Sinking Sand Quotes

When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.

Fear is like the wilderland - Stepping stones or sinking sand

Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.

When the tides change, you have two choices. You can either stand there, letting the water wash over you and your feet sink deeper into the wet sand... or you can get out of the way. You can move up the beach - or off the beach, if you want. The point is to not get stuck.

Eo took out a pen and autographed the arm of one of the nymphs. “Narcissus is a loser! He’s so weak, he can’t bench-press a Kleenex. He’s so lame when you look up lame on Wikipedia, it’s got a picture of Narcissus-only the picture is so ugly , no one ever checks it out.” Narcissus knit his handsome eyebrows. His face was turning from bronze to salmon pink. For the moment, he’d totally forgotten about the pond, and Leo could see the sheet of bronze sinking into the sand.

The ocean to my right was maroon, the sky above it silver. There were sand trails through the thick purple ice plant that grew along the roadside... but now the sky is the color of peaches... It was a ball of bright saffron sinking into the sea, turning the water purple, the sky orange and green.

IGNORANCE I didn’t know love would make me this crazy, with my eyes like the river Ceyhun carrying me in its rapids out to sea,where every bit of shattered boat sinks to the bottom. An alligator lifts its head and swallows the ocean, then the ocean floor becomes a desert covering the alligator in sand drifts. Changes do happen. I do not know how, or what remains of what has disappeared into the absolute. I hear so many stories and explanations, but I keep quiet, because I don’t know anything, and because something I swallowed in the ocean has made me completely content with ignorance.

In the sinking sand, where we’ve come to rest, have I had a hand in your loneliness?

To a person who expects every desert to be barren sand dunes, the Sonoran must come as a surprise. Not only are there no dunes, there's no sand. At least not the sort of sand you find at the beach. The ground does have a sandy color to it, or gray, but your feet won't sink in. It's hard, as if it's been tamped. And pebbly. And glinting with -- what else -- mica.

This time as we ascend, I watch the world sinking below us. I watch the way the city fades into sand that gets washed by the ocean.

What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell forever? Forever! For all eternity! Not for a year or an age but forever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness, and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of air. And imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all. Yet at the end of that immense stretch time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been carried all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals – at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not even one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time, the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would have scarcely begun.

The sands of time are quicksands, said Adam One. So much can sink into them without a trace. And what a blessing when those things that sink away are needless worries.

Self-improvement without self-love is like building a house upon sand. You can build and build, but it will always sink.

On Jesus' rock, my life abounds; all other floors are slippery grounds. His love for me, is mercy band; any other love is sinking sand.

Your dreams are your solid rock; all other dreams are sinking sands! Recreate Your World and I believe you can!

Sinking onto the sand, I turned my face into the wind, hoping the breeze would blow away the pain. The pain of rejection, the pain of betrayal, and the pain of everything that had been lost to us.

Abyssinias "I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: A huge four-footed limestone form Sits in the desert, sinking in the sand. Its whiskered face, though marred by wind and storm, Still flaunts the dainty ears, the collar band And feline traits the sculptor well portrayed: The bearing of a born aristocrat, The stubborn will no mortal can dissuade. And on its base, in long-dead alphabets, These words are set: "Reward for missing cat! His name is Abyssinias, pet of pets; I, Ozymandias, will a fortune pay For his return. he heard me speak of vets -- O foolish King! And so he ran away.

Have you ever stood on a sandy beach when the tide is coming in? Felt the waves come up around your feet and suck the sand from under you. That’s my life now. With every day, I feel I sink deeper into uncertainty.” p. 628 The Fool to Fitz

The Fever Bird The fever bird sand out last night. I could not sleep, try as I might. My brain was split, my spirit raw. I looked into the garden, saw The shadow of the amaltas Shake slightly on the moonlit grass Unseen, the bird cried out its grief, Its lunacy, without relief: Three notes repeated closer, higher, Soaring, then sinking down like fire Only to breathe the night and soar, As crazed, as desperate, as before. I shivered in the midnight heat And smelt the sweat that soaked my sheet. And now tonight I hear again The call that skewers though my brain, The call, the brain-sick triple note-- A cone of pain stuck inits throat. I am so tired I could weep. Mad bird, for God's sake let me sleep Why do you cry like one possessed? When will you rest? When will you rest? Why wait each night till all but I Lie sleeping in the house, then cry? Why do you scream into my ear What no one else but I can hear?

I don't know why people are so shy about expressing openly in front of the world their longing for each other, the most powerful and tender natural attraction, but they pretend to be proud or indifferent and they don't consider, especially if they're young, that the sands of our life have been measured by God unto the last grain and that every carelessly wasted second of love sinks irreversibly into eternity.

I shake Mira's hand away, letting the ship steal my attention. Its wood creaks with laughter as it settles onto the sand, mocking me. The sounds sinks into my bones, and I wonder: If I cannot rule one ship, then how am I ready to rule an entire kingdom?

Out here, where the sand is so white, so Westernized, how could I not sink into it & burn with questions like what am I doing here I am in the wrong book I am in the wrong era I am not Dorothea I am Analicia

I cannot get you close enough, I said to him, pitiful as a child, and never can and never will. We cannot get from anyone else the things we need to fill the endless terrible need, not to be dissolved, not to sink back into sand, heat, broom, air, thinnest air. And so we revolve around each other and our dreams collide. It is embarrassing that it should be so hard. Look out the window in any weather. We are part of all that glamour, drama, change, and should not be ashamed.

I climb mountains, while you keep sinking in sand.

It happened on a Valentine night. Chris was an expert panther, a James Bond. Sarah was a lamb, a Virgin Mary. It was a night of mixed feelings and inner conflict. In her flesh she felt walking on liquid gold; but in her mind, heart and soul she could not help but hate herself for partaking of this “forbidden fruit” of pleasure. Not long was the thrill gone that her soul went sinking in the quick sands of condemnation, “did you have to do it?

Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking - so they say - but they're booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you're not careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you're still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you're clever enough to stay out of the army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain't much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits.

America Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

The purpose of sacred wandering is to explore the foundation of our faith. To prove if it's authentic. Whether your faith is like sinking sand or a solid rock, Christ wants to take you on an adventure. His desire is to spiritually strengthen you.

Vacations in my family are rare events squeezed between races. I can count them on one hand, and even those amount to only a few hours each. Shopping in Los Angeles. Sinking my toes into snow white sand in Florida. They are tiny slips of memory strung around horses.

Don’t worry. If we sink, we’ll swim together to shore. We’ll use your bewitching chapeau as a float.” The nose of the yacht dipped hard, then rose. The wing began a low howl around us. “I’m not blotto,” he said, in response to my expression. He turned to the railing and chucked the empty flute to the waves. “Not yet, in any case.” I went to stand beside him. The flute had sunk beneath the surface already, on its way to an eternity of sand and tide. “That’s good. Because I can’t swim.” “Why did you go swimming in the grotto, then,” he asked too pleasantly, “if you can’t swim?” “I wasn’t swimming there. I was smoke, at the ceiling, when you came in. Falling into the water was an accident.” “You’re welcome,” Armand said. I refused to ask for what. We both knew.

And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep. Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips, murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky. 'Mag-gie!' the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path--the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.

There, below the cliffs, is a bay of sand where the rocks stand up like the fangs of wolves, and no boat or swimmer can live when the tide is breaking round them. To right and left of the bay the sea has driven arches through the cliff. The rocks are purple and rose-coloured and pale as turquoise in the sun, and on a summer’s evening when the tide is low and the sun is sinking, men see on the horizon land that comes and goes with the light. It is the Summer Isle, which (they say) floats and sinks at the will of heaven, the Island of Glass through which the clouds and stars can be seen, but which for those who dwell there is full of trees and grass and springs of sweet water . . .’ The

The powdery sand caves under his weight and his bare feet sink at once marking the beach with shallow potholes

Bare spirit facing shore, frothy and icy white. Soul sinking in sand’s sighs, light subdued by sea water. [Shedding at Shore]

An unfulfilled dream is like spilled milk on dry earth. It sinks instantly and leaves a useless patch to re- mind you that you can never taste it.

Roads, roads!” she wrote in her little apartment, which was sinking deeper into the sand each year. “The more there are, the more beautifully kept they are, the harder it is to go anywhere.

He’s battling the Mayor, across some kind of sand-covered square in front of what looks like a chapel– And I get a sinking feeling of how many terrible things have happened to me and Todd in churches

This morning's pastry poses challenges. To assemble the tiny mosaic disks of chocolate flake and candied ginger, Avis must execute a number of discrete, ritualistic steps: scraping the chocolate with a fine grater, rolling the dough cylinder in large-grain sanding sugar, and assembling the ingredients atop each hand-cut disk of dough in a pointillist collage. Her husband wavers near the counter, watching. "They're like something Marie Antoinette would wear around her neck. When she still had one." "I thought she was more interested in cake," Avis says, she tilts her narrow shoulders, veers around him to stack dishes in the sink.

When will it be enough?” Celia asks, but there is no reply, and she stands alone amongst the stars. She sinks to the ground, picking up a handful of pearl-white sand and letting it fall slowly through her fingers.

Sonnet: To the River Otter Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West! How many various-fated years have passed, What happy and what mournful hours, since last I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast, Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes I never shut amid the sunny ray, But straight with all their tints thy waters rise, Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey, And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes, Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way, Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs: Ah! that once more I were a careless child!

Once, my grandmama told me a story about her great-grandmama. She'd come across the ocean, been kidnapped and sold. Said her great-grandmama told her that in her village, they ate fear. Said it turned the food to sand in they mouth. Said everyone knew about the death march to the cost, that word had come down about the ships, about how they packed men and women into them. Some heard it was even worse for those who sailed off, sunk into the far. Because that's what it looked like when the ship crossed the horizon: like the ship sailed off and sunk, bit by bit, into the water. Her grandmama said they never went out at night, and even in the day, they stayed in the shadows of they houses. But still, they came for her. Kidnapped her here, and she learned the boats didn't sink to some watery place, sailed by white ghosts. She learned that bad things happened on that ship, all the way until it docked. That her skin grew around the chains. That her mouth shaped to the muzzle. That she was made into an animal under the hot, bright sky, the same sky the rest of her family was under, somewhere far aways, in another world. I knew what that was, to be made a animal.

Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the pain of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite, as they are destined to last for ever. But while they are everlasting they are at the some times, as you know, intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplies as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many million upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and i f the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it sop rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.

Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay, As the flowers recited their lines And pike stirred at the bottom of the pond. The pen was cool to the touch. The staircase swept upward Through fragmented garlands, keeping the melancholy Already distilled in letters of the alphabet. It would be time for winter now, its spun-sugar Palaces and also lines of care At the mouth, pink smudges on the forehead and cheeks, The color once known as "ashes of roses.-" How many snakes and lizards shed their skins For time to be passing on like this, Sinking deeper in the sand as it wound toward The conclusion. It had all been working so well and now, Well, it just kind of came apart in the hand As a change is voiced, sharp As a fishhook in the throat, and decorative tears flowed Past us into a basin called infinity. There was no charge for anything, the gates Had been left open intentionally. Don't follow, you can have whatever it is. And in some room someone examines his youth, Finds it dry and hollow, porous to the touch... O keep me with you, unless the outdoors Embraces both of us, unites us, unless The birdcatchers put away their twigs, The fishermen haul in their sleek empty nets And others become part of the immense crowd Around this bonfire, a situation That has come to mean us to us, and the crying In the leaves is saved, the last silver drops.

Imagine standing next to the water as it laps on the shore of a beach. As it washes over your feet, they gradually sink below the sand and eventually disappear from view. Like quicksand, liquefaction changes the composition of the soil such that heavier objects sink into it.

Love Me Like There's No Tomorrow You had to kill the conversation You always had the upper hand Got caught in love and stepped in sinking sand You had to go and ruin all our plans Packed your bags and you're leaving home Got a one-way ticket and you're all set to go But we have one more day together, so Love me like there's no tomorrow Hold me in your arms, tell me you mean it This is our last goodbye and very soon it will be over But today just love me like there's no tomorrow I guess we drift alone in separate ways I don't have all that far to go God knows I learnt to play the lonely man I've never felt so low in all my life We were born to be just losers So I guess there's a limit on how far we go But we only have one more day together so Love me like there's no tomorrow Hold me in your arms, tell me you mean it This is our last goodbye and very soon it will be over But today just love me like there's no tomorrow Tomorrow god knows just where I'll be Tomorrow who knows just what's in store for me Anything can happen but we only have one more day together, yeah Just one more day forever, so Love me like there's no tomorrow Hold me in your arms, tell me you mean it This is our last goodbye and very soon it will be over But today just love me like there's no tomorrow

They were the cars at the fair that were whirling around her; no, they were the planets, while the sun stood, burning and spinning and guttering in the centre; here they came again, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto; but they were not planets, for it was not the merry-go-round at all, but the Ferris wheel, they were constellations, in the hub of which, like a great cold eye, burned Polaris, and round and round it here they went: Cassiopeia, Cepheus, the Lynx, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and the Dragon; yet they were not constellations, but, somehow, myriads of beautiful butterflies, she was sailing into Acapulco harbour through a hurricane of beautiful butterflies, zigzagging overhead and endlessly vanishing astern over the sea, the sea, rough and pure, the long dawn rollers advancing, rising, and crashing down to glide in colourless ellipses over the sand, sinking, sinking, someone was calling her name far away and she remembered, they were in a dark wood, she heard the wind and the rain rushing through the forest and saw the tremours of lightning shuddering through the heavens and the horse—great God, the horse—and would this scene repeat itself endlessly and forever?—the horse, rearing, poised over her, petrified in midair, a statue, somebody was sitting on the statue, it was Yvonne Griffaton, no, it was the statue of Huerta, the drunkard, the murderer, it was the Consul, or it was a mechanical horse on the merry-go-round, the carrousel, but the carrousel had stopped and she was in a ravine down which a million horses were thundering towards her, and she must escape, through the friendly forest to their house, their little home by the sea.

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw smelled the Malthusian morbidity underlying natural selection, lamenting, “When its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you.” Shaw lamented natural selection’s “hideous fatalism,” and complained of its “damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration.”4

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

Marthe said dryly, ‘Philippa wishes only to say thank you, and so also do I. They say in Italy, don’t they, that the boat will sink that carries neither monk, nor student, nor whore.… How good that we have Mr Blyth.' ‘How good that we have Mlle Marthe,’ Lymond replied. His clothes, freshly changed, were impeccable and his brushed yellow hair, free of sand, was lit guinea-gold by the gleam of the lamps. ‘Of her fellow men so charming a student.

This time he was underwater, running, feet sinking deeper and deeper into the seabed. The surface was within reach if he raised his arms, but he couldn’t get his head out of the water. He had to breathe. The compulsion to inhale was huge. But he couldn’t, musn’t. Still he ran, getting nowhere, each frantic step burying his feet in the wet sand until he was no longer able to lift them. Finally, with one great gulp, he opened his mouth, his lungs to the flood of seawater.

The Witnesses In Ocean's wide domains, Half buried in the sands, Lie skeletons in chains, With shackled feet and hands. Beyond the fall of dews, Deeper than plummet lies, Float ships, with all their crews, No more to sink nor rise. There the black Slave-ship swims, Freighted with human forms, Whose fettered, fleshless limbs Are not the sport of storms. These are the bones of Slaves; They gleam from the abyss; They cry, from yawning waves, We are the Witnesses! Within Earth's wide domains Are markets for men's lives; Their necks are galled with chains, Their wrists are cramped with gyves. Dead bodies, that the kite In deserts makes its prey; Murders, that with affright Scare school-boys from their play! All evil thoughts and deeds; Anger, and lust, and pride; The foulest, rankest weeds, That choke Life's groaning tide! These are the woes of Slaves; They glare from the abyss; They cry, from unknown graves, We are the Witnesses!

You forgot the Way of Water, kid?’ Durral would’ve asked. ‘What business you got hangin’ on to someone else’s pain? Listen to ’em, that’s all. Let ’em cry or scream or spew a thousand hateful words your way. That’s what a friend does. Then you take yourself off into the desert and tell yourself dirty jokes until you’re laughing so hard all the pain shakes off you like rainwater. Let it sink into the sand at your feet, where it can’t do any more harm. That’s the Argosi way.

Sometimes Valène dreamt of cataclysms and tempests, of whirlwinds that would carry the whole house off like a wisp of straw and display the infinite marvels of the solar system to its shipwrecked inhabitants; or that an unseen crack would run through the building from top to bottom, like a shiver, and with a long, deep, snapping sound it would open in two and be slowly swallowed up in an indescribable yawning chasm; then hordes would overrun it, bleary-eyed monsters, giant insects with steel mandibles, blind termites, great white worms with insatiable mouths: the wood would crumble, the stone would turn to sand, the cupboards would collapse under their own weight, all would return to dust. But no. Only these shabby squabbles over buckets and tubs, over matches and sinks. And behind that ever-closed door the morbid gloom of that slow revenge, that ponderous business of two senile monomaniacs churning over their feigned histories and their wretched traps and snares.

You’re a trigger finger dug into the starting gun, the smack as it fires, the tense stroke of hooves pressing into a fresh track. You’re the curiosity of a flashbulb nibbling air, tricky camera lens grabbing a mane as it quivers back. I’m a rising overture of thighs. I’m dirt exploding midair —sand fireworks. I’m the impulse to grab hold: the jockey’s knees clenching as he rocks above the heaving saddle. You’re the bit I can’t keep from tasting, and I, the clench of jaws, willing to split in two for the shiver of collision, tooth on tooth. Darling, you’re a wager: the whole wad riding on one last leap, but then you’re abrupt: an ankle’s vomity pop. And I’m the entire crowd grunting to its feet. You’re one blossoming moment of unstoppable collapse: the bracing limbs, the beveling slide, the shriek of submission to gravity, a hard landing. From the stands, I’m a hush: hand to mouth. I’m needles of heat, a gut sinking over a lost life savings. You’re someone else’s carnation wreath, red as a bitemark necklace.

You are the mermaid; I am the mermaid hunter. You lead me through your wake and I follow, Knowing my fate. You swish your tales and the water boils between them: I sink, I drown, going down to green depths wordless. I shall not taste your full sweetness, only your salt madness; I will not tell our wild secrets, For while it lasts, my hollow skull skulks after you, Lying at times in your cold hands, To be tossed aside indifferently, Roll and rise with the tides, fall again, Come to rest half buried in the sinking shifting sands. Anemones be my eyes As I watch you swimming from me Laughing.

But it wasn't all bad. Sometimes things wasn't all bad. He used to come home easing into bed sometimes, not too drunk. I make out like I'm asleep, 'casue it's late, and he taken three dollars out of my pocketbook that morning or something. I hear him breathing, but I don't look around. I can see in my mind's eye his black arms thrown back behind his head, the muscles like a great big peach stones sanded down, with veins running like little swollen rivers down his arms. Without touching him I be feeling those ridges on the tips of my fingers. I sees the palms of his hands calloused to granite, and the long fingers curled up and still. I think about the thick, knotty hair on his chest, and the two big swells his breast muscles make. I want to rub my face hard in his chest and feel the hair cut my skin. I know just where the hair growth slacks out-just above his navel- and how it picks up again and spreads out. Maybe he'll shift a little, and his leg will touch me, or I feel his flank just graze my behind. I don't move even yet. Then he lift his head, turn over, and put his hand on my waist. If I don't move, he'll move his hand over to pull and knead my stomach. Soft and slow-like. I still don't move, because I don't want him to stop. I want to pretend sleep and have him keep rubbing my stomach. Then he will lean his head down and bite my tit. Then I don't want him to rub my stomach anymore. I want him to put his hand between my legs. I pretend to wake up, and turn to him, but not opening my legs. I want him to open them for me. He does, and I be soft and wet where his fingers are strong and hard. I be softer than I ever been before. All my strength in his hand. My brain curls up like wilted leaves. A funny, empty feeling is in my hands. I want to grab holt of something, so I hold his head. His mouth is under my chin. Then I don't want his hands between my legs no more, because I think I am softening away. I stretch my legs open, and he is on top of me. Too heavy to hold, too light not to. He puts his thing in me. In me. In me. I wrap my feet around his back so he can't get away. His face is next to mine. The bed springs sounds like them crickets used to back home. He puts his fingers in mine, and we stretches our arms outwise like Jesus on the cross. I hold tight. My fingers and my feet hold on tight, because everything else is going, going. I know he wants me to come first. But I can't. Not until he does. Not until I feel him loving me. Just me. Sinking into me. Not until I know that my flesh is all that be on his mind. That he couldnt stop if he had to. That he would die rather than take his thing our of me. Of me. Not until he has let go of all he has, and give it to me. To me. To me. When he does, I feel a power. I be strong, I be pretty, I be young. And then I wait. He shivers and tosses his head. Now I be strong enough, pretty enough, and young enough to let him make me come. I take my fingers out of his and put my hands on his behind. My legs drop back onto the bed. I don't make a noise, because the chil'ren might hear. I begin to feel those little bits of color floating up into me-deep in me. That streak of green from the june-bug light, the purple from the berries trickling along my thighs, Mama's lemonade yellow runs sweet in me. Then I feel like I'm laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all mixed up with the colors, and I'm afraid I'll come, and afraid I won't. But I know I will. And I do. And it be rainbow all inside. And it lasts ad lasts and lasts. I want to thank him, but dont know how, so I pat him like you do a baby. He asks me if I'm all right. I say yes. He gets off me and lies down to sleep. I want to say something, but I don't. I don't want to take my mind offen the rainbow. I should get up and go to the toilet, but I don't. Besides Cholly is asleep with his leg thrown over me. I can't move and I don't want to.

It was in the Cornish summer of his twelfth year that Peter began to notice just how different the worlds of children and grown-ups were. You could not exactly say that the parents never had fun. They went for swims - but never for longer than twenty minutes. They liked a game of volleyball, but only for half an hour or so. Occasionally they could be talked into hide-and-seek or lurky turkey or building a giant sand-castle, but those were special occasions. The fact was that all grown-ups, given half the chance, chose to sink into one of three activities on the beach: sitting around talking, reading newspapers and books, or snoozing. Their only exercise (if you could call it that) was long boring walks, and these were nothing more than excuses for more talking. On the beach, they often glanced at their watches and, long before anyone was hungry, began telling each other it was time to start thinking about lunch or supper. They invented errands for themselves - to the odd-job man who lived half a mile away, or to the garage in the village, or to the nearby town on shopping expeditions. They came back complaining about the holiday traffic, but of course they were the holiday traffic. These restless grown-ups made constant visits to the telephone box at the end of the lane to call their relatives, or their work, or their grown-up children. Peter noticed that most grown-ups could not begin their day happily until they had driven off to find a newspaper, the right newspaper. Others could not get through the day without cigarettes. Others had to have beer. Others could not get by without coffee. Some could not read a newspaper without smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. Adults were always snapping their fingers and groaning because someone had returned from town and forgotten something; there was always one more thing needed, and promises were made to get it tomorrow - another folding chair, shampoo, garlic, sun-glasses, clothes pegs - as if the holiday could not be enjoyed, could not even begin, until all these useless items had been gathered up.

Behind us lay rainy weeks—grey sky, grey fluid earth, grey dying. If we go out, the rain at once soaks through our overcoat and clothing;—and we remain wet all the time we are in the line. We never get dry. Those who will wear high boots tie sand bags round the tops so that the mud does not pour in so fast. The rifles are caked, the uniforms caked, everything is fluid and dissolved, the earth one dripping, soaked, oily mass in which lie yellow pools with red spiral streams of blood and into which the dead, wounded, and survivors slowly sink down. The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the child-like cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence.

And Vincent was standing by the editor, glancing from him to Terri as if trying to decide who would make the tastier snack. Bastien wasn’t surprised when his gaze settled on Terri. “Bastien, I could use a bite,” his cousin announced as if on cue. “It was a long flight.” “You will eat out, thank you,” Bastien said firmly. “Okay,” Vinny agreed easily—too easily, Bastien thought. And he wasn’t surprised when his cousin turned to Terri and asked, “You wouldn’t happen to be hungry, would you? Care to step out for a bite?” “Actually—” “Mrs. Houlihan will make you something,” Bastien interrupted quickly, moving closer to Terri in a protective manner. He’d be damned if his cousin was going to sink his teeth into her. She was—well, she wasn’t on the menu.

The bathroom was last, and Valerie was very aware that Anders was standing a foot away, waiting patiently. She would have liked to ask him to leave, but she was a grown-up, he was a grown-up and old enough to know about the physiology of the female body, so she took a deep breath, knelt to open the cupboard under the sink and pulled out tampons and pads. Her period should come in the next week or so and she didn’t know how long she’d have to stay at Leigh’s house. Valerie set the feminine items on the counter, and then moved to the other end of the cupboard to gather some makeup and moisturizer from a drawer there. When she turned back with the new items, Anders was calmly packing her feminine hygiene products away in the duffel with her clothes. “Thank you,” she murmured self-consciously as she dumped the new items in.

The gods in Lankhmar (that is, the gods and candidates for divinity who dwell or camp, it may be said, in the Imperishable City, not the gods of Lankhmar—a very different and most secret and dire matter)… the gods in Lankhmar sometimes seem as if they must be as numberless as the grains of sand in the Great Eastern Desert. The vast majority of them began as men, or more strictly the memories of men who led ascetic, vision-haunted lives and died painful, messy deaths. One gets the impression that since the beginning of time an unending horde of their priests and apostles (or even the gods themselves, it makes little difference) have been crippling across that same desert, the Sinking Land, and the Great Salt Marsh to converge on Lankhmar's low, heavy-arched Marsh Gate—meanwhile suffering by the way various inevitable tortures, castrations, bindings and stonings, impalements, crucifixions, quarterings and so forth at the hands of eastern brigands and Mingol unbelievers who, one is tempted to think, were created solely for the purpose of seeing to the running of that cruel gauntlet.

As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow. You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths. You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there. You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths. And you do not know how this happens to you. You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress. But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you. From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvellous branches twine around you from above. You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again, and a wide smooth swell lifts you softly and leads you again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf. But from far off your heights shine to you above the sea in a golden light, like the moon emerging from the tide, and you become aware of yourself from afar. And longing seizes you and the will for your own movement. You want to cross over from being to becoming, since you have recognized the breath of the sea, and its flowing, that leads you here and there without your ever adhering; you have also recognized its surge that bears you to alien shores and carries you back, and gargles you up and down. You saw that was the life of the whole and the death of each individual. You felt yourself entwined in the collective death, from death to the earth’s deepest place, from death in your own strangely breathing depths. Oh – you long to be beyond; despair and mortal fear seize you in this death that breathes slowly and streams back and forth eternally. All this light and dark, warm, tepid, and cold water, all these wavy, swaying, twisting plantlike animals and bestial plants, all these nightly wonders become a horror to you, and you long for the sun, for light dry air, for firm stones, for a fixed place and straight lines, for the motionless and firmly held, for rules and preconceived purpose, for singleness and your own intent.

The human personality contains nothing which may not, in the twinkling of an eye, become altogether changed — nothing in which, before you can look round, there may not spring to birth some cankerous worm which is destined to suck thence the essential juice. Yes, it is a common thing to see not only an overmastering passion, but also a passion of the most petty order, arise in a man who was born to better things, and lead him both to forget his greatest and most sacred obligations, and to see only in the veriest trifles the Great and the Holy. For human passions are as numberless as is the sand of the seashore, and go on to become his most insistent of masters. Happy, therefore, the man who may choose from among the gamut of human passions one which is noble! Hour by hour will that instinct grow and multiply in its measureless beneficence; hour by hour will it sink deeper and deeper into the infinite paradise of his soul. But there are passions of which a man cannot rid himself, seeing that they are born with him at his birth, and he has no power to abjure them. Higher powers govern those passions, and in them is something which will call to him, and refuse to be silenced, to the end of his life. Yes, whether in a guise of darkness, or whether in a guise which will become converted into a light to lighten the world,

I watch Ethan try to connect the dots in his head, And suddenly his face falls into a sad smile. "Oh," he says. And that's all. I walk over to him, my bare feet sinking into the sand as I trudge along. He's grinning at me now, but it's not the usual plastered-on smile he usually has. This one is somehow more authentic. When I'm within a few feet of him, he holds his arms out. "You're going to be such a good leader," he says. "I'm so proud of you, Five." I embrace Ethan. His arms fold around me as he pats me on the back. He lets out a long, slow sigh and then starts to say something. I cut him off before he can get the words out. I can't stand to hear him say another thing. "Ethan, I'm really sorry about this. But it's for the best." I can feel his body clench as the blade slips out of my forearm sheath and into his back. It slides between his ribs-a lucky shot- then retracts back into my hoodie sleeve. It's over in an instant. I step away from him. He stands frozen, probably in shock. There's a deep spot of read blooming across the right side of his chest where the blade must have broken the skin. Blood drops down from the hidden wrist sheath, running over my right hand before falling from my fingertips to the sand. "It's over," I murmur, more to myself than to Ethan. He's probably not paying much attention to what I have to say. Tears are welling in his good eye, but I don't know if they're for me or for himself. He blinks once and then falls to the beach with a soft thud.

HlI watch Ethan try to connect the dots in his head, And suddenly his face falls into a sad smile. "Oh," he says. And that's all. I walk over to him, my bare feet sinking into the sand as I trudge along. He's grinning at me now, but it's not the usual plastered-on smile he usually has. This one is somehow more authentic. When I'm within a few feet of him, he holds his arms out. "You're going to be such a good leader," he says. "I'm so proud of you, Five." I embrace Ethan. His arms fold around me as he pats me on the back. He lets out a long, slow sigh and then starts to say something. I cut him off before he can get the words out. I can't stand to hear him say another thing. "Ethan, I'm really sorry about this. But it's for the best." I can feel his body clench as the blade slips out of my forearm sheath and into his back. It slides between his ribs-a lucky shot- then retracts back into my hoodie sleeve. It's over in an instant. I step away from him. He stands frozen, probably in shock. There's a deep spot of read blooming across the right side of his chest where the blade must have broken the skin. Blood drops down from the hidden wrist sheath, running over my right hand before falling from my fingertips to the sand. "It's over," I murmur, more to myself than to Ethan. He's probably not paying much attention to what I have to say. Tears are welling in his good eye, but I don't know if they're for me or for himself. He blinks once and then falls to the beach with a soft thud.

I have a secret to confide to you, my confidante. Who should I confide it to? To Echo? She would betray it. To the stars? They are cold. People? They do not understand. Only to you can I confide it, for you know how to safeguard it. There is a girl, more beautiful than my soul’s dream, purer than the light of the sun, deeper than the source of the ocean, more proud than the flight of the eagle―there is a girl―oh! bend your head to my ear and my words, that my secret may steal into it―this girl I love more dearly than my life, for she is my life; more dearly than all my desires, for she is the only one; more dearly than all my thoughts, for she is the only one; more warmly than the sun loves the flower, more intensely than sorrow the privacy of the troubled mind; more longingly than the desert’s burning sand loves the rain―I cling to her more tenderly than the mother’s eye to the child, more confidingly than the pleading soul to God, more inseparably than the plant to its root.―Your head grows heavy and thoughtful, it sinks down on your breast, your bosom rises to its aid―my Cordelia! You have understood me, you have understood me exactly, to the letter, not one jot have you ignored. Shall I stretch the membrane of my ear and let your voice assure me of this? Should I doubt? Will you safeguard this secret? Can I depend on you? One hears of people who, in terrible crimes, dedicate themselves to mutual silence. I have confided to you a secret which is my life and my life’s content. Have you nothing to confide to me, nothing so beautiful, so significant…?” ―Johannes de Silentio, from_Either/Or_

Dear Matt, In less than a day, I’ ll be standing on the same sand you stood on so many times before. Well, not the same sand, with the tides and winds and erosion and all of that, but the same symbolic sand. I’m so excited and scared that I can’ t sleep – even though I have to wake up in five hours! You know, I saved every one of your postcards. They’re here in a box under my bed – all the little stories you sent, like little pieces of California. Like the beach glass you guys always brought me. Sometimes I dump it out on my desk and press my ear to the pieces, trying to hear the ocean. Trying to hear you. But you don’ t say anything. Remember how you’ d come back from your vacation on the beach and tell me what it really felt like? What the ocean sounded like at dawn when the beach was deserted? What your hair and skin tasted like after swimming in saltwater all day? How the sand could burn your feet as you walked on it, but if you stuck your toes in, it was cold and wet underneath? How you spent three hours sitting on Ocean Beach just to watch the sun sink into the water a million miles away? If I closed my eyes as you were talking, it was like I was there, like your stories were my stories. In many ways, I feel as if I have memories of you there, too. Do you think that’s crazy? Matt, please don’ t think badly about Frankie’s contest. It’s just a silly game. It’s so Frankie, you know? No, I guess you wouldn’ t. You’ d kill her if you did! She just misses you. We all do. I’ ll look out for her, though. I promise. Please watch over us tomorrow, and for the next few weeks while we’re away. You’ ll be in my thoughts the whole time, like always. I’m going to find some red sea glass for you. I miss you more than you could ever know. Love, Anna

The small moan she released into his mouth made him smile, and kiss her more deeply. After several moments he shifted his mount's reins to his left hand to free his right to caress her. His eager fingers went straight to her breast to knead briefly before focusing on her nipple. Much to his satisfaction, Claray gasped and arched into the caress when he pinched and teased the sensitive tip as he'd wanted to do. Her response to his touch was most gratifying. Her kiss became frantic, and she squirmed in his lap, her bottom unintentionally rubbing against him in a most exciting manner. Eager for the moans and mewls of pleasure he'd drawn from her in the river, Conall released her nipple and let his hand drift down over the swaddled fox and below to press between her legs through the plaid she wore. When Claray immediately broke their kiss on a gasp, he pressed more firmly, then claimed her lips again and thrust his tongue into her mouth as he began to rub her through the heavy cloth, eliciting those groans and mewls he'd wanted. She was so damed responsive to him it made him ache, and if it weren't for the fact that he had Payton, Roderick, Hamish and two hundred warriors at his back, he'd have ridden into the woods, dragged her to the ground, thrown up her skirts and sunk himself into her. As Payton had said, bedding her every night and filling her belly with a bairn or nine would be no hardship at all, and where before Conall had thought he wouldn't care if her father decided to break the betrothal and find her someone else to wed, the idea was now anathema to him. He wanted her for himself. He wanted to sink himself into her wet heat and stay there for a week. The only way to do that though was to claim and marry her. Oddly enough, that suddenly didn't seem a bad idea.

Let’s say a man really loves a woman; he sees her as his equal, his ally, his colleague; but she enters this other realm and becomes unfathomable. In the krypton spotlight, which he doesn’t even see, she falls ill, out of his caste, and turns into an untouchable. He may know her as confident; she stands on the bathroom scale and sinks into a keening of self-abuse. He knows her as mature; she comes home with a failed haircut, weeping from a vexation she is ashamed even to express. He knows her as prudent; she goes without winter boots because she spent half a week’s paycheck on artfully packaged mineral oil. He knows her as sharing his love of the country; she refuses to go with him to the seaside until her springtime fast is ended. She’s convivial; but she rudely refuses a slice of birthday cake, only to devour the ruins of anything at all in a frigid light at dawn. Nothing he can say about this is right. He can’t speak. Whatever he says hurts her more. If he comforts her by calling the issue trivial, he doesn’t understand. It isn’t trivial at all. If he agrees with her that it’s serious, even worse: He can’t possibly love her, he thinks she’s fat and ugly. If he says he loves her just as she is, worse still: He doesn’t think she’s beautiful. If he lets her know that he loves her because she’s beautiful, worst of all, though she can’t talk about this to anyone. That is supposed to be what she wants most in the world, but it makes her feel bereft, unloved, and alone. He is witnessing something he cannot possibly understand. The mysteriousness of her behavior keeps safe in his view of his lover a zone of incomprehension. It protects a no-man’s-land, an uninhabitable territory between the sexes, wherever a man and a woman might dare to call a ceasefire. Maybe he throws up his hands. Maybe he grows irritable or condescending. Unless he enjoys the power over her this gives him, he probably gets very bored. So would the woman if the man she loved were trapped inside something so pointless, where nothing she might say could reach him. Even where a woman and a man have managed to build and inhabit that sand castle—an equal relationship—this is the unlistening tide; it ensures that there will remain a tag on the woman that marks her as the same old something else, half child, half savage.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad shouted a FORCE battle cry and charged through the dust storm to intercept the Shrike before it covered the final thirty meters to where Sol Weintraub crouched next to Brawne Lamia. The Shrike paused, its head swiveling frictionlessly, red eyes gleaming. Kassad armed his assault rifle and moved down the slope with reckless speed. The Shrike shifted. Kassad saw its movement through time as a slow blur, noting even as he watched the Shrike that movement in the valley had ceased, sand hung motionless in the air, and the light from the glowing Tombs had taken on a thick, amberish quality. Kassad’s skinsuit was somehow shifting with the Shrike, following it through its movements through time. The creature’s head snapped up, attentive now, and its four arms extended like blades from a knife, fingers snapping open in sharp greeting. Kassad skidded to a halt ten meters from the thing and activated the assault rifle, slagging the sand beneath the Shrike in a full-power wide-beam burst. The Shrike glowed as its carapace and steel-sculpture legs reflected the hellish light beneath and around it. Then the three meters of monster began to sink as the sand bubbled into a lake of molten glass beneath it. Kassad shouted in triumph as he stepped closer, playing the widebeam on the Shrike and ground the way he had sprayed his friends with stolen irrigation hoses in the Tharsis slums as a boy. The Shrike sank. Its arms splayed at the sand and rock, trying to find purchase. Sparks flew. It shifted, time running backward like a reversed holie, but Kassad shifted with it, realizing that Moneta was helping him, her suit slaved to his but guiding him through time, and then he was spraying the creature again with concentrated heat greater than the surface of a sun, melting sand beneath it, and watching the rocks around it burst into flame. Sinking in this cauldron of flame and molten rock, the Shrike threw back its head, opened its wide crevasse of a mouth, and bellowed. Kassad almost stopped firing in his shock at hearing noise from the thing. The Shrike’s scream resounded like a dragon’s roar mixed with the blast of a fusion rocket. The screech set Kassad’s teeth on edge, vibrated from the cliff walls, and tumbled suspended dust to the ground. Kassad switched to high-velocity solid shot and fired ten thousand microfléchettes at the creature’s face.

Sam Underwater, everything is quiet. Tranquil. Like heaven is all around you, caressing your body, pulling you into its embrace. Deeper and deeper, it pulls at your legs until they beg to be released. I hold my water-resistant camera in front of me and take multiple pictures of the cold depths of the ocean. Its beauty never fails to mesmerize me. But I can’t stay for too long; sooner or later, that urge to breathe always pulls me back to the surface toward the dark sky littered with a million flickering lights … back into the noise of swooshing water and rushing wind. The shore is mostly deserted, except for a few beer cans, party cups, and some clothes and trash lying scattered all around. The only other person there is Nate Wilson … the most handsome guy at school and so much more than that. He’s sitting on a few rocks near the edge of the beach with a girl by his side. I can’t stop watching. Their hands touch briefly, but then the wave overtakes me and blocks my view. When the water lowers, I shake my head, but the waves keep picking up. Still, I hold up my camera and take a few pictures. Right as he turns his head toward me, I dive underwater again. Here, there are no boys, no girls, and no secret touches. Just me and the water, and all the beautiful creatures below that need to meet my camera. A single picture says more than words ever will. No matter how powerful they are. Nate People say it only takes a few minutes for your life to be destroyed. I never believed them … until today. With just the snap of a finger, a stupid decision and a simple push, I marked my own fate. My body grows colder and colder the longer I stay in the water. It consumes me whole as I stray farther and farther away from myself. From reality. I’m so damn dizzy, but I can’t collapse here. Not now, not in the middle of the ocean. I take a deep breath and peel my eyes open, forcing myself to go. That’s when I spot her … the girl and her camera. FLASH. I cover my eyes with my hand. Salty seawater enters my nostrils and mouth as I struggle to swim. When I open my eyes again, the girl is gone; swallowed by the same waves that drag me back to the shore. As my feet sink into the sand and the water creeps up against my toes, I stop and turn around, clutching the long red hairs in my hand as though they’re my last lifeline. This is now the place where not only my life changed forever. But hers too.

I DON'T WANT to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately-that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much. You just want and want and want. You believe in yourself excessively. You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups. You don't even take pleasure in looking at nature photographs these days. Oh, they can be just as pretty as always, but don't they make you feel increasingly ... anxious? Filled with more trepidation than peace? So what's the point? You see the picture of the baby condor or the panda munching on a bamboo shoot, and your heart just sinks, doesn't it? A picture of a poor old sea turtle with barnacles on her back, all ancient and exhausted, depositing her five gallons of doomed eggs in the sand hardly fills you with joy, because you realize, quite rightly, that just outside the frame falls the shadow of the condo. What's cropped from the shot of ocean waves crashing on a pristine shore is the plastics plant, and just beyond the dunes lies a parking lot. Hidden from immediate view in the butterfly-bright meadow, in the dusky thicket, in the oak and holly wood, are the surveyors' stakes, for someone wants to build a mall exactly there-some gas stations and supermarkets, some pizza and video shops, a health club, maybe a bulimia treatment center. Those lovely pictures of leopards and herons and wild rivers-well, you just know they're going to be accompanied by a text that will serve only to bring you down. You don't want to think about it! It's all so uncool. And you don't want to feel guilty either. Guilt is uncool. Regret maybe you'll consider. Maybe. Regret is a possibility, but don't push me, you say. Nature photographs have become something of a problem, along with almost everything else. Even though they leave the bad stuff out-maybe because you know they're leaving all the bad stuff out-such pictures are making you increasingly aware that you're a little too late for Nature. Do you feel that? Twenty years too late? Maybe only ten? Not way too late, just a little too late? Well, it appears that you are. And since you are, you've decided you're just not going to attend this particular party.

But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate, withstand trials, and undergo changes. Such was the case with the peace Josephus Famulus enjoyed. It was unstable, visible one moment, gone the next, sometimes near as a candle carried in the hand, sometimes as remote as a star in the wintry sky. And in time a new and special kind of sin and temptation more and more often made life difficult for him. It was not a strong, passionate emotion such as indignation or a sudden rush of instinctual urges. Rather, it seemed to be the opposite. It was a feeling very easy to bear in its initial stages, for it was scarcely perceptible; a condition without any real pain or deprivation, a slack, luke-warm, tedious state of the soul which could only be described in negative terms as a vanishing, a waning, and finally a complete absence of joy. There are days when the sun does not shine and the rain does not pour, but the sky sinks quietly into itself, wraps itself up, is gray but not black, sultry, but not with the tension of an imminent thunderstorm. Gradually, Joseph's days became like this as he approached old age. Less and less could he distinguish the mornings from the evenings, feast days from ordinary days, hours of rapture from hours of dejection. Everything ran sluggishly long in limp tedium and joylessness. This is old age, he thought sadly. He was sad because he had expected aging and the gradual extinction of his passions to bring a brightening and easing of his life, to take him a step nearer to harmony and mature peace of soul, and now age seemed to be disappointing and cheating him by offering nothing but this weary, gray, joyless emptiness, this feeling of chronic satiation. Above all he felt sated: by sheer existence, by breathing, by sleep at night, by life in his cave on the edge of the little oasis, by the eternal round of evenings and mornings, by the passing of travelers and pilgrims, camel riders and donkey riders, and most of all by the people who came to visit him, by those foolish, anxious, and childishly credulous people who had this craving to tell him about their lives, their sins and their fears, their temptations and self-accusations. Sometimes it all seemed to him like the small spring of water that collected in its stone basin in the oasis, flowed through grass for a while, forming a small brook, and then flowed on out into the desert sands, where after a brief course it dried up and vanished. Similarly, all these confessions, these inventories of sins, these lives, these torments of conscience, big and small, serious and vain, all of them came pouring into his ear, by the dozens, by the hundreds, more and more of them. But his ear was not dead like the desert sands. His ear was alive and could not drink, swallow, and absorb forever. It felt fatigued, abused, glutted. It longed for the flow and splashing of words, confessions, anxieties, charges, self-condemnations to cease; it longed for peace, death, and stillness to take the place of this endless flow.

You’ve come a long way,” Liv said. “You never cared about the riding stable horses back home.” “Those horses weren’t Cisco,” Sophie grinned. They led Cisco and Cactus Jack to the corral, slipped off their halters and watched them sink gratefully to the ground and roll like two large puppies in the sand. “There goes all our hard work.” Liv laughed. “Dirty as ever.” “Cisco’s wonderful,” Sophie said. “I can trust him. We’re on the same wavelength. Maybe he wasn’t a special horse till I started riding him. Maybe I wasn’t a very good rider. But together we’re good.

Activities to Develop the Tactile Sense Rub-a-Dub-Dub—Encourage the child to rub a variety of textures against her skin. Offer different kinds of soap (oatmeal soap, shaving cream, lotion soap) and scrubbers (loofah sponges, thick washcloths, foam pot-scrubbers, plastic brushes). Water Play—Fill the kitchen sink with sudsy water and unbreakable pitchers and bottles, turkey basters, sponges, eggbeaters, and toy water pumps. Or, fill a washtub with water and toys and set it on the grass. Pouring and measuring are educational and therapeutic, as well as high forms of entertainment. Water Painting—Give the child a bucket of water and paintbrush to paint the porch steps, the sidewalk, the fence, or her own body. Or, provide a squirt bottle filled with clean water (because the squirts often go in the child’s mouth). Finger Painting—Let the sensory craver wallow in this literally “sensational” activity. Encourage (but don’t force) the sensory avoider to stick a finger into the goop. For different tactile experiences, mix sand into the paint, or place a blob of shaving cream, peanut butter, or pudding on a plastic tray. Encourage him to draw shapes, letters, and numbers. If he “messes up,” he can erase the error with his hand and begin again. Finger Drawing—With your finger, “draw” a shape, letter, number, or design on the child’s back or hand. Ask the child to guess what it is and then to pass the design on to another person. Sand Play—In a sandbox, add small toys (cars, trucks, people, and dinosaurs), which the child can rearrange, bury, and rediscover. Instead of sand, use dried beans, rice, pasta, cornmeal, popcorn, and mud. Making mud pies and getting messy are therapeutic, too.

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

A NATION’S STRENGTH What makes a nation’s pillars high And its foundations strong? What makes it mighty to defy The foes that round it throng? It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand Go down in battle shock; Its shafts are laid on sinking sand, Not on abiding rock. Is it the sword? Ask the red dust Of empires passed away; The blood has turned their stones to rust, Their glory to decay. And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown Has seemed to nations sweet; But God has struck its luster down In ashes at his feet. Not gold but only men can make A people great and strong; Men who for truth and honor’s sake Stand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep, Who dare while others fly . . . They build a nation’s pillars deep And lift them to the sky. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

My hope is built on nothing less Than Jesu’s blood and righteousness, I dare not trust my sweetest frame, But wholly lean on Jesu’s Name. On Christ the solid Rock I stand, All other ground is sinking sand.

escape from a First Order spacecraft, and they had done that. Not that it would matter if he was found here, wandering alive among the dunes. Of one thing he was certain: His former colleagues would not understand, no matter how hard he tried to explain. No one fled the First Order and lived. The sand sucked at his feet as he stumbled toward the rising smoke. “Poe! Say something if you can hear me! Poe!” He did not expect a response, but he hoped for one. Flame had joined smoke in enveloping the wreck of the TIE fighter. Built more robustly than the typical ship of its class, the Special Forces craft had survived the crash landing, although hardly intact. Debris from the impact was scattered over a wide area. Careful not to cut himself on twisted shards of metal and still-hot composite, he pushed through the heat and haze until he reached the cockpit. It lay crushed and open to the desert air. Trying to shield his eyes against the smoke, Finn moved in closer. Something—there was something sticking out of the wreckage. An arm. Ignoring the heat and the licking flames, Finn reached in until he could get a grip on it. First one hand, then both, then pull—and it came free in his hands. No arm, no body: just Poe’s jacket. Frustrated, he threw it aside and tried to enter the ruined cockpit. Increasing smoke and heat made it impossible for him to even see, much less work his way inside. “Poe!” He felt his legs start to go out from under him. But they hadn’t buckled; the ground had. Looking down, he saw sand beginning to slide beneath him. His feet were already half covered. He was sinking. In front of him, the ruins of the ship began to slide into the hollow in which it had come to rest. Sand was crawling up the wings and reaching for the open cockpit. If he didn’t get away from the quicksand, it was clear he was going to join the TIE fighter in premature internment. He began backpedaling frantically, yelling at the disappearing vessel. “POE!” Going. Down, down into the sand, to a depth that could not be

Here is the story, which I have abridged (with acknowledgement to Sergey Parkhomenko, journalist and broadcaster, who reported it): The River Ob makes a turn at Kolpashevo, and every year it eats away a few feet of a sand cliff there. On April 30, 1979, the Ob's waters eroded another six-foot section of bank. Hanging from the newly exposed wall were the arms, legs and heads of people who had been buried there. A cemetery at least several yards wide had been exposed. The bodies had been packed in and layered tightly. Some of the skulls from the uppermost layer rolled out from the sandbank, and little boys picked them up and began playing with them. News of the burial spread quickly and people started gathering at the sandbank. The police and neighbourhood watch volunteers quickly cordoned off the whole thing. Shortly afterwards, they built a thick fence around the crumbling sandbank, warning people away. The next day, the Communist Party called meeting in the town, explaining that those buried were traitors and deserters from the war. But the explanation wasn't entirely convincing. If this were so, why was everyone dressed in civilian clothes? Why had women and children been executed as well? And from where, for that matter, did so many deserters come in a town of just 20,000 people? Meanwhile, the river continued to eat away at the bank and it became clear that the burial site was enormous; thousands were buried there. People could remember that there used to be a prison on these grounds in the late 1930s. It was general knowledge that there were executions there, but nobody could imagine just how many people were shot. The perimeter fence and barbed wire had long ago been dismantled, and the prison itself was closed down. But what the town's people didn't know was that Kolpashevo's prison operated a fully-fledged assembly line of death. There was a special wooden trough, down which a person would descend to the edge of a ditch. There, he'd be killed by rifle fire, the shooter sitting in a special booth. If necessary, he'd be finished off with a second shot from a pistol, before being added to the next layer of bodies, laid head-to-toe with the last corpse. Then they'd sprinkle him lightly with lime. When the pit was full, they filled in the hole with sand and moved the trough over a few feet to the side, and began again. But now the crimes of the past were being revealed as bodies fell into the water and drifted past the town while people watched from the shore. In Tomsk, the authorities decided to get rid of the burial site and remove the bodies. The task, it turned out, wasn't so easy. Using heavy equipment so near a collapsing sandbank wasn't wise and there was no time to dig up all the bodies by hand. The Soviet leadership was in a hurry. Then from Tomsk came new orders: two powerful tugboats were sent up the Ob, right up to the riverbank, where they were tied with ropes to the shore, facing away from the bank. Then they set their engines on full throttle. The wash from the ships' propellers quickly eroded the soft riverbank and bodies started falling into the water, where most of them were cut to pieces by the propellers. But some of the bodies escaped and floated away downstream. So motorboats were stationed there where men hooked the bodies as they floated by. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory was moored near the boats and the men were told to tie pieces of scrap metal to the bodies with wire and sink them in the deepest part of the river. The last team, also composed of local men from the town, worked a bit further downstream where they collected any bodies that had got past the boats and buried them on shore in unmarked graves or sank them by tying the bodies to stones. This cleanup lasted almost until the end of the summer.

A mirror sink, sank, sunk in white Sand of a Palm Tree.

》Insidious《 "Why are you so cold hearted", she asks. Words of wise say 'There is a pagoda inside every human being'. I want to see. She drops a destination pin twisted at end. In his silence, she sinks into abyss inside him, travelling canyons, caverns and reaches a red dead barren land like amidst of kangaroo country. The only things one see here are Zigzag paths created by Horned vipers, young barrel cactus and corpus of human emotions. "Come under the shelter of this Uluru hill", a thunderous voice she hears. This is blood which trickles like sand in hour glass. The lightning in anonymity is the veins where it flows. That dark clot moving towards mind is sudden anger, spreading in entire body and generates uncontrolled hypertension. Deceit, dishonesty, falsity and hypocrisy of travellers from ages has evolved this place. "But.. but where is that heart soft as fairyfloss? Let me go inside that rock" she urges. You don't need to go there. Purify your heart as of a child in cradle. You will inhale the fumes of fragrance approaching you like incense stick. Then again visit and observe this place, no less than Garden of Eden.

The only lovers! When you seek nothing, When the world seems still and silent, When the Sun shines bright yet darkness is lurking behind everything, When there is stillness with no movement, Then let me confess, “I love you Irma for all known and unknown reasons” And as we gradually progress, Let me admit, “I would love you the same in life’s all seasons!” In the fears of today, in the uncertainties of tomorrow, You will be the certain joy of everyday, In the moments of joy and during the times of sorrow, To strengthen our faith and feelings of love, I shall always invent a new way, Then as we flow being a part of river of life, Everything will be stationary while we shall have attained a happy flow, And in this paramount moment of my, and your life, Like the sparkling atoms of joy we shall now over the surface of the river of life glow! And as we pour ourselves into the sea of naked feelings, We shall drift as waves always chasing each other, To end our journeys at the shore of our naked feelings, And sink deep into the sand as a single feeling of love, where now you are my and I am your only lover!

I was a very nervous kid, I was anxious all the time when I was younger, but what's nice is that some of the things I was anxious about don't bother me at all anymore. Like, uh, I always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be. Because if you watch cartoons, quicksand is like the third biggest thing you have to worry about in adult life behind real sticks of dynamite and giant anvils falling on you from the sky. I used to sit around and think about what to do about quicksand. I never thought about how to handle real problems in adult life, I was never like "Oh, what's it gonna be like when relatives ask to borrow money?" Now that I've gotten older, not only have I never stepped in quicksand—I've never even heard about it! No one's ever been like, "Hey if you're coming to visit, take I-90 'cause I-95 has a little quicksand in the middle. Looks like regular sand, but then you're gonna start to sink into it.

The Reaper's Harvest by Stewart Stafford Vast underworld gates open on Samhain night, The grail Sun winters there, in paling sight. Unquiet spirits swarm forth in feral misprision, Trick-or-treat landlords knock in spectral vision. Autumn, perennially-early to Death's season, Winter's welcome overstayed in icy reason. Spring's distant wave thrills in emerging seed, Summer's blush in full alignment decreed. Snowflake to blossom, and greenery to withering; As effigy reminders of cyclical dithering, Seasonal standing stones sink to shifting sands, Saplings of the forest’s new strength, in nature’s hands. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

The "pull" of this quicksand was so strong that four of us were unable to lift a steer's tail out, once it was imbedded in the sand. And when we had released a tail by burrowing around it to arm's length and freed it, it would sink of its own weight in a minute's time until it would have to be burrowed out again. To avoid this we had to coil up the tails and tie them with a soft rope hobble.

April When we have gone the stone will stop singing April April Sinks through the sand of names Days to come With no stars hidden in them You That can wait being there You that lose nothing Know Nothing _______________ WS Merwin "April' February 1966

Oh, I should like to ride the seas, A roaring buccaneer; A cutlass banging at my knees, A dirk behind my ear. And when my captives’ chains would clank I’d howl with glee and drink, And then fling out the quivering plank And watch the beggars sink. I’d like to straddle gory decks, And dig in laden sands, And know the feel of throbbing necks Between my knotted hands. Oh, I should like to strut and curse Among my blackguard crew....

All I can think about is the Iraqi kid. Lying on the blood-soaked sand. In bed surrounded by family. Gasping for breath or for death or for both. Sunken eyes and sinking self. At this time of year death is all around. The fading of the sun's rays. Blackened leaves littering the pavements. The snow graves of small things.

CHAPTER 38   Venial Sins       Though the sins of which we have been treating are those which we should avoid with most care, yet do not think that you are dispensed from vigilance in regard to venial sins. I conjure you not to be one of those ungenerous Christians who make no scruple of committing a sin because it is venial. Remember these words of Holy Scripture: "He that contemneth small things shall fall by little and little." (Ecclus. 19:1). "Do not despise venial sins because they appear trifling," says St. Augustine, "but fear them because they are numerous. Small animals in large numbers can kill a man. Grains of sand are very small, yet, if accumulated, they can sink a ship. Drops of water are very small, yet how often they become a mighty river, a raging torrent, sweeping everything before them!

...though by then it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish the acts of God from the endeavors of men. The wind was God; of this they were confident. As were the mountains funneling the wind. But the sand, all that monstrous, infinite sand. Who had latticed the Southwest with a network of aqueducts? Who had drained first Owens Lake then Mono Lake, Mammoth Lake, Lake Havasu and so on, leaving behind wide white smears of dust? Who had diverted the coast's rainwater and sapped the Great Basin of its groundwater? Who had tunneled beneath Lake Mead, installed a gaping outlet at its bottommost point, and drained it like a sink? Who had sucked up the Ogallala Aquifer, the Rio Grande aquifer, the snowpack of the Sierras and the Cascades? If this was God, he went by new names: Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, City of San Diego, City of Phoenix, Arizona Water and Power, New Mexico Water Commission, Las Vegas Housing and Water Authority, Bureau of Land Management, United States Department of the Interior.

She craned her neck to the side, stretching it. “When you reach my age, it’s sometimes hard to remember the shape of your life as it once was. Once, I carried that bedraggled rat on my shoulders, much like you do with your girl. I would take him to the beach before lunch-time and think that I would never tire of watching him squeal as the sand sinks around his toes, such precious toes. Now his squealing sounds like wheels in much need of oiling, and if they don’t grate my old bones, they make me snore. I don’t even want to think about what his toes might look like.” “Sorrow,” she said with a smile, “is not always tragic.

That girl could make friends with the meanest croc alive with little more than a smile and a laugh. You, on the other hand, made her work for it.” “Did you just compare me to a mean old croc?” Kerry asked, the thread of amusement back in her tone. “If the tough hide fits,” he said, but not unkindly. Kerry nodded, gave him a considering look. “True that,” she said. She picked her way over a tricky stretch of kelp-covered rock, then added, “Maybe I was trying to save her from her own friendly nature.” She looked back as Cooper hopped his way over the last pile, his heavy-booted feet sinking into a narrow stretch of sand before starting over the next rock bed. “I knew I was going to leave. You all did. No point in breaking hearts.” She held his gaze more directly now, turning back slightly to look at him full on. “I might be a tough old croc, but I’m not heartless.” “I didn’t say--” “You didn’t have to.” She opened her mouth, closed it again, then took in a slow, steadying breath, letting the deep salt tang tickle the back of her throat and the tart brine of the sea fill her senses. Anything to keep his scent from doing that instead. “As a rule, I don’t do good-byes well. I know that about myself. I also know that I have the attention span of a sand fly. A well-intentioned sand fly,” she added, trying to inject a bit of humor, mostly failing judging by the unwavering look in his eyes. “So, given my wanderlusting, gypsy life, I learned early on to keep things friendly and light. Easy, breezy. I’ve made friends all over the world, but none so close that--” “That missing them causes a pang,” he added, “Here maybe,” he said, pointing at his own head. “But not here.” He pointed at her chest, more specifically at her heart. This was how they were, how they’d been from the start. Finishing each other’s sentences, following each other’s train of thought, even when the exchange of words was a bare minimum. She glanced up into his steady gaze and thought, or when there’d been no words at all. That was why they’d worked so well together. And also why she’d had a tough time keeping her feelings for him strictly professional…She’d forgotten how threatening it felt, to have someone read her so easily. Most folks never look past the surface. Cooper--hell, the entire Jax family--hadn’t even blinked at surface Kerry before barreling right on past all of her well-honed, automatically erected barriers. “Like I said,” she went on, “I don’t do good-byes well.” She continued walking down the beach then, knowing she was avoiding continued eye contact, but it was unnerving enough that he was here, in her personal orbit, in her world. Her home world. Wasn’t that invasive enough? “Would a postcard or two have killed you?” he finally asked her retreating back. “Not for me; I never expected one.” She didn’t glance back at that, but just as he knew her too well, she knew him the same way. She’d heard that little hint of disappointment, of long-held hope. Of course the very fact that he was there, on her beach, was proof enough that he’d had hopes where she was concerned. And in that moment, she thought, the hell with this, and stopped. Running halfway around the world apparently hadn’t been far enough to leave him and all of what had transpired between her and the entire Jax family behind. So why did she think she could escape it along the span of one low-tide beach?

They felt justified when, days later, Churchill took the drastic step of ordering the sinking of the French fleet anchored off Mers el Kébir in French Algeria, in order to deny it to the Germans. The bombardment, which killed thirteen hundred French sailors, revived and validated the traditional suspicions among the Levantine French of their British rival’s true ambitions.14 It also made de Gaulle’s task much harder. Only Georges Catroux, the former aide to the one-armed General Gouraud and now high commissioner of French Indo-China, responded enthusiastically. Catroux also knew de Gaulle personally from their time together in prison camp during the previous war.

He took the cup to the sink. There, in the mirror staring back, was a circular bandage in the middle of his forehead. He touched it, gently. The fog cleared. The Haystack and the fan and the mist. The needle. Vertigo smacked him. He held onto the sink. It got worse. He sank to his knees and crawled to the bed while the memories settled. It was strange how his mind was like water and the memories swirled like grains of sand. There was something he was supposed to remember but it was so hard. Summer camp? FBI? Damn, he couldn’t remember it now. He had journeyed through the needle to some… dream. Foreverland. It was torture to get there.

I wanna hear about yer brothers," Mira said.  "Are they all like Lucien?" Charles made a noise of amusement.  "Thank God, no.  I'm the second oldest, and then there's Gareth.  He's the black sheep of the family and leads a group of ne'er do wells who've styled themselves after the Hellfire Club and call themselves the Den of Debauchery.  Gareth is irresponsible and dissolute, and Lucien despairs of him ever making anything of himself besides a general public nuisance — but I have rather more faith in him than that." "And what do the villagers call him?" "The Wild One." "He sounds fun," Mira said.  "Is he betrothed?" Charles laughed.  "No mama in her right mind would want their daughter married to Gareth.  His reputation is not undeserved."  He leaned back, his elbows sinking into the sand, the sun warming his upturned face.  "And then of course there's Andrew, my youngest brother, who aspires to be an inventor and is, according to the last letter I received from him, hoping to construct a flying machine." "A flying machine?" cried both girls in unison. "Yes.  A preposterous notion, isn't it?  However, I suppose that if anyone can do it, Andrew can.  He has a clever brain, and did very well at Oxford." "What's his nickname?" "The Defiant One." "Why?" "Because he is fiery and independent, and is ever at odds with Lucien." There was long silence.  And then, softly, Amy said, "And what did the villagers call you, Charles?" Everything stilled inside him.  He sat up, feeling a sudden rush of self-loathing and loss.  "The Beloved One," he said quietly.  Head bent, he picked up a handful of sand, letting it trickle out through his fingers.  "Because I always did everything right, always lived up to what everyone expected of me, always succeeded at whatever I put my mind to — and never let anyone down."  He turned his face toward the salty breeze.  "Until now." Even

To the east the land was darkening. Night does not fall. It rises from the earth as the sun sinks low, sets, and embraces the land with its shadow. How could I describe this place? Words could only be read and the scene imagined. Even a photo could only be seen. It would not include the sound of the water on the stones, the scent of the spruce trees, the coolness of sea wrack under my hand, or the weary satisfaction of just sitting there after paddling six hours that day, and six weeks before that. The size of these islets and their details of sand, shell and rock beach, grass, driftwood, and flowers, the small woods back of the shore – these are proportioned to kayaks and close-ups, not big cruise ships or ferries. Those get a far outline of the shore, but their only close-ups are of the docks and the towns. This country is made for the pace of a kayak.

God will leave you when you come to die? I must tell you that story of the good Welsh lady, who, when she lay dying, was visited by her minister. He said to her, “Sister, are you sinking?” She answered him not a word, but looked at him with a suspicious eye. He repeated the question, “Sister, are you sinking?” She looked at him again, as if she could not believe he would ask such a question. At last, rising a little in the bed, she said, “Sinking! Sinking! Did you ever know a sinner sink through a rock? If I had been standing on the sand, I might sink; but, thank God, I am on the Rock of Ages, and there is no sinking there.” How glorious to die! Oh angels come! Oh, legions of the Lord of hosts, stretch, stretch your broad wings and lift us up from earth. Oh, winged seraphs, lift us far above the reach of these inferior things. But until you come, I will sing, “Since Jesus is mine, I’ll not fear undressing-- But gladly put off these garments of clay, To die in the Lord is covenant blessing; Since Jesus to glory, through death led the way.

Time is suddenly an hourglass running out of sand, and instead of building castles, I’m sinking in it.