Sheets Escape Quotes

You saw a ghost, didn't you?" he said. To my relief, I managed to laugh. "Hate to break it to you, but there's no such thing as ghosts." Huh." His gaze traveled around the laundry room, like a cop searching for an escaped convict. When he turned that piercing look on me, its intensity sucked the backbone out of me. What do you see, Chloe?" I -I-I don't s-s-s-" Slow down." He snapped the words, impatient. "What do they look like? Do they talk to you?" You really want to know?" Yeah." I chewed my lip, then lifted onto my tiptoes. He bent to listen. They wear white sheets with big eye holes. And they say 'Boo!'" I glowered up at him. "Now get out of my way." I expected him tosneer. Cross his arms and say, Make me, little girl.His lips twitched and I steeled myself, then I realized he was smiling.Laughing at me. He stepped aside. I swept past him to the stairs.

It was nice to be alone, not to have to smile and look pleased; a relief to stare dejectedly out the window at the sheeting rain and let just a few tears escape.

I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.

To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research. Those sheets eventually gave rise to the white hooded cloaks of the Ku Klux Klan.

My firm resolve was to escape my wicked cousin and my English captors. But the wind was howling, and rain was coming down in sheets. And even as I relaxed in a hot bath in my snug apartments, the clamor of the storm outside was counseling me to be patient and wait. A wise woman never does anything in a hurry.

Some of the stories were conjured by white plantation owners taking advantage of the long-held African belief that ghosts caused disease and death. To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research. Those sheets eventually gave rise to the white hooded cloaks of the Ku Klux Klan.

Perhaps, some day, humanity can start afresh, a new world, a tabula rasa, a world with a mind without prior experiences. No memories and no pain. A day when the ones with abundance do not look down at the poor and the needy, a day when we learn to care for the victims, the fallen souls of civilization and advancement, a day when the world will be pure. When all of humanity becomes a clean sheet of parchment, without knowledge and prejudice, simple, hungry for knowing, tasting, and feeling; hungry for life and ready to absorb the ink of experience.

Water everywhere, falling in thundering cataracts, singular drops, and draping sheets. Kellhus paused next to one of the shining braziers, peered beneath the bronze visage that loomed orange and scowling over his father, watched him lean back into absolute shadow. “You came to the world,” unseen lips said, “and you saw that Men were like children.” Lines of radiance danced across the intervening waters. “It is their nature to believe as their fathers believed,” the darkness continued. “To desire as they desired … Men are like wax poured into moulds: their souls are cast by their circumstances. Why are no Fanim children born to Inrithi parents? Why are no Inrithi children born to Fanim parents? Because these truths are made, cast by the particularities of circumstance. Rear an infant among Fanim and he will become Fanim. Rear him among Inrithi and he will become Inrithi … “Split him in two, and he would murder himself.” Without warning, the face re-emerged, water-garbled, white save the black sockets beneath his brow. The action seemed random, as though his father merely changed posture to relieve some vagrant ache, but it was not. Everything, Kellhus knew, had been premeditated. For all the changes wrought by thirty years in the Wilderness, his father remained Dûnyain … Which meant that Kellhus stood on conditioned ground. “But as obvious as this is,” the blurred face continued, “it escapes them. Because they cannot see what comes before them, they assume nothing comes before them. Nothing. They are numb to the hammers of circumstance, blind to their conditioning. What is branded into them, they think freely chosen. So they thoughtlessly cleave to their intuitions, and curse those who dare question. They make ignorance their foundation. They confuse their narrow conditioning for absolute truth.” He raised a cloth, pressed it into the pits of his eyes. When he withdrew it, two rose-coloured stains marked the pale fabric. The face slipped back into the impenetrable black. “And yet part of them fears. For even unbelievers share the depth of their conviction. Everywhere, all about them, they see examples of their own self-deception … ‘Me!’ everyone cries. ‘I am chosen!’ How could they not fear when they so resemble children stamping their feet in the dust? So they encircle themselves with yea-sayers, and look to the horizon for confirmation, for some higher sign that they are as central to the world as they are to themselves.” He waved his hand out, brought his palm to his bare breast. “And they pay with the coin of their devotion.

After You Left the weight of your absence became a black hole revolving around my memory of you--itself a black hole. Wavelets wrinkled the sheer sheet of space and time. Father, the loss of you is a planet orbiting what might have been. I cannot say if the emptiness is a grand celestial body or a vacuum so complete nothing can escape. I know these forces have mass and motion that bends, calls in, ripples fabric-- distorts the pace of light for a billion years.

The Lackses aren’t the only ones who heard from a young age that Hopkins and other hospitals abducted black people. Since at least the 1800s, black oral history has been filled with tales of “night doctors” who kidnapped black people for research. And there were disturbing truths behind those stories. Some of the stories were conjured by white plantation owners taking advantage of the long-held African belief that ghosts caused disease and death. To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research. Those sheets eventually gave rise to the white hooded cloaks of the Ku Klux Klan.

She slid her free hand over his shoulder, soft breasts crushing against his chest. All his blood rushed down to his groin, taking with it the last vestiges of his rational thought. He locked his arms around her, pulling her so close he could feel each gentle breath as an exquisite stroke on his cock. Raw desire coursed through his veins as his hands skimmed over the sweet softness of her curves. "Someone is watching us through the window," she murmured, her breath warm on his cheek. "All the more reason to put on a good show." With one hand on her nape, he tipped back her head and covered her mouth with his own. A moan escaped her lips, filling his head with thoughts of tangled sheets, banging headboards, sweat-slicked skin, and the realization of a fantasy that had consumed him night after sleepless night since she'd turned sixteen and he'd realized she wasn't a little girl anymore. He parted her lips with the gentle slide of his tongue, touching, tasting, savoring, pausing between heady sips to let her essence dance over his taste buds. With every breath he inhaled the fresh scent of wildflowers in a rain-soaked meadow, the grassy lawn where they'd played catch in the summer sun. He'd known she was smart and fun and beautiful. But this kiss. These feelings. The throbbing heat of desire. It was all completely new.

Fear is not shaking, knowing that you are going to be harmed. Fear is not sweating profusely because you can’t do anything else. Fear is not hiding under your bed or under your sheets or in your closet because you know the monsters are trying to find you. Fear is not having nightmares about these monsters because you know you cannot escape them. Fear is not anything I have experienced in my sixteen years of life. Fear is the feeling that a block of ice has been dropped into your stomach and it’s slowly melting sending poison coursing through your veins, rooting you to where you stand. Fear is knowing that there is nothing you can do about your current situation. You can’t run or hide or escape even in your dreams. Fear is not the knowledge that you’re going to be hurt, but the knowledge that you can do nothing to stop what is coming. Fear is learning that the person you love most has been dying for you over and over again because they value your life over their own.

Luz leaned her head against the window. The bus was already on the outskirts of Mexico City and the endless urban landscape had never seemed so gray and or so harsh. Most of the city was nothing like the old money enclave of Lomas Virreyes where the Vegas lived or Polanco where the city’s most expensive restaurants and clubs catered to the wealthy. The bus passed block after block of sooty concrete cut into houses and shops and shanties and parking garages and mercados and schools and more shanties where people lived surrounded by hulks of old cars and plastic things no one bothered to throw away. Sometimes there wasn’t concrete for homes, just sheets of corrugated metal and big pieces of cardboard that would last until the next rainy season. It was the detritus of millions upon millions of people who had nowhere to go and nothing to do and were angry about it. The Reforma newspaper had reported a few weeks ago that the city’s population was in excess of 28 million--more than 25 percent of the country’s entire population--and Luz believed it. All of those people were clawing at each other in a huge fishbowl suspended 7500 feet above sea level, where there was never enough oxygen and the air was thin and dirty. The city was hemmed in by mountains on all sides; mountains like Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl that sometimes spewed smoke and ash and prevented the contaminatión from cars and factories and sewers from escaping. Luz privately thought of it as la sopa--a white soup that often blotted out the stars and prevented the night sky from getting dark. The bus slowed in traffic. As they crept along Luz saw a car stopped on the side of the road, pulled over by a transito traffic cop. As Luz watched, the driver handed the cop a peso bill from his wallet. The transito accepted it but kept talking, gesturing at the car. The motorist handed him another bill. La mordida--the bite--of the traffic cop, right under her nose. Los Hierros was crap.

What a great temptation she felt to escape from the cruelty of the empty nights, the darkness, the loneliness, the cold bed, the sheets that gradually lost the aroma of the beloved body that had been wrapped in them for so many years. But time does not stop. Despite the painful absence beside her, the sun came up and set each day, though as a veteran of loss, this fact no longer surprised her so much. The empty hours of the night do not pass unnoticed, because in their unrelenting cruelty, they do not allow one to rest; they force one to think, and they demand a great deal. Because it is at night that fear is most frightening, yes, but it is also when sorrow becomes deeper and one regrets what one did or did not do more.

