Silhouette Of A Woman Quotes

Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was-a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.

What chilled my blood was a felt marker outline of a woman on the wall. Hands above the head, where there was a hook, then below the shape of the head, a neck strap. Then a waist strap, and two ankle clamps. The silhouette gave me no doubt that Gina had been confined here. But where was she now?

She was a sweet girl but not really pretty, a rough sketch of a woman with a little of everything in her, one of those silhouettes which artists draw in three strokes on the tablecloth in a café after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes turns out creatures like that.

He pointed toward the silhouettes on the side of the [bathrooms] instead--black cutout man, black cutout woman. The man had his legs apart, the woman had hers together. Pretty much the story of the human race in sign language.

I love how grown children will still name their mothers the most beautiful. It is as though, their eyes have met the cascading curves and golden silhouettes of every woman. Yet their souls still drum to the beat  of their mother's warmth and care.

She is a silhouette on the windowsill, an apparition in the alley, a woman there and gone again. She is a pocket full of witch-ways and a voice whispering the right words to the right woman, the clack of a cane against cobbles.

We have come to live among specters, Sara tells herself. They are not people, but silhouettes sketched on a backdrop to deceive us into thinking that the stage is crowded. She searches for an expression, any expression, in their eyes - the eyes of that man on the corner whose raised hand holds a cigarette he is allowing to burn to his fingers; the eyes of that woman who has lifted a dripping jar of water halfway to her head. They will never speak to me, she thinks. I will never know their names.

On my drive from Salt Lake City to Moab, Utah, I passed an eighteen-wheeler with mud flaps on the rear tires. The flaps were black and featured the silver silhouette of a very statuesque naked woman. I’m sure you’ve seen this artistic expression in your travels. I wondered: has this ploy ever worked, like some kind of perverted fishing lure?

How beautiful it was, lying embowered in the twilight of the old trees; the tops of the loftiest sources came out in purple silhouette against the north-western sky of rose and amber; down behind it the Blair Water dreamed in silver; the Wind Woman had folded her misty bat-wings in a valley of sunset and stillness look at over the world like a blessing.

Continuing up Rennes. Dodging little Saabs and Renaults. Loving walking here. Sun alternately streaming. Obliterating physiognomies. No longer nouns. But movement. Disappearing. Now heavily raining. Sitting out anyway. Over drain smelling of beer. Metro. Sewers. Fetid breath of Paris. Two cold coffees. Watching shadows lengthening. On la Gaite opposite. Where Colette once performing. Having walked in old boots across city. Drawing mole above lip. Rice-powdering delicious arms. Paris a drug. P saying on phone. Yes Paris a drug. A woman. And I waking this a.m. Thinking there must be some way. Of staying. Now my love’s silhouette of rooftops eclipsing. Into night. Cold heinous breath. Blowing on privates. Through grille underneath.

How beautiful it was, lying embowered in the twilight of the old trees; the tips of the loftiest spruces came out in purple silhouettes against the north-weatersn sky of rose and amber; down behind it the Blair Water dreamed in silver; the Wind Woman had folded her misty bat-wings in a valley of sunset and stillness that lay over the world like a blessing. Emily felt sure that everything would be all right.

Thin, androgynous, simply dressed in striped naval-uniform-style suits, or schoolboy sports clothes and blazers, the “Chanel woman” conjured the silhouette of the war’s millions of soldiers—the young men dying just out of sight of the general population.

My strongest memory is not a memory. It's something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened. The memory was formed when I was five, just before I turned six, from a story my father told in such detail that I and my brothers and sister had each conjured our own cinematic version, with gunfire and shouts. Mine had crickets. That's the sound I hear as my family huddles in the kitchen, lights off, hiding from the Feds who've surrounded the house. A woman reaches for a glass of water and her silhouette is lighted by the moon. A shot echoes like the lash of a whip and she falls. In my memory it's always Mother who falls, and she has a baby in her arms. The baby doesn't make sense - I'm the youngest of my mother's seven children - but like I said, none of this happened.

How beautiful it was, lying embowered in the twilight of the old trees; the tips of the loftiest spruces came out in purple silhouette against the north-western sky of rose an amber; down behind it the Blair Water dreamed in silver; the Wind Woman had folded her misty bat-wings in a valley of sunset and stillness lay over the world like a blessing.

There is no greater reason for children to honor parents than for parents to honor children, except that while the children are young, the parents are stronger than the children. The same thing, of course, happened in the relations of men and women. It was the duty of the wives to submit to husbands, not of husbands to submit to wives. The only basis for this view was that if wives could be induced to accept it, it saved trouble for their husbands. 'The man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man; neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man' (I Cor. xi. 8,9). I defy anyone to find any basis for this view, except that men have stronger muscles than women.

But what might a woman say about church as she? What might a woman say about the church as body and bride? Perhaps she would speak of the way a regular body moves through the world—always changing, never perfect—capable of nurturing life, not simply through the womb, but through hands, feet, eyes, voice, and brain. Every part is sacred. Every part has a function. Perhaps she would speak of impossible expectations and all the time she’s wasted trying to contort herself into the shape of those amorphous silhouettes that flit from magazines and billboards into her mind. Or of this screwed-up notion of purity as a status, as something awarded by men with tests and checklists and the power to give it and take it away. Perhaps she would speak of the surprise of seeing herself—flaws and all—in the mirror on her wedding day. Or of the reality that with new life comes swollen breasts, dry heaves, dirty diapers, snotty noses, late-night arguments, and a whole army of new dangers and fears she never even considered before because life-giving isn’t nearly as glamorous as it sounds, but it’s a thousand times more beautiful. Perhaps she would talk about being underestimated, about surprising people and surprising herself. Or about how there are moments when her own strength startles her, and moments when her weakness—her forgetfulness, her fear, her exhaustion—unnerve her. Maybe she would tell of the time, in the mountains with bare feet on the ground, she stood tall and wise and felt every cell in her body smile in assent as she inhaled and exhaled and in one loud second realized, I’m alive! I’m enfleshed! only to forget it the next. Or maybe she would explain how none of the categories created for her sum her up or capture her essence.

was laughable. An aisle stretched down the middle of the ballroom, defined by candelabras topped with more pale orbs, their light flickering like little flames. The aisle runner was black and set with rhinestones in mimicry of the night sky. Or, the always sky, as it was here on Luna. A hush fell over the room, and Kai could tell it was not a normal hush. It was too controlled, too flawless. His heart pounded, uncontrolled in its cage. This was the moment he’d been dreading, the fate he’d fought against for so long. No one was going to interfere. He was alone and rooted to the floor. At the far back of the room, the massive doors opened, chorused with a fanfare of horns. At the end of the aisle, two shadows emerged—a man and a woman in militaristic uniforms carrying the flags of Luna and the Eastern Commonwealth. After they parted, setting the flags into stands on either side of the altar, a series of Lunar guards marched into the room, fully armed and synchronized. They, too, spread out when they reached the altar, like a protective wall around the dais. Next down the aisle were six thaumaturges dressed in black, walking in pairs, graceful as black swans. They were followed by two in red, and finally Head Thaumaturge Aimery Park, all in white. A voice dropped down from some hidden speakers. “All rise for Her Royal Majesty, Queen Levana Blackburn of Luna.” The people rose. Kai clasped his shaking hands behind his back. She appeared as a silhouette first in the lights of the doors, a perfect hourglass dropping off to a full billowing skirt that flowed behind her. She walked with her head high, gliding toward

Yatima found verself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, reorganised. It looked like a flesher embryo – though not quite a realist portrait. The imaging technique kept changing, revealing different structures: Yatima saw hints of delicate limbs and organs caught in slices of transmitted dark; a stark silhouette of bones in an X-ray flash; the finely branched network of the nervous system bursting into view as a filigreed shadow, shrinking from myelin to lipids to a scatter of vesicled neurotransmitters against a radio-frequency MRI chirp. There were two bodies now. Twins? One was larger, though – sometimes much larger. The two kept changing places, twisting around each other, shrinking or growing in stroboscopic leaps while the wavelengths of the image stuttered across the spectrum. One flesher child was turning into a creature of glass, nerves and blood vessels vitrifying into optical fibres. A sudden, startling white-light image showed living, breathing Siamese twins, impossibly transected to expose raw pink and grey muscles working side by side with shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuators, flesher and gleisner anatomies interpenetrating. The scene spun and morphed into a lone robot child in a flesher's womb; spun again to show a luminous map of a citizen's mind embedded in the same woman's brain; zoomed out to place her, curled, in a cocoon of optical and electronic cables. Then a swarm of nanomachines burst through her skin, and everything scattered into a cloud of grey dust. Two flesher children walked side by side, hand in hand. Or father and son, gleisner and flesher, citizen and gleisner... Yatima gave up trying to pin them down, and let the impressions flow through ver. The figures strode calmly along a city's main street, while towers rose and crumbled around them, jungle and desert advanced and retreated. The artwork, unbidden, sent Yatima's viewpoint wheeling around the figures. Ve saw them exchanging glances, touches, kisses – and blows, awkwardly, their right arms fused at the wrists. Making peace and melting together. The smaller lifting the larger on to vis shoulders – then the passenger's height flowing down to the bearer like an hourglass's sand.

There was no eagerness in the sheep woman’s face, only the impersonal curiosity of a spectator at a display in which he had no part. She accepted as a matter of course the fact that she would be here, as she was at home, an outsider, an alien. Kate saw nothing interesting or unusual in what she had done—it was all in the day’s work. She was merely one of innumerable stock raisers bringing the results of months and years of patient effort to the great stock market of the west. As she looked listlessly at the dark silhouette of tanks and towers, skyscrapers and gable roofs, at countless threads of smoke going straight up in the still air from the great hive of industry and life, she wondered at her apathy, at the fact that there was no anticipation in her mind. Her face darkened. Had Prouty, along with other things, robbed her of the capacity for enjoyment? Had it crushed out of her the last remnant of the spirit of youth? Was she old, already hopelessly old at heart? Her

A vision washes over my mind. Elena’s innocent face, inches away from mine, her arms tight around my neck. Somewhere, a dragon is roaring, flecks of hot spittle twirling past in yellow clouds. The silhouette of a woman wavers in the haze—death incarnate.

Hunter was sitting under a brush arbor, tossing dice with several men, when Blackbird came tearing up the path between the lodges, screaming, “The yellow-hair! She’s back, Uncle! She’s back!” Accustomed as he was to Blackbird’s mischief, Hunter ignored her while he finished a throw. Then he swept the child onto his lap and growled like a bear, playfully biting her belly. He knew something was amiss when Blackbird didn’t let loose with her usual cackles of glee. “The yellow-hair! She’s come back!” Blackbird caught his face between her tiny hands so he had no choice but to look at her. “She isn’t moving. I think she’s waiting for you.” Hunter’s heart tripped. “If you’re teasing me, you little weasel, I’ll toss you into a prickly pear.” Blackbird’s eyes danced. “She’s here! Grandmother sent me to tell you. Nabone, look!” Hunter set the child aside and left the arbor. He shaded his brow against the sun. Up on the plateau, he could see the distinct silhouette of a white woman on a horse. As he walked up the path between the lodges, the breeze caught her hair and lifted it. Gold glinted in the sunshine.

He shaded his brow against the sun. Up on the plateau, he could see the distinct silhouette of a white woman on a horse. As he walked up the path between the lodges, the breeze caught her hair and lifted it. Gold glinted in the sunshine. Hunter’s throat tightened. He nearly tripped over Blackbird, who danced excitedly about his feet as he walked. A mixture of gladness and dread filled him, one emotion as powerful as the other. His little blue-eyes had come to him, just as the prophecy foretold. He couldn’t help but wonder if it would not also come to pass that he would one day leave the People. Numbly placing one foot before the other, Hunter strode to the edge of the village and stared up at the plateau. Even at a distance he recognized the way she sat a horse, the tilt of her head. He couldn’t believe she had come so far and so quickly. Fate had indeed led her in a circle back to him. Ordering Blackbird back to his mother’s lodge, Hunter increased his pace, the dread of leaving his people forgotten. Destiny. A month ago he had railed against it. Now he wasn’t certain how he felt. Resentful, yet pleased. And relieved. Deep in the quiet places of his heart, he sensed the rightness. Fate. Today it had brought him a woman, a woman like no other, with skin as white as a night moon, hair like honey, and eyes like the summer sky. His woman, and this time she came freely.

His thoughts were haunted by flames—first the field of marihuana, then the bonfire, then the old woman’s house. The cackling faces of the vaqueros possessed by the narcotic, the silhouette of the girl slumping dead in a sliver of moonlight, the old woman eviscerated for helping him—all of it consumed by the haunting flames.

The music had started, the couples had begun a promenade, but Mr. Nobley paused to hold Jane’s arm and whisper, “Jane Erstwhile, if I never had to speak with another human being but you, I would die a happy man. I would that these people, the music, the food and foolishness all disappeared and left us alone. I would never tire of looking at you or listening to you.” He took a breath. “There. That compliment was on purpose. I swear I will never idly compliment you again.” Jane’s mouth was dry. All she could think to say was, “But…but surely you wouldn’t banish all the food.” He considered, then nodded once. “Right. We will keep the food. We will have a picnic.” And he spun her into the middle of the dance. While the music played, they didn’t speak again. All his attention was on her, leading her through the motions, watching her with admiration. He danced with her as though they were evenly matched, no indication that she was the lone rider of the Precedence Caboose. She had never before felt so keenly that Mr. Nobley and Miss Erstwhile were a couple. But I’m not really Miss Erstwhile, thought Jane. Her heart was pinching her. She needed to get away, she was dizzy, she was hot, his eyes were arresting, he was too much to take in. What am I supposed to do, Aunt Caroline? she asked the ceiling. Everything’s headed for Worse Than Before. How do I get out of this alive? She spun and saw Martin, and kept her eyes on him as though he were the lone landmark in a complicated maze. Mr. Nobley noticed her attention skidding. His eyes were dark when he saw Martin. His recent smile turned down, his look became more intense. As soon as the second number ended, Jane curtsied, thanked her partner, and began to depart, anxious for a breath of cold November air. “A moment, Miss Erstwhile,” Mr. Nobley said. “I have already taken your hand for the last half hour, but now I would beg your ear. Might we…” “Mr. Nobley!” A woman with curls shaking around her face flurried his way. Had Mr. Nobley been making visits to other estates while he was supposed to be hunting? Or was this a repeat client who might’ve known the man from a past cast? “I’m so happy to find you! I insist on dancing every dance.” “Just now is not…” Jane took advantage of the interruption to slip away, searching above the tops of heads for Martin. He’d been just over there…a hand grabbed her arm. She turned right into Mr. Nobley, their faces close, and she was startled by the wildness in him now, a touch of Heathcliff in his eyes. “Miss Erstwhile, I beg you.” “Oh, Mr. Nobley!” said another lady behind him. He glanced back with a harried look and gripped Jane’s arm tighter. He walked her out of the ballroom and into the darkened library, only then releasing her arm, though he had the good grace to look embarrassed. “I apologize,” he said. “I guess you would.” He was blocking the escape, so she gave in and took a chair. He began to pace, rubbing his chin and occasionally daring to look at her. The candlelight form the hallway made of him a silhouette, the starlight from the window just touching his eyes, his mouth. It was as dark as a bedroom. “You see how agitated I am,” he said. She waited, and her heart set to thumping without her permission. He wildly combed his hair with his fingers. “I can’t bear to be out there with you right now, all those indifferent people watching you, admiring you, but not really caring. Not as I do.” Jane: (hopeful) Really? Jane: (practical) Oh, stop that. Mr. Nobley sat in the chair beside her and gripped its arm. Jane: (observant) This man is all about arm gripping.

He'd always lived off by himself in a hut, keeping a small garden and a hutch of rabbits. On some nights, his fellow pilots would see the red glow from a signal flare stuck in the ground, and Ball's dark silhouette as he played the violin in his pajamas. One of the reasons for his introspection was a woman. He'd fallen in love during his time off in England, but he refused to marry the girl until the war ended. It appears he didn't believe he'd survive; he once said to his father, Sir Albert Ball, that "no fighter pilot who fought seriously could hope to escape from the war alive.

When he placed a candle on the shelf across the room from him and lit its wick, he came to realize that in fact everything he saw was a flat surface, like a screen – that in fact dimension was an illusion. Everything was a flat surface and the pinpoints of light, whether from a candle on the shelf or a gaslamp above the street, were punctures in that surface – gashes made by somebody behind the screen. He realized then that beyond everything he saw there was an entire realm of blazing sunfire, and that colors were only the silhouettes of people in that realm – walking, eating, dancing, doing whatever they were doing behind the screen. “It astonished Adolphe that everyone failed to realize they were just figures on a tapestry, the shadows of something else. He was therefore amused by the conceit of women, for instance, who who admired the creamy color of their skin when in fact it was only the haze of some other woman behind the vast screen staring into a mirror. Adolphe could explain all of this to himself but he could not explain Janine: Janine wasn't the same as the others. Janine was like their mother; and Adolphe decided Lulu was from this place beyond the surface, and she had, perhaps when she was a little girl, slipped through. “Adolphe wondered why Lulu hadn't told them about this, and then realized she probably would when she thought they were old enough to understand it. He could see it wasn't something one would want to tell a child too soon.

A tree is my keeper, a warrior silhouette.

One does not dislike the half of everything. You bore me, you young people, when you talk about one sex or the other, as if they were separate things. There is only one human entity and that is a man and a woman. The man is the silhouette, the woman is the detail. The one often spoils or makes the other. But apart they are so much material. Don't be a fool.

He shaded his brow against the sun. Up on the plateau, he could see the distinct silhouette of a white woman on a horse. As he walked up the path between the lodges, the breeze caught her hair and lifted it. Gold glinted in the sunshine. Hunter’s throat tightened. He nearly tripped over Blackbird, who danced excitedly about his feet as he walked. A mixture of gladness and dread filled him, one emotion as powerful as the other. His little blue-eyes had come to him, just as the prophecy foretold. He couldn’t help but wonder if it would not also come to pass that he would one day leave the People. Numbly placing one foot before the other, Hunter strode to the edge of the village and stared up at the plateau. Even at a distance he recognized the way she sat a horse, the tilt of her head. He couldn’t believe she had come so far and so quickly. Fate had indeed led her in a circle back to him.

Another beep sounded before a shimmering, imperfect silhouette formed in front of me. “Message request from the Council of Hadramiel,” the robotic monotone voice echoed. I’d never get any peace. “Allow.” “Samkiel.” My fists clenched, pure energy dancing across my knuckles. I hated that name. The once shapeless silhouette vibrated out of focus before returning as the embodiment of a tall, curvaceous woman. Her long blonde hair was loosely braided and ran down her side. Imogen. She resembled the Goddess Athos who had made her. The only difference was that Imogen was pure celestial and one of The Hand—my Hand.

When everything-EVERYTHING about life makes you want to grin, and it just gets sunnier and funnier until after a while you can only see the teeth in the smiles and then you feel... —well, not "on the edge" exactly, for the world has no edge; but as if you have always been over the edge, and the smiling and laughing is a sort of spastic reflex like crying or retching (really, it's all the same);— when you drink red wine in a cup and try to categorize the geometry of the gleam-patterns you see on the liquid's surface-and you may find, my friends, that you can almost do it: you agree with yourself upon the existence of a light-shape like the outline of a hemisphere drawn in concave at the equator; but another sip and it changes to a gleam-ring all around the rim of the wine circle; and another and it is reddish-black everywhere with the unsteady image of your face in it, your skin redder and your mouth blacker than the wine, and another and you see white specks swimming in the cup: they are not reflections at all, but bits of grease or rice or cereal, or maybe cheek-cells that got washed out of your mouth (the age-old question: is the imper-fection, the filth, in you or in the glass?); —but then your attention is diverted forever by the ugly purple stain around the edge of the cup where your lips have been; when everything is so confusing that you can never be sure whether or not your whore is a woman until she pulls her underpants down; when nothing is clear, and whore-chasing is a merry-go-round of death (if you don't catch a disease that will kill you, why, you will go around again, not because you want to die but because until you do everything remains unclear); when you get drunken crushes on women whose drunken mothers used to try to stab them; when the names of streets are like Nabokov's wearisome clever-ness; when only the pretty shapes of women have integrity and when you close your eyes still see them leaning and crossing their legs and milking their tits at you, THEN you may on occasion like Jimmy find yourself looking down a long black block, down the tunnels of infinity to a streedamp, a corner and a woman's waiting silhouette. —Or else like Jimmy you may have another drink

The "Monalisa Lisa" is an optical illusion created by Leonardo Da Vinci. The woman in the painting "The Mona Lisa" doesn't appear to be always smiling. When you look at the mouth you feel she looks sad, melancholic, and hostile. But when you look at the eyes you feel she is happy and cheerful. Leonardo perfected the "sfumato technique," which translated literally from Italian means "vanished or evaporated." He created imperceptible transitions between light and shade, and sometimes between colors. "Why the Silhouette?" appears as a simple story of a few individuals, but when you look at it from a distance, it appears to show you the philosophy of life. I have tried to create imperceptible transitions between light and darkness and sometimes between colors. Hope you see the illusion in "Why the Silhouette?

The "Mona Lisa" is an optical illusion created by Leonardo Da Vinci. The woman in the painting "The Mona Lisa" doesn't appear to be always smiling. When you look at the mouth you feel she looks sad, melancholic, and hostile. But when you look at the eyes you feel she is happy and cheerful. Leonardo perfected the "sfumato technique," which translated literally from Italian means "vanished or evaporated." He created imperceptible transitions between light and shade, and sometimes between colors. "Why the Silhouette?" appears as a simple story of a few individuals, but when you look at it from a distance, it appears to show you the philosophy of life. I have tried to create imperceptible transitions between light and darkness and sometimes between colors. Hope you see the illusion in "Why the Silhouette?

The "Mona Lisa" is an optical illusion created by Leonardo Da Vinci. The woman in the painting "The Mona Lisa" doesn't appear to be always smiling. When you look at her mouth you feel she looks sad, melancholic, and hostile. But when you look at her eyes you feel she is happy and cheerful. Leonardo perfected the "sfumato technique," which translated literally from Italian means "vanished or evaporated." He created imperceptible transitions between light and shade, and sometimes between colors. "Why the Silhouette?" appears as a simple story of a few individuals, but when you look at it from a distance, it appears to show you the philosophy of life. I have tried to create imperceptible transitions between light and darkness and sometimes between colors. Hope you see the illusion in "Why the Silhouette?

But I was stuck for a long time by myself at Abraham Lincoln's portrait, standing in the middle of the huge hall as people moved all around me with mostly children. I felt as if time had stopped as I watched Lincoln, facing him, while watching the woman’s back as she was looking out the window. I felt wronged, so much like Truman from the movie, standing there in the middle of the museum alone. I was wondering what would Abraham Lincoln do if he realized he was the slave in his own cotton fields, being robbed by evil thieves, nazis. I had taken numerous photos of Martina from behind, as well as silhouettes of her shadow. I remember standing there, watching as she stood in front of the window; it was almost as if she was admiring the view of the mountains from our new home, as I did take such pictures of her, with a very similar composition to that of the female depicted in the iconic Lincoln portrait looking outwards from the window. I hadn't realized how many photographs I snapped of Martina with her back turned towards me while we travelled to picturesque places. Fernanda and I walked side-by-side in utter silence, admiring painting after painting of Dali's, without exchanging a single word. Meanwhile, Luis and Martina had got lost somewhere in the museum. When I finally found her, she was taking pictures outside of the Rainy Cadillac. We both felt something was amiss without having to say it, as Fernanda knew things I didn't and vice versa. We couldn't bring ourselves to discuss it though, not because we lacked any legal authority between me and Martina, but because neither Fernanda or myself had much parental authority over the young lady. It felt like when our marriages and divorces had dissolved, it was almost as if our parenting didn't matter anymore. It was as if I were unwittingly part of a secret screenplay, like Jim Carrey's character in The Truman Show, living in a fabricated reality made solely for him. I was beginning to feel a strange nauseous feeling, as if someone was trying to force something surreal down my throat, as if I were living something not of this world, making me want to vomit onto the painted canvas of the personalised image crafted just for me. I couldn't help but wonder if Fernanda felt the same way, if she was aware of the magnitude of what was happening, or if, just like me, she was completely oblivious, occasionally getting flashes of truth or reality for a moment or two. I took some amazing photographs of her in Port Lligat in Dali's yard in the port, and in Cap Creus, but I'd rather not even try to describe them—they were almost like Dali's paintings which make all sense now. As if all the pieces are coming together. She was walking by the water and I was walking a bit further up on the same beach on pebbles, parallel to each other as we walked away from Dali's house in the port. I looked towards her and there were two boats flipped over on the two sides of my view. I told her: “Run, Bunny! Run!

Like a creature within the perpetual shadows, demonic eyes stare. Darkness oozes behind the beast, adding eeriness to the already sinister atmosphere. Sounds of discomfort enter the air as its leering continues. The silhouette of a head bobs erratically, as if too heavy for its long, thin neck, blending into the background. Unnaturally long fingers, bony in shape, each appearing like a tendril of a parasitic plant, reach forward, brushing against the porcelain creature’s unchanging face of wrinkles; how disconcerting. “Harold!” The call of an elderly woman rings throughout the upstairs hallway of the modern household. The man in question jumps, startled by his wife of fifty-four years. He removes his fingers from the abnormal portrait he’d been admiring. He gazes towards the open doorway of the bedroom. His wife stomps inside, fury in her eyes, exasperation in her expression. She pauses before him, hunching over with palms on her brittle hip bones. Her head constantly shakes involuntarily. “You told me you would get rid of that thing.

I had hardly ever seen Great Granny Webster at that time, and yet her feelings interested me. She was little more to me than the silhouette of a formidable old woman dressed in black who appeared occasionally at family gatherings and made us feel that she was taking a dangerous risk with her upright spine when circumstances forced her to bend over and kiss her great-grandchildren.

Sam was hovering right beside me, watching my face intently. "You ok, sweetie?" I looked at him with a smile. "I did it! I just asked, and she started pushing. I had no idea it would be so easy. I mean, I figured there was some mental magic you had to pull to get people to die for you, but it's so easy! And she gave me all her life, just boom." He stared at me in shock for a moment, his eyes flicking between mine as I rambled on. Gently, he pulled me away from the neon reflection of the daughter and the grey silhouette of the corpse, easing me out of the room without saying a thing. That in itself was enough to make me worried, replaying what had happened over and over in my mind as I tried to figure out where I'd made some kind of horrendous mistake. "Sia?" he finally asked when we reached the hall. "You know it's ok to be sad about this, right?" "Why would I feel bad? I didn't know her." "Because her daughter was there?" I waved that away. "Her daughter was telling her to let go. The old woman was suffering, and I found a way to make it better." "You know you killed her, right?" Those words made me finally understand the problem. "Sam, that woman was going to die. She could've rolled around in pain, groaning in misery until her heart clenched or her lungs gave out. As her body failed her, she would've panicked. It's kinda what we do. Instead, I made her smile. In her last moments on Earth, I made her feel comforted and protected, like this was just moving to the next step. She wasn't afraid." He nodded, taking that in. "Ok?" "You don't get it because you can't die. Death? It's the monster in the dark. It's the one thing we all fear the most, and in her last seconds, she wasn't afraid. She was thrilled. She knew she'd had a good life, and seeing me proved it to her. That's all we want. People pray to die in their sleep so they don't have to face that one terrifying second. We think about it our whole lives, refusing to talk about it because no one knows the answer, but now I do. I finally understand, and I made her death into something beautiful. Something her daughter will look back on and think is proof that she's in a better place.