Slab Day Quotes

I always wonder about raindrops. I wonder about how they're always falling down, tripping over their own feet, breaking their legs and forgetting their parachutes as they tumble right out of the sky toward an uncertain end. It's like someone is emptying their pockets over the earth and doesn't seem to care where the contents fall, doesn't seem to care that the raindrops burst when they hit the ground, that they shatter when they fall to the floor, that people curse the days the drops dare to tap on their doors. I am a raindrop. My parents emptied their pockets of me and left me to evaporate on a concrete slab.

Concerning trees and leaves... there's a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.

Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. This is the hour that stretches. Djan karet. We are the cavalry. We're here. Put away the pills. We'll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it'll be your turn to help us. "Eidolons" (1988)

Very often, what is meant to be a stepping stone turns out to be a slab of wet cement that will harden around your foot if you do not take the next step soon enough.

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret. Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really. You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge. There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter. At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.

In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents are buried side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite. Then, all day, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of houses and beating down the steps. The sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day.

My day starts like a regular guy’s. I wake up, drink raw eggs, run around Philadelphia, and punch raw slabs of meat. Wait, that’s not my story—that’s Rocky’s. I get us confused all the time.

But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present. I have seen men consumed by their dreams, and it is a sour business. If you cling too tightly to a dream—a poodle bitch or a personal sausage chef or whatever—then you miss the felicity of your heart beating and the smell of the grass growing and the sounds lizards make when you run through the neighborhood with our friend. Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you’ve eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, then the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you chew on the next one.

I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight. The lyric cast of the sun, the teeming fields with tall plants nodding away under the intense midafternoon heat, the squeak of our wooden floors, or the scrape of the clay ashtray pushed ever so lightly on the marble slab that used to sit on my nightstand. I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn't dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but I didn't care to read the signposts. This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. He could turn out to be a creep; he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip might ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down till nothing but fish bones remained. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I'd always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment.

Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d. Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined. Harpier cries ’Tis time, ’tis time. Round about the cauldron go; In the poison’d entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Silver’d in the moon’s eclipse, Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron, For the ingredients of our cauldron. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble. By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.

Just to say evil Islamics did it, that's so lame, and we know it. We see those official close-ups on the screen. The shifty liar's look, the twelve-stepper's gleam in the eye. One look at these faces and we know they're guilty of the worst crimes we can imagine. But who's in any hurry to imagine? To make the awful connection? Any more than Germans were back in 1933, when Nazis torched Reichstag within a month of Hitler becoming chancellor. Which of course is not to suggest that Bush and his people have actually gone out and staged the events of 11 September. It would take a mind hopelessly diseased with paranoia, indeed a screamingly anti-American nutcase, even to allow to cross her mind the possibility that that terrible day would have deliberately been engineered as a pretext to impose some endless Orwellian 'war' and the emergency decrees we will soon be living under. Nah, nah, perish that thought. "But there's still always the other thing. Our yearning. Our deep need for it to be true. Somewhere, down at some shameful dark recess of the national soul, we need to feel betrayed, even guilty. As if it was us who created Bush and his gang, Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Feith and the rest of them--we who called down the sacred lightning of 'democracy' and then the fascist majority on the Supreme Court threw the switches, and Bush rose from the slab and began his rampage. And whatever happened then is on our ticket.

The whole process disgusts me, just put me in the goddamn earth and walk away. I don’t want to lie on a cold slab in some old house waiting to have my innards drained and embalming fluid put inside my poor dead body, just put me in the goddamn earth and walk away.

No Time In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents lie buried side by side under a smooth slab of granite. Then, all day long, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

Into the cargo room. Down the ramp of the hatch door, into the brightness of day. They’d barely stepped off of it when squeals pierced the air and the slab of metal began to close. Alec lifted the Berg off the ground, blue thrusters roaring. Mark was barely holding onto his mind, but he felt a sudden, unbearable sadness. He’d never see the old bear again.

The Fish She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her—there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

Hazel heads up the hill to the cemetery where generations of my husband’s people are buried behind a low iron fence, and for whatever reason I follow the dog. A plush vegetation is knitted over all the graves, and I think of how meticulously Joe’s aunt had kept things here, but this is not the summer for weeding. The cemetery is the highest point on the property and would have been the logical site for a house, the way it overlooks the trees and the barn and all the way to the edge of the lake, but those first settlers gave the best land to their dead, the very first a two-year-old named Mary. One by one they followed her up the hill until twenty-nine of them were resting beneath the mossy slabs, and there they wait for us to join them. That’s what life was like back in the day, you buried your children, your husband, your parents right there on the farm. They had never been anywhere else. They had never wanted to be anywhere else.

His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat. After the terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who’d escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound. And his grandmother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon made up in rubies; such a gesture of luxurious defiance! That night at the opera comes back to me even now… the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood. I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I’d never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it; and it was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.

The taste of fresh orange juice. A fig. the sight of a flower. The sound of music. A slab of sunlight on floorboards. Cats and dogs and goats and lizards and dolphins. Harrison Ford’s face. Imagine if you were from a planet with none of those things. Imagine how full of wonder everything would seem. How unjaded we would be by everything in front of us. How a picture of a sunset would never seem corny again. How a simple walk in an orchard would be utopia. How a cool breeze on a hot day would be a lottery win. How each and every bird song would be a symphony.