No one, not a soul, intimidating stillness. Uncannily, though, in the midst of all this, a fire is blazing, lit, in fact,with petrol. It's flickering, a ghostly fire, wind. On the orange-coloured plain below I can see sheets of rain, and the annunciation of the end of the world is glowing on the horizon, glimmering there. A train races through the land and penetrates the mountain range. Its wheels are glowing. One car erupts in flames. The train stops, men try to extinguish it, but the car can no longer be extinguished. They decide to move on, to hasten, to race. The train moves, it moves into fathomless space, unwavering. In the pitch-blackness of the universe the wheels are glowing, the lone car is glowing, Unimaginable stellar catastrophes take place, entire worlds collapse into a single point. Light can no longer escape, even the profoundest blackness would seem like light and the silence would seem like thunder. The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity. This is the situation.

eating only when one was hungry, loving without lies, sleeping without having to feign sleep in order to escape the indecency of official love, possessed at last of the right to an entire bed to themselves, where no one fought them for half of the sheet, half of the air they breathed, half of their night, until their bodies were satisfied with dreaming their own dreams, and they woke alone.

Matthews asked: “How intimate was your relationship with Dr. Miller?” “Intimate?” Phil still couldn’t grasp what they were asking. “My colleague is asking if you’d ever had sex with Dr. Miller before that evening.” Jones added curtly. “I’ve never…We’ve never…We’re friends. We’d never had sex before that evening, and we didn’t have sex that evening either.” “How do you explain your semen in her sheets then, Mr. Marshall?

They owe this lavish abundance to the deep, loamy soils of their sheltered valleys, known locally as coves; to their warm, moist climate (which produces the natural bluish haze from which they get their name); and above all to the happy accident of the Appalachians’ north—south orientation. During the last ice age, as glaciers and ice sheets spread down from the Arctic, northern flora all over the world naturally tried to escape southwards.

He walked steadily, feeling them behind him. His stride did not falter; he pretended they weren’t there. He pretended that all was well—that those hideous things knew nothing about what he had done earlier in the night. But each pumpkin he passed nearly leapt off its porch or railing or wooden chair, expanded and morphed and throbbed as if in a funhouse mirror, and joined the procession behind him. The wind picked up, suddenly and fiercely, and construction paper decorations adorning the houses that surrounded him flapped helplessly against their doors and windows. The man ducked against the cold wind, and from the pursuing army of the jack-o’-lanterns behind him. Cardboard skeletons with fastener joints and witches with shredded yarn hair and ghosts with cotton ball sheets and black crayon eyes escaped their thumbtacks and scotch tape and newspaper twine and they flashed and danced in his face. He brushed at them desperately with his hands, attempting to tear a hole through them and escape.

I must have roamed dementedly about for a time in the streets. When I at last got back to my own place, Faustine was again there ahead of me, coiled torpid in the bed like a loathsome boa-constrictor. She was already in the never-never land where ghouls like her belonged. I covered her face with one of the pillows, pressed down upon it with the weight of my whole body, held it there until she should have been dead ten times over. Yet when I removed the pillow to look, the black of strangulation was missing from her face. She was still in that state of suspended animation that defied me, a taunting smile visible about her lips. I had a gun in my valise, from years before when I'd been on an engineering job in the jungles of Ecuador. I got it out, looked it over. It was still in good working order, although it only had one bullet left in it. That one would be enough. She wasn't going to escape me! I pressed the muzzle to her smooth white forehead, mid-center. "Die, damn you!" I growled, and pulled the trigger back. It exploded with a crash. A film of smoke hid her face from me for a minute. When it had cleared again, I looked. There was no bullet-hole in her skull! A black powder-smudge marked the point of contact. The gun dropped to the floor with a thud. That ineradicable smile still glimmered up at me, as if to say: "You see? You can't." I rubbed my finger over the black; the skin was unbroken underneath. A blank cartridge, that must have been it. I raised her head; there was a rent in the sheet under it. I probed through it with two fingers. I could feel the bullet lying imbedded down in the stuffing of the mattress. ("Vampire's Honeymoon)

But since these rolls of bread and wine bottles are needed by me, and your faces with their hollows and prominences are beautiful, and the table-cloth and its yellow stain, far from being allowed to spread in wider and wider circles of understanding that may at last (so I dream, falling off the edge of the earth at night when my bed floats suspended) embrace the entire world, I must go through the antics of the individual. I must start when you pluck at me with your children, your poems, your chilblains or whatever it is that you do and suffer. But I am not deluded. After all these callings hither and thither, these pluckings and searchings, I shall fall alone through this thin sheet into gulfs of fire. And you will not help me. More cruel than the old torturers, you will let me fall, and will tear me to pieces when I am fallen. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

The Abominable Snowman has arrived,” he said to Milo. “If I’m not as clean as most abominable snowmen are, it is because I was kidnapped as a child from the slopes of Mount Everest, and taken as a slave to a bordello in Rio de Janeiro, where I have been cleaning the unspeakably filthy toilets for the past fifty years. A visitor to our whipping room there screamed in a transport of agony and ecstasy that there was to be an arts festival in Midland City. I escaped down a rope of sheets taken from a reeking hamper. I have come to Midland City to have myself acknowledged, before I die, as the great artist I believe myself to be.

I too, weary of pleading an incomprehensible cause, at six and eight the thousand flowers of rhetoric, let myself drop among the contumacious, nice image that, telescoping space, it must be the Pulitzer Prize, they want to bore me to sleep, at long range, for fear I might defend myself, they want to catch me alive, so as to be able to kill me, thus I shall have lived, they think I’m alive, what a business, were there but a cadaver it would smack of body-snatching, not in a womb either, the slut has yet to menstruate capable of whelping me, that should singularly narrow the field of research, a sperm dying, of cold, in the sheets, feebly wagging its little tail, perhaps I’m a drying sperm, in the sheets of an innocent boy, even that takes time, no stone must be left unturned, one mustn’t be afraid of making a howler, how can one know it is one before it’s made, and one it most certainly is, now that it’s irrevocable, for the good reason, here’s another, here comes another, unless it escapes them in time, what a hope, the bright boy is there, for the excellent reason that counts as living too, counts as murder, it’s notorious, ah you can’t deny it, some people are lucky, born of a wet dream and dead before morning, I must say I’m tempted, no, the testis has yet to descend that would want any truck with me, it’s mutual, another gleam down the drain.

She sinks into the armchair by the window. It's soft, deep, and striped in her favorite colors: dusty pink and green. Nearly a year and a half after Francois died, Amandine insisted on redesigning the bedroom and, although Heloise protested at the time, she's grateful for it now. The room is a fairy tale, an escape from reality, a reminder of the romance of the past instead of the grief of the present. The bed is wrought-iron with white sheets and a canopy of cream gauze. The desks, bookshelves, and matching wardrobe are all original Victorian antiques painted white. With the touch of a sparkling crystal chandelier, Amandine created a room that gives Heloise a tiny smile of pleasure every time she wakes.

Chickens are true creatures of zen - they live only and absolutely for the moment. Their actions one particular second will not necessarily have any influence or bearing on their actions in the next second, nor are they necessarily influenced by their actions of the prior second. Chicken thoughts arrive in their tiny mad little minds like flashes of a strobe light, each light being an action, each flashing with the brilliance of a not very brilliant thing. Each action utterly random. The complete randomness of chaos. Chickens are notorious escape artists, not due to their ability to devise cunning plans as they huddle together in their coop beneath a bare light bulb, scratching out complex diagrams in the dirt, but simply out of sheet unpredictability. They are the pachinko balls of the animal kingdom, effecting their escapes through the simple device of, say, turning left for no particular reason.

A writer toils to combat the insufficiency plaguing his or her life. Every writer seeks to ward off the corrosive obliteration wrought by the passage of time upon memory by capturing on paper his or her present day thoughts on life. For these intrepid souls, writing not only entails a lifetime of work it also represents their very lifeblood spilled out onto sheets of virgin white paper. Writers’ inkblot of words forms a pictograph for present and future generations to view; their thoughtful elucidations speak to us from the grave. Writers’ words transcend time by creating indelible images that survive wars, famines, epidemics, and censorship. Thanks to great writers, every man, woman, or child can escape the confines of their own cloistered environment and converse with other people of every occupation and lifestyle whose communal heartbeats form the bloodstream of every city. Thanks to literary figures, each reader can peer into the depths of past generations whose eclectic filament forms the ever-evolving equitable eye in humankinds’ collective consciousness, or colloquially what we refer to as humanity.

A woman pushed her way through the swarm of people. “She’s the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas, and known to be a fornicator.” I called out again in protest, but my denial was swallowed by the black odium that boiled out of their hearts. “Show us your pocket!” a man yelled. One by one, they took up the petition. Gripping my forearm, Chuza let their shouts grow fevered before he reached for my sleeve. I writhed and kicked. I was a fluttering moth, a hapless girl. My skirmish yielded nothing but jeers and laughter. He snatched the sheet of ivory from my coat and lifted it over his head. A roar erupted. “She is a thief, a blasphemer, and a fornicator!” Chuza cried. “What would you do with her?” “Stone her!” someone cried. The chant began, the dark prayer. Stone her. Stone her. I shut my eyes against the dazzling blur of anger. Their hearts are boulders and their heads are straw. They seemed to be not a multitude of persons, but a single creature, a behemoth feeding off their combined fury. They would stone me for all the wrongs ever done to them. They would stone me for God. Most often victims were dragged to a cliff outside the city and thrown off before being pelted, which lessened the laborious effort of having to throw so many stones—it was in some way more merciful, at least quicker—but I saw I would not be accorded that lenience. Men and women and children plucked stones from the ground. These stones, God’s most bountiful gift to Galilee. Some rushed into the building site, where the stones were larger and more deadly. I heard the sizzle of a rock fly over my head and fall behind me. Then the commotion and noise slowed, elongating, receding to some distant pinnacle, and in that strange slackening of time, I no longer cared to fight. I felt myself bending to my fate. I ached for the life I would never live, but I yearned even more to escape it. I sank onto the ground, making myself as small as I could, my arms and legs tucked beneath my chest and belly, my forehead pressed to the ground. I fashioned myself into a walnut shell. I would be broken apart and God could have the meat. A stone struck my hip in a sunburst of pain. Another fell beside my ear. I heard the stomp of sandals running toward me, then a voice glittering with indignation. “Cease your violence! Would you stone her on the word of this man?” The mob quieted, and I dared to raise my head. Jesus stood before them, his back to me. I stared at the bones in his shoulders. The way his hands were drawn into fists. How he’d planted himself between me and the stones.

The use of ghosts as a means of social control predated the Klan. Slave owners employed so-called patterollers, usually poor whites, who would patrol the countryside at night; such patrols would regularlyuse spook stories, among other tactics, to help keep enslaved people from escaping. "The fraudulent ghost," [Gladys-Marie] Fry writes, "was the first in a gradually developed system of night-riding creatures, the fear of which was fostered by white for the purpose of slave control." A man in a white sheet on horseback riding ominously through a forest could help substantiate rumers that the forest was haunted and that those who valued their lives best avoid it. By spreading ghost stories, Southern whites hoped to limit the unauthorized movement of black people. If cemeteries, crossroads, and forests came to be known particularly as haunted, it's because they presented the easiest means of escape and had to be patrolled. Now it's common to think of such places as the provenance of spirits. We have stories for such places: a tragic death, forlorn lovers, a devil waiting to make a deal -- stories that reflect a rich tradition of American folklore. But all this might have come much later, and these places might have first earned their haunted reputation through much more deviant methods. In the ghost-haunting legacies of many of these public spaces lies a hidden history of patrolling and limiting access.

The count, fearing to yield to the entreaties of her he had so ardently loved, called his sufferings to the assistance of his hatred. “Revenge yourself, then, Edmond,” cried the poor mother; “but let your vengeance fall on the culprits,—on him, on me, but not on my son!” “It is written in the good book,” said Monte Cristo, “that the sins of the fathers shall fall upon their children to the third and fourth generation. Since God himself dictated those words to his prophet, why should I seek to make myself better than God?” “Edmond,” continued Mercedes, with her arms extended towards the count, “since I first knew you, I have adored your name, have respected your memory. Edmond, my friend, do not compel me to tarnish that noble and pure image reflected incessantly on the mirror of my heart. Edmond, if you knew all the prayers I have addressed to God for you while I thought you were living and since I have thought you must be dead! Yes, dead, alas! I imagined your dead body buried at the foot of some gloomy tower, or cast to the bottom of a pit by hateful jailers, and I wept! What could I do for you, Edmond, besides pray and weep? Listen; for ten years I dreamed each night the same dream. I had been told that you had endeavored to escape; that you had taken the place of another prisoner; that you had slipped into the winding sheet of a dead body; that you had been thrown alive from the top of the Chateau d’If, and that the cry you uttered as you dashed upon the rocks first revealed to your jailers that they were your murderers. Well, Edmond, I swear to you, by the head of that son for whom I entreat your pity,—Edmond, for ten years I saw every night every detail of that frightful tragedy, and for ten years I heard every night the cry which awoke me, shuddering and cold. And I, too, Edmond—oh! believe me—guilty as I was—oh, yes, I, too, have suffered much!

When Evie awakened alone in the large bed, the first thing she beheld was a scattering of pale pink splashes over the snowy white linens, as if someone had spilled blush-colored wine in bed. Blinking sleepily, she propped herself up on one elbow and touched one of the pink dabs with a single fingertip. It was a creamy pink rose petal, pulled free of a blossom and gently dropped to the sheet. Gazing around her, she discovered that rose petals had been sprinkled over her in a light rain. A smile curved her lips, and she lay back into the fragrant bed. The night of heady sensuality seemed to have been part of some prolonged erotic dream. She could hardly believe the things she had allowed Sebastian to do, the intimacies that she had never imagined were possible. And in the drowsy aftermath of their passion, he had cradled her against his chest and they had talked for what seemed to be hours. She had even told him the story of the night when she and Annabelle and the Bowman sisters had become friends, sitting in a row of chairs at a ball. "We made up a list of potential suitors and wrote it on our empty dance cards," Evie had told him. "Lord Westcliff was at the top of the list, of course. But you were at the bottom, because you were obviously not the marrying kind." Sebastian had laughed huskily, tangling his bare legs intimately with hers. "I was waiting for you to ask me." "You never spared me a glance," Evie had replied wryly. "You weren't the sort of man to dance with wallflowers." Sebastian had smoothed her hair, and was silent for a moment. "No, I wasn't," he had admitted. "I was a fool not to have noticed you. If I had bothered to spend just five minutes in your company, you'd never have escaped me." He had proceeded to seduce her as if she were still a virginal wallflower, coaxing her to let him make love to her by slow degrees, until he was finally sheathed in her trembling body.

...literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind ; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null , negligible and nonexistent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always about the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how it has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher's turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which it wages by itself, with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism. More practically speaking, the public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in it—wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks, investing certain faces with divinity, setting us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair, and wreathing the faces of the absent (plain enough in health, Heaven knows) with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor liberty in health.

literature does itsnbest to maintain that its concern is with the mind ; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null , negligible and nonexistent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always about the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how it has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher's turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which it wages by itself, with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism. More practically speaking, the public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in it—wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks, investing certain faces with divinity, setting us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair, and wreathing the faces of the absent (plain enough in health, Heaven knows) with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor liberty in health.

Orion threw a grin back at me as headed to the bar, ducking behind it. “What would madam like?” he asked in a formal tone which was a damn good impression of the Acruxes' butler. I giggled hurrying over to take a stool in front of the bar and placing my clutch down, relishing the cool breeze against my burning neck. “Hmm...a Manhattan?” I teased and he cocked his head. “I'm afraid we're fresh out of bullshit, how about a white wine spritzer with a tiny umbrella in it?” I laughed, nodding eagerly as he made up my drink then poured himself a measure of bourbon. He held it out for me and I leaned across the bar to take it. As I took hold of the glass, he didn't let go and I gazed up at him under my lashes questioning why. “Have I told you have exceptionally beautiful you look tonight, Darcy?” Darcy. He'd said my name. For the first time ever. And why did it sound like so much more than a name when he spoke it? It was like he'd fired an arrow and it had punctured a flesh wound in me at the exact same moment. Hell. I needed to get over this guy. Why was I so caught up on him? Unavailable, that's what it was. We always want what we can't have and Professor Orion was off limits. Simple as that. And those muscles. And the beard. And the dark eyes. And the dimple. But that was it. “That's the first I've heard of it, Professor,” I whispered, unable to make my voice rise any louder. “Don't do that,” he grunted, releasing the drink. I eyed him curiously as he walked around the bar with his bourbon in hand. He took the stool beside mine, his arm butting up against me. “Do what?” I asked, swivelling around to face the pool and taking a sip of my spritzer. It fizzed on my tongue and sent a deep kick of heat through my chest. “You know what.” “You're very presumptuous, Orion. You think I'm far more aware of your chaotic way of thinking than I really am.” I sipped my drink again, spying on him from the corner of my eye. He took a swig of his own drink and the familiar waft of bourbon drifted over me, tingling my senses. It was becoming a trigger, like the moment I walked into his office and he uncorked a bottle, it made me want to taste it on his mouth. And then that led to me wondering whether his fangs would brush my tongue when we kissed, and that always led to me mentally undressing him, then me conjuring an image of what those muscles looked like beneath that shirt... “I have something for you,” he said and I turned, blinking out of my dark fantasy. “You do?” He nodded, reaching into his inside pocket and taking out my coil of blue hair. My heart combusted and a choked noise escaped me. I reached for it and he slid it onto my wrist. He kept my hand in his, his eyes downcast as they remained on the band of hair. “I want you to know, I believe you would have gotten this back yourself when you were ready. But I took a lot of pleasure in retrieving it for you all the same.” I stared at him in complete shock, unsure what to say, my tongue tied in knots. “But Fae don't fight battles for other Fae,” I blurted, completely astonished that his actions that day had been to take this back from Seth. For me. And nothing else. He finished his drink and planted the glass on the bar, rising to his feet. He didn't reply to what I'd said and I barely even remembered what it was as he started pulling his clothes off. “Err, what are you doing?” I half laughed as he shed his jacket and kicked off his shoes, pulling off his socks. Oh my god. “I hate parties, but I like swimming.” He started undoing the buttons of his shirt and thought his back was to me, I was still captivated as he dropped it to the floor like a silken sheet. My eyes scraped down his skin to where his muscles etched an upside down v into his lower back, disappearing beneath his waistband. His shoulders were tanned and heavenly broad, making me long to explore all of those muscles with my hands.(Darcy)

I noticed some scratch marks and faded blood stains high up on a wall. “What happened there?” “An inmate must have tried to escape. I saw a guy use two suction devices like the ones used to carry glass sheets to help lever himself up. He reached half way before being spotted by a blue shirt.” “What happened to him?” “The blue shirt called a guard. He was ordered to come down, but didn’t. They shot him in the leg, he fell and later in the cell, he removed a blade from a disposable razor, slashed his left wrist then wrote a suicide note on the wall with his right hand – in his own blood. Suicide is really common in here and nobody bats an eyelid.

A friend and I came up with a game called Raconteur. You pair up with another Raconteur at a party and talk to everyone you can. You score points by getting people to disclose something about their lives. If you dominate the conversation, you lose a point. The two raconteurs communicate using hand signals and keep a tally on a sheet of paper or in their minds. You’d think people would notice but they are so amused by the attention that the fact you’re playing Raconteur escapes their attention.

Britt: "Derek, aren't you gonna get into bed?" Derek: *Scoffs.* "No. It'd be harder for me to escape Norman Bates if I'm caught up in the sheets.

How to become the President of Liberia from “Liberia & Beyond” In 1973, Charles Taylor enrolled as a student at Bentley University, in Waltham, Massachusetts. A year later Taylor became chairman of the Union of Liberian Associations in America, which he founded on July 4, 1974. The mission of ULAA was meant to advance the just causes of Liberians and Liberia at home and abroad. In 1977 Taylor graduated from Bentley University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. Returning to Liberia he supported the violent coup, led by Samuel Doe, and became the Director General of the General Services Agency most likely because of his supposed loyalty. His newly acquired elevated position put him in charge of all the purchases made for the Liberian government. Taylor couldn’t resist the urge of stealing from the till, and in May of 1983, he was found out and fired for embezzling nearly a million dollars in State funds. During this time he transferred his ill-gotten money to a private bank account in the United States. On May 21, 1984, seizing the opportunity, Taylor fled to America where he was soon apprehended and charged with embezzlement by United States Federal Marshals in Somerville, Massachusetts. Taylor was held in the Plymouth, County jail until September 15, 1985, when he escaped with two of his cohorts, by sawing through the steel bars covering a window in his cell. He precariously lowered himself down 20 feet of knotted sheets and then deftly escaped into the nearby woodlands. He most likely had accomplices, since his wife Jewel Taylor conveniently met him with a car, which they then drove to Staten Island in New York City.

What do I remember of that night? The night I escaped from North Korea? There are so many things that I don’t remember, that I’ve put out of my mind forever . . . But I’ll tell you what I do recall. It’s drizzling. But soon the drizzle turns to torrential rain. Sheets of rain so heavy, I’m soaked to the skin. I collapse

Plasma escapes containment to displace great gulps of dirt and air. It turns running men and women into gray puffs of instant cinder, then blows them into dust with howling wind. A thick layer of surface sand ripples into moving sheets of gooey glass that flow stickily down flattened dunes, pooling into molten lakes at the bottom. Rolling sheets engulf craters and ruins, encasing scalded bones of dead armor and bits of wrecked trench works. More liquid glass captures screaming fighters inside hardening silicate globes. a man’s or woman’s last moment of life and pain and final scream trapped in clear, golden glass sarcophagi. They’ll cool later, lying atop the desert like huge, ancient insects locked in Triassic amber. They’ll be the most prized of all Amasian death-glass, illegal but kept anyway in secret private collections.

Where Jolson conquered, Bing Crosby convinced and charmed, and like Astaire, Jolson too for that matter, he did not possess the physical gifts of a standard leading man (angles and ears and hair, yet again). Also like Astaire, he made it all seem easy, with the laid-back acting and the unforced way that devastating baritone could pour out and swing out. In one crucial sense he was more beholden to Jolson than Astaire, being primarily a solo performer who sang to people more than he sang with them. Recall: who was Crosby’s only steady partner on film? Bob Hope, in a partnership based in jokey rivalry. Other singers in Crosby films, besides Hope and Dorothy Lamour, seldom counted. Nor did most of Crosby’s films. Paramount, his home studio, was a formula-bound factory for most of the 1930s and ’40s, and the golden goose of the Crosby films did not countenance feather-ruffling. One after another, they were amiable time-passers, relaxed escapism that made a mint and sold tons of records and sheet music. For many then and some now, these vehicles offered unthreatening comfort—few chances taken, little deviation from formula, a likable guy ambling through some minor plot and singing mostly great songs. On occasion there was something as glaring as the ridiculous Dixie: as composer Dan Emmett, Crosby speeds up the title song into an uptempo hit only because the theater’s caught on fire. Generally, his films lacked even that cuckoo invigoration, which is why posterity dotes on Holiday Inn and its splashy, inferior semi-remake, White Christmas, and few of the others. While it would not be accurate to view Crosby as another megalomaniacal Jolson type, he lacked Astaire’s forceful imagination. Greater professional curiosity might have made his films—not simply his singing—transcend time and circumstance.

Since I’m new down here, I’m going to need directions on how to make you squirm. Do you like this?” I taunted, sucking her nub into my mouth. She didn’t say a word, I could barely hear her breathing. “Or…” I sucked her clit, moving my head side-to-side. “Like this.” She loudly moaned that time, which earned her a smile. I didn’t even try to hide it. “Feels good, yeah?” “Yes...” With my index and middle finger, I pushed through her pussy. “Oh, God…” Feeling like the king of the fucking world, I continued my sweet torture with my tongue on her clit. “Lala is slippery when wet.” She ground her hips against what I was doing. “I’m going to taste you now, Mila.” A whimper escaped her lips as I dove my tongue as far as it would go into her core, loving the taste of her. She melted against my tongue, into my touch, coming apart from everything I was doing. Sucking her clit harder and faster, I was relentless in my pursuit to have her come over and over again on my fingers and in my mouth. “Oh, God, right there.” Pushing in and out with a steady rhythm, I worked her over. “Right there?” I mocked, pushing harder against that rigid spot inside of her. Her back arched off the bed again, fisting the sheets. Her impending orgasm completely consuming her. “Stop talking and… right there…” “Here?” “Oh god, yes—there…” “You feel that?” I huskily groaned, appreciating the sight and feel of her getting off.

I took a step away, pulling my sheets over her and intending to take a position in the armchair by the fire for the night but she caught my hand before I could leave. I looked at her in surprise and found her eyes open, her gaze locked on mine. “Don’t go,” she breathed, her grip tightening. “I don’t think you really-” “Please don’t leave me alone,” she begged and the vulnerability in her voice broke down any further protests I’d been going to make. She sat up a little and tugged on my arm, trying to pull me down into the bed with her. And I couldn’t really deny the fact that I’d thought about getting her in my bed more than once before. Not that I’d lay a finger on her in her current state but even seeing her here, surrounded by gold and half undressed was sending zips of turbulent energy right through me. She pulled on my hand again and I gave up trying to talk myself out of it as I kicked my shoes off and got in beside her. She smiled at me and it wasn’t sarcastic or taunting, the difference that made taking my breath away for a moment. I settled back against the pillows and she rolled against me, pressing her nearly naked body flush to mine. I could feel myself getting hard just from that small amount of contact. I tried to prise her away from me but she wriggled closer, pressing her full breasts against me and giving me a clear view of them trying to break free of the confines of her bra. “Fuck, Roxy, I cant sleep next to you while you’re dressed like that,” I said, rolling her away from me more forcefully. She blinked up at me in confusion for a moment before pushing herself upright and looking down at her undressed state. “Oh, sorry,” she mumbled before pulling off the unbuttoned shirt and throwing it to the floor. “Better?” My mouth dried up and a growl escaped me as the Dragon writhed beneath my skin. “You need to be putting more on, not taking things off,” I said tersely. She huffed like I was the one who was being ridiculous. “Give me your shirt then,” she demanded, reaching out to pull at my black t-shirt. “I don’t think it will help if I start taking off my clothes too,” I said, catching her wrist to stop her. “You’re so fucking bossy,” she muttered, a bit of her usual fire rising to the surface. “Just do as you’re told for once.” Before I could respond to that, she shoved my hand aside and moved to straddle me in one quick movement. I was so surprised that for a moment I couldn’t even react as she yanked on my shirt and pulled it over my head. My hands found her waist, my thumbs brushing against her hip bones as she looked down at me with her dark hair tumbling around her shoulders and that sexy as sin underwear begging me to touch it. She laughed as she waved the shirt at me triumphantly, doing a little victory dance which meant she was grinding right against my hard-on and sending my body haywire. Before I could say or do anything, she pulled the shirt over her head and covered herself with it. I was so much bigger than her that it fell right down to pool around her thighs, trapping my hands beneath the material where I still held her. Her gaze locked with mine and for a moment it was like none of the shit that had passed between us had ever happened and we were just us, alone...in my bed. (DariusPOV)

His version of the piece will not be the same as anyone else’s on this Earth, though both orchestras are playing from identical sheet music. For that reason, his knowledge of the score must be total, more even than the composer’s. Is there any more difficult calling?

But keep on the alert at all times, praying in order that you may have strength to escape all these things that are about to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man. Luke 21:36

Henry,” reaching out to shake him awake but my hand lands on top of the sheets. “Henry!” I say, looking around the room. The face cocks his head, the paper around his eyes pinches together. Blood pulsing, the man crawls onto the bed. His head wrapped in paper, words etching it, and nausea swirls in the pit of my stomach. “Not again,” I rasp. Fisting my hands in the sheets, he slinks closer. “No.” Leaning over me, pressing my back to the bed, he breathes in deeply against my neck. The incubus moves his hand down my curves, resting it on my hip. Pressing down, a pain flares in the area and the remembrance of hitting my hip against the counter this morning comes forth. A small groan escapes me. Trailing my hand to my thigh, I dig my nails in till I break skin. Wake up, I think as I squeeze my eyes shut. His breath tickles my collarbone, down to my breasts. Wake up, I scream as blood trickles from my open wounds.

The second letter was sealed plainly, with no crest. I flung myself onto my pillows, broke the seal impatiently, and read: My Dear Countess: You say you would prefer discourse to gifts. I am yours to command. I will confess my hesitancy was due largely to my own confusion. It seems, from my vantage anyway, that you are surrounded by people in whom you could confide and from whom you could obtain excellent advice. Your turning to a faceless stranger for both could be ascribed to a taste for the idiosyncratic if not to mere caprice. I winced and dropped the paper to the table. “Well, I asked for the truth,” I muttered, and picked it up again. But I am willing to serve as foil, if foil you require. Judging from what you reported of your conversation with your lady of high rank, the insights you requested are these: First, with regard to her hint that someone else in power lied about rendering assistance at a crucial moment the year previous, you will not see either contender for power with any clarity until you ascertain which of them is telling the truth. Second, she wishes to attach you to her cause. From my limited understanding of said lady, I suspect she would not so bestir herself unless she believed you to be in, at least potentially, a position of influence. There was no signature, no closing. I read it through three times, then folded it carefully and fitted it inside one of my books. Pulling a fresh sheet of paper before me, I wrote: Dear Unknown: The only foil--actually, fool--here is me, which isn’t any pleasure to write. But I don’t want to talk about my past mistakes, I just want to learn to avoid making the same or like ones in future. Your advice about the event of last year (an escape) I thought of already and have begun my investigation. As for this putative position of power, it’s just that. I expect you’re being confused by my proximity to power--my brother being friend to the possible king and my living here in the Residence. But believe me, no one could possibly be more ignorant or less influential than I. With a sense of relief I folded that letter up, sealed it, and gave it to Mora to send along the usual route. Then I went gratefully to sleep.

hate being alone, but when I wake up in some guy's bed with dry come on the sheets underneath me and he's snoring like a garbage truck, I go, let me out of here. I slip out and crawl around the floor groping for my clothes, trying to untangle his blue jeans from mine, my bra from his Jockeys—Skip wears boxers, of course—and trying to be quiet at the same time, then slide out the door laughing like a seal escaping from the zoo and race home to where Jeannie has been warming the bed all night. Jumping in between the sheets and she wakes up and

That there is no consequence to massacring foreigners, our criminal rulers have long known, but they also know that when Pentagon guns are turned on Americans, a good portion of the world will break out in cheers, just as we've whooped and hollered as our tax-paid munitions splattered their loved ones. When blood darkens our streets, our victims will dance in theirs, no doubt, so why are our transfat asses still parked at this sad cul-de-sac as that day of reckoning looms? When you're broke, though, it's hard to move a mile, much less out of the country, so many of us will simply escape into our private universe, inside our various screens, and ignore, as best we can, an increasingly ugly reality. Moreover, some still believe there is no serious decline, while others that a unified fight is possible. For the most hopeless, there is always suicide. This month, a thirty-year-old Bensalem man and his fifty-nine-year-old mother attempted, it appears, a suicide pact by breathing toxic fumes from a borrowed generator. Only she died, however, so now he's charged with her murder. Neighbors said they had fallen on hard times and "had nothing left". Not that long ago, it was highly unusual to have young adults living with their parents, but not anymore. As this trend continues, many Americans will know exactly one house their whole lives, but at least they'll still have a home. Should you be homeless in greater Philadelphia, there is one place you can have a private bed and bathroom for a few hours, at minimal cost. Keep this information in mind, for you might need it. At Bensalem's Neshaminy Inn, you'll only have to cough up $34, including tax, if you check in after 7 a.m. and leave by 4 p.m. This will give you plenty of time to refresh yourself or even have sex, with or without a (paid) partner, many of whom routinely patrol the hallways. Dozing before dark will also spare you from the worst of the bedbugs, and don't even think of complaining about heroin addicts' bloodstains on the walls, no sheet on your bed or used condoms beneath it. You didn't pay much, OK?

The most significant innovation in Chisholm’s overhaul of the office involves an “early intervention” program, which begins after a defendant is arrested but before arraignment. Each defendant is given an eight-question assessment, which can be conducted in about fifteen minutes and is compared to the information on the rap sheet and in the police report. The questions include: “Two or more prior adult convictions?” “Arrested under age sixteen?” “Currently unemployed?” “Some criminal friends?” A low score can lead to an offer of “diversion”—a kind of unofficial probation that, if successfully completed, leaves the individual without a criminal record. A high score leads to a second, more detailed, fifty-four-question assessment. The questions include: “Ever walked away/escaped from a halfway house?” “Were you ever suspended or expelled from school?” “Does your financial situation contribute to your stress?” “Tell me the best thing about your supervisor/teacher.” Results of the assessment may

With a surge of panic, Simon Cross pushed himself off the bed and away from the cold, sweat-soaked sheets. His heart racing, his breath quick and rough, he forced his eyes to adjust to the dark room as the last vestiges of sleep faded. He glared down at his bed, as if it were to blame, as if the sheets and pillows had knowingly harbored the nightmare. Swearing, Simon escaped the darkened bedroom wanting to get as far away from the nightmares as he could,

In what is one of the most bizarre and ecologically damaging episodes of the Great Leap Forward, the country was mobilised in an all-out war against the birds. Banging on drums, clashing pots or beating gongs, a giant din was raised to keep the sparrows flying till they were so exhausted that they simply dropped from the sky. Eggs were broken and nestlings destroyed; the birds were also shot out of the air. Timing was of the essence, as the entire country was made to march in lockstep in the battle against the enemy, making sure that the sparrows had nowhere to escape. In cities people took to the roofs, while in the countryside farmers dispersed to the hillsides and climbed trees in the forests, all at the same hour to ensure complete victory. Soviet expert Mikhail Klochko witnessed the beginning of the campaign in Beijing. He was awakened in the early morning by the bloodcurdling screams of a woman running to and fro on the roof of a building next to his hotel. A drum started beating, as the woman frantically waved a large sheet tied to a bamboo pole. For three days the entire hotel was mobilised in the campaign to do away with sparrows, from bellboys and maids to the official interpreters. Children came out with slings, shooting at any kind of winged creature.77 Accidents happened as people fell from roofs, poles and ladders. In Nanjing, Li Haodong climbed on the roof of a school building to get at a sparrow’s nest, only to lose his footing and tumble down three floors. Local cadre He Delin, furiously waving a sheet to scare the birds, tripped and fell from a rooftop, breaking his back. Guns were deployed to shoot at birds, also resulting in accidents. In Nanjing some 330 kilos of gunpowder were used in a mere two days, indicating the extent of the campaign. But the real victim was the environment, as guns were taken to any kind of feathered creature. The extent of damage was exacerbated by the indiscriminate use of farm poison: in Nanjing, bait killed wolves, rabbits, snakes, lambs, chicken, ducks, dogs and pigeons, some in large quantities.

The hood had a clear see-through sheet that allowed you to see (like a mask) and allowed the person to breathe and talk on ascent due to the air released from the expanding jacket. To make sure the trainees did not hold their breath (one could not be sure if the bubbles where from the jacket or trainees breathing) they had to sing (normally go ho ho ho) on the way up. Early Santa Clause practice. The Steinke hood replaced the Momsen lung and was later replaced by escape suits, called Submarine Escape Immersion Equipment.

a long line of men, each with a torch, all dressed in the finery of the Highland chieftains. They were barbarous and splendid, decked in grouse feathers, the silver of swords and dirks gleaming red by the torchlight, picked out amid the folds of tartan cloth. The pipes stopped abruptly, and the first of the men strode into the clearing and stopped before the stands. He raised his torch above his head and shouted, “The Camerons are here!” Loud whoops of delight rang out from the stands, and he threw the torch into the kerosene-soaked wood, which went up with a roar, in a pillar of fire ten feet high. Against the blinding sheet of flame, another man stepped out, and called, “The MacDonalds are here!” Screams and yelps from those in the crowd that claimed kinship with clan MacDonald, and then— “The MacLachlans are here!” “The MacGillivrays are here!” She was so entranced by the spectacle that she was only dimly aware of Roger. Then another man stepped out and cried, “The MacKenzies are here!” “Tulach Ard!” bellowed Roger, making her jump. “What was that?” she asked. “That,” he said, grinning, “is the war cry of clan MacKenzie.” “Sounded like it.” “The Campbells are here!” There must have been a lot of Campbells; the response shook the bleachers. As though that was the signal he had been waiting for, Roger stood up and flung his plaid over his shoulder. “I’ll meet you afterward by the dressing rooms, all right?” She nodded, and he bent suddenly and kissed her. “Just in case,” he said. “The Frasers’ cry is Caisteal Dhuni!” She watched him go, climbing down the bleachers like a mountain goat. The smell of woodsmoke filled the night air, mixing with the smaller fragrance of tobacco from cigarettes in the crowd. “The MacKays are here!” “The MacLeods are here!” “The Farquarsons are here!” Her chest felt tight, from the smoke and from emotion. The clans had died at Culloden—or had they? Yes, they had; this was no more than memory, than the calling up of ghosts; none of the people shouting so enthusiastically owed kinship to each other, none of them lived any longer by the claims of laird and land, but … “The Frasers are here!” Sheer panic gripped her, and her hand closed tight on the clasp of her bag. No, she thought. Oh, no. I’m not. Then the moment passed, and she could breathe again, but jolts of adrenaline still thrilled through her blood. “The Grahams are here!” “The Inneses are here!” The Ogilvys, the Lindsays, the Gordons … and then finally, the echoes of the last shout died. Brianna held the bag on her lap, gripped tight, as though to keep its contents from escaping like the jinn from a lamp. How could she? she thought, and then, seeing Roger come into the light, fire on his head and his bodhran in his hand, thought again, How could she help it?

Ironically both of them were on the pavement that night to escape their past and all that had circumscribed their lives so far. And yet, in order to arm themselves for battle, they retreated right back into what they sought to escape, into what they were used to, into what they really were. He, a revolutionary trapped in an accountant’s mind. She, a woman trapped in a man’s body. He, raging at a world in which the balance sheets did not tally. She, raging at her glands, her organs, her skin, the texture of her hair, the width of her shoulders, the timbre of her voice. He, fighting for a way to impose fiscal integrity on a decaying system. She, wanting to pluck the very stars from the sky and grind them into a potion that would give her proper breasts and hips and a long, thick plait of hair that would swing from side to side as she walked, and yes, the thing she longed for most of all, that most well stocked of Delhi’s vast stock of invectives, that insult of all insults, a Maa ki Choot, a mother’s cunt. He, who had spent his days tracking tax dodges, pay-offs and sweetheart deals. She, who had lived for years like a tree in an old graveyard, where, on lazy mornings and late at night, the spirits of the old poets whom she loved, Ghalib, Mir and Zauq, came to recite their verse, drink, argue and gamble. He, who filled in forms and ticked boxes. She, who never knew which box to tick, which queue to stand in, which public toilet to enter (Kings or Queens? Lords or Ladies? Sirs or Hers?). He, who believed he was always right. She, who knew she was all wrong, always wrong. He, reduced by his certainties. She, augmented by her ambiguity. He, who wanted a law. She, who wanted a baby. A circle formed around

Snakes shed their skin, cats their fur, manta rays their teeth. Man sheds used-up objects: he leaves an open Nesquik tin and a dirty glass on the kitchen counter, an open toothpaste tube, unmade beds, their sheets stained with urine; he leaves grandfather clocks, cigarette burns in the ashtrays, comics that have been scrawled on and books borrowed from the school library; he leaves clothes in the wardrobes and food in the fridge.

Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it’s essential. To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or a screen, a map must distort reality. As a scale model, the map must use symbols that almost always are proportionally much bigger or thicker than the features they represent. To avoid hiding critical information in a fog of detail, the map must offer a selective, incomplete view of reality. There’s no escape from the cartographic paradox: to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies.

north—south orientation. During the last ice age, as glaciers and ice sheets spread down from the Arctic, northern flora all over the world naturally tried to escape southwards. In Europe, untold numbers of native species were crushed against the impassable barrier of the Alps and its smaller cousins and fell into extinction. In eastern North America, there was no such impediment to retreat, so trees and other plants found their way through river valleys and along the flanks of mountains until they arrived at a congenial refuge in the Smokies, and there they have remained ever since.

from off the Point Pedro shore I saw a dark line form on the water and travel toward us. It was the steady breeze I had been expecting so long. I called to the Chinese and pointed it out. They hailed it with exclamations. Then I pointed to the sail and to the water in the Reindeer, and indicated by signs that when the wind reached the sail, what of the water aboard we would capsize. But they jeered defiantly, for they knew it was in my power to luff the helm and let go the main-sheet, so as to spill the wind and escape damage. But my mind was made up. I hauled in the main-sheet a foot or two, took a turn with it, and bracing my feet, put my back against the tiller. This left me one hand for the sheet and one for the revolver. The dark line drew nearer, and I could see them looking from me to it and back again with an apprehension they could not successfully conceal. My brain and will and endurance were pitted against theirs, and the problem was which could stand the strain of imminent death the longer and not give in.

Women and men with bodies covered in feathers and heads crowned with tiny curved horns dangled from the ceiling, twirling and spinning around thick sheets of gold or magenta silk that hung like massive party ribbons. Below them, performers in costumes made of fur, more feathers and paint slathered over skin, prowled and crawled as if they were wild chimeras escaped from another world. Tella saw performers dressed to look like tigers with dragon wings, horses with forked tails, snakes with lion manes, and wolves with ram horns, who growled and nipped and sometimes licked at the hells of guests. There were a few low balconies where shirtless men with wings as large as angels' and fallen stars pushed grinning couples back and forth on giant swings hanging from canopies of thorns and flowers.

He grazed a fang across my collarbone and I shivered. The building pressure had me on the edge and teetering. It was absolutely ridiculous that I was so close to orgasm with only a few strokes of his fingers, but Devin managed to pull it out of me as I grabbed the sheets at my side and pressed the side of my face into the bed. The heat slammed into me in waves. It was all I could do to hold on for the ride, letting out a senseless sound of pleasure. He pulled his hand away slowly, kissing my forehead. "More?" "No," I breathed. "You, now, please." I pulled him down and kissed him deeply. He shifted how he was leaning over me, scooting up the bed as he did it. As he pressed himself firmly against my entrance, I was ready to beg for it if I had to. I wanted Devin. Now. He slid himself just inside. A sharp breath, my eyes widened. The nostalgia pinch of being stretched open surprised me. "I'm all right," I breathed. "It's just been a while." He pressed in a little farther. I dug my nails lightly into his back, and he growled in approval. He grazed my neck with his fangs and a soft noise escaped my lips; he licked and kissed my skin on his way back up to my mouth. An ice-cold breeze whipped past us. I held on tighter as Devin thrust deep inside. I screamed as the waves of pleasure hit again, somehow even harder than before. I removed my nails from his back when I realized how deeply I had dug them into his skin, but he didn't seem to notice. Everything felt like jelly. Content, unwound jelly. I rolled on my side, catching my breath as Devin curled me into his body, one hand lazily stroking my stomach. "How do you feel?" "That was intense," I breathed. "Is it always like that with fae?" "Too much?" He nuzzled into my hair.

toothbrush and dental powder; a mattress and cover, two sheets, one pillow case. An instant after

This is not every man. Dao is in another place, another time. The savagery of his ejection may have triggered some deep rooted trauma. In 1975, Saigon had fallen. His home was no longer his home. Dao was forced to flee as a refugee, and he and his wife raised their family of five kids in Kentucky, a new home that – if reports are to be believed about his checkered history – had its own share of absurd hardships. Dao was caught trafficking prescription drugs for sex and lost his medical license, after which he earned his income as a poker player. While I agree with his defenders that his rap sheet is irrelevant to the United Airlines incident, it's relevant to me, since it helps us to see Dao in a more complex, realistic light. Dao is not a criminal nor is he some industrious automaton who could escape the devastation of his homeland and, through a miraculous arc of resilience, become an upstanding doctor whose kids are also doctors. For may immigrants, if you move here with trauma, you're going to do what it takes to get by. You cheat. You beat your wife. You gamble. You're a survivor and, like most survivors, you are a god-awful parent.

the sheet rope

1½ pounds small red potatoes, unpeeled 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme Salt and pepper 1 Arrange potatoes in center of large sheet of aluminum foil and lift sides to form bowl. Pour ¾ cup water over potatoes and crimp foil tightly to seal. Place foil packet in air-fryer basket, place basket in air fryer, and set temperature to 400 degrees. Cook until paring knife inserted into potatoes meets little resistance (poke through foil to test), 25 to 30 minutes. 2 Carefully open foil packet, allowing steam to escape away from you, and let cool slightly. Arrange potatoes in single layer on cutting board; discard foil. Place baking sheet on top of potatoes and press down firmly on baking sheet, flattening potatoes to ½-inch thickness. Transfer smashed potatoes to large bowl; drizzle with oil and sprinkle with thyme, ½ teaspoon salt, and ⅛ teaspoon pepper. Toss until well combined and most potatoes have broken apart into chunks. 3 Return potatoes to air fryer and cook until well browned and crispy (do not stir or shake during cooking), 15 to 20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve.

But he had to hold her, so he tucked the sheet around her neck and then wrapped an arm around her waist. And if the sobs escaped then, if the sheets grew salty and wet, there was no one to see them but the moon.

Experience post-traumatic growth – Incredibly, male Holocaust survivors lived longer than men of the same age who escaped Nazi rule. Despite all odds, these survivors experienced post-traumatic growth which enhanced their later years of life.

It was now clear that I had hung a veil up decades ago - a thick white sheet in the back of my mind to keep certain truths from myself. The dread was a catchall. It was a colorless amalgamation of feeling because I did not have the tools to tease out the wild knot of my real emotions and needs. The dread was a sliver of light escaping from behind the veil.

Have you read about the Law of Attraction before? His believers say, that a person has what looks like broadcasting and receiving channels, and these channels transmit his thoughts to the universe, and his receivers receive the results and interact with him, he is part of it as everything else, affects and is affected, and the master here is the universe, and the reason is the person, they are his thoughts that decide the response of the universe to him, it will give him back what he thinks, and it will seek to implement it for him. If you are looking for an answer to a question that has puzzled you for a long time, all you have to do is think about it, and imagine that you will find the answer in some way, imagine that moment when you know it, and then leave it to the universe, it will come to you with the answer, as long as you broadcast the idea. Based on that, if you think about something that you hate to happen, if you think about it for a long time, it will inevitably happen to you, for the law does not differentiate between good and evil, what you want and what you hate, but rather what you think. In other words, the subconscious mind is fertile, uncultivated land, and the conscious mind or brain is a seed-sowing machine. What you think about is the kind of seeds that you will sow in your subconscious mind, and your harvest will be the result of what you sow, the more you think, you are like the one who waters and plows the land and nurtures it, and in the end, the universe will be the machine of the harvest, it will inevitably make your ideas a reality for you. This law has been strengthened in all religions and customs. In religion, God alerted us to the need to monitor our thoughts well, so he says in the honorable Prophetic hadith, “I am as my servant thinks of me,” meaning that if you think well of God, he will be with you as you think. If think that he will only send you all good, God will send it to you. In all religions you will find many texts saying like this, although this completely contradicts the law of determinism in religion, God has written everything in advance, and your belief in him will not change anything in your destiny, but even your thoughts themselves, including your good thinking of him It is something he already wrote to you. As for our ancestors, they said it from the reality of their inherited experiences, they said things like that the one who is afraid of something, it will happen to him. They summarized them in the form of popular examples, which you will find in various cultures. However, what if the believers in this law understand things from the perspective of the ancient human understanding of the sense of sight, we do not receive determinism, and the universe does not make it and does not respond to us with what we think, and we cannot change it with our thoughts, we have already drawn them in advance, and we have no escape today except for reaping what we sowed. An inevitability we managed at once, in one moment. He was silent for a moment, then added: Or perhaps, we are drawing the inevitable now, Ruslan, what if I did not exist in this world before you had a need for me? And somehow you made me, and gave me a whole life, with its memories, memories that make me feel like I have lived forty whole years, and make you feel this, you arranged them for me, and you created me, to answer all the questions I have always thought of. And while I feel like I am forty, in fact, it is one second, maybe a lot less. What if we had never met in Syria before, if you were not there, and you are still retreating in your hut on the hill, thinking about the empty, the unknown, and what happened next? It is nothing but an arrangement that you did, to transcend the authority of your mind, to get you to know the answers to everything that afflicts you, even if this life is a blank sheet of paper, you are the one who arrange it and draw it, step by step.

That's his perception of reality," Nenad responded. "He has adopted it as his interpretation and cannot break free from it, and probably doesn't even consider doing so. In fact, we too are unable to escape his worldview as it partly is our own. However, when faced with the choice between the cat and the belt, I choose the cat. It's not doomed, it's not poisoned, and it can be easily removed by hand from the engine, even if it comes at a financial cost. I have enough space in my cage for its rescue. I can imagine that within its mind, this engine has become a prison for his hopes of salvation. Overcoming our phobias of losing money in the pursuit of something else, even in small amounts, is healthy. A ground strap costs nothing, and though it may require a bit of time in a repair shop, in this day and age, we are used to wasting our time for far less. The reality of our daily lives is filled with every online distraction, like a sheet riddled with holes from moths that we wrap ourselves in out of habit without even noticing. It’s so comforting. At first, you embrace what everyone else does, what you are told to think. But eventually, you come to the realization that you have the power to dictate your thought patterns and become the architect of your ideology. You can construct a personal propaganda machine that aligns with your values and desires, creating a unique model of the world that is entirely your own. Your mind is still going to be a box in one of the billions of drawers, but it’s going to be YOUR box. Your true home. Manipulate yourself. We should manipulate ourselves towards common sense, compassion, and hope that we’ll get a good batch of people at some point so we can live among more like-minded peers. Now it’s up to our online feed. Now the education in our phone holds the reins, encapsulated in the three-second video of someone's take on history, the five-second clip of fitness models or investment strategies. And if we're fortunate, some famous person would quote Epictetus' Discourses, perhaps echoing the wisdom of Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, Marcus Aurelius, Sartre, etc. This is our chance for us to avoid descending into mere survival instincts without the tempering influence of morality and an understanding of the absurdity that we have created around us. To get addicted to the freedom in our minds. OR to choose the ground strap, choose to sacrifice someone else’s life so we can preserve our resources, because that’s what greed is, on a deep ancient level it’s you hoarding resources the same way a squirrel does with its winter supplies. Choose to be a squirrel rather than a human and live off your acorns. Choose to kill the cat. Choose not to ruin your precious machine. Choose the current model of society and disappear in it like a pelican getting caught in an airplane engine. Perhaps responsibility is the first and maybe even the only synonym for human purpose. Of course, there is value in the small moments we experience, but they lack foundation if they don’t fit into the break from working on something meaningful.

In the restorative idleness of solitude, on the other hand, the widows discovered that the honorable way to live was at the body’s bidding, eating only when one was hungry, loving without lies, sleeping without having to feign sleep in order to escape the indecency of official love, possessed at last of the right to an entire bed to themselves, where no one fought them for half of the sheet, half of the air they breathed, half of their night, until their bodies were satisfied with dreaming their own dreams, and they woke alone.

During the ice age around 425,000 years ago (five ice ages before the most recent glaciation) a vast lake of water became trapped between the Scottish and Scandinavian ice sheets and the 30-kilometre-wide ridge of rock then still linking England and France. This lake was filled with meltwater from the ice sheets as well as the discharge from rivers like the Thames and Rhine. And with no outlet to escape through, the water rose and rose, until inevitably it began to spill over the top of the land bridge. These colossal waterfalls scooped out vast plunge pools on the channel floor and gouged backwards through the barrier until this natural dam collapsed. The entire trapped lake emptied itself as a catastrophic megaflood, widening the gaping breach in the barrier and carving the landforms on the floor of the Channel we can see with sonar today. This first megaflood 425,000 years ago

Now we have complicated the question a little more by our analysis of freedom. The Outsider wants to be free; he doesn’t want to become a healthy-minded, once-born person because he declares such a person is not free. He is an Outsider because he wants to be free. And what characterizes the ‘bondage5 of the once-born? Unreality, the Outsider replies. So we can at least say that, whatever the Outsider wants to become, that new condition of being will be characterized by a perception of reality. And reality ?—what can the Outsider tell us about that? That is more difficult. We have got two distinct sets of answers. Let us try posing the question to various Outsiders, and compare their answers: So, our question: What is Reality? Barbusse: Knowledge of the depths of human nature. Wells: The Cinema sheet; man’s utter nothingness. Roquentin: Naked existence that paralyses and negates the human mind. Meursault: Glory. The Universe’s magnificent indifference. No matter what these stupid and half-real human beings do, the reality is serene and unchanging. This is a fuller answer than the other three; we can follow it up by asking Meursault: And what of the human soul? Meursault: Its ground is the same as that of the universe. Man escapes his triviality by approaching his own fundamental indifference to everyday life. Hemingway too would give us some such answer. Ask him what he means by ‘reality’: Krebs: The moment when you do ‘the one thing, the only thing’, when you know you’re not merely a trivial, superficial counter on the social chessboard. Strowde: Ineffable. Unlivable. The man who has seen it is spoilt for everyday life.

Let us go in and see if I can repair the damage.” “Go carefully, Gregori,” Mikhail cautioned. The silver eyes glittered, reflected the driving sheets of rain. “I am known for my careful ways, am I not?” Gregori glided through the broken door; Mikhail, shaking his head over the outrageous lie, followed one step behind. “I am known for my careful ways, am I not?” Gregori glided through the broken door; Mikhail, shaking his head over the outrageous lie, followed one step behind. Jacques’ head snapped up, a black fury smoldering in his eyes as he tracked them. A long, slow hiss of warning escaped from deep in his throat. Gregori stopped, held his hands away from his sides in the age-old gesture of a peacemaker. Mikhail leaned against the doorjamb, so completely still, he seemed to become part of the wall itself. He was well aware that he had made a major mistake in his attack upon the woman. “I am Gregori, Jacques.” Greogri’s voice was power itself, yet soft and soothing. “A healer for our people.

Alma decided she had to get out of the 'disastrous house' on the Hohe Warte.... Werfel had never found the grandeur of it comfortable and had often escaped elsewhere to write. They decided to rent it out. After packing up 10,000 books and 5,000 sheets of music, their paintings and furniture--'in reality junk for eternity, and baggage during everyday life'--she threw a party... [citing Alma's diary entry for June 15, 1937]

When Jeremy Liew and Lightspeed had invested just a few weeks prior, Liew had included terms giving Lightspeed the right of first refusal to invest in Snapchat’s next round of funding, as well as rights to take 50 percent of the next round. Essentially, Lightspeed controlled Snapchat’s next round of funding and made Snapchat unattractive to other investors, who would want to take a larger stake in the Series A round. Evan was furious. He felt betrayed and taken advantage of. Liew had told him these terms were standard. Evan would warn other students about this betrayal for years to come, as he did in a keynote address at a Stanford Women in Business conference in 2013: One of my biggest mistakes as an entrepreneur involved a term sheet. This particular term sheet was our first. And when we talked to the venture capitalists, and we talked to our lawyers, they took refuge in the notion of Standard. When I asked a question because I didn’t understand something, I was reassured that the term was standard, and therefore agreeable. I forgot that the idea of STANDARD is a construct. It simply does not exist. So rather than attempt to further understand the document, I accepted it. It wasn’t until a bit later, when the company had grown and we needed more capital—that I realized I had made a very expensive mistake. He also warned in a 2015 talk at the University of Southern California, “If you hear the words ‘standard terms,’ then figure out actually what the terms are, because they are probably not standard and the person explaining [them] to you probably doesn’t know how they work.” Teo and General Catalyst put Evan in touch with lawyers who would help him escape the blocking structure with a new round of funding. Evan struck a deal with Jeremy Liew to sell Lightspeed a limited number of Snapchat shares at a discount in exchange for removing the onerous terms. Feeling stung by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Evan then put the deal with General Catalyst on hold and put together a group of angel investors from Los Angeles, including his father, John Spiegel, and the CEO of Sony Entertainment, Michael Lynton.

The first explosion detonated in the road directly in front of our bus. There was a blinding flash of light and then a concussion of air that shattered the windshield and knocked me flat. The bus was thrown sideways like a Matchbox car and slammed into the rock face. Dust and debris ballooned through the gap in the window, coating me, Alexander, and everyone in the first three rows. Someone screamed in terror next to me. I thought it was one of the girls in my class, but when I sat up and wiped the dust from my eyes, I found it was Nate Mackey. He was on the floor in the fetal position, white as a sheet. “We’re going to die!” he screamed. “We’re going to die!” I looked to Woodchuck for help. Unfortunately, he was slumped in his seat, unconscious. Perhaps he’d been clocked in the head by a piece of flying debris. Or maybe he’d simply fainted in fear. Whatever the case, he wasn’t going to be any help. A second explosion went off in the road behind the bus. Out the back window, I saw part of the road crumble and plummet into the gorge, cutting off our escape route.

A descent into an unlit place from which there is no escape, an underwater labyrinth of impossible mazes. No ghosts floating around down there with writing utensils hidden under their white eyehole sheets. I prefer to either drown like a cockroach in the toilet, or swim the English Channel like a hero. I may well be an eleven-fingered oaf slobbering over a typewriter, pounding out a thorny jumble of trash, an uneducated animal who runs on instinct and feeling. But this is my voice. The facts and figures aren’t important to me, the colors and shapes that make up my world are; they are who I am, right or wrong. The limits of my memory are their own reward. Like Rashomon, the same thing looks different to everyone from their angle. The greatest fault of humankind belongs to those who think their view of what’s real is the only truth. I can only write and hope. Hope to arise from the muddy depths of this process, clear and cleansed, laser beams shooting from my eyeballs, holding the sunken treasure aloft, resplendent in silver and gold, an ebullient grin plastered on my face, and sea monsters docile at my feet.

15 million years ago ice sheets began forming over Greenland, and by the beginning of the Quaternary the cooling had passed the threshold for the North Pole’s ice cap to begin expanding. We entered the current phase of pulsing ice ages.23 It seems the Earth has been committed to a concerted effort towards cooling down. What grand-scale planetary processes have been conspiring to drive this global chilling? Gases like carbon dioxide and methane, as well as water vapour, in the atmosphere act like the panes of glass in a greenhouse: they allow the short-wavelength visible sunlight to shine right through and heat the Earth, but block the longer-wavelength infrared light given off by the warm planet surface. The effect of these greenhouse gases is to trap heat energy from escaping back into space, and so insulate the planet, leading to higher temperatures. Any mechanism that reduces the amount of these greenhouse gases in the air will therefore drive a global cooling.

If we don’t find out where we are, we won’t ever escape,” she said, handing him the sheet of paper. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” She jogged off, skirt swishing.