is it the custom where you come from to dress so…simply?” Elizabeth took a dainty bite of meat. “Not really. I disapprove of too much personal adornment.” She turned to Sir Francis with an innocent stare. “Gowns are expensive. I consider them a great waste of money.” Sir Francis was suddenly inclined to agree, particularly since he intended to keep her naked as much as possible. “Quite right!” he beamed, eyeing the other ladies with pointed disapproval. “No sense in spending all that money on gowns. No point in spending money at all.” “My sentiments exactly,” Elizabeth said, nodding. “I prefer to give every shilling I can find to charity instead.” “Give it away?” he said in a muted roar, half rising out of his chair. Then he forced himself to sit back down and reconsider the wisdom of wedding her. She was lovely-her face more mature then he remembered it, but not even the black veil and scraped-back hair could detract from the beauty of her emerald-green eyes with their long, sooty lashes. Her eyes had dark circles beneath them-shadows he didn’t recall seeing there earlier in the day. He put the shadows down to her far-too-serious nature. Her dowry was creditable, and her body beneath that shapeless black gown…he wished he could see her shape. Perhaps it, too, had changed, and not for the better, in the past few years. “I had hoped, my dear,” Sir Francis said, covering her hand with his and squeezing it affectionately, “that you might wear something else down to supper, as I suggested you should.” Elizabeth gave him an innocent stare. “This is all I brought.” “All you brought?” he uttered. “B-But I definitely saw my footmen carrying several trunks upstairs.” “They belong to my aunt-only one of them is mine,” she fabricated hastily, already anticipating his next question and thinking madly for some satisfactory answer. “Really?” He continued to eye her gown with great dissatisfaction, and then he asked exactly the question she’d expected: “What, may I ask, does your one truck contain if not gowns?” Inspiration struck, and Elizabeth smiled radiantly. “Something of great value. Priceless value,” she confided. All faces at the table watched her with alert fascination-particularly the greedy Sir Francis. “Well, don’t keep us in suspense, love. What’s in it?” “The mortal remains of Saint Jacob.

You seem surprised to find us here,’ the man said. ‘I am,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find anyone.’ ‘We are everywhere,’ the man said. ‘We are all over the country.’ ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand. Who do you mean by we?’ ‘Jewish refugees.’ [...] ‘Is this your land?’ I asked him. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘You mean you are hoping to buy it?’ He looked at me in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘The land is at present owned by a Palestinian farmer but he has given us permission to live here. He has also allowed us some fields so that we can grow our own food.’ ‘So where do you go from here?’ I asked him. ‘You and all your orphans?’ ‘We don’t go anywhere,’ he said, smiling through his black beard. ‘We stay here.’ ‘Then you will all become Palestinians,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps you are that already.’ He smiled again, presumably at the naïvety of my questions. ‘No,’ the man said, ‘I do not think we will become Palestinians.’ ‘Then what will you do?’ ‘You are a young man who is flying aeroplanes,’ he said, ‘and I do not expect you to understand our problems.’ ‘What problems?’ I asked him. The young woman put two mugs of coffee on the table as well as a tin of condensed milk that had two holes punctured in the top. The man dripped some milk from the tin into my mug and stirred it for me with the only spoon. He did the same for his own coffee and then took a sip. ‘You have a country to live in and it is called England,’ he said. ‘Therefore you have no problems.’ ‘No problems!’ I cried. ‘England is fighting for her life all by herself against virtually the whole of Europe! We’re even fighting the Vichy French and that’s why we’re in Palestine right now! Oh, we’ve got problems all right!’ I was getting rather worked up. I resented the fact that this man sitting in his fig grove said that I had no problems when I was getting shot at every day. ‘I’ve got problems myself’, I said, ‘in just trying to stay alive.’ ‘That is a very small problem,’ the man said. ‘Ours is much bigger.’ I was flabbergasted by what he was saying. He didn’t seem to care one bit about the war we were fighting. He appeared to be totally absorbed in something he called ‘his problem’ and I couldn’t for the life of me make it out. ‘Don’t you care whether we beat Hitler or not?’ I asked him. ‘Of course I care. It is essential that Hitler be defeated. But that is only a matter of months and years. Historically, it will be a very short battle. Also it happens to be England’s battle. It is not mine. My battle is one that has been going on since the time of Christ.’ ‘I am not with you at all,’ I said. I was beginning to wonder whether he was some sort of a nut. He seemed to have a war of his own going on which was quite different to ours. I still have a very clear picture of the inside of that hut and of the bearded man with the bright fiery eyes who kept talking to me in riddles. ‘We need a homeland,’ the man was saying. ‘We need a country of our own. Even the Zulus have Zululand. But we have nothing.’ ‘You mean the Jews have no country?’ ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ he said. ‘It’s time we had one.’ ‘But how in the world are you going to get yourselves a country?’ I asked him. ‘They are all occupied. Norway belongs to the Norwegians and Nicaragua belongs to the Nicaraguans. It’s the same all over.’ ‘We shall see,’ the man said, sipping his coffee. The dark-haired woman was washing up some plates in a basin of water on another small table and she had her back to us. ‘You could have Germany,’ I said brightly. ‘When we have beaten Hitler then perhaps England would give you Germany.’ ‘We don’t want Germany,’ the man said. ‘Then which country did you have in mind?’ I asked him, displaying more ignorance than ever. ‘If you want something badly enough,’ he said, ‘and if you need something badly enough, you can always get it.’ [...]‘You have a lot to learn,’ he said. ‘But you are a good boy. You are fighting for freedom. So am I.

Yet when she returned to the house, Sarsine had a smile on her face. “Go into the salon,” she said. Her piano. Its surface gleamed like wet ink. An emotion flooded through Kestrel, but she didn’t want to name it. It wasn’t right that she should feel it, simply because Arin had given back to her something that he had more or less taken. Kestrel shouldn’t play. She shouldn’t sit on that familiar velvet bench or think about how transporting a piano across the city was no mean feat. It meant people. Pulleys. Horses straining to haul a cart. She shouldn’t wonder how Arin had found the time and begged his people’s goodwill to bring her piano here. She shouldn’t touch the cool keys, or feel that delicious tension between silence and sound. She remembered that Arin had refused to sing for who knows how long. Kestrel didn’t have that particular kind of strength. She sat and played.

A tiny little baby!' says Tam. 'People look at me like I'm an animal. People who don't know me judge me. I always remember going up to visit someone in prison, and this woman was sitting there. She was looking at me, growling a bit, and I could imagine what she was thinking: "There's a pedophile!" Anyway, I later discovered about her character. And I'll tell you, it outweighed anything I'd ever done.' 'What had she done?' I ask. 'Shoplifting,' says Tam. There is silence.

Patrick gave me a dare. I don't even think he knew what he was doing, but he gave it to me anyway. "Kiss the prettiest girl in the room on the lips." That's when I chose to be honest. In retrospect, I probably could not have picked a worse time. The silence started after I stood up (since Mary Elizabeth was sitting right next to me). By the time I had knelt down in front of Sam and kissed her, the silence was unbearable. It wasn't a romantic kiss. It was friendly, like when I played Rocky and she played Janet. But it didn't matter. I could say that it was the wine or the beer that I chugged. I could also say that I had forgotten the time Mary Elizabeth asked me if I thought she was pretty. But I would be lying. The truth is that when Patrick dared me, I knew that if I kissed Mary Elizabeth, I would be lying to everyone. Including Sam. Including Patrick. Including Mary Elizabeth. And I just couldn't do it anymore. Even if it was part of a game.

Celestial Music” I have a friend who still believes in heaven. Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god, she thinks someone listens in heaven. On earth, she’s unusually competent. Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness. We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it. I’m always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality. But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes. Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out according to nature. For my sake, she intervened, brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down across the road. My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else explains my aversion to reality. She says I’m like the child who buries her head in the pillow so as not to see, the child who tells herself that light causes sadness— My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person— In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We’re walking on the same road, except it’s winter now; she’s telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music: look up, she says. When I look up, nothing. Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees like brides leaping to a great height— Then I’m afraid for her; I see her caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth— In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set; from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall. It’s this moment we’re both trying to explain, the fact that we’re at ease with death, with solitude. My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn’t move. She’s always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image capable of life apart from her. We’re very quiet. It’s peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering— it’s this stillness that we both love. The love of form is a love of endings.

He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.' The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it. The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window. The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it. And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street. That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name: David Singer. Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.

Well, are you just going to sit there with your mouths gaping-open or are you able to speak? Why didn’t you announce yourselves prior to crashing ashore, the Fairy Queen scolded. How-Ya-Do’s eyes were even larger than usual as he cowered on Cricket’s shoulder; the both of them speechless, shocked into silence, and Face-to-Face with Magic itself! You scared the spark right out of us, well speak-up for goodness sake before I sic’ The Hummers onto you both, she warned while pointing to the massive army of bees.

Don't take a bath" Jana said, and they cracked up. It was an inside joke. They'd been coached once by Jacob Liedel, the aging emeritus director of the conservatory, who sat with his saggy skin and liver spots in a chair inexplicably on the other side of the room, and shouted at them the whole time. He barely let them get through a phrase before waving his hands, interrupting them, correcting them. Brit admired his old-school edge, but she knew Jana found it upsetting, and the louder he yelled, the more strained her bow arm became, until Jacob finally yelled, "Don't take a bath!" and Jana stopped playing and said, "What?" Jacob repeated "Don't take a bath there. With that phrase." None of them asked him what he meant, but he said it two, three more times during the coaching session; afterward, at dinner, the four of them sitting in a tired silence, Henry said, "What's taking a bath mean?" and Jana and Brit laughed so hard they cried into their cheese fries and slid under the booth. Now and again they still said it to each other with no consistency of context.

I became expert at making myself invisible. I could linger two hours over a coffee, four over a meal, and hardly be noticed by the waitress. Though the janitors in Commons rousted me every night at closing time, I doubt they ever realized they spoke to the same boy twice. Sunday afternoons, my cloak of invisibility around my shoulders, I would sit in the infirmary for sometimes six hours at a time, placidly reading copies of Yankee magazine ('Clamming on Cuttyhunk') or Reader's Digest (Ten Ways to Help That Aching Back!'), my presence unremarked by receptionist, physician, and fellow sufferer alike. But, like the Invisible Man in H. G. Wells, I discovered that my gift had its price, which took the form of, in my case as in his, a sort of mental darkness. It seemed that people failed to meet my eye, made as if to walk through me; my superstitions began to transform themselves into something like mania. I became convinced that it was only a matter of time before one of the rickety iron steps that led to my room gave and I would fall and break my neck or, worse, a leg; I'd freeze or starve before Leo would assist me. Because one day, when I'd climbed the stairs successfully and without fear, I'd had an old Brian Eno song running through my head ('In New Delhi, 'And Hong Kong,' They all know that it won't be long...'), I now had to sing it to myself each trip up or down the stairs. And each time I crossed the footbridge over the river, twice a day, I had to stop and scoop around in the coffee-colored snow at the road's edge until I found a decent-sized rock. I would then lean over the icy railing and drop it into the rapid current that bubbled over the speckled dinosaur eggs of granite which made up its bed - a gift to the river-god, maybe, for safe crossing, or perhaps some attempt to prove to it that I, though invisible, did exist. The water ran so shallow and clear in places that sometimes I heard the dropped stone click as it hit the bed. Both hands on the icy rail, staring down at the water as it dashed white against the boulders, boiled thinly over the polished stones, I wondered what it would be like to fall and break my head open on one of those bright rocks: a wicked crack, a sudden limpness, then veins of red marbling the glassy water. If I threw myself off, I thought, who would find me in all that white silence? Might the river beat me downstream over the rocks until it spat me out in the quiet waters, down behind the dye factory, where some lady would catch me in the beam of her headlights when she pulled out of the parking lot at five in the afternoon? Or would I, like the pieces of Leo's mandolin, lodge stubbornly in some quiet place behind a boulder and wait, my clothes washing about me, for spring?

He stood up, a giant of a man—er, male, his dark hair catching the dim light from the street lamps out in front of the condo. A wave of sadness came over her, and she closed her eyes. “Hey,” he said, sitting down next to her. “None of that. We’re not sad. You and me? We’re not sad. We don’t do sad.” She laughed with a choking sound. “How did you know what I was feeling? Or do I look that pathetic?” He tapped his nose. “I can smell it. Spring rain is what the scent’s like.” “I hate this good-bye shit.” “Me, too.” He leaned down and brushed his lips against her forehead. “Here.” He shrugged out of his long-sleeved shirt, balled it up, and put it under her cheek. “Pretend this is me.” She breathed in deep, caught the bonding scent, and was calmed a little. As he stood, he looked so strong in just a muscle shirt, invincible, like a superhero. And yet he breathed. “Please…be careful.” “Always.” He bent over and kissed her again. “I love you.” As he pulled away, she reached out and grabbed his arm. Words failed, but the silence said enough. “I hate the leaving, too,” he replied roughly. “But I’ll be back. I promise.” -Vishous & Jane

Who is Mr. Jasper?" Rosa turned aside her head in answering: "Eddy's uncle, and my music-master." "You do not love him?" "Ugh!" She put her hands up to her face, and shook with fear or horror. "You know that he loves you?" "O, don't, don't, don't!" cried Rosa, dropping on her knees, and clinging to her new resource. "Don't tell me of it! He terrifies me. He haunts my thoughts, like a dreadful ghost. I feel that I am never safe from him. I feel as if he could pass in through the wall when he is spoken of." She actually did look round, as if she dreaded to see him standing in the shadow behind her. "Try to tell me more about it, darling." "Yes, I will, I will. Because you are so strong. But hold me the while, and stay with me afterwards." "My child! You speak as if he had threatened you in some dark way." "He has never spoken to me about - that. Never." "What has he done?" "He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat. When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips. When he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding me to keep his secret. I avoid his eyes, but he forces me to see them without looking at them. Even when a glaze comes over them (which is sometimes the case), and he seems to wander away into a frightful sort of dream in which he threatens most, he obliges me to know it, and to know that he is sitting close at my side, more terrible to me than ever." "What is this imagined threatening, pretty one? What is threatened?" "I don't know. I have never even dared to think or wonder what it is." "And was this all, to-night?" "This was all; except that to-night when he watched my lips so closely as I was singing, besides feeling terrified I felt ashamed and passionately hurt. It was as if he kissed me, and I couldn't bear it, but cried out. You must never breathe this to any one. Eddy is devoted to him. But you said to-night that you would not be afraid of him, under any circumstances, and that gives me - who am so much afraid of him - courage to tell only you. Hold me! Stay with me! I am too frightened to be left by myself.

She listens, determined to locate the trapped bird that had called out from within the madness of suffering. But there is only silence now, not even a halting fragment. Ali! Ali! A dervish, having renounced dealings with all words except that one, never utters another, in any circumstance...The sentence enters her mind from a book she had been looking at earlier. Her gaze is drifting across the sky where the moon sits in a great cold ring as she recalls more and more words. Only one thing matters, only one word. If we speak, it is because we have not found that thing, nor shall find it.

Close both eyes to see with the other eye. Open your hands, if you want to be held. Sit down in this circle. Quit acting like a wolf, and feel the shepherd's love filling you. At night, your beloved wanders. Don't accept consolations. Close your mouth against food. Taste the lover's mouth in yours. You moan, "She left me." "He left me." Twenty more will come. Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.

Close both eyes to see with the other eye. Open your hands, if you want to be held. Sit down in this circle. Quit acting like a wolf, and feel the shepherd's love filling you. At night, your beloved wanders. Don't accept consolations. Close your mouth against food. Taste the lover's mouth in yours. You moan, "She left me." "He left me." Twenty more will come. Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.” (page 3)

She doesn’t ask what broke me. She just shows up A mug of coffee in one hand, a wilted orchid in the other. The purple matches the bruise of the sky, sun bleeding out behind the hills. We sit with silence between us. She lets mine grow wild. Pours warmth into it without stirring. When I finally say “it still hurts,” she doesn’t say it’ll stop. She just shifts closer, like grief is a door she knows how to hold open without letting anything spill. The orchid rests between us on the table. One petal falls. She catches it. Says, “even the softest things learn how to let go.” And I believe her.

His blue eyes watched her as she walked to him, and the room was filled with the quietness of afternoon sunlight. It fell through the window, across the rocking chair, hit broadside the wallpaper with its brightness. The mahogany bed knobs shone. Through the curved-out window was the blue of the sky, the bayberry bush, the stone wall. The silence of this sunshine, of the world, seemed to fold over Olive with a shiver of ghastliness, as she stood feeling the sun on her bare wrist. She watched him, looked away, looked at him again. To sit down beside him would be to close her eyes to the gaping loneliness of this sunlit world.

Drink all your passion, and be a disgrace. Close both eyes to see with the other eye. Open your hands, if you want to be held. Sit down in this circle. Quit acting like a wolf, and feel the shepherd's love filling you. At night, your beloved wanders. Don't accept consolations. Close your mouth against food. Taste the lover's mouth in yours. You moan, "She left me." "He left me." Twenty more will come. Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.

After all this time, she still had not found an end to her grief. It was a dark well, an echoing place into which she'd once cast a stone, sure that it would strike bottom and she would stop hurting. Instead, it just kept falling. She forgot about the stone, forgot about the well, sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. Then she would think Liliyana’s name, or her eye would pause on the little boat painted on her bedroom wall, its two-starred flag frozen in the wind. She'd sit down to write a letter and realize she had no one to write to, and the quiet that surrounded her became the silence of the well, of the stone still falling.

Under the stilly boughs and the black gauze of dusk the street was meshed in silence. There was but the hum of motor tires crunching the road, the creak of a rocker on the Howlands' porch, the slap of a hand attacking a mosquito, a heat–weary conversation starting and dying, the precise rhythm of crickets, the thud of moths against the screen—sounds that were a distilled silence. It was a street beyond the end of the world, beyond the boundaries of hope. Though she should sit here forever, no brave procession, no one who was interesting, would be coming by. It was tediousness made tangible, a street builded of lassitude and of futility.

Mum was pregnant, then there was Sharron. [...] I wanted to keep him away from her - but for the wrong reasons. In my head he was mine, he was my special person but, of course, as I was getting older, his interest in me was waning anyway. I don't know whether it was because he had lost interest in me, or because the abuse elsewhere was so horrific, particularly without him in my life to make things seem better but, whatever the reason, I soon moved from wanted him to leave Sharron alone for my sake, to wanting him to leave her alone for the right reasons. She was tiny, just a toddler, and the thought of him touching her or abusing her horrified me. I started trying to attract his attention whenever he looked at her. I'd dance, I'd sing, I'd sit on his lap. I'd do a hundred things that were completely out of character - anything, anything to avoid seeing that look in his eye when he glanced at the baby. I knew that he was planing to do to her what he had done to me. I tried to get in the way, I tried to get him to play with me, but once Sharron was about three, the penny finally dropped. I had always thought he wasn't in the same category as the others; they weren't nice, and he always was. But as she began to replace me, it made me face up to things. What Uncle Andrew did wasn't right. [...] Even though I loved my uncle, and craved his attention, the thought of him coming into my bed was starting to repulse me. sharron slept in my bed, too, by then, and I wanted that to continue because I wanted to protect her. Of course, there were plenty of times when I wasn't there. I was still being taken away to be abused. I was at school; Sharon was often left unprotected. Something must have been happening because she started wetting the bed almost every night. This was a sign that even I couldn't turn away from. Sharon was being abused. I was sure of it. But I wouldn't stand for it, not for much longer. p209-2010

She heard Arin shift, felt him look at her. “Kestrel.” She imagined how he would sit, lean forward. How he would look in the glow of the carriage lantern. “Survival isn’t wrong. You can sell your honor in small ways, so long as you guard yourself. You can pour a glass of wine like it’s meant to be poured, and watch a man drink, and plot your revenge.” Perhaps his head tilted slightly at this. “You probably plot even in your sleep.” There was a silence as long as a smile. “Plot away, Kestrel. Survive. If I hadn’t lived, no one would remember my mother, not like I do.” Kestrel could no longer deny sleep. It pulled her under. “And I would never have met you.

She/I -- the dreamer -- cannot act as a principal in her own dream. She, the narrator of the table, is an easy accomplice. She sits quietly on the sidelines at the dance, waiting to be invited. The watcher has a bitter place in the world. She has so much yearning in her heart, so little acumen. Her loneliness is unbearable. Her unrequited longing calcified into her ventricles. Her silence welling up in her throat, all she can do now is gasp or sing for blood. She must quench her thirst for revenge. She must sound the sirens. She must rage out for being the obedient one, for being the repressed singer, for being that perfect Chinese girlhood too timorous to break the mold.

The library smells like old books—a thousand leather doorways into other worlds.” Mr. Brown paused and glanced up at the room, but especially at James for one moment. “I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers.” Mr. Brown paused as he stared at the page, and then read, “Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like—” Here Mr. Brown paused again. “Like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I’ll say this is just a place where you can’t play music or eat. She’s gone. The library sucks.

Honesty," she announced. Her slightly shaky voice echoed through the dark assembly hall. the single word and the long silence after it made the students in the audience sit up a little straighter in their seats. Then Gabriella began to recite: "I see you there in front of me- Your face, your hands, your eyes. I hear you talk, I hear you tell Your hopes, your dreams, your lies. I walked with you, a sunlit trail, Together hand in hand. Then twilight came, and you were gone, And now alone I stand. The woods are cold, the trees are black, The dark is closing in. And you have gone away from me, Your faultless light has dimmed. Betrayal is an empty space, Raw night, cold room, alone. And no one can redeem your face, Sweet knight, safe light, you're gone."

I want to be married,” I blurted. “I want you to marry me.” Fuuuuuuuck. And so my entire carefully constructed speech was thrown out the window. My grandmother’s antique ring was in a box in the dresser—nowhere near me—and my plan to kneel and do everything right just evaporated. In the circle of my arms, Chloe grew very still. “What did you just say?” I had completely botched the plan, but it was too late to turn back now. “I know we have only been together for a little over a year,” I explained, quickly. “Maybe it’s too soon? I understand if it’s too soon. It’s just that how you feel about the way we kiss? I feel that way about everything we do together. I love it. I love to be inside you, I love working with you, I love watching you work, I love fighting with you, and I love just sitting on the couch and laughing with you. I’m lost when I’m not with you, Chloe. I can’t think of anything, or anyone, who is more important to me, every second. And so for me, that means we’re already sort of married in my head. I guess I wanted to make it official somehow. Maybe I sound like an idiot?” I looked over at her, feeling my heart try to jackhammer its way up my throat. “I never expected to feel this way about someone.” She stared at me, eyes wide and lips parted as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. I stood and ran over to the dresser, pulling the box from the drawer and carrying it over to her. When I opened the box and let her see my grandmother’s antique diamond and sapphire ring, she clapped a hand over her mouth. “I want to be married,” I said again. Her silence was unnerving, and fuck, I’d completely botched this with my rambling nonsense. “Married to you, I mean.” Her eyes filled with tears and she held them, unblinking. “You. Are such. An ass.” Well, that was unexpected. I knew it might be too soon, but an ass? Really? I narrowed my eyes. “A simple ‘It’s too soon’ would have sufficed, Chloe. Jesus. I lay my heart out on the—” She pushed off the bed and ran over to one of her bags, rummaging through it and pulling out a small blue fabric bag. She carried it back to me with the ribbon hooked over her long index finger, and dangled the bag in my face. I ask her to marry me and she brings me a souvenir from New York? What the fuck is that? “What the fuck is that?” I asked. “You tell me, genius.” “Don’t get smart with me, Mills. It’s a bag. For all I know you have a granola bar, or your tampons, in there.” “It’s a ring, dummy. For you.” My heart was pounding so hard and fast I half wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like. “A ring for me?” She pulled a small box out of the bag and showed it to me. It was smooth platinum, with a line of coarse titanium running through the middle. “You were going to propose to me?” I asked, still completely confused. “Do women even do that?” She punched me, hard, in the arm. “Yes, you chauvinist. And you totally stole my thunder.” “So, is that a yes?” I asked, my bewilderment deepening. “You’ll marry me?” “You tell me!” she yelled, but she was smiling. “Technically you haven’t asked yet.” “Goddamnit, Bennett! You haven’t, either!” “Will you marry me?” I asked, laughing. “Will you marry me?” With a growl, I took the box and dropped it on the floor, flipping her onto her back.

Can I tell you a funny story?” Gina asked. She didn’t wait for him to say yes or no. “It’s about, well . . . You know the whole age-issue thing?” “The age-issue thing,” Max repeated. “Are you sure this is a funny story?” “Does it still bother you?” she asked. “Being a little bit older than me? And it’s more funny weird than funny ha-ha.” “Twenty years isn’t exactly ‘a little bit,’” he said. “Tell that to a paleontologist,” she countered. Okay, he’d give her that one. “Just tell me the story.” “Once upon a time, when Jones first came to Kenya,” Gina said, “I didn’t know who he was. Molly didn’t tell me, and he came to our tent for tea, and . . . Maybe this isn’t even a funny weird story. Maybe it’s more of an ‘I’m an asshole’ story, because I immediately jumped to the conclusion that he was there because he was all hot for me. It never occurred to me—it never even crossed my narrow little mind—that he might’ve been crushing on Molly. And she’s only maybe ten years older than he is. I remember sitting there after I figured it out, and thinking, shoot. People do make assumptions based on age. Max wasn’t just being crazy.” She smiled at him. “Or at least not crazier than usual. I guess . . . I just wanted to apologize for mocking you all those times.” “It’s okay,” Max said. “I just keep reminding myself that love doesn’t always stop to do the math.” He looked at her. “I’m trying to talk myself into that. How’d I sound? Convincing?” “That was pretty good.” They sat in silence for a moment, then Gina spoke again. “Maybe I could get a T-shirt that says, ‘I’m not his daughter, I’m his wife.’” Max nodded as he laughed. “Yet still you mock me.

Busy in the business of day— my storming blood has just met a pair of eyes rainswept sand…. That face, again, that face like sunken sand— the sand, sunken, of a face that ancient…. More worn than my face unborn— contours I have known in the bones of her cheeks a recognition— a pair of orphans unmasked at morn…. Because only, only a girl borne of remembering could wear that countenance of mourning…. Across the wash pale soft of dawn float close weighty blossoms on thresholds unknown— for the fragile, delicate tenderness of her composure just-holding, achingly, on the edge of things…. A world of raindrops floating in her eyes— in her eyes sand grains softly settle…. Although to one another we are only a presence in the room and all's silence between us— still, hers is a presence I’ve known: of age more somehow than the day I was born a relation there remains nose kissed to nose…. Slaving in the sweat of the sun I’m back at it in the beds— as, over all the grounds, waxing with the sun personalities of sheds, tines, the animals, define themselves…. Heading now to the meal hall to eat and talk, after digging— when my momentum stalled: by hedges of the wall's the visage of her in the sunny landscape a teardrop of midnight…. Tearing's the flesh of my heart on my cheeks in tears— for her fragile chin and the wrinkles of her eyes when she smiles so glassy I could cry…. Commotion of knives and forks— today the commons are aloud with cups and conversation: a wisp here, a leap of voices there the day’s news bounces its way through the crowd…. Splashing up a laughter of glasses the guys devour their stories about girls at the party— and when we eat our fill glad in our stomachs there’s lots of chin in it we raise each other’s grins sitting in satisfaction and stimulating to the sun…. Tense in the laughter of friends and companions— lines of my age un-wrinkle: by portals of the door her expression there's more sober than smiling: for guile am I un-abled…. Not the friction of sticks, no, nor some feverish itch that must until exhaustion consume— but a long blue flame, slow and fluidly moving will our relation be: a translucent vein loose in the midnight river…. Now— into the doings of day: but to approach her my eyes can't meet my walkingʻs fallen dead at the knees and thoughts of my head now drown in blood— blackness and oblivion...

The silences between them were peculiar. There would be the swift, slight 'cluck' of her needle, the shard 'pop' of his lips as he let out the smoke, the warmth, the sizzle on the bars as he spar in the fire. Then her thoughts turned to William... she saw him a man, young, full of vigour, making the world glow again for her. And Morel sitting there, quite alone, and having nothing to think about, would be feeling vaguely uncomfortable. His soul would reach out in its blind way to her, and find her gone. He felt a sort of emptiness, almost like a vacuum in his soul. He was unsettled and restless. Soon he could not live in that atmosphere, and he affected his wife. Both felt an oppression on their breathing, when they were left together for some time. Then he went to bed, and she settled down to enjoy herself alone, working, thinking, living.

But the best reward from that meditation center was a familiar face I could access every time I sat down to meditate. For a couple of minutes, I basked in the sun and breathed, and then I summoned an older version of myself, a year into the future. I imagined she was sitting behind me, enveloping me in a big-spoon hug. She had a few more wrinkles. A couple more freckles. She was wearing baggy, soft clothing. 'Hi,' I said. 'Hi,' she said. 'I’m sad today,' I admitted. 'It’s okay to be sad. You won’t be sad a week from now. I love you, and you are doing your best,' she said, and I knew she was right. I leaned back into her belly. I could almost feel it pushing back against me, a solid pressure, telling me I was not alone. She silenced my mother’s voice in my head. Excised her not just in body but in mind. She did it because, as my third parent, that is her right.

What’s the most frightening thing to a child? The pain of being the outsider, of looking ridiculous to others, of being teased or picked on in school. Every child burns with fear at the prospect. It’s a primal instinct: to belong. McDonald’s has surely figured this out—along with what specific colors appeal to small children, what textures, and what movies or TV shows are likely to attract them to the gray disks of meat. They feel no compunction harnessing the fears and unarticulated yearnings of small children, and nor shall I. “Ronald has cooties,” I say—every time he shows up on television or out the window of the car. “And you know,” I add, lowering my voice, “he smells bad, too. Kind of like … poo!” (I am, I should say, careful to use the word “alleged” each and every time I make such an assertion, mindful that my urgent whisperings to a two-year-old might be wrongfully construed as libelous.) “If you hug Ronald … can you get cooties?” asks my girl, a look of wide-eyed horror on her face. “Some say … yes,” I reply—not wanting to lie—just in case she should encounter the man at a child’s birthday party someday. It’s a lawyerly answer—but effective. “Some people talk about the smell, too… I’m not saying it rubs off on you or anything—if you get too close to him—but…” I let that hang in the air for a while. “Ewwww!!!” says my daughter. We sit in silence as she considers this, then she asks, “Is it true that if you eat a hamburger at McDonald’s it can make you a ree-tard? I laugh wholeheartedly at this one and give her a hug. I kiss her on the forehead reassuringly. “Ha. Ha. Ha. I don’t know where you get these ideas!” I may or may not have planted that little nugget a few weeks ago, allowing her little friend Tiffany at ballet class to “overhear” it as I pretended to talk on my cell phone.

I prop my guitar up against the nightstand. Then I turn toward the bed and fall into it face first. The mattress is soft but firm, like a sheet of steel wrapped in a cloud. I roll around, moaning loud and long. “Oh, that’s good. Really, really good. What a grand bed!” Sarah clears her throat. “Well. We should probably get to sleep, then. Big day tomorrow.” The pillow smells sweet, like candy. I can only imagine it’s from her. I wonder if I pressed my nose to the crook of her neck, would her skin smell as delicious? I brush away the thought as I watch her stiffly gather a pillow and blanket from the other side of the bed, dragging them to . . . the nook. “What are you doing?” She looks up, her doe eyes widening. “Getting ready for bed.” “You’re going to sleep there?” “Of course. The sofa’s very uncomfortable.” “Why can’t we share the bed?” She chokes . . . stutters. “I . . . I can’t sleep with you. I don’t even know you.” I throw my arms out wide. “What do you want to know? Ask me anything—I’m an open book.” “That’s not what I mean.” “You’re being ridiculous! It’s a huge bed. You could let one rip and I wouldn’t hear it.” And the blush is back. With a vengeance. “I’m not . . . I don’t . . .” “You don’t fart?” I scoff. “Really? Are you not human?” She curses under her breath, but I’d love to hear it out loud. I bet uninhibited Sarah Von Titebottum would be a stunning sight. And very entertaining. She shakes her head, pinning me with her eyes. “There’s something wrong with you.” “No.” I explain calmly, “I’m just free. Honest with myself and others. You should try it sometime.” She folds her arms, all tight, trembling indignation. It’s adorable. “I’m sleeping in the nook, Your Highness. And that’s that.” I sit up, pinning her gaze right back at her. “Henry.” “What?” “My name is not Highness, it’s fucking Henry, and I’d prefer you use it.” And she snaps. “Fine! Fucking Henry—happy?” I smile. “Yes. Yes, I am.” I flop back on the magnificent bed. “Sleep tight, Titebottum.” I think she growls at me, but it’s muffled by the sound of rustling bed linens and pillows. And then . . . there’s silence. Beautiful, blessed silence. I wiggle around, getting comfy. I turn on my side and fluff the pillow. I squeeze my eyes tight . . . but it’s hopeless. “Fucking hell!” I sit up. And Sarah springs to her feet. “What? What’s wrong?” It’s the guilt. I’ve barged into this poor girl’s room, confiscated her bed, and have forced her to sleep in a cranny in the wall. I may not be the man my father was or the gentleman my brother is, but I’m not that much of a prick. I stand up, rip my shirt over my head. and march toward the window seat. I feel Sarah’s eyes graze my bare chest, arms. and stomach, but she circles around me, keeping her distance. “You take the bloody bed,” I tell her. “I’ll sleep in the bloody nook.” “You don’t have to do that.” I push my hand through my hair. “Yes, I do.” Then I stand up straight and proper, an impersonation of Hugh Grant in one of his classic royal roles. “Please, Lady Sarah.” She blinks, her little mouth pursed. “Okay.” Then she climbs onto the bed, under the covers. And I squeeze onto the window bench, knees bent, my elbow jammed against the icy windowpane, and my neck bent at an odd angle that I’m going to be feeling tomorrow. The light is turned down to a very low dim, and for several moments all I hear is Sarah’s soft breaths. But then, in the near darkness, her delicate voice floats out on a sigh. “All right, we can sleep in the bed together.” Music to my ears. I don’t make her tell me twice—I’ve fulfilled my noble quota for the evening. I stumble from the nook and crash onto the bed. That’s better.

see? I’ve let that go. We’ve had enough offense and punishment in this family to last a lifetime. Please, don’t try to make us suffer any more.” She stared at me in silence, and I think the truth of my words finally connected with her because her face slowly softened. In truth, only I had the key to any prison in my mind, but I didn’t want to see my mother suffer. My mother was beaming proudly. There was no way I could let her go to prison. It seemed absurd to me. I smiled at her. “I’m going to find Bobby.” I left them sitting in silence and made my way toward the lake to look for Bobby. Funny how the swamps looked so different to me the last two days. I had lived in fear of them—they were a part of my prison. But now I saw that it was my fear of the swamps, not the actual swamps, that had fortified that prison. There’s always something to fear if you think fear will keep you safe. Fire. Swamps. Alligators . . . Water. I’m

He was just a child himself, she saw. And lonely. He was the kind of man who probably always would be. 'Would you like some cake?' she tried. His countenance brightened. He would like some cake, he realized. He would like some cake very much indeed; he would like it above anything. When Sarah brought a slice of fruitcake up on a pretty blue-rimmed plate, she found that Mary was now also in the breakfast room, sitting stiffly on an upright chair near the young clergyman; she look round, heavy-eyed, when Sarah came in. Sarah had the distinct impression that she had disturbed not a conversation but a silence. Mary must be struggling to converse with him -- Sarah could sympathize -- too much time spent with books had not fitted her to be easy with herself, and other people. The young lady got up abruptly, and went to the window, and Mr. Collins got up too, looking relieved. He took the plat from Sarah and was profuse in his thanks, but then, with Mary there, did not know what to do with the cake after all.

Call him,” Vicky urges one last time, placing my phone on my desk, tapping her nail on the screen before leaving me to it. I stare at my phone and then with shaky fingers I pick it up and press redial on his number. He answers on the first ring. “Tru,” his voice comes deep and sexy down the line. “Hi, Jake.” Silence. “So…” I say, not really knowing what to say. “I’m taking it your boss beat me to it?” he states rather than asks. “She did.” “And?” “And what?” “Will you do it – the bio?” “Do I have a choice?” There’s a really long pause. I can practically feel his tension radiating down the line. “There’s always a choice, Tru.” He sounds a little pissed off. “Sorry,” I recover. “That sounded a little shitty, it’s just a lot of information to process this early in the morning. Especially when I haven’t even had a chance to have a coffee yet.” “You haven’t?” “No, and I don’t function without coffee,” I say in a Spanish accent. I’m actually fluent in Spanish, something my mum insisted on, and it does comes in handy at times – well, mainly holiday’s in Spanish speaking countries. And my crap Spanish accent always used to make Jake laugh when we were kids, so I’m aiming for just that again. He chuckles, deep and throaty down the line. It does incredible things to me. “I see you’re still an idiot.” “I am, and it still takes one to know one.” “That it does … so you’ll do it?” I get the distinct feeling he’s not asking me. And really in what world would I ever say no. “I’ll do it,” I smile. I can practically feel his grin down the phone. “Okay, so as your new boss – well one of them – I order you to go get some coffee as I can’t have you talking in that cute Spanish accent of yours all day. You’ll drive me nuts.” I’ll drive him nuts?! In a good or bad way… “I’m seeing you today?” “Of course. Go get that coffee and I’ll call you back soon.” He hangs up, and I sit staring at the phone in my hand, feeling a little dumbfounded. And somehow a little played. I just haven’t figured out as to how yet.

I dial her mum's number, then sit down cross-legged, facing the wall. When she comes on the line, she sounds uncertain, hesitant. 'Hey! Guess where I am?' I ask, my voice loud with false cheer. 'Rami told me. The Wellesly Hospital in Worthing. What's it like?' 'For a loony-bin it's actually quite decent,' I reply. 'I don't have Sky or an en-suite, and the menu isn't exactly à la carte, but you know...' I tail off. There is a silence. 'Do you have your own room?' Jenna asks, 'Oh yeah, yeah. I have a lovely view of the sea between the bars of my window.' She doesn't laugh. 'Have you started' -there is a pause as she searches for the right word -'threatment?' 'Yeah, yeah. We had group therapy today. Tomorrow we'll probably have art therapy - maybe I'll draw you a hourse and a garden. I know, perhaps they'll teach us to make baskets! Isn't that why they call us basket cases?' 'Flynn, stop,' Jennah softly implores. 'And we'll probably have music therapy the day after. Maybe I'll get to play the tambourine. Or the triangle. I've always wanted to play the triangle!' 'Flynn-' 'No, I'm serious! I'll ask for some manuscript paper and see if I can write a composition for tambourine and triangle. Then I can post if off to you to hand in for my next composition assignment.' 'Flynn, listen-' 'Hold on, hold on! I'm making a note to myself now: Find fellow insane musician and start composing the Flynn Laukonen Sonata for Tambourine and Triangle.' 'Flynn-' 'And then, when they let me out, if they ever let me out, perhaps you could pull a few strigns and organize for me and my tambourine buddy to give a recital. I'm not sure where though -how about the subway at Marble Arch tube? Nice and central, good acoustics-' 'What are the other people like?' Jennah cuts in, an edge to her voice. I notice she doesn't use the word patients. Clever Jennah. For a moment there you almost made me forget I was locked up in a mental institution. 'Round the bend, just like me,' I reply. 'I'm in excellent company. We'll be swapping suicide tips in no time at all!' I give a harsh laugh.

I was certainly not the best mother. That goes without saying. I didn’t set out to be a bad mother, however. It just happened. As it was, being a bad mother was child’s play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn’t do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul. Why did I allow Grace to make Mia cry? Why did I snap at Mia to stop just to silence the noise? Why did I sneak to a quiet place, whenever I could? Why did I rush the days—will them to hurry by—so I could be alone? Other mothers took their children to museums, the gardens, the beach. I kept mine indoors, as much as I could, so we wouldn’t cause a scene. I lie awake at night wondering: what if I never have a chance to make it up to Mia? What if I’m never able to show her the kind of mother I always longed to be? The kind who played endless hours of hide-and-seek, who gossiped side by side on their daughters’ beds about which boys in the junior high were cute. I always envisioned a friendship between my daughters and me. I imagined shopping together and sharing secrets, rather than the formal, obligatory relationship that now exists between myself and Grace and Mia. I list in my head all the things that I would tell Mia if I could. That I chose the name Mia for my great-grandmother, Amelia, vetoing James’s alternative: Abigail. That the Christmas she turned four, James stayed up until 3:00 a.m. assembling the dollhouse of her dreams. That even though her memories of her father are filled with nothing but malaise, there were split seconds of goodness: James teaching her how to swim, James helping her prepare for a fourth-grade spelling test. That I mourn each and every time I turned down an extra book before bed, desperate now for just five more minutes of laughing at Harry the Dirty Dog. That I go to the bookstore and purchase a copy after unsuccessfully ransacking the basement for the one that used to be hers. That I sit on the floor of her old bedroom and read it again and again and again. That I love her. That I’m sorry. Colin

threat condition state. Although Sheepdogs operate in “yellow,” they’re prepared to escalate to “orange” or “red” in a moment’s notice. Though the warrior trains for violence and can withstand the psychological impact of violence, he/ she abhors violence. Identifying and diffusing a threat is the largest segment of the Unbeatable Mind warrior training. Only when all else fails will the warrior engage in a violence to end the threat. When this happens, he/he terrifies their opponent with an offensive mind. Exercise Think about a violent and vicious animal - wolverine, lion, or bear. Sit in silence and begin your breath control. Count backwards from 100. At 50, invoke the image and psychological energy of your chosen animal. Feel the animal’s ferocious attack energy. Feel the animal’s emotions as it seeks to protect its offspring. Imagine yourself fighting a violent criminal with the same psychic animal. Now, practice turning this energy on and off, like a light switch. Repeat this exercise daily for a month. This will cultivate an offensive mind-set and provide an enormous amount of psychological energy to be used in the event of a violent encounter.

The children slept late, and washed and dressed almost in silence. Both of them were afraid to speak. Maia packed her belongings in an old canvas bag and stroked the dog. “I’ll come over in a minute to say good-bye,” said Finn. The Carters’ boat was ready to leave, breakfast tidied away, ropes coiled. The professor was sorting out the firebox and feeding in fresh logs. Miss Minton, sitting in the stern, had a parcel wrapped in burlap on her knees. “I’m ready,” said Maia, trying to keep her voice steady. She mustn’t cry. Above all, she mustn’t sulk. “Finn’s coming over to say good-bye.” “No need,” said Miss Minton. “He’d like to.” “All the same, there is no need.” Maia looked at her governess. Miss Minton seemed different…Softer? Rounder? More at peace? “Why?” she asked. “Why is there no need?” “Because we’re coming with you. We’re going on. Get back on the Arabella and tell Finn we’ll follow three lengths behind.” As Maia turned to go, hardly believing that there could be such happiness, she heard a loud splash. Miss Minton was leaning over the side, watching the parcel she had held on her knees floating away downriver. “What was that?” asked Maia. Miss Minton straightened herself. If you must know,” she said, “it was my corset.

what about your new way of looking at things? We seem to have wandered rather a long way from that.’ ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Philip, ‘we haven’t. All these camisoles en flanelle and pickled onions and bishops of cannibal islands are really quite to the point. Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,’ he nodded after the retreating group, ‘thinks of it in terms of good times. And then there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once. With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes, homme moyen sensuel eyes . . .’ ‘Loving eyes too.’ He smiled at her and stroked her hand. ‘The result . . .’ he hesitated. ‘Yes, what would the result be?’ she asked. ‘Queer,’ he answered. ‘A very queer picture indeed.’ ‘Rather too queer, I should have thought.’ ‘But it can’t be too queer,’ said Philip. ‘However queer the picture is, it can never be half so odd as the original reality. We take it all for granted; but the moment you start thinking, it becomes queer. And the more you think, the queerer it grows. That’s what I want to get in this book—the astonishingness of the most obvious things. Really any plot or situation would do. Because everything’s implicit in anything. The whole book could be written about a walk from Piccadilly Circus to Charing Cross. Or you and I sitting here on an enormous ship in the Red Sea. Really, nothing could be queerer than that. When you reflect on the evolutionary processes, the human patience and genius, the social organisation, that have made it possible for us to be here, with stokers having heat apoplexy for our benefit and steam turbines doing five thousand revolutions a minute, and the sea being blue, and the rays of light not flowing round obstacles, so that there’s a shadow, and the sun all the time providing us with energy to live and think—when you think of all this and a million other things, you must see that nothing could well be queerer and that no picture can be queer enough to do justice to the facts.’ ‘All the same,’ said Elinor, after a long silence, ‘I wish one day you’d write a simple straightforward story about a young man and a young woman who fall in love and get married and have difficulties, but get over them, and finally settle down.’ ‘Or

Honest to God, I hadn’t meant to start a bar fight. “So. You’re the famous Jordan Amador.” The demon sitting in front of me looked like someone filled a pig bladder with rotten cottage cheese. He overflowed the bar stool with his gelatinous stomach, just barely contained by a white dress shirt and an oversized leather jacket. Acid-washed jeans clung to his stumpy legs and his boots were at least twice the size of mine. His beady black eyes started at my ankles and dragged upward, past my dark jeans, across my black turtleneck sweater, and over the grey duster around me that was two sizes too big. He finally met my gaze and snorted before continuing. “I was expecting something different. Certainly not a black girl. What’s with the name, girlie?” I shrugged. “My mother was a religious woman.” “Clearly,” the demon said, tucking a fat cigar in one corner of his mouth. He stood up and walked over to the pool table beside him where he and five of his lackeys had gathered. Each of them was over six feet tall and were all muscle where he was all fat. “I could start to examine the literary significance of your name, or I could ask what the hell you’re doing in my bar,” he said after knocking one of the balls into the left corner pocket. “Just here to ask a question, that’s all. I don’t want trouble.” Again, he snorted, but this time smoke shot from his nostrils, which made him look like an albino dragon. “My ass you don’t. This place is for fallen angels only, sweetheart. And we know your reputation.” I held up my hands in supplication. “Honest Abe. Just one question and I’m out of your hair forever.” My gaze lifted to the bald spot at the top of his head surrounded by peroxide blonde locks. “What’s left of it, anyway.” He glared at me. I smiled, batting my eyelashes. He tapped his fingers against the pool cue and then shrugged one shoulder. “Fine. What’s your question?” “Know anybody by the name of Matthias Gruber?” He didn’t even blink. “No.” “Ah. I see. Sorry to have wasted your time.” I turned around, walking back through the bar. I kept a quick, confident stride as I went, ignoring the whispers of the fallen angels in my wake. A couple called out to me, asking if I’d let them have a taste, but I didn’t spare them a glance. Instead, I headed to the ladies’ room. Thankfully, it was empty, so I whipped out my phone and dialed the first number in my Recent Call list. “Hey. He’s here. Yeah, I’m sure it’s him. They’re lousy liars when they’re drunk. Uh-huh. Okay, see you in five.” I hung up and let out a slow breath. Only a couple things left to do. I gathered my shoulder-length black hair into a high ponytail. I looped the loose curls around into a messy bun and made sure they wouldn’t tumble free if I shook my head too hard. I took the leather gloves in the pocket of my duster out and pulled them on. Then, I walked out of the bathroom and back to the front entrance. The coat-check girl gave me a second unfriendly look as I returned with my ticket stub to retrieve my things—three vials of holy water, a black rosary with the beads made of onyx and the cross made of wood, a Smith & Wesson .9mm Glock complete with a full magazine of blessed bullets and a silencer, and a worn out page of the Bible. I held out my hands for the items and she dropped them on the counter with an unapologetic, “Oops.” “Thanks,” I said with a roll of my eyes. I put the Glock back in the hip holster at my side and tucked the rest of the items in the pockets of my duster. The brunette demon crossed her arms under her hilariously oversized fake breasts and sent me a vicious sneer. “The door is that way, Seer. Don’t let it hit you on the way out.” I smiled back. “God bless you.” She let out an ugly hiss between her pearly white teeth. I blew her a kiss and walked out the door. The parking lot was packed outside now that it was half-past midnight. Demons thrived in darkness, so I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’d been counting on it.

But then she paused, as if thinking something over. And, unexpectedly, she turned back. Blushing harder than ever, she came to the head of the bed, stopping just a foot or so away from where Frances was sitting; and she put out a hand towards Frances’s bosom. She didn’t touch the bosom itself. Instead, while Frances watched, transfixed, bewildered, she curled her fingers as if taking hold of something that lay jutting out of Frances’s breast, and, making a creaking, hissing sound with her mouth, she slowly pulled her hand back. Only when the little charade was nearly complete did Frances understand what it was all about. The spot at which Lilian had been grasping lay just above her heart. She had been drawing an imaginary stake from it. She did it without once meeting Frances’s gaze; but she did it smoothly, deliberately—even casting the stake aside afterwards with a graceful unclosing of her hand. But then she stood as if startled by the implications of what she had done. Her own heart was thudding: Frances could see it, a drum-skin quiver at the base of her throat. They looked at each other in silence, and the moment seemed to swell, to be suspended, like a drop of water, like a tear . . . Then the curtains billowed and rattled, and that made her start back into life. She put down her head and stepped away, left the room and closed the door behind her.

There is a scene I love where a brother and sister meet after many years and little communication. They meet in an arranged café in mid-afternoon. The light is dying and the city outside rumbles softly in the complacent time before rush hour. The café is unexceptional and quiet. She comes first, sits at the far end, a table facing the door, nervous in her buttoned raincoat. The waiter is an older man. He leaves her be. The brother enters late with the look but not the words of apology. He kisses her cheek. They sit and the old man brings them teas they do not want, two pots, strong for him weak for her. It is long ago since they said each other’s names aloud, and saying them now has the extraordinary shyness of encounter I imagine on the Last Day. At first there is the full array of human awkwardness. But here is the thing: almost in an instant their old selves are immediately present. The years and the changes are nothing. They need few words. They recognise each other in each other, and even in silence the familiarity is powerfully consoling, because despite time and difference there remains that deep-river current, that kind of maybe communion that only exists within people joined in the word family. So now what washes up between them, foam-white and fortifying and quite unexpectedly, is love. I cannot remember what book it is in. But it’s in this one now.

Security had changed at the hotel as well, with armed SWAT teams deployed in the stairwells. Our family and closest friends were already in the suite, everyone smiling, kids racing around the room, and yet the atmosphere was still strangely muted, as if the reality of what was about to happen hadn’t yet settled in their minds. My mother-in-law, in particular, made no pretense of being relaxed; through the din, I noticed her sitting on the couch, her eyes fixed on the television, her expression one of disbelief. I tried to imagine what she must be thinking, having grown up just a few miles away during a time when there were still many Chicago neighborhoods that Blacks could not even safely enter; a time when office work was out of reach for most Blacks, and her father, unable to get a union card from white-controlled trade unions, had been forced to make do as an itinerant tradesman; a time when the thought of a Black U.S. president would have seemed as far-fetched as a pig taking flight. I took a seat next to her on the couch. “You okay?” I asked. Marian shrugged and kept staring at the television. She said, “This is kind of too much.” “I know.” I took her hand and squeezed it, the two of us sitting in companionable silence for a few minutes. Then suddenly a shot of my face flashed up on the TV screen and ABC News announced that I would be the forty-fourth president of the United States.

Max’s unflinching gaze never left that house. “What do you think’s going to happen?” Jules asked him quietly, “if you let yourself peel that giant S off your shirt and take a nap? If you let yourself spend an hour, an evening, screw it, a whole weekend doing nothing more than breaking and taking enjoyment from living in the moment? What’s going to happen, Max, if—after this is over—you give yourself permission to actually enjoy Gina’s company? To sit with her arms around you and let yourself be happy. You don’t have to be happy forever—just for that short amount of time.” Max didn’t say anything. So Jules went on. “And then maybe you could let yourself be happy again the next weekend. Not too happy,” he added quickly. “We wouldn’t want that. But just happy in a small way, because this amazing woman is part of your life, because she makes you smile and probably fucks like a dream and yeah—see? You are listening. Don’t kill me, I was just making sure you hadn’t checked out.” Max was giving him that look. “Are you done?” “Oh, sweetie, we have nowhere to go and hours til dawn. I’m just getting started.” Shit, Max said with his body language. But he didn’t stand up and walk away. He just sat there. Across the street, nothing moved. And then it still didn’t move. But once again, Max was back to watching it not move. Jules let the silence go for an entire minute and a half. “Just in case I didn’t make myself clear,” he said, “I believe with all my heart that you deserve—completely—whatever happiness you can grab. I don’t know what damage your father did to you but—” “I don’t know if I can do that,” Max interrupted. “You know, what you said. Just go home from work and . . .” Holy shit, Max was actually talking. About this. Or at least he had been talking. Jules waited for more, but Max just shook his head. “You know what happens when you work your ass off?” Jules finally asked, and then answered the question for him. “There’s no ass there the next time. So then you have to work off some other vital body part. You have to give yourself time to regrow, recharge. When was the last time you took a vacation? Was it nineteen ninety-one or ninety-two?” “You know damn well that I took a really long vacation just—” “No, sir, you did not. Hospitalization and recovery from a near-fatal gunshot wound is not a vacation,” Jules blasted him. “Didn’t you spend any of that time in ICU considering exactly why you made that stupid mistake that resulted in a bullet in your chest? Might it have been severe fatigue caused by asslessness, caused by working said ass off too many 24-7’s in a row?” Max sighed. Then nodded. “I know I fucked up. No doubt about that.” He was silent for a moment. “I’ve been doing that a lot lately.” He glanced over to where Jones was pretending to sleep, arm up and over his eyes. “I’ve been playing God too often, too. I don’t know, maybe I’m starting to believe my own spin, and it’s coming back to bite me.” “Not in the ass,” Jules said.

He stared at her in insolent silence, unable to believe the alluring, impulsive girl he remembered had become this coolly aloof, self-possessed young woman. Even with her dusty clothes and the smear of dirt on her cheek, Elizabeth Cameron was strikingly beautiful, but she’d changed so much that-except for the eyes-he scarcely recognized her. One thing hadn’t changed: She was still a schemer and a liar. Straightening abruptly from his stance in the doorway, Ian walked forward. “I’ve had enough of this charade, Miss Cameron. No one invited you here, and you damn well know it.” Blinded with wrath and humiliation, Elizabeth groped in her reticule and snatched out the handwritten letter her uncle had received inviting Elizabeth to join Ian there. Marching up to him, she slapped the invitation against his chest. Instinctively he caught it but didn’t open it. “Explain that,” she commanded, backing away and then waiting. “Another note, I’ll wager,” he drawled sarcastically, thinking of the night he’d gone to the greenhouse to meet her and recalling what a fool he’d been about her. Elizabeth stood beside the table, determined to have the satisfaction of hearing his explanation before she left-not that anything he said could make her stay. When he showed no sign of opening it, she turned furiously to Jake, who was sorely disappointed that Ian was deliberately chasing off two females who could surely be persuaded to do the cooking if they stayed. “Make him read it aloud!” she ordered the startled Jake. “Now, Ian,” Jake said, thinking of his empty stomach and the bleak future that lay ahead for it if the ladies went away, “why don’t you jes’ read that there little note, like the lady asked?” When Ian Thornton ignored the older man’s suggestion, Elizabeth lost control of her temper. Without thinking what she was actually doing, she reached out and snatched the pistol off the table, primed it, cocked it, and leveled it at Ian Thornton’s broad chest. “Read that note!” Jake, whose concern was still on his stomach, held up his hands as if the gun were pointed at him. “Ian, it could be a misunderstanding, you know, and it’s not nice to be rude to these ladies. Why don’t you read it, and then we’ll all sit down and have a nice”-he inclined his head meaningfully to the sack of provisions on the table-“supper.” “I don’t need to read it,” Ian snapped. “The last time I read a note from Lady Cameron I met her in a greenhouse and got shot in the arm for my trouble.” “Are you implying I invited you into that greenhouse?” Elizabeth scoffed furiously. With an impatient sigh Ian said, “Since you’re obviously determined to enact a Cheltenham tragedy, let’s get it over with before you’re on your way.” “Do you deny you sent me a note?” she snapped. “Of course I deny it!” “Then what were you doing in the greenhouse?” she shot back at him. “I came in response to that nearly illegible note you sent me,” he said in a bored, insulting drawl. “May I suggest that in future you devote less of your time to theatrics and some of it to improving your handwriting?” His gaze shifted to the pistol. “Put the gun down before you hurt yourself.

Oh,Ella. I wish you'd had a better time at the ball." "Fuhgeddaboudit," I muttered. Greaseball. Freddy. Freak. "It's not like she and I were ever going to be BFFs." "I wasn't just referring to Amanda." Of course he wasn't. "I'll try," I moaned into the crook of my elbow. "Oh, Lord.I'll try to carry on." "That sounds rather dramatic, even for you." "It's Styx," I told him. "After your time, before mine. I don't know all the words,but those work for the moment. And for the record, I'm being ironic, not dramatic." "If you say so." I ignored him. "I have had my last flutter over Alex Bainbridge. I mean it. Frankie was right.How many signs do I need that we are never, ever going to have...anything...before I get it? Obviously, it doesn't matter that we realte to the same schizo seventies songs. Or that we can discuss antique Japanese woodblock prints. Or that when he sits next to me, he kinda takes my breath away. You would think that would count for a lot,wouldn't you?" Edward gets the concept of rhetorical questions, so I went on. "I wouldn't even want to hazard a guess about what makes Amanda's pulse go all skittery, but I would bet anything it's not Alex. And he's still with her. He doesn't belong with her, but apparently he feels he belongs to her. Explain that,please." "Oh,Ella.We men are not always the best at looking beyond the...er..." "Boobs,Edward. You can say it. Amanda Alstead has boobs and blonda hair. Beyond that, I can't see a single thing that's special about her." "Because there isn't a single thing. Beyond the...er, obvious. You,on the other hand,are a creature of infinite charms. Shall I list them alphabetically or from the top down?" I scowled up at him. "Y'know, you are beginning to sound a little too much like Frankie and Sadie,my deluded Greek chorus." "yes,well,I rather thought that's what friends are for." "You're not supposed to be my friend," I muttered. "You're supposed to be my Prince Charming." "Ahem." Edward's sculpted lips compressed into a grim line. "Have you looked at me lately? I am supposed to be startling and even a bit scary." "Nope.Neither." I rested my chin on my forearm. "To me,you are perfect. You are loyal and reliable and completely lacking in surprises." "That is a good thing?" "Absolutely," I said. "It's an excellent thing.I don't want any more surprises, over." "Hardly an admirable goal,that." "Maybe not," I agreed, "but pleasant. Among all the other bizarreness tonight, I found something new to be afraid of. Evil girlfriends." "Now,Ella. You can't go on being afraid forever." "Oh,yes,I can. As far as Amanda Alstead is concerned, I can." Edward tilted his head and studied me for a moment. He looked annoyed. "Why do you insist on having these conversations with me when you ignore everything I have to say?" It was a pretty good question. "Fine." I sat up straight and folded my hands in my lap. Home Truth time. "Go ahead. On this night when we celebrate the mysteries of life and death..Say something profound, something startling." There was a long silence. Then, "Boo," Edward said. "Thank you,Mr. Willing." "Don't mention it, Miss Marino. I am yours to command.

Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette! But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

Because he’d talked to her about Catriona Bruce. He must be a lonely man. Living all on his own in that house since his mother died. Suddenly he had company, someone sympathetic, wanting him to talk, listening to him. Perhaps she had her own reasons for encouraging him to speak. She wanted his stories for her film. Perhaps she was just a nice kid who felt sorry for him. And the temptation was too much for him. Perhaps he’d had a whisky or two and that loosened his tongue. Whatever.’ ‘I can see that,’ Perez said. ‘I can even see him killing her afterwards to keep the whole thing quiet. But I can’t see him going into the Ross house, searching her room and finding the disk, finding the script and wiping all trace of it from the PC. I don’t get that.’ They sat looking at each other for a moment in silence. Taylor stretched, shuffled in his chair. He’d told Perez he had a bad back, disc trouble, that was why he couldn’t sit still, but Perez wasn’t convinced. It was the man’s mind that didn’t know how to rest, not his body. ‘So what do we do about it?’ Taylor said. ‘Time’s running out for me. I’ve promised I’ll be back at the end of the week. Any longer than that and they’ll start talking about a disciplinary.’ ‘I’m going to take another trip to the Anderson,’ Perez said. ‘Check she didn’t hand the film in early, give it to a friend to look at. If the film is safe we have to let the whole thing go. Like you said, the note on the back of the receipt incriminates Magnus. It shows he talked to her about Catriona. Euan says there’s no other way she could have known about the girl.’ Taylor stood up, lifting the plan with both hands on his way.

The homily which Mrs. Elton read at prayers that evening, bore upon the same subject nominally as the chapter that preceded it—that of election; a doctrine which in the Bible asserts the fact of God's choosing certain persons for the specific purpose of receiving first, and so communicating the gifts of his grace to the whole world; but which, in the homily referred to, was taken to mean the choice of certain persons for ultimate salvation, to the exclusion of the rest. They were sitting in silence after the close, when Harry started up suddenly, saying: "I don't want God to love me, if he does not love everybody;" and, bursting into tears, hurried out of the room. Mrs. Elton was awfully shocked at his wickedness. Euphra, hastened after him; but he would not return, and went supperless to bed. Euphra, however, carried him some supper. He sat up in bed and ate it with the tears in his eyes. She kissed him, and bade him good night; when, just as she was leaving the room, he broke out with: "But only think, Euphra, if it should be true! I would rather not have been made." "It is not true," said Euphra, in whom a faint glimmer of faith in God awoke for the sake of the boy whom she loved—awoke to comfort him, when it would not open its eyes for herself. "No, Harry dear, if there is a God at all, he is not like that." "No, he can't be," said Harry, vehemently, and with the brightness of a sudden thought; "for if he were like that, he wouldn't be a God worth being; and that couldn't be, you know." Euphra knelt by her bedside, and prayed more hopefully than for many days before. She prayed that God would let her know that he was not an idol of man's invention.

And then we heard Aled scream. It wasn’t really a scream. It was more of a long wail. I’d never heard anyone sound like that in real life before. I pelted to our front door and opened it, just as Aled opened his and stumbled out of it. I ran to meet him and he was staggering and for a minute I thought he was injured, but I couldn’t see anything physically wrong with him except the fact that his face was contorted because he was sobbing uncontrollably, and I caught him in my arms just as he sank to the ground on the kerb, making the most painful noises I’d ever heard, like he’d been shot, like he was dying … Then he started to cry out, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no …” the tears falling continuously from his eyes, and I started to ask him frantically what it was, what had happened, what had she done, but he just shook his head over and over and choked like he couldn’t form any words even if he wanted to, and then I heard it … “Sh-she killed him— Sh-she killed him.” I felt like I was going to be sick. “Who? What happened, tell me …” “My … my dog … my dog Brian …” And then he started to sob again, so loudly, like he’d never cried before in his whole life. I stayed very still. “She … killed … your dog …?” “She s-said … she couldn’t look after him … because I was gone, and he— He was getting old, s-so She— She just— She went and … had him put down.” “No …” He let out another wail and pressed his face into my jumper. I didn’t want to believe anyone was capable of doing something like that. But we were sitting under the streetlamps and Aled was shaking in my arms and this was real, this was happening. She was taking everything Aled had and burning it. She was burning him, slowly, until he died.

Everyone will remember the chanting from the Hed fans’ standing area: “Queers! Sluts! Rapists!” A Lot of people will believe that that whole part of the stand was chanting, because it felt like it, and from a distance it’s hard to differentiate among people. So everyone in the standing area will be criticized, even though by no means all of them were chanting, because we’ll want scapegoats, and it’ll be easy for anyone wanting to moralize to say that “ culture isn’t just what we encourage but what we allow to happen.” But when everyone is shouting, it can be hard to hear the opposition, and once an avalanche of hate has started to roll, it can be hard to tell who is responsible for stopping it. So when a young woman in a red shirt bearing a picture of a bull on the front leaves her place in the standing area, no one notices at first. But the woman loves Hed Hockey as much as the people shouting, she’s supported the team all her life, this part of the rink belongs to her, too. Going to stand among the seated fans, the hot dog brigade she’s always mocked, is her silent protest. A man in a green shirt sitting a short distance away sees her and stands up. He goes to the cafeteria, buys two paper cups of coffee, then walks down and gives one of them to her. They stand there next to each other, one red, one green, and drink in silence. A cup of coffee is no big thing. But sometimes it actually is. Within a few minutes, more red shirts have walked out of the standing area. Soon the steps of the seated part of the rink are full. The chant of “Queers! Sluts! Rapists!” is still echoing loudly, but the people chanting are exposed now. So everyone can see that there aren’t as many of them as we think. There never are.

It was the morning when she went confront my father's killer. I asked her why she wouldn't let one of the soldiers or gerents handle his rescue. And she said to me that all little girls, regardless of what they say, dream of a prince to come in and sweep them off their feet and save the day. But what no one ever mentions is that all little boys dream of a princess to do the same thing for them. But the problem with princes and princesses is that they're spoiled and self-absorbed. They act in their own best interest. They don't go after their loved ones to rescue them so much as they do it for their own vainglory, and to serve themselves. While she'd had many princes try for her hand, it was a king who had claimed her heart. Unlike princes, kings take responsibility. they think of others instead of themselves and they will risk everything, even their very lives , for those they love. It is never about them, but rather about the ones they cherish most. they love to such depth that they would sacrifice all just to see their family smile. For every thousand princes, there is only one king. And such rare men do not deserve a useless princess who sits on her duff and orders others to worship her and do her bidding. Kings deserve queens- rare women who never flinch to do whatever it takes to keep their king safe. Women who have the courage to face any attacker and to rally to whatever challenge life throws at them. I will not sit here, she said to me, and let your father suffer while I hide in comfort. He risked his life to keep us safe and I will do no less for him. If it means my life, so be it. After all, he is my life and I don't want to live without him. He deserves only my best and that's exactly what he's going to get, no matter the personal cost.

To Lillian’s surprise, she had been seated near the head of Lord Westcliff’s table, only three places away from his right hand. Occupying a place so close to the host was a mark of high favor, very seldom given to an unmarried girl with no rank. Wondering if the footman had make a mistake in seating her there, she glanced cautiously at the faces of those guests nearest her, and saw that they too were puzzled by her presence. Even the countess, who was being seated at the very end of the table, stared at her with a frown. Lillian gave Lord Westcliff a questioning glance as he took his place at the head of the table. One of his dark brows arched. “Is something amiss? You seem a bit perturbed, Miss Bowman.” The correct response would probably have been to blush and thank him for the unexpected honor. But as Lillian stared at his face, which was softened by the influence of candleglow, she found herself answering with brazen frankness. “I am wondering why I am sitting near the head of the table. In light of what happened this morning, I assumed you would have me seated all the way out on the back terrace.” There was a moment of utter silence as the guests around them registered shock that Lillian would so openly refer to the conflict between them. However, Westcliff astonished them all by laughing quietly, his gaze locked with hers. After a moment, the others joined in with forced chuckles. “Knowing of your penchant for trouble, Miss Bowman, I have concluded that it is safer to keep you in my sight, and within arm’s reach if possible.” His statement was delivered with matter-of-fact lightness. One would have to search very hard to find any innuendo in his tone. And yet Lillian felt a strange liquid ripple inside, sensation passing from one nerve to another like a flow of warm honey.

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. “I wonder if all the things move along with us?” thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, “Faster! Don’t try to talk!” Not that Alice had any idea of doing that. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried “Faster! Faster!” and dragged her along. “Are we nearly there?” Alice managed to pant out at last. “Nearly there!” the Queen repeated. “Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster!” And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in Alice’s ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied. “Now! Now!” cried the Queen. “Faster! Faster!” And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy. The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, “You may rest a little now.” Alice looked round her in great surprise. “Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!” “Of course it is,” said the Queen, “what would you have it?” “Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” “I’d rather not try, please!” said Alice.

You remember that documentary they showed us in sixth grade? The one about Hurricane Katrina?” “Yeah.” I shrug, remembering how we’d all piled into the media center to watch it on the big, pull-down screen. I don’t recall much about the movie itself, but I’m pretty sure Brad Pitt had narrated it. “What about it?” "I had nightmares for weeks. I have no idea why it affected me the way it did.” “Seriously?” He nods. “Ever since, well…let’s just say I don’t do well in storms. Especially hurricanes.” I just stare at him in stunned silence. “You’re going to have fun with this, aren’t you?” “No, I…of course not. Jeez.” How big of a bitch does he think I am? “I’m not going to tell a soul. I promise. Okay? What happens in the storm shelter stays in the storm shelter,” I quip, trying to lighten the mood. His whole body seems to relax then, as if I’ve taken a weight off him. “Did you seriously think I was going to rag on you for this? I mean, we’ve been friends forever.” He quirks one brow. “Friends?” “Well, okay, not friends, exactly. But you know what I mean. Our moms used to put us in a crib together. Back when we were babies.” He winces. “I know.” “When we were little, things were fine. But then…well, middle school. It was just…I don’t know…awkward. And then in eighth grade, I thought maybe…” I shake my head, obviously unable to form a complete sentence. “Never mind.” “You thought what? C’mon, don’t stop now. You’re doing a good job distracting me.” “Yeah?” “Yeah. Call it a public service. Or…pretend I’m just one of the pets.” “Poor babies,” I say, glancing over at the cats. Kirk and Spock are curled up together in the back of the crate, keeping the bromance alive. Sulu is sitting alone in the corner, just staring at us. “He’s a she, you know.” “Who?” “Sulu. Considering she’s a calico, you’d think Daddy would have figured it out.

So you know how to help me?” Lucy asks, desperate hope cracking through her calm. The doctor’s smile fades ever so slightly. “I’m afraid that the studies on these particular conditions are still quite new, but if what you have is the same as what I’ve seen before, well…there’s a possibility that you could have this condition for the rest of your life.” Lucy stills. “You mean there’s nothing we can do?” The doctor sets a comforting hand on Lucy’s knee. “We’ve made lots of progress with some treatments that help alleviate the symptoms—medications and diet changes you can try—but I just wanted you to be mentally and emotionally prepared for a bit of a long haul.” Lucy asks questions, and the doctor answers as best she can, and finally, after what feels like an eternity, the doctor leaves, shutting the door with a gentle click. Lucy and I sit in silence for several moments. I watch her face for any sign of emotion, but it’s blank. She stares at the wall, cupping George stonily to her chest. After a moment I ask, “Do you want to talk about it?” She sniffs. “I don’t know what there is to say.” “What are you feeling?” “Angry,” she says, planting a fierce kiss on George’s head and depositing him into his tank before turning back to me. “I mean… what the hell, Myra? Why does everything always have to be a fight?” Her eyes shine as she spits the words out. “For once, I thought I could be done with this. We’re finally here, at a hospital. Doctors are everywhere. I guess I hoped they’d have more answers, I’m angry that they don’t.” “It’s not fair at all.” I nod. “And it makes me so mad I could break something.” She laughs, but it turns into a sob, and she draws her knees up against her chest. “I’m also scared. Of hurting forever. Of not being able to do the things I dream of doing. Of not getting to live the life I want to.” She looks at me, tears dropping down her cheeks. “Of holding you back from the life you want.

When he reached the doorman, he stopped. “Did you see Miss Christian come in a few minutes ago?” The doorman nodded. “Yes, sir. She got here just before you arrived.” Relief staggered him. He bolted for the elevator. A few moments later, he strode into the apartment. “Kelly? Kelly, honey, where are you?” Not waiting for an answer, he hurried into the bedroom to see her sitting on the edge of the bed, her face pale and drawn in pain. When she heard him, she looked up and he winced at the dullness in her eyes. She’d been crying. “I thought I could do it,” she said in a raw voice, before he could beg her forgiveness. “I thought I could just go on and forget and that I could accept others thinking the worst of me as long as you and I were okay again. I did myself a huge disservice.” “Kelly…” Something in her look silenced him and he stood several feet away, a feeling of helplessness gripping him as he watched her try to compose herself. “I sat there tonight while your friends and your mother looked at me in disgust, while they looked at you with a mixture of pity and disbelief in their eyes. All because you took me back. The tramp who betrayed you in the worst possible manner. And I thought to myself I don’t deserve this. I’ve never deserved it. I deserve better.” She raised her eyes to his and he flinched at the horrible pain he saw reflected there. Then she laughed. A raw, terrible sound that grated across his ears. “And earlier tonight you forgave me. You stood there and told me it no longer mattered what happened in the past because you forgave me and you wanted to move forward.” She curled her fingers into tight balls and rage flared in her eyes. She stood and stared him down even as tears ran in endless streams down her cheeks. “Well, I don’t forgive you. Nor can I forget that you betrayed me in the worst way a man can betray the woman he’s supposed to love and be sworn to protect.” He took a step back, reeling from the fury in her voice. His eyes narrowed. “You don’t forgive me?” “I told you the truth that day,” she said hoarsely, her voice cracking under the weight of her tears. “I begged you to believe me. I got down on my knees and begged you. And what did you do? You wrote me a damn check and told me to get out.” He took another step back, his hand going to his hair. Something was wrong, terribly wrong. So much of that day was a blur. He remembered her on her knees, her tear-stained face, how she put her hand on his leg and whispered, “Please don’t do this.” It made him sick. He never wanted to go back to the way he felt that day, but somehow this was worse because there was something terribly wrong in her eyes and in her voice. “Your brother assaulted me. He forced himself on me. I didn’t invite his attentions. I wore the bruises from his attack for two weeks. Two weeks. I was so stunned by what he’d done that all I could think about was getting to you. I knew you’d fix it. You’d protect me. You’d take care of me. I knew you’d make it right. All I could think about was running to you. And, oh God, I did and you looked right through me.” The sick knot in his stomach grew and his chest tightened so much he couldn’t breathe. “You wouldn’t listen,” she said tearfully. “You wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say. You’d already made your mind up.” He swallowed and closed the distance between them, worried that she’d fall if he didn’t make her sit. But she shook him off and turned her back, her shoulders heaving as her quiet sobs fell over the room. “I’m listening now, Kelly,” he forced out. “Tell me what happened. I’ll believe you. I swear.” But he knew. He already knew. So much of that day was replaying over and over in his head and suddenly he was able to see so clearly what he’d refused to see before. And it was killing him. His brother had lied to him after all. Not just lied but he’d carefully orchestrated the truth and twisted it so cleverly that Ryan had been completely deceived.

You’re having a bad day. You mess up a few lines. You’re distracted. You’ve had this look about you all afternoon, like you’re not quite there. “Christ, Cunningham, get it together,” Hastings says, running his hands down his face. “If you can’t handle being Brutus—” “Fuck you.” You cut him off. “Don’t act like you’re perfect.” “I don’t make rookie mistakes,” Hastings says. “Maybe if you weren’t so preoccupied with trying to screw the new girl, you might—” BAM. You shut him up mid-sentence with a punch to the face, your fist connecting hard, nearly knocking him off his feet. He stumbles, stunned, as you go at him again, grabbing the collar of his uniform shirt and yanking him to you. “Shut your fucking mouth.” People come between the two of you, forcing you apart. Hastings storms out, shouting, “I can’t deal with him!” Drama Club comes to a screeching halt. You stand there for a moment, fists clenched at your side, calming down. You flex your hands, loosening them as you approach the girl. She’s watching you in silence, expression guarded. You sit down near her. There’s an empty seat between you today. It’s the first time you’ve not sat right beside her in weeks. You’re giving her space. It doesn’t take long before Hastings returns, but he isn’t alone. The administrator waltzes in behind him. The man heads for you, expression stern. “Cunningham, give me one good reason why I shouldn’t expel you.” “Because my father gives you a lot of money.” “That’s what you have to say?” “Is that not a good reason?” “You punched a fellow student!” “We were just acting,” you say. “I’m Brutus. He’s Caesar. It’s to be expected.” “Brutus stabs him. He doesn’t throw punches.” “I was improvising.” The girl laughs when you say that. She tries to stop herself, but the sound comes out, and the administrator hears it, his attention shifting to her. “Look, it won’t happen again,” you say, drawing the focus back to you. “Next time, I’ll stab him and be done with it.” “You better watch yourself,” the administrator says, pointing his finger in your face. “One more incident and you’re gone for good. Understand?” “Yes, sir.” “And rest assured, your father will be hearing about this

This was the last time I ever saw my Mother alive. Just the same, this picture gets all mixed up in my mind with pictures I had of her when she was younger. The way I always see her is the way she used to be on Sunday afternoon, say, when the old folks were talking after the big Sunday dinner. I always see her wearing pale blue. She'd be sitting on the sofa. And my Father would be sitting in the easy chair, not far from her. And the living room would be full of church folks and relatives. There they sit, in chairs all around the living room, and the night is creeping up outside, but nobody knows it yet. You can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes and you hear the street noises every now and again, or maybe the jangling beat of a tambourine from one of the churches close by, but it's real quiet in the room. For a moment nobody's talking, but every face looks darkening, like the sky outside. And my Mother rocks a little from the waist, and my Father's eyes are closed. Everyone is looking at something a child can't see. For a minute they've forgotten the children. Maybe a kid is lying on the rug, half asleep. Maybe somebody's got a kid in his lap and is absent-mindedly stroking the kid's head. Maybe there's a kid, quiet and big-eyed, curled up in a big chair in the corner. The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frighten the child obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes his forehead will never stop - will never die. He hopes that there will never come a time when the old folks won't be sitting around the living room, talking about where they've come from, and what they've seen, and what's happened to them and their kinfolk. But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won't talk anymore that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he's moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It's what they've come from. It's what they endure. The child knows that they won't talk anymore because if he knows too much about what's happened to them, he'll know too much too soon, about what's going to happen to him.

Sorrow walked in my clothes before I did. Flocks of shadows followed me. One night I looked at the stars I thought were gods until they disappeared. Some say I smashed my father’s idols and walked away. Or walked towards a desert of barren promises. Or promises that are hummingbirds hovering for a moment then drifting away. Even now, walking towards that mountain, sometimes I will watch my shadow sitting beneath a plane tree, casting dice, ignoring my steps. Some of you made me a founder but it was only that shadow. Some of you made me your father, but it was yourselves you were describing. You plant a tree, you dig a well, and it brings life, that’s all. Everything else is the heart’s mirage. Except what begins inside you. Except Sarah. When she stepped inside my dream the curtains shivered, whole mountains entered the room. It always seemed a question of which love to honor. The land I loved fills with fire. Who should we listen to? It’s true, He offered the world and I offered only myself. But I thought His words were coffins. I was frantic for any scrap of shade. Now everything is shade. Your old newspapers are taken up by the wind like pairs of broken wings. Each window, each door is a wound. One track erases another track. One bomb. One rock, one rubber bullet. What can I tell you? Where have you left your own morning of promises? You remember Isaac, maybe Ishmael, but not the love that led me there. Not Sarah. Just to hear the sound of her eyelids opening, or her plants pushing the air aside as they reach for the sun, twilight filling her fingers like fruit. This afternoon a flock of doves settled on my porch. Their silence took the shape of all I ever wanted to say. Today, the miracle you want aches inside the trees. Why believe anything except what is unbelievable? I never thought of it as a trial, not any of it. Now the leaves turn into messages that are simply impossible to read. The roots turn into roads as they break through the surface. How can I even know what I mean? Beneath the hem of night the rain falls asleep on the grass. We have to turn into each other. One heart inside the other’s heart. One love. One word. Inside us, our shadows will walk into water, the water will walk into the sky. Blind. Faithful. Inside us the music turns into a flock of birds. Theirs is a song whose promise we must believe the way the moon believes the earth, the fire believes the wood, that is, for no reason, for no reason at all.

Your fortune is yet doubtful: when I examined your face, one trait contradicted another. Chance has meted you a measure of happiness: that I know. I knew it before I came here this evening. She has laid it carefully on one side for you. I saw her do it. It depends on yourself to stretch out your hand, and take it up: but whether you will do so, is the problem I study. Kneel again on the rug." "Don't keep me long; the fire scorches me." I knelt. She did not stoop towards me, but only gazed, leaning back in her chair. She began muttering, — "The flame flickers in the eye; the eye shines like dew; it looks soft and full of feeling; it smiles at my jargon: it is susceptible; impression follows impression through its clear sphere; where it ceases to smile, it is sad; an unconscious lassitude weighs on the lid: that signifies melancholy resulting from loneliness. It turns from me; it will not suffer further scrutiny; it seems to deny, by a mocking glance, the truth of the discoveries I have already made, — to disown the charge both of sensibility and chagrin: its pride and reserve only confirm me in my opinion. The eye is favourable. "As to the mouth, it delights at times in laughter; it is disposed to impart all that the brain conceives; though I daresay it would be silent on much the heart experiences. Mobile and flexible, it was never intended to be compressed in the eternal silence of solitude: it is a mouth which should speak much and smile often, and have human affection for its interlocutor. That feature too is propitious. "I see no enemy to a fortunate issue but in the brow; and that brow professes to say, — 'I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.' The forehead declares, 'Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.' Well said, forehead; your declaration shall be respected.

Mystery is the sugar in the cup,' said the Doctor. She picked up the container of white crystals the delicatessen had included in the picnic basket and poured a large dollop into her cognac. 'I don’t think I’d do that, Gunilla,' said Darcourt. 'Nobody wants you to do it, Simon. I am doing it, and that’s enough. That is the curse of life—when people want everybody to do the same wise, stupid thing. Listen: Do you want to know what life is? I’ll tell you. Life is a drama.' 'Shakespeare was ahead of you, Gunilla,' said Darcourt. '"All the world’s a stage,"' he declaimed. 'Shakespeare had the mind of a grocer,' said Gunilla. 'A poet, yes, but the soul of a grocer. He wanted to please people.' 'That was his trade,' said Darcourt. 'And it’s yours, too. Don’t you want this opera to please people?' 'Yes, I do. But that is not philosophy. Hoffmann was no philosopher. Now be quiet, everybody, and listen, because this is very important. Life is a drama. I know. I am a student of the divine Goethe, not that grocer Shakespeare. Life is a drama. But it is a drama we have never understood and most of us are very poor actors. That is why our lives seem to lack meaning and we look for meaning in toys—money, love, fame. Our lives seem to lack meaning but'—the Doctor raised a finger to emphasize her great revelation—'they don’t, you know.' She seemed to be having some difficulty in sitting upright, and her natural pallor had become ashen. 'You’re off the track, Nilla,' said Darcourt. 'I think we all have a personal myth. Maybe not much of a myth, but anyhow a myth that has its shape and its pattern somewhere outside our daily world.' 'This is all too deep for me,' said Yerko. 'I am glad I am a Gypsy and do not have to have a philosophy and an explanation for everything. Madame, are you not well?' Too plainly the Doctor was not well. Yerko, an old hand at this kind of illness, lifted her to her feet and gently, but quickly, took her to the door—the door to the outside parking lot. There were terrible sounds of whooping, retching, gagging, and pitiful cries in a language which must have been Swedish. When at last he brought a greatly diminished Gunilla back to the feast, he thought it best to prop her, in a seated position, against the wall. At once she sank sideways to the floor. 'That sugar was really salt,' said Darcourt. 'I knew it, but she wouldn’t listen. Her part in the great drama now seems to call for a long silence.' 'When she comes back to life I shall give her a shot of my personal plum brandy,' said Yerko. 'Will you have one now, Priest Simon?

One day, on the verge of dying of boredom, Uncle Johnny had had enough. He turned to me and said sternly, “Noah, I’m not gonna sit in here like we’re in an oversized coffin. We’re either opening the door or we’re turning the TV on. Which one do you want?” I rolled my eyes and grumbled for a few minutes before answering, “All right. Turn on the TV.” Without hesitation Uncle Johnny shot up out of that chair and reached up to hit the power button on the TV mounted from the ceiling. No sooner had his butt hit the chair seat than he was right back up again. “Fuck that. I am opening the door, too, because I want it open.” He vigorously emphasized his intention so I didn’t protest. He marched over and swung that door open. I swear he might have even taken a deep breath as if it were fresh mountain air. Then he came back to his chair and sat down. There was a movie on starring Matthew Broderick. I’d never heard of it before but Uncle Johnny was explaining to me that this was a remake and Gene Wilder had played Broderick’s character in the original film. In spite of myself, and my stubborn wish to sit and suffer in silence, I really liked the movie. And I remember thinking, I am really enjoying myself. I even turned to Uncle Johnny and said, “I’m glad we turned the TV on. This is great!” Uncle Johnny just smiled as if to say, “Of course! Finally!” We were right in the middle of the movie when one of my machines started to malfunction. The machine’s beeps drowned out the movie. A nurse came in to fix the problem and it just happened to be the hot nurse I had a crush on. She had short hair, a few tattoos on her arm, and she always wore a bandana over her head. The machine she was trying to fix was plugged in on the other side of the bed, up against the wall. “Oh, I see. Hold on. I have to move the bed out from the wall to fix this,” she said. At this point I was just watching her. She fixed the machine and pushed the bed back up against the wall. She actually hit the wall with the bed and zap! The TV went out! “WHAT?! NO!” I screamed. She couldn’t get it to turn back on. She tried but nothing worked. “Oh no, I’m sorry. We’ll have to get maintenance down here to fix it,” she said with an apologetic look that I met with a glare of disdain. She was no longer hot to me. She was just the nurse who broke the TV. Maintenance didn’t come to repair the TV until the next day. I didn’t get to watch the rest of the movie. In fact, I never saw the end of the movie and I didn’t even know the name of it until years later. Maybe one of these days I’ll get to see The Producers from start to finish.

There’s my girl.” He tossed the rag to the hearth. “Now, cuddle up. Do you know, I think you put bruises on my arse, woman?” He stretched out on his side, right smack beside her. “You have slain me, Emmie Farnum.” He sighed happily and felt cautiously for her in the dark. His hand found her hair, which he smoothed back in a tender caress. “I badly needed slaying, too, I can tell you.” He bumped her cheek with his nose and pulled back abruptly. “I would have said you were in need of slaying, as well,” he said slowly, “but why the tears, Emmie, love?” There were women who cried in intimate circumstances, a trait he’d always found endearing, but they weren’t Emmie, and her cheek wasn’t damp. It was wet. “Did I hurt you?” he asked, pulling her over his body. He positioned her to straddle him and wrapped an arm around her even while his hand continued to explore her face. He thought he’d been careful, but at the end, he’d been ardent—or too rough? “Sweetheart.” He found her cheek with his lips. “I am so heartily sorry.” “For what?” she expostulated, sitting up on him. “I am the one who needs to apologize. Oh, God, help me, I was hoping you wouldn’t learn this of me, and I tried to tell you, but I couldn’t… I just…” She was working herself up to a state. Even in the dark, her voice alone testified to rising hysteria. “Emmie.” He leaned up and gathered her in his arms. “Emmie, hush.” But she couldn’t hush; she was sobbing and hiccupping and gulping in his arms, leaving him helpless to do more than hold her, murmur meaningless reassurances, and then finally, lay her gently on her side, climb out of bed, and fish his handkerchief out of his pockets. All the while though, he sorted through their encounter and seized upon a credible source of Emmie’s upset. “You were not a virgin,” he said evenly as he tucked the handkerchief into her hand and gathered her back over him. “I was n-n-not,” she said, seizing up again in misery. “And I h-h-hate to cry. But of course you know.” I do now, he thought with a small smile, though had he thought otherwise, he wouldn’t have been so willing to bed her—he hoped. “Cease your tears, Emmie love.” He tucked her closer. “I am sorry for your sake you are so upset, and I hope your previous liaisons were not painful, but as for me, I am far more interested in your future than your past.” A moment of silence went by, his hands tracing lazy patterns on her lovely back, and then she looked up at him. “You cannot mean that.” “I can,” he corrected her gently. “I know you were without anyone to protect you, and you were in service. One of my own sisters was damned near seduced by a footman, Emmie. It happens, and that’s the end of it. Has your heart been broken?” She nodded on a shuddery breath. “Shall I trounce him for you? Flirt with his wife?” “That won’t be necessary,” she said, her voice sounding a little less shaky.

Do we need to talk about my kissing you a year ago? I’ve behaved myself for two weeks, Ellen, and hope by action I have reassured you where words would not.” Silence or the summer evening equivalent of it, with crickets chirping, the occasional squeal of a passing bat, and the breeze riffling through the woods nearby. “Ellen?” Val withdrew his hand, which Ellen had been holding for some minutes, and slid his arm around her waist, urging her closer. “A woman gone silent unnerves a man. Talk to me, sweetheart. I would not offend you, but neither will I fare well continuing the pretense we are strangers.” He felt the tension in her, the stiffness against his side, and regretted it. In the past two weeks, he’d all but convinced himself he was recalling a dream of her not a real kiss, and then he’d catch her smiling at Day and Phil or joking with Darius, and the clench in his vitals would assure him that kiss had been very, very real. At least for him. For him, that kiss had been a work of sheer art. “My husband seldom used my name. I was my dear, or my lady, or occasionally, dear wife. I was not Ellen, and I was most assuredly not his sweetheart. And to you I am the next thing to a stranger.” Val’s left hand, the one she’d just held for such long, lovely moments between her own, drifted up to trace slow patterns on her back. “We’re strangers who kissed. Passionately, if memory serves.” “But on only one occasion and that nearly a year ago.” “Should I have written? I did not think to see you again, nor you me, I’m guessing.” Now he wished he’d written, though it would hardly have been proper, even to a widow. That hand Valentine considered so damaged continued its easy caresses on Ellen’s back, intent on stealing the starch from her spine and the resolve from her best intentions. And she must have liked his touch, because the longer he stroked his hand over her back, the more she relaxed and leaned against him. “I did not think to see you again,” Ellen admitted. “It would have been much easier had you kept to your place in my memory and imagination. But here you are.” “Here we are.” Haunting a woman’s imagination had to be a good thing for a man whose own dreams had turned to nightmares. “Sitting on the porch in the moonlight, trying to sort out a single kiss from months ago.” “I shouldn’t have kissed you,” Ellen said, her head coming to rest on Val’s shoulder as if the weight of truth were a wearying thing. “But I’m lonely and sometimes a little desperate, and it seemed safe, to steal a kiss from a handsome stranger.” “It was safe,” Val assured her, seeing the matter from her perspective. In the year since he’d seen Ellen FitzEngle, he’d hardly been celibate. He wasn’t a profligate Philistine, but neither was he a monk. There had been an older maid in Nick’s household, some professional ladies up in York, the rare trip upstairs at David’s brothel, and the frequent occasion of self-gratification. But he surmised Ellen, despite the privileges of widowhood, had not been kissed or cuddled or swived or flirted with in all those days and weeks and months. “And now?” Ellen pressed. “You show up on my porch after dark and think perhaps it’s still safe, and here I am, doing not one thing to dissuade you.” “You are safe with me, Ellen.” He punctuated the sentiment with a kiss to her temple then rested his cheek where his lips had been. “I am a gentleman, if nothing else. I might try to steal a kiss, but you can stop me with a word from even that at any time. The question is, how safe do you want to be?” “Shame

THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP Part III Report your commission without faltering, Give your advice in your master’s council. If he is fluent in his speech, It will not be hard for the envoy to report, Nor will he be answered, "Who is he to know it ?” As to the master, his affairs will fail If he plans to punish him for it. He should be silent upon (hearing): "I have told.” If you are a man who leads. Whose authority reaches wide, You should do outstanding things, Remember the day that comes after. No strife will occur in the midst of honors, But where the crocodile enters hatred arises. If you are a man who leads. Listen calmly to the speech of one who pleads; Don’t stop him from purging his body Of that which he planned to tell. A man in distress wants to pour out his heart More than that his case be won. About him who stops a plea One says: “Why does he reject it ?” Not all one pleads for can be granted, But a good hearing soothes the heart. If you want friendship to endure In the house you enter As master, brother, or friend, In whatever place you enter, Beware of approaching the women! Unhappy is the place where it is done. Unwelcome is he who intrudes on them. A thousand men are turned away from their good: A short moment like a dream, Then death comes for having known them. Poor advice is “shoot the opponent,” When one goes to do it the heart rejects it. He who fails through lust of them, No affair of his can prosper. If you want a perfect conduct, To be free from every evil, Guard against the vice of greed: A grievous sickness without cure, There is no treatment for it. It embroils fathers, mothers, And the brothers of the mother, It parts wife from husband; It is a compound of all evils, A bundle of all hateful things. That man endures whose rule is rightness, Who walks a straight line; He will make a will by it, The greedy has no tomb. Do not be greedy in the division. Do not covet more than your share; Do not be greedy toward your kin. The mild has a greater claim than the harsh. Poor is he who shuns his kin, He is deprived of 'interchange' Even a little of what is craved Turns a quarreler into an amiable man. When you prosper and found your house, And love your wife with ardor, Fill her belly, clothe her back, Ointment soothes her body. Gladden her heart as long as you live, She is a fertile held for her lord. Do not contend with her in court, Keep her from power, restrain her — Her eye is her storm when she gazes — Thus will you make her stay in your house. Sustain your friends with what you have, You have it by the grace of god; Of him who fails to sustain his friends One says, “a selfish ka". One plans the morrow but knows not what will be, The ( right) ka is the ka by which one is sustained. If praiseworthy deeds are done, Friends will say, “welcome!” One does not bring supplies to town, One brings friends when there is need. Do not repeat calumny. Nor should you listen to it, It is the spouting of the hot-bellied. Report a thing observed, not heard, If it is negligible, don’t say anything. He who is before you recognizes worth. lf a seizure is ordered and carried out, Hatred will arise against him who seizes; Calumny is like a dream against which one covers the face. If you are a man of worth, Who sits in his master’s council. Concentrate on excellence, Your silence is better than chatter. Speak when you know you have a solution, It is the skilled who should speak in council; Speaking is harder than all other work. He who understands it makes it serve.

Our patients predict the culture by living out consciously what the masses of people are able to keep unconscious for the time being. The neurotic is cast by destiny into a Cassandra role. In vain does Cassandra, sitting on the steps of the palace at Mycenae when Agamemnon brings her back from Troy, cry, “Oh for the nightingale’s pure song and a fate like hers!” She knows, in her ill-starred life, that “the pain flooding the song of sorrow is [hers] alone,” and that she must predict the doom she sees will occur there. The Mycenaeans speak of her as mad, but they also believe she does speak the truth, and that she has a special power to anticipate events. Today, the person with psychological problems bears the burdens of the conflicts of the times in his blood, and is fated to predict in his actions and struggles the issues which will later erupt on all sides in the society. The first and clearest demonstration of this thesis is seen in the sexual problems which Freud found in his Victorian patients in the two decades before World War I. These sexual topics‒even down to the words‒were entirely denied and repressed by the accepted society at the time. But the problems burst violently forth into endemic form two decades later after World War II. In the 1920's, everybody was preoccupied with sex and its functions. Not by the furthest stretch of the imagination can anyone argue that Freud "caused" this emergence. He rather reflected and interpreted, through the data revealed by his patients, the underlying conflicts of the society, which the “normal” members could and did succeed in repressing for the time being. Neurotic problems are the language of the unconscious emerging into social awareness. A second, more minor example is seen in the great amount of hostility which was found in patients in the 1930's. This was written about by Horney, among others, and it emerged more broadly and openly as a conscious phenomenon in our society a decade later. A third major example may be seen in the problem of anxiety. In the late 1930's and early 1940's, some therapists, including myself, were impressed by the fact that in many of our patients anxiety was appearing not merely as a symptom of repression or pathology, but as a generalized character state. My research on anxiety, and that of Hobart Mowrer and others, began in the early 1940's. In those days very little concern had been shown in this country for anxiety other than as a symptom of pathology. I recall arguing in the late 1940's, in my doctoral orals, for the concept of normal anxiety, and my professors heard me with respectful silence but with considerable frowning. Predictive as the artists are, the poet W. H. Auden published his Age of Anxiety in 1947, and just after that Bernstein wrote his symphony on that theme. Camus was then writing (1947) about this “century of fear,” and Kafka already had created powerful vignettes of the coming age of anxiety in his novels, most of them as yet untranslated. The formulations of the scientific establishment, as is normal, lagged behind what our patients were trying to tell us. Thus, at the annual convention of the American Psychopathological Association in 1949 on the theme “Anxiety,” the concept of normal anxiety, presented in a paper by me, was still denied by most of the psychiatrists and psychologists present. But in the 1950's a radical change became evident; everyone was talking about anxiety and there were conferences on the problem on every hand. Now the concept of "normal" anxiety gradually became accepted in the psychiatric literature. Everybody, normal as well as neurotic, seemed aware that he was living in the “age of anxiety.” What had been presented by the artists and had appeared in our patients in the late 30's and 40's was now endemic in the land.

He stood at the window, staring at the black scope of sky, and thought of his father glaring at the front door the day his mother left, as if persistence alone was enough to make it swing open and reveal her. He had set a chair there and two bottles. Hours he seemed to sit. “She’ll be back,” he had said, and Harold lay in his bed, his body so taut with listening he felt he was more silence than boy. In the morning, her frocks were strewn like empty mothers all over the small house. Some were even perched in the scrap of grass they called a front lawn. “What’s been going on?” said the lady from next door. Harold had collected the clothes in his arms and screwed them into a ball. His mother’s deep smell was so vividly present it was impossible to credit she wasn’t coming back.

Jamie considered herself outside that, but there was a definite feeling of distrust that underpinned every conversation, and a palpable sense of contempt that beat in the background.  She put it out of her mind and pressed on, hoping to hell that they weren’t going to find Grace dead with a needle in her arm.  That would turn a shit-clap into a shit-pie.  Her dad had practically been a poet.  But she wasn’t hungry. A two-lane road swept across a bridge headed north out of the city. Below it, an old line ran perpendicular, the rails buried in stone chips grown over with brambles. It hadn’t been used in years, and provided a sheltered area stretching across its width.  The banks on either side were fenced off and let down around twenty feet onto the flat at the bottom, and the space beneath the bridge was filled with tents and tarps, all huddled together out of the worst of the weather.  A section of fence had been pushed down, one of the posts dug out and shoved over. It had been trampled flat and an old blanket had been laid over the crushed barbed wire at the top so that the denizens could make the traverse without getting nicked.  They’d walked the last stretch up a pretty much deserted street that had been blocked off at the bottom when the line had been put out of commission. Jamie and Roper moved between the bollards and up the cracked pavement towards the gap in the fence in silence.  Three homeless people were sitting on the street — two by the makeshift entrance to the old line and one opposite.  He was wearing a bright green wind-cheater and had his arms folded under his armpits.

Then shall we sit here in silence while you consider what I have said?" he suggested with unaccustomed gentleness. "Are you serious, your Grace?" she asked dubiously. "About sitting in silence? Oh, yes, I very often contemplate the state of my own soul, ma'am." "No, silly. I meant about marrying me." "Oh, certainly. It can be dangerous to propose to a lady in fun, you know. She might just accept. Then the joke would be on me. But I would not be amused." "But why?" Henry asked. "Why would I not be amused, ma'am? Why, because—" "No, stupid. Oh, pardon me, your Grace," Henry said, slapping a hand over her mouth. She noticed with dismay that last night's gleam was back in the duke's eyes. "You meant why do I wish to marry you?" he prompted. "I have the notion that it might be amusing, Henry. And it is a long time since I have been amused.

I REGARD,” Chopper Jim said judiciously, “all forms of organized religion as a blight, an abomination and a public nuisance. It is the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse. I’m not talking about the guy who takes a vow of silence, or poverty, or celibacy”—he shivered—“and goes and sits on top of a mountain to meditate for the rest of his life.” He fixed Kate with a stern look. “It’s the people who follow him up that mountain, and then come back down and beat His word into their fellow man who annoy me.” She didn’t reply, and he forked up a french fry. Mutt, well aware of who was the soft touch at this table, sat pressed against his side, looking yearningly up into his face. He forked up another french fry and she took it delicately between her teeth, casting him a look of adoration in the process. “Most of those people—not all, I admit—but most of the people who subscribe to organized religion are too lazy and or too frightened to answer the hard questions themselves, and so hand their souls over for safe-keeping to a bunch of thieves and charlatans who know more about separating fools from their money than they do about God. Any God.” He took a bite of cheeseburger. “Religion is a crutch. You lean on it long enough, you forget how to walk on your own two feet.

Silence I wondered why Grandmother and Grandpapa could sit in Silence on the front porch She smoked a cigarette He didn’t Sitting on the swing in Silence I washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen trying to figure out why they sat in Silence Then I got to be my own age with my own deck and my own person and I understood

That peculiar light just before sunset, before gloaming: it is then that Essa sees for the first time the famous dunes at Avanue, which roll like fat people in their sleep, and shift restlessly forever. “They cast long shadows, these sleeping giants, and Essa shivers. She has walked too far—after the trip north she was so grateful to be out of hospital—her hands and feet are cold, and she is dizzy with exhaustion. She sits down on the ragged grass at the edge of the bluff which overlooks the dunes, and tries not to hate them. “Her mother’s words, remembered in a dream, sound like water flowing in her thoughts. There is no water here. The grasses under her are dry and stiff, and they grow in sand so fine it grits through her clothing against the skin of her ass. The sea is too far away to see or smell. But at least she is alone. “Though she is shivering, it is still a hot day, and the sun has warmed the sand. The ground radiates heat into her body. She lies down flat on her belly, her head to one side so that she can still see the dunes, and puts her hands beneath her; gradually they warm. “Gradually her body comes back into balance and she starts to see an eerie beauty before her. The sun is fully down when she sits up, brushes the sand away as well as she can, and hugs her knees to her chest. She puts her chin on her knees and watches darkness descend over the low rolling landscape. “This is unlike any cliff on which she has rested yet. It is low and gives no perspective. The dunes come up almost to her feet. Yet the demarcation is quite abrupt: there is no grass growing anywhere after this brief crumbling drop-off, and she can see as the land-breeze begins to quicken that ahead of her the sand is moving. In fact, she realizes, she can hear it, a low sweeping sound which has mounted from inaudibility until it inexorably backs every other sound: sounds of grasses moving, insects scraping, birds calling from the invisible sea far beyond her viewpoint are all subsumed in one great sand-song. “It is a sound so relentlessly sad that Essa can hardly bear to listen, but so persistent that she cannot ignore it now that she has become aware of its susurration. She pulls her sweater—the one her mother made by her knitting—around her and waits. “When it is fully dark and the wind has died again, she rises and begins the long walk back to town in the dim light of stars and crescent moon.

They both loved black-and-white movies and heavily buttered popcorn. And they enjoyed sitting in silence together. Whether it was reading books or just swinging on the porch swing, it didn’t matter as long as she was there.

And Papa will say “ Kahin jane ki zaroorat nahin hai, ghar pe baitho . There is no need to go anywhere, sit at home.”’ For a while she keeps thinking about how to get out of her house with friends, but then she gives up the fight to go out and becomes good. Her parents are relieved. Gradually hiding becomes a habit. Invisibility becomes safe. A habit.

She tries to lie still, but she's forgotten how. On the farm everything had been still. The silence was a complete thing. She could touch it with her fingers, taste it with her mouth, and sit in it like bathwater. Things took time on the farm; they gathered and grew. You sat and drank tea on the stoep and didn't think about whether it was day or night. But here she feels like being lived; outside the curtains people are shouting, children are laughing, trains are running, and buses are leaving.

She stays silent, Jaded as she is, she sits down, alone for a moment of silence. This was her roman empire.

I would just always wonder if I could ever really know a white woman, if she could ever really know me.” He shakes his head. “Enough to trust her with my life? With my children?” “And did your wife really know you? I bet she didn’t think you would cheat on her, but you did, and from what I can tell, you’re both Black.” A heavy silence follows my words, and as we sit in it, Iz slowly raises his eyes. “I didn’t cheat on her.” He twists the grim line of his mouth around the words. “She cheated on me.” Damn. Now I feel like a real asshole. “I’m sorry about that. I assumed . . .” I leave not-well-enough alone and press on. “I do know I don’t ever have to worry about that and neither does Bristol. It’s nothing to do with our race. I would never do that to her, and I know she would never do that to me. Have you never been captivated by someone so much that the rest of your life without them seems . . . empty?

I thought the only threat against us came from the rogue noblemen who are plotting a revolt under our very noses. Not the Aveyonian commoners you've spent weeks assuring us are content, happy even." Bastien eyed her as though seeing her in a new light. "Threats can take many forms, madame. It would not be prudent in times like these to invite them into your home." "If we are willing to open our doors to the rich, then we must also be willing to open our doors to the poor. You speak as though wealth precludes someone from committing a crime, and that has not been true in my experience." "I think I speak for everyone, the king included, when I say you are perhaps not thinking clearly." "And I speak for myself alone when I say you're wrong. Do you forget that I am a commoner? That I grew up in a poor village with the very people you seek to malign? I do not fear them in the same way I fear a rich man who believes justice is a fluid concept and that innocence can be bought." She let them sit with what she had said for a few moments before continuing. "I called this meeting as a courtesy. This is how I envision the salon, and I believe it will be beneficial for all the people of our kingdom. You still get the prestige-raising, economy-boosting aspects, only now the doors are open for everyone. If you cannot abide by that, then I suggest you remain in your estates for the duration." If she had ruffled the feathers of the advisers before, it was nothing compared to how they viewed her now. "All in favor of the amendment to the salon?" They mutely assented with barely raised hands, but it was enough. In a way, it seemed they almost feared her. No one protested or voiced any concerns, and the meeting ended in near silence. She would take their unease over their disdain. She thought perhaps it was time for men like them to fear what a woman could do.

He had been like this before. Everyone had faltered then. What had happened had reduced them all to a silence, quieting their lives for months afterwards, but it was John who seemed to migrate even further than anyone else. Taking himself to the very edges of his life, and staying there out of harm’s way. “Let’s go and sit in the kitchen,” she said. “Let’s make a drink and talk about it.

Lydia, sitting in silence through all of this, had absorbed gradually what they were speaking of, and what it meant. And for days after that she had lived with a heavy place deep in her heart where a piece of her innocence had been torn out and replaced with the weightier truth of the world.

left the basket on the doorstep. Clearly, he wanted to be left alone. After last night, she was happy to oblige. Back in her kitchen, she filled the electric kettle and flicked on its switch. She put a scoop of tea leaves in her teapot. The kettle clicked off as the water came to a boil and she went to fetch it. When she turned around, Alec was standing in the doorway. “Hello, you,” he said. “Hi.” They stood looking at each other, smiling shyly. Fiona broke the silence. “You will have noted,” she needled, “that my interpretation of the marine weather forecast yesterday was correct.” “I did, yes. Not a great day to give the mountain another try.” “I shouldn’t think so, given your last attempt.” Alec was about to protest, but there was a knock at the back door. Fiona went to open it. “Oh hello, Owen; come in and have a cuppa.” Owen followed her into the kitchen. “Morning, Alec,” he said. Fiona poured a cup of tea and gestured for Owen to sit. “What do you need, Owen?” Owen hesitated, as if searching for the right words. “David’s already gone back to his cottage. Looked done in when he arrived this morning and left after a

Don’t feel as though you have to answer me. I can see plain as day that a melancholy has taken hold of you. I am here to offer whatever support you need. Even if that means simply sitting quietly.” She allows the room to settle into silence. Melancholy. That’s it exactly, I think. A deep melancholy at the state of the world and the futility of my efforts. No one else has ever identified it so precisely.

Transfixed, she exits the car in a dream-like state, and I grin and follow. I pass a handful of tables to join her where she sits on the waist-high rock wall lining the cliff. Before us is an endless view of the peaks and valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We spend a few minutes in comfortable silence.

The other queens indeed fled from Briallyn weeks ago, as Eris said. She alone sits in the throne room of their shared palace. And what Eris revealed about Beron was true, too: the High Lord visited Briallyn on the continent, pledging his forces to her cause.” A muscle ticked in Azriel’s jaw. “But Briallyn’s gathering of armies, the alliance with Beron, is only the auxiliary force to what she has planned.” He shook his head, shadows slithering over his wings. “Briallyn wishes to find the Cauldron again. In order to retrieve her youth.” “She’ll never attain the Cauldron,” Amren said, waving a hand gleaming with rings. “No one but us, Miryam, and Drakon know where it’s hidden. Even if Briallyn did uncover its location, there are enough wards and spells on it that no one could ever break through.” “Briallyn knows this,” Azriel said gravely. Nesta’s stomach churned. Azriel nodded to Cassian. “What Vassa suspected is true. The death-lord Koschei has been whispering in Briallyn’s ear. He remains trapped at his lake, but his words carry on the wind to her. He is ancient, his depth of knowledge fathomless. He pointed Briallyn toward the Dread Trove—not for her sake, but for his own ends. He wishes to use it to free himself from his lake. And Briallyn is not the puppet we believed her to be—she and Koschei are allies.” He added to Cassian, “You need to ask Eris whether Beron knows about this. And the Trove.” Cassian nodded into the ensuing silence. Nesta found herself asking, “What’s the Dread Trove?” Amren’s eyes glowed with a remnant of her power. “The Cauldron Made many objects of power, long ago, forging weapons of unrivaled might. Most were lost to history and war, and when I went into the Prison, only three remained. At the time, some claimed there were four, or that the fourth had been Unmade, but today’s legends only tell of three.

There is a scene I love where a brother and sister meet after many years and little communication. They meet in an arranged café in mid-afternoon. The light is dying and the city outside rumbles softly in the complacent time before rush hour. The café is unexceptional and quiet. She comes first, sits at the far end, a table facing the door, nervous in her buttoned raincoat. The waiter is an older man. He leaves her be. The brother enters late with the look but not the words of apology. He kisses her cheek. They sit and the old man brings them teas they do not want, two pots, strong for him weak for her. It is long ago since they said each other’s names aloud, and saying them now has the extraordinary shyness of encounter I imagine on the Last Day. At first there is the full array of human awkwardness. But here is the thing: almost in an instant their old selves are immediately present. The years and the changes are nothing. They need few words. They recognise each other in each other, and even in silence the familiarity is powerfully consoling, because despite time and difference there remains that deep-river current, that kind of maybe communion that only exists within people joined in the word family. So now what washes up between them, foam-white and fortifying and quite unexpectedly, is love. I cannot remember what book it is in. But it’s in this one now.

Barkin. And let me begin by saying that Pajama Day is canceled.” A discontented murmur ran through the auditorium. Holly looked around at the faces of her fellow students. She stood up. “But, Principal Barkin,” she said. “The last Principal Barkin—” Barkin slammed his fist onto the podium. “SILENCE! I WILL NOT BE INTERRUPTED.” He pointed a long finger at Holly Rash. “YOU. YOU WILL REPORT TO MY OFFICE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THIS ASSEMBLY. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?” “Yes, but—” “SIT

my imagination – after ten years of absence, I guess it must be – but I’m convinced my senses are assailed by the smell of that perfume she once wore . . . Closing the door again firmly, not yet able to deal with the Pandora’s Box of memories that would fly out of any of these bedrooms, I retreat back downstairs. I see night has fallen, and it’s pitch-black outside. I check my watch, add two hours for the time difference and realise it’s almost nine in the evening here – my empty stomach is growling for food. I unpack the car and stow the supplies I picked up from the shop in the local village in the pantry, then take some bread, feta cheese and a very warm beer out onto the terrace. Sitting there in the silence, with only the odd sleepy cicada to interrupt its purity, I sip the beer, wondering if it was really a good idea to arrive two days earlier than the others. Navel-gazing is something I have a double first in, after all – to the point where

When Mrs. Kennedy finally stood up, I looked again at the seat and saw a bullet on top of the tufted black leather cushioning behind where she had been sitting. It was resting in a seam where the tufted leather padding ended against the car’s metal body. It wasn’t a bullet fragment like the other two pieces. It was a completely intact bullet. It had been hidden behind Mrs. Kennedy all the time she was seated. No wonder I hadn’t seen it sooner.

After sitting there in silence for several minutes, sheathed inside her as she clung tightly to my shirt, I kissed her forehead and said softly, “You’re perfect, angel. You’re absolutely perfect.

The Storyteller The little boy stumbled through the forest. He was sure that wild animals were chasing him, and wanted to eat him. As he crashed through the undergrowth he suddenly emerged into a clearing. He looked around, fearing that he could hear animals, but all was quiet. The little boy walked further into the clearing. He saw a small stool with a book on it. He stopped, and looked around wondering who had left the stool, and the book there. He walked over to the stool, and picked up the book to look at it. Without thinking, he sat down, and opened the book. He started to read aloud. The only sound in the clearing was the little boy’s voice. He had forgotten about his earlier fear, and he had also stopped imagining that he could hear animals after him. Once he had finished reading the story he put the book down, and he said to the clearing, “I’ll come back tomorrow to read again.” The little boy left the clearing and reentered the forest. He wasn’t afraid anymore. It was if he had a new found confidence, and manner. The next day he returned, and found a different book on the stool, and as before, he sat down, and started to read. This went on for a week. After seven days animals started to come through the undergrowth, and entered the clearing. When they saw the boy, and heard his storytelling they would stop, find a place to sit down, and listen to him. One day he heard a roar behind him, and the little boy turned around, coming face to face with a tiger. “Shhh!” he told the tiger, and gave it a smack across the nose. The tiger was taken aback, but he did as he was told and he went to a tree. Then he too, sat and listened to the little boy. This went on for many years, and some animals died never to return, while others grew old as the little boy did. One day, when the little boy was no more but a little old man he died as he was reading one of his stories. The animals looked up, and listened to the silence. Wild dogs howled, elephants trumpeted their calls, birds tweeted and chirped, monkeys chatted and tigers roared as one. The tiger, who many years ago the little boy had smacked across the nose, carried the little boy, and laid him to rest under his tree. The animals lined up to pay their respects to the little boy who had devoted his life to reading to the animals. As they lined up, they were watched by God, Buddha, Allah and Ganesha, who were standing off to the side. They had tears in their eyes, not because the little boy had died, but because as each animal came to the body of the little boy, each animal would lay their head down on his chest, and shed tears over the boy’s body. Finally a small baby elephant came, and laid his head, and trunk down on the little boy’s body, and his tears flowed over the little boy’s chest. When the animals had left, there was an eerie silence over the clearing. Many, many years passed until one day, a small girl come running through the bushes, with a frightened look on her face. She stopped, and looked around the clearing. She saw a small stool, and so she walked over to it, wondering who would leave such a thing here in the forest. She sat down on the stool and looked down. She saw a box full of books. The little boy smiled.

In movies, therapist silences have become a cliche, but it's only in silence that people can truly hear themselves. Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void- words, words, and more words- something important rises to the surface. And when the silence is a shared experience, it can be a gold mine for thoughts and feelings that the patient didn't even know existed. ... Even great joy is sometimes best expressed through silence, as when a patient comes in after landing a hard-won promotion or getting engaged and can't find the words to express the magnitude of what she's feeling. So we sit in silence together, beaming.

At first I felt something like an oppressed anxiety when I was near the little sick girl, which later changed into pious and reverential awe in face of this dumb and strangely moving suffering. Whenever I saw her, an obscure sensation would arise in me that she must surely die. And then I grew afraid to look her in the face. Whenever I roamed the forests during the day, feeling so joyful in this solitude and peace, when I stretched out wearily on the moss and gazed for hours together into the bright, shimmering sky, into whose very depths one could see, when a strange and profound sense of joy thrilled me, I would suddenly think of the sick Maria - then I would get up and roam aimlessly about, overwhelmed by inexplicable thoughts and feel a dull pressure in my head and my heart which brought me to the verge of tears. At times when I walked in the evening along the dusty main street which was filled with the scent of the blossoming lime and watched whispering couples as they stood in the shadows of the trees; when I saw two people pressed close together as though they were one being, sauntering slowly beside the fountain as it quietly played in the moolight, and a feverish thrill of presentiment coursed through me as I thought of poor sick Maria; then I was seized by a quiet yearning for something inexplicable and all at once I saw myself strolling arm in arm with her in the shade of the fragrant lime trees. And a strange radiance shone from Maria's great dark eyes, and the moon made her slender little face appear still paler and more transparent. Then I fled upstairs into my attic, leaned against the window, looked up into the deep dark heavens where the stars appeared to have gone out and for hours abandoned myself to formless and confusing dreams until overcome by sleep. And yet - and yet I did not exchange so much as ten words with poor sick Maria. She never spoke. I would only sit at her side for hours gazing into her sick, suffering face, feeling ever and again that she must die. In the garden I lay in the grass and breathed in the fragrance of a thousand flowers; my eye was intoxicated by the gleaming colours of blossoms flooded with sunlight, and I listened too for the silence in the air above, interrupted only by the mating call of a bird. I sensed the ferment of the fruitful, torrid earth, that mysterious sound of ever-creative life. I could then darkly feel the greatness and beauty of life. Then it semed to me as if life belonged to me. But then my eye lit upon the bay-window of the house. I could see the sick Maria sitting there - silent and motionless and with closed eyes. And all my thinking was again drawn to the suffering of this being and remained there - became a painful but shyly conceded yearning which struck me as puzzling and confusing. And I left the garden timidly, silently, as though I had no right to linger in this temple.

You took naked pictures of me, Asher! Why? I thought that night couldn’t be ruined any more, and yet…” She covered her mouth as she choked back a sob, but still, she didn’t cry. “You didn’t have to do that to Elijah. I get that you hate me for some reason, but he’s done nothing to you.” The second she said his name, defending him, I saw red. Motherfucking crimson. My hold on her hands tightened until she whimpered. “That kid back there who just called you a cunt? That’s who you’re worried about?” I shook my head, spitting my disgust on the pavement beside the car. “Your head is twisted. More than I even thought. You don’t mean shit to that kid. The second he found out you’d chosen someone else, you became nothing to him. And yet, here you sit, worried for him, when you should be on your knees for me.” Our gazes clashed, igniting a wildfire between us. Waves of heat and hate rose in the air, the silence deafening. My heart thrashed wildly in my chest as my fury transformed into disgust.

Then I head home and sit in silence. I hate nights. Hate them so much. The hours drag past with painful slowness, and every night I find myself wishing that the sun would come up again so I can leave. My home no longer feels like home, but a prison. Another aquarium I'm being kept in, a protected environment designed to keep me comfortable but not content.

I waited to see if he’d say more, if he’d stop with the jokes. We were both quiet for a bit. Then John began counting. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi …” He shot me an exasperated look. “How long are we going to sit here saying nothing?” I understood his frustration. In movies, therapist silences have become a cliché, but it’s only in silence that people can truly hear themselves. Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void—words, words, and more words—something important rises to the surface. And when the silence is a shared experience, it can be a gold mine for thoughts and feelings that the patient didn’t even know existed. It’s no wonder that I spent an entire session with Wendell saying virtually nothing and simply crying. Even great joy is sometimes best expressed through silence, as when a patient comes in after landing a hard-won promotion or getting engaged and can’t find the words to express the magnitude of what she’s feeling. So we sit in silence together, beaming.

This is Maya’s house. She controls everything. She has every advantage. We are patients in Maya’s asylum, and all instruction to sit still and quiet the mind come directly from her. Stillness and silence are the antithesis of the awakening process, and those who advocate peace and compassion and a quiet mind are just reselling their preferred sleep potions.

She jumped from the cliffs of Infanta Bay.” An uncomfortable silence sits between them, and Sadie relishes in it. “I…I never knew.” Of course you didn’t. “There’s a lot that you don’t know, Odette. There’s a lot that happened when you were gone.

Dad lets out a sigh. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Well, did you ask Billy to explain what’s going on?” “He said it’s not what I think it is. That he would never cheat on me. But he was so cagey and weird, and when I asked him to prove it by showing me the messages on his phone, he looked like a deer in headlights. It was like dating Ezra all over again.” I freeze when my father’s eyes snap to mine. Oh, shit. I slap my hand over my mouth and frantically shake my head. “No. Forget I said that last part.” He braces his arms on the table and looks down. We sit in silence for several minutes. “I wondered if Ezra was Marley’s father. She has his dark hair. And Billy punched him in the face. The better I got to know Billy, the more I realized he wasn’t just a loose cannon, that he must’ve had a good reason for doing that, but I didn’t want to believe the kid I treated like my own son would get you pregnant and then bail on you.” Finally, he looks at me. “I’m assuming you told Ezra the truth?” It’s a sad day when my father wonders whether I told the father of my baby I was pregnant. After how I behaved back then, I guess I deserve that doubt. “Of course.” “And he didn’t want to be involved?” “His response was basically, ‘Fuck no, I don’t want a baby.’” I take a deep breath. “Swear to me you won’t say anything. Because I promised Ezra I wouldn’t tell you the truth if he dropped the charges against Billy.

They sit in companionable silence watching a man in a shiny blue jumpsuit and a helmet hurtling down a near-vertical slope crouched on carbon planks, straightening out as the curve tips him up to shoot into the air. “Who comes up with this stuff?” Kirby says. She’s right, Dan thinks. The grace and absurdity of human endeavor.

tried not to think about the time before Mum died. The three of them had been so happy. Dad had settled into a good job, buildings manager for a large company headquarters after years working worldwide as a project manager on construction sites. Mum worked part time in a creche for babies and toddlers, and Matt was in his first year at senior school, making new friends, struggling a bit during French and English lessons but doing well at maths and enjoying the chance to show his skills at football. Weekends were brilliant. Picnics and trips to adventure parks, the seaside, football matches, the swimming pool – always the three of them together, having fun, laughing. Then, just a year ago, it ended. On one of her days off Mum had gone shopping in the nearest big town. A gang of older boys racing along the pavement had knocked her into the path of a bus and she had died before an ambulance could reach the scene. After that all Matt could remember was the silence. The silent house, Dad sitting huddled in front of the television screen, the volume turned to mute, Matt sitting in his bedroom not knowing what to do, feeling it was wrong to play computer games or phone his mates. His mates were silent anyway – they didn’t know what to say to someone whose Mum had been killed so suddenly and shockingly.

In Xenophon's summary of the allegory [Prodicus' "Choice of Heracles'' ] the young Heracles has sat down at a crossroads, not knowing which path to follow through life. As he sits deliberating, two women appear to him. Their physical appearance is a study in contrasts, and they are clearly villainness and heroine. Evil (Kakia) is overfed, plump, rouged, and all powdered up. She wears revealing clothes and is vain, viewing herself in a mirror and turning around to see if she is being admired. Virtue (Arete), on the other hand, wears simple white; her only adornments are purity, modesty, and temperance. These apparitions proceed to give speeches in praise of the life that they can give Heracles. Evil speaks first-an ominous choice, since in such debates, the first speaker typically loses. She offers Heracles a life of free, effortless pleasure. There will be no delights that he will not taste, no difficulties that he will not avoid. He need never worry about wars and affairs. All he need trouble himself about will be what food or drink to take; what to look at, hear, smell or touch for his pleasure; what partner he might enjoy, how he might sleep softest, and how he can obtain all these with the least toil (aponOtata). If ever there are shortages, he will not suffer ponos or hardship either in body or soul. Rather "you will enjoy those things that others work to produce, and you will not hold back from profiting everywhere." Evil tells Heracles her name, but adds confidentially that to her friends she is known as Happiness (Eudaimonia). Very different is the tone and substance of Virtue's argument. For while Evil would have Heracles live for himself alone and treat others as means to his self-gratification, Virtue begins by saying that she knows Heracles' parents and nature: Heracles must live up to his Olympian heritage. Therefore she will not deceive him with "hymns to pleasure." Evil's enticements are in fact contrary to the divine ordering, "for the gods have given men nothing good without ponos and diligence." There follows a series of emphatic verbal nouns to hammer home this truth: if you want divine favor, you must worship the gods; if you want to be admired, you must do good works for your friends; if you want to be honored, you must benefit your city and Greece; if you want the earth to bear crops, you must cultivate the land. Flocks require tending, war demands practice. And if you want strength (Heracles' trademark), you must accustom your body to serve your will, and you must train "with ponoi and sweat:' At this point, Evil bursts in to deplore such a harsh lifestyle. She is immediately silenced, however, as Virtue argues that duality is essential to a sense of fulfillment and even to pleasure itself. For paradoxically, ponos (pain, struggle) makes pleasure pleasurable. Evil's vision of happiness is one of continual and languid orgy-food without hunger, drink without thirst, sex without desire, sleep without weariness. But as experience shows, continual partying soon loses its zest, even if one goes so far as to cool expensive drinks "with snow" in summertime. By contrast, Virtue's own followers have no real trouble in satisfying their desires. They do so not by committing violence against others or living off others' labor, but by simply "holding off until they actually do desire" food or drink. Hunger is the best sauce, and it is free. Furthermore, Virtue appeals to Heracles' native idealism. What hedonists have ever accomplished any "fine work" (ergon kalon)? None, for no beautiful or divine deed is ever done "without me [Virtue] ." Therefore, wherever there are energetic, effective people, Virtue is present: she is a helper to craftsmen, a guard of the household, a partner in peacetime ponoi, an ally for the works (erga) of war, the best support of friendship. To choose Evil would be shameful and not even extremely pleasurable, while with Virtue one will lead the most varied and honorable life.

During the short time they’d lived together, they’d had rather a lot of serious talks, and the format had always been the same. She’d start with a speech-cum-lecture-cum-list-of-charges and he’d sit still and be quiet, trying not to let his attention wander; then there’d be an awkward silence, and then she’d start talking again, usually saying the same things but in a slightly different order. The cycle would repeat itself (rarely more than five times), and at the end either she’d burst into tears and stomp out of the room, lose her temper and stomp out of the room or sit on his lap and start nibbling his ear.

She pressed her forehead down onto the cold, clean tiles. “Please undo what I’ve done, Lord,” she said. “I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav.” “I can’t,” he said. He had a bittersweet, scratchy voice, and it was infinitely gentle. “I would very much like to. But that soul’s inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I’d take yours with it and destroy both in the process. What’s done is done. Now you have to live with it.” She was empty. That was the terrible thing: there was nothing inside her but the sick and bubbling detestation of her House. Even the silence of her soul could not dilute the hatred that had fermented in her from the genesis of the Ninth House downward. Harrowhark picked herself up off the floor and looked her Emperor dead in his dark and shining eyes. “How dare you ask me to live with it?” The Emperor did not render her down to a pile of ash, as she partly wished he would. Instead, he rubbed at one temple, and he held her gaze, sombre and even. “Because,” he said, “the Empire is dying.” She said nothing. “If there had been any less need you would be sitting back home in Drearburh, living a long and quiet life with nothing to worry or hurt you, and your cavalier would still be alive. But there are things out there that even death cannot keep down. I have been fighting them since the Resurrection. I can’t fight them by myself.” Harrow said, “But you’re God.” And God said, “And I am not enough.

Finally, without a word, he plated dinner for her. Just for her. She sat and ate in silence as he did something else in the kitchen. There was no conversation. There was no cuddling. Anna went to bed soon after, dinner sitting unsettled in her stomach and a resigned sort of dread lodged in her throat. Here it comes, she thought as she slipped under her covers. She saw it coming, had prepared herself, but that didn’t mean a few tears didn’t escape for what might have been. Sometimes she hated being right.

Anna didn't tend to talk much, but every so often she would become frantically loquacious. Her conversation would have something of the make-believe about it, as if she were an actress chattering away on stage but was secretly exhausted and wanted nothing more than to return to reality and be alone. If Francesco even touched on the subject of money or employment, Anna's face immediately darkened and she retreated into silence. Francesco had been forced to tell her upfront that he owned no castle or country estate. Yes, he'd stammered, he was of baronial origins, but his family had fallen into ruin and had almost nothing left. At this revelation, Anna had shown neither regret nor surprise as if this was something she'd known all along or was of little interest to her. A hard, slightly ironic expression appeared on her face. "But of course, of course," she said impatiently, and lowering her eyes, she began to fiddle with her spoon.They both were silent while the last sunlight streaming the dirty caffè window faded and the room darkened. But then suddenly, as he turned towards Anna, Francesco noticed that her pouting mouth was trembling and that her eyes, which she raised for an instant, were moist and bright. Perhaps she really did harbor a hope that those imaginary holdings of his were real? Or perhaps she was thinking of something else entirely? Francesco was so mortified and unsure of himself that he didn't dare ask her anything. The silence between them grew longer and Anna raised her now dry, wide eyes and remained stiffly in her seat in the corner of the half-empty coffee shop without looking at her companion again. She was so stern and detached that one might have mistaken her for a foreigner passing through, seated all alone at that little table in the caffè. Sitting beside her, Francesco, deeply disappointed that he wasn't privy to her most intimate thoughts, let his gaze wander over the small iron tables, across the streaked marble countertop, to the brazier no longer stoked by the lazy shop boy, its few remaining sparks dying among the ashes. Even without catching his fiancée's eye, he could see her dark eyes glowing in the twilight like those of a visionary fixated on her inner thoughts. This was how they spent their brief and acrimonious engagement.

They’re waiting for us in the… room,” Cora sniffs, pulling back to glance at me through red-rimmed eyes. She swipes at the tears along her cheekbone. “Mandy’s at work. She said it was too hard to be here. Mom and Dad are going to wait out here, but… did you want to come in with me? To say goodbye?” “Of course.” I don’t hesitate. We rescued this dog together, and I’ll be damned if I’m not with Cora when Blizzard takes her last breath. Goddamn. Cora gives a tight nod, then alerts one of the staff that we’re ready to go in. I follow her, a solemn silence settling between us. It’s a quiet, peaceful room, adorned with electronic candles and soft music. Blizzard is lying very still on a dog bed in the center of the floor, her fluffy chest heaving ever so slowly with each breath. I feel my emotions get stuck in my throat when I lay eyes on the dog that has felt like my own for the last ten years. I’d dog-sit her when the Lawsons took family vacations. I’d take her to the dog park with Mandy and Cora, watching her chase tennis balls and make new friends. Blizzard always greeted me first when I’d walk through the front door with Mandy, collapsing onto my feet and rolling over for belly rubs. She always sat beside me at the dinner table, waiting for the snack I’d inevitably offer her, and she always wagged her tail in adoration as I sang karaoke in the Lawson’s living room.

I recently worked with a survivor of sexual violence who was early in her healing process. She was by turns angry and despairing and frozen—and she was afraid all the time. Though she had been practicing meditation for a long time, the intensity of her emotions felt too big for her to allow them to move through her; they bottlenecked inside her. She felt panicked and stuck in the pain. She wanted to know what to do with all the feelings, how to fix them. She wanted to know how to stop hurting and how soon the pain would end. “All I can tell you,” I said, “is that everything you’re experiencing, all the contradictory feelings and all the pain, is a normal part of the healing process. Everyone goes through it differently, and there’s no way to know how long it will last. It sucks for a while, and then gradually it gets better. But I can tell you this for sure: Every single survivor I’ve ever known has found their way through it.” We sat in silence while she absorbed the idea of not knowing when the pain would end and having to simply trust her body and her heart to heal in their own time. At last she said, “It’s like . . . I’m sitting with a stunned bird in the palm of my hand. If I get tense and try to hurry it, it will just stay frozen. But if I’m still and patient long enough, the bird will wake up and fly away.” Yes. That.

reaches for her purse, but I stretch out and catch her hand in mine. “Please don’t go,” I say. “Please.” She nods, biting her lower lip between her teeth. “Okay,” she breathes. She sits down beside me and fidgets. I lean over and place Kit in her arms and then press a kiss to her temple. “Let me love you,” I say softly. Then I sit back and I watch her as she arranges Kit in her lap so that she can look into the baby’s face. Silence sinks over the room like a wet, heavy blanket. “He was perfect,” she says quietly. “He looked like me. He had dark-blue eyes and freckles and he wasn’t but a minute old. Then I never got to see him again. Not close up. They took him from me, and I didn’t even get to hold him.” “Where is he now?” My throat clogs so tight with emotion that I have to cough past it. “He’s with a wonderful family that adopted him when he was a day old.” She finally looks up at me, and her eyes shimmer with tears. One drops down her cheek, and she doesn’t brush it away. “They send me pictures every six months. He’s beautiful. He plays baseball, and he loves trains.” “We all do what we have to do to survive,” I say. She snorts. I pass her a tissue because it almost comes out like a sob. “I was fifteen and completely alone.” She unwraps Kit and counts her toes and fingers. “She’s going to play guitar like her mom,” she says. “Look at these fingers.” Kit grips Friday’s finger in her sleep, and Friday wraps her back up. I don’t say anything because I don’t think she wants me to. “His name is Jacob,” she says. She smiles. “I have his footprints and his date of birth on my inner thigh. Pete did it for me.” Fucking Pete. He knew all this time and didn’t tell me. “Little fucker,” I grumble. “Pete knows the value of a well-placed secret.” I’m glad she had someone to tell her secrets to. I hope someday, it’ll be me. “I treasure your secrets. I’ll hold them close to my heart and keep them between us and only us, always.” She smiles. “I know.” She takes a deep breath, and I feel like she’s just relieved some of her burden. “You’ve never seen him?” “No. I’m allowed to. It was an open adoption. But I never have.” “Why not?” “I’m afraid that if I ever get my hands on him I won’t be able to let him go.” Her voice breaks again. “Or worse—what if I see him and he hates me? I wouldn’t be able to stand myself. It’s hard enough knowing that he doesn’t know who I am. If he hates me, too, I won’t be able to take it.” “Thank you for telling me,” I say softly.

Some instinct told Steven who the ladies’ man was even before Chloe spoke. “You’ve been so curious about Mr. Fairfax, Fulton,” she said, in an idle tone. “Here he is.” The banker. Steven got to his feet, not as a gesture of courtesy, but so the man couldn’t look down on him. “Fulton Whitney,” the banker said by way of introduction. His tone was grudging. Steven didn’t put out his hand, or speak. He was wondering what kind of polecat would cozy up to a woman like Emma, then spend a sunny April morning rolling in the sheets with a couple of floozies. Whitney cleared his throat and shifted awkwardly on his feet, while Chloe left the sofa where she’d been sitting, her fan still fluttering. “I’d better see how things are going downstairs,” she said, and then she was gone. “So you’ll be leaving now, I suppose,” the banker said, breaking the strained silence. “I don’t imagine a man like you cares to stay in one place too long.” Steven folded his arms. “Until just a few minutes ago, I figured on riding out,” he answered. “Now I’m not so sure.” Color blossomed in Whitney’s pasty cheeks. “What possible reason could you have to stay?” “Just one. Her name is Emma.” The banker stared at him with undisguised contempt, and Steven figured he must look pretty seedy, all things considered. It had been days since he’d shaved, and two months since he’d had a haircut. “You aren’t good enough to lick her shoes.” Steven indulged in a slow, obnoxious smile. “Let me understand this,” he drawled. “I’m not good enough for Emma, but you, her fiancé, just crawled out of bed with two whores?” Again, Whitney’s face flooded with blustery color. “I don’t have to explain anything to you,” he rasped. And then he started to walk away. Steven was possessed of a rage nobody but Macon had been able to arouse in him before. He grasped the banker by the arm, whirled him around, and threw his fist into the middle of the bastard’s face. Fulton gave a startled yelp as he struck the wall, then slowly slid down it, one hand to his bleeding mouth. “Now,” Steven said calmly, “we know exactly where we stand, you and I.

JENNA SMILED WHEN Easy walked into the bedroom, carrying what appeared to be half the refrigerator on a bowing cookie sheet. How much more sweet could he be? He glanced between her and Sara like he was unsure what to do next. Jenna pulled the covers back so the surface would be flat and patted the bed next to her. “Put it anywhere.” Easy set the makeshift tray down and rubbed a hand over his head. “I tried to think of things that would be gentle on your stomach,” he said in a low voice. “But if you want something different—” “No, this looks perfect.” Her gaze settled on a tall glass of . . . She gasped. “You made me a milk shake?” At that, Sara patted her on the knee. “Okay, I’m gonna go. Let me know if you need anything?” “Oh, uh, Shane was making you all something to eat,” Easy said. Sara smiled. “Good timing. This is making me hungry,” she said, gesturing to the tray. Jenna grabbed up the milk shake and hugged the glass against her chest. “Get your own.” Holding up her hands in surrender, Sara smiled. “All yours. Besides, Nick and Jeremy have the world’s biggest sweet tooths. There’s an endless supply of ice cream downstairs. I’m not even joking. So there’s more where that came from.” She squeezed Easy’s arm. “You know where to find me if you need me,” she said. And then they were alone. Jenna was glad. Not because having Easy here warded off her panic and fear but because she just wanted to be with him. She fished a spoon out from between two plates and took a taste of her treat. Freaking heaven. “Oh, my God,” she said, scooping another big bite. “This is so good. I can’t believe you made me a milk shake.” Even when her father had been alive, no one was really taking care of Jenna. So maybe Easy’s thoughtfulness wouldn’t have been so earthshaking to someone else, but to her, it meant everything. She peered up at him, which made her realize he was still standing. Crisscrossing her legs, she pointed at the foot of the bed. “Come sit down. Some of this has to be for you, right?” “Yeah,” Easy said. “You sure this is okay?” “It’s great, really. I can’t even remember the last time I ate, so this is like filet mignon and Maine lobster rolled into one. Seriously.” She exchanged the milk shake for the bowl of soup, and the warm, salty broth tasted every bit as good. They ate in companionable silence for a while, then he asked, “So, what are you studying in school?” “International business,” Jenna said around a spoonful of soup. “I always wanted to travel.” And, to put it more plainly, she’d always wanted to get the hell out of here. “Sounds ambitious,” Easy said. “Did you have to learn languages?” Jenna nodded. “I minored in Spanish, and I’ve taken some French, too. What I’d really like to learn is Chinese since there are so many new markets opening up there. But I’ve heard it’s really hard. Do you speak any other languages?” Wiping his mouth with a napkin, Easy nodded. “Hablo español, árabe, y Dari.” Grinning, Jenna reached for her bagel. She’d thought him hard to resist just being his usual sexy, thoughtful, protective self. If he was going to throw speaking to her in a foreign language into the mix, she’d be a goner. “What is Dari?” “One of the main languages in Afghanistan,” he said. “Oh. Guess that makes sense. Are Arabic and Dari hard to learn?” “Yeah. Where I grew up in Philly, there were a lot of Hispanic kids, so Spanish was like a second language. But coming to languages as an adult about kicked my ass. Cultural training is a big part of Special Forces training, though. We’re not out there just trying to win battles, but hearts and minds, too. . .” He frowned. “Or, we were, anyway.

I love you,” Val began, wondering where in the nine circles of hell that had come from. He sat forward, elbows on his knees, and scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’m sorry; that came out… wrong. Still…” He glanced at her over his shoulder. “It’s the truth.” Ellen’s fingers settled on his nape, massaging in the small, soothing circles Val had come to expect when her hands were on him. “If you love me,” she said after a long, fraught silence, “you’ll tell me the truth.” Val tried to see that response as positive—she hadn’t stomped off, railed at him, or tossed his words back in his face. Yet. But neither had she reciprocated. “My name is Valentine Windham,” he said slowly, “but you’ve asked about my family, and in that regard—and that regard only—I have not been entirely forthcoming.” “Come forth now,” she commanded softly, her hand going still. “My father is the Duke of Moreland. That’s all. I’m a commoner, my title only a courtesy, and I’m not even technically the spare anymore, a situation that should improve further, because my brother Gayle is deeply enamored of his wife.” “Improve?” Ellen’s voice was soft, preoccupied. “I don’t want the title, Ellen.” Val sat up, needing to see her eyes. “I don’t ever want it, not for me, not for my son or grandson. I make pianos, and it’s a good income. I can provide well for you, if you’ll let me.” “As your mistress?” “Bloody, blazing… no!” Val rose and paced across the porch, turning to face her when he could go no farther. “As my wife, as my beloved, dearest wife.” A few heartbeats of silence went by, and with each one, Val felt the ringing of a death knell over his hopes. “I would be your mistress. I care for you, too, but I cannot be your wife.” Val frowned at that. It wasn’t what he’d been expecting. A conditional rejection, that’s what it was. She’d give him time, he supposed, to get over his feelings and move along with his life. “Why not marry me?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest. She crossed her arms too. “What else haven’t you told me?” “Fair enough.” Val came back to sit beside her and searched his mind. “I play the piano. I don’t just mess about with it for polite entertainment. Playing the piano used to be who I was.” “You were a musician?” Val snorted. “I was a coward, but yes, I was a musician, a virtuoso of the keyboard. Then my hand”—he held up his perfectly unremarkable left hand—“rebelled against all the wear and tear, or came a cropper somehow. I could not play anymore, not without either damaging it beyond all repair or risking a laudanum addiction, maybe both.” “So you came out here?” Ellen guessed. “You took on the monumental task of setting to rights what I had put wrong on this estate and thought that would be… what?” “A way to feel useful or maybe just a way to get tired enough each day that I didn’t miss the music so much, and then…” “Then?” She took his hand in hers, but Val wasn’t reassured. His mistress, indeed. “Then I became enamored of my neighbor. She beguiled me—she’s lovely and dear and patient. She’s a virtuoso of the flower garden. She cared about my hand and about me without once hearing me play the piano, and this intrigued me.” “You intrigued me,” Ellen admitted, pressing the back of his hand to her cheek. “You still do.” “My Ellen loves to make beauty, as do I.” Val turned and used his free hand to trace the line of Ellen’s jaw. “She is as independent as I am and values her privacy, as I do.” “You are merely lonely, Val.

You,” Elena says, pointing directly at me. “Come with me. Alex, I want you and your brothers to sing.” Alex shakes his head. “Elena, I don’t think--” Elena holds up a hand in front of Alex, silencing even him. “I didn’t ask you to think. I asked you to join your brothers in singin’ to me and my new husband.” Elena opens the door and yanks me through the house, stopping only when we reach the backyard. She lets me go only to grab the microphone from the lead singer. “Paco!” she announces loudly. “Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you,” Elena says, pointing to Paco talking to a bunch of girls. “Next time you want to take a dump, do it in someone else’s house.” Paco’s entourage of girls backs up and giggles, leaving him alone. Jorge rushes to the stage and attempts to pick up his wife. The poor man struggles while everyone laughs and claps. When Elena is finally off the stage and Alex talks to the band leader, the guests cheer for Alex and his brothers to sing. Paco sits next to me. “Uh, sorry about the bathroom thing. I tried to warn you,” he says sheepishly. “It’s okay. I think Elena embarrassed you enough.” I lean over to Paco and ask, “Seriously, what do you think of Alex and me together?” “Seriously, you’re pro’bly the best thing that’s ever happened to the guy.