In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery, and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee.  Or there were stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam.  At the mid-day meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima- beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn-bread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits-- cherries, pears, peaches.  At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork-chops, fish, young fried chicken.

I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight. The lyric cast of the sun, the teeming fields with tall plants nodding away under the intense midafternoon heat, the squeak of our wooden floors, or the scrape of the clay ashtray pushed ever so lightly on the marble slab that used to sit on my nightstand. I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn't dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but I didn't care to read the milestones. This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. He could turn out to be a creep; he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip might ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down till nothing but fish bones remained. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I'd always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment.

… but not a single one of them is more or less remarkable or ridiculous than everything already here. The taste of fresh orange juice. A fig. the sight of a flower. The sound of music. A slab of sunlight on floorboards. Cats and dogs and goats and lizards and dolphins. Harrison Ford’s face. Imagine if you were from a planet with none of those things. Imagine how full of wonder everything would seem. How unjaded we would be by everything in front of us. How a picture of a sunset would never seem corny again. How a simple walk in an orchard would be utopia. How a cool breeze on a hot day would be a lottery win. How each and every bird song would be a symphony.

We are all doomed, Yankee detective. One day I will come into work and see myself lying on this slab.

WHEN YOU LIVE IN GOD, your day begins when you open your eyes, though you have done nothing yourself to open them, and you take your first breath, though there is no reason why this life-giving breeze should be given to you and not to some other. In the dark or in the light, with a stone slab under your back or a feather topper, your day begins when you let God hold you because you do not have the slightest idea how to hold yourself—when you let God raise you up, when you consent to rest to show you get the point, since that is the last thing you would do if you were running the show yourself. When you live in God, your day begins when you lose yourself long enough for God to find you, and when God finds you, to lose yourself again in praise.

I take a deep breath and tiptoe to the window only to press my nose against the cool surface. Feel my breath fog up the glass. Close my eyes to the sound of a soft pitter-patter rushing through the wind. Raindrops are my only reminder that clouds have a heartbeat. That I have one, too. I always wonder about raindrops. I wonder about how they’re always falling down, tripping over their own feet, breaking their legs and forgetting their parachutes as they tumble right out of the sky toward an uncertain end. It’s like someone is emptying their pockets over the earth and doesn’t seem to care where the contents fall, doesn’t seem to care that the raindrops burst when they hit the ground, that they shatter when they fall to the floor, that people curse the days the drops dare to tap on their doors. I am a raindrop. My parents emptied their pockets of me and left me to evaporate on a concrete slab.

dawned, even for her, that the end was here. Spots swam before Mark’s eyes, flashing lights. His heart wouldn’t stop racing, and it felt as if the organ pumped acid through his veins. Trina, silent, kept up with him. Into the cargo room. Down the ramp of the hatch door, into the brightness of day. They’d barely stepped off of it when squeals pierced the air and the slab of metal began to close. Alec lifted the Berg off the ground, blue thrusters roaring. Mark was barely holding onto his mind, but he

Layla!" Don bounded into her sight. The door behind her was still bolted. Where had he come from? The starshot tumbled from her hands and clattered to the floor. She snatched it up and slipped it back inside her dress. Bill was gone.But Don was-Daniel was right where she wanted him to be. "What are you doing here?" Her voice broke with the force of having to act surprised to see him. He didn't seem to hear it.He rushed toward her and wrapped her in his arms. "Saving your life." "How did you get in?" "Don't worry about that.No mortal man, no slab of stone can obstruct a love as true as ours. I will always find you." In his bare, bronzed arms, it was Luce's instinct to feel comforted. But she couldn't right then.Her heart felt ragged and cold.This easy happiness, these feelings of complete trust, every one of the lovely emotions Daniel had shown her how to feel in every life-they were torture to her now. "Fear not," he whispered. "Let me tell you, my love, what happens after this life.You come back,you rise again. Your rebirth is beautiful and real.You come back to me,again and again-" The light from the lamp flickered and made his violet eyes sparkle.His body was so warm against hers. "But I die again and again." "What?" He tilted his head.Even when his physique looked exotic to her, she knew his expressions so well-that bemused adoration when she expressed something he hadn't expected her to understand. "How do you-Never mind. It doesn't matter.What matters is that we will again be together.We will always find each other,always love each other, no matter what.I will never leave you." Luce fell to her knees on the stone steps. She hid her face in her hands. "I don't know how you can stand it.Over and over again,the same sadness-" He lifted her up. "The same ecstasy-" "The same fire that kills everything-" "The same passion that ignites it all again.You don't know.You can't remember how wonderful-" "I've seen it.I do know." How she had his attention. He didn't seem sure whether or not to believe her, but at least he was listening. "What if there's no hope of anything ever changing?" she asked. "There is only hope. One day, you will live through it.That absolute truth is the only thing that keeps me going. I will never give up on you. Even if it takes forever." He wiped away her tears with his thumb. "I'll love you with all my heart,in every life, through every death. I will not be bound by anything but my love for you." "But it's so hard.Isn't it hard for you? Haven't you ever thought,what if..." "One day,our love will conquer this dark cycle.That's worth everything to me.

But that is the difference between us, I always want more than what the world has to give me. There is a crow outside calling out a lonesome call. Maybe one day I will sprout wings and fly above the land, only to wish that I was a salmon swimming upriver to the sea.

Let us suppose you give your three-year-old daughter a coloring book and a box of crayons for her birthday. The following day, with the proud smile only a little once can muster, she presents her first pictures for inspection. She has colored the sun black, the grass purple, and the sky green. In the lower right-hand corner, she has added woozy wonders of floating slabs and hovering rings; on the left, a panoply of colorful, carefree squiggles. You marvel at her bold strokes and intuit that her psyche is railing against its own cosmic puniness in the face of a big, ugly world. Later at the office, you share with your staff your daughter's first artistic effort and you make veiled references to the early work of van Gogh. A little child can not do a bad coloring; nor can a child of God do bad prayer. "A father is delighted when his little one, leaving off her toys and friends, runs to him and climbs into his arms. As he holds hi little one close to him, he cared little whether the child is looking around, her attention flittering from one thing to another or just settling down to sleep. Essentially the child is choosing to be with the father, confident of the love, the care, the security that is hers in those arms. Our prayer is much like that. We settle down in our Father's arms, in his loving hands. Our minds, our thoughts, our imagination may flit about here and there; we might even fall asleep; but essentially we are choosing for this time to remain intimately with our Father, giving ourselves to him, receiving his love and care, letting him enjoy us as he will. It is very simple prayer. It is very childlike prayer. It is prayer that opens us out to all the delights of the kingdom.

more than anything else was … CHOCOLATE. Walking to school in the mornings, Charlie could see great slabs of chocolate piled up high in the shop windows, and he would stop and stare and press his nose against the glass, his mouth watering like mad. Many times a day, he would see other children taking bars of creamy chocolate out of their pockets and munching them greedily, and that, of course, was pure torture. Only once a year, on his birthday, did Charlie Bucket ever get to taste a bit of chocolate. The whole family saved up their money for that special occasion, and when the great day arrived, Charlie was always presented with one small chocolate bar to eat all by himself. And each time he received it, on those marvellous birthday mornings, he would place it carefully in a small wooden box that he owned, and treasure it as though it were a bar of solid gold; and for the next few days, he would allow himself only to look at it, but never to touch it.

Moons have passed since last we met, battles fought and enemies fallen. At the bridge of Anrag I took fifteen heads. I overthrew the tyrant Dagrud War-Scythe and took his cattle as tribute to my skill. It was a glorious day.’ ‘Sounds pretty wild. I’m having a new patio put down. You and me both, eh?’ ‘Square slabs or crazy paving?’ ‘Square slabs.

Motion is the enduring principle of Eastern Europe. Motion of people, motion of faiths, motion of ideas. This is the reason why population maps of Eastern Europe, especially old ones, look so disorderly, like slabs of marbled beef or a cup of coffee before the cream has settled. The migrations leading to the creation of Western European nations happened in the very distant past. In Eastern Europe, they never stopped. Long after the Visigoths and Franks, Saxons and Jutes of the West were a distant memory, nomadic Cumans and Pechenegs were still arriving from the steppes. Tatars were still conducting great slave raids in the territory around Lviv in Mozart's day, and only ceased when Catherine the Great finally put a stop to them.

And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun’s surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the now. Spring is seeping north, towards me and away from me, at sixteen miles a day. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in black clusters like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance. Somewhere east of me, on another continent, it is sunset, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; within each case, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and curve inward, align, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now?

with walls of bare black stone and four tall narrow windows that looked out to the four points of the compass. In the center of the chamber was the great table from which it took its name, a massive slab of carved wood fashioned at the command of Aegon Targaryen in the days before the Conquest. The Painted Table was more than fifty feet long, perhaps half that wide at its widest point, but less than four feet across at its narrowest. Aegon’s carpenters had shaped it after the land of Westeros, sawing out each bay and peninsula until the table nowhere ran straight. On its surface, darkened by near three hundred years of varnish, were painted the Seven Kingdoms as they had been in Aegon’s day; rivers and mountains, castles and cities, lakes and forests.

However, the experience of the world as one individual is so fleeting it is barely even measurable; especially when held up against the great passage of time felt since Earth’s conception. As humans, we arrive and pass like a mayfly spiralling on a breath of wind for its single day of life in the sun. Our lives are so short when measured against something like the formation of a granite slab, lying out on my garden path; so short, in fact, that the revelation of this brevity can make you feel like your life is even a little pointless – but the other side of this, quite extraordinary, humbling, is to see your time as the most wonderful gift of all. And if it is so (which it really is) then, like the mayfly with only twenty-four hours to live, I am going to open my senses to everything that this day has to offer.

And it is strange: a few moments after the cars that brought us down drive off, I become aware that already I have discovered something new. Because we do not have a place of our own, nor will have for the next three days, we must invent one. I catch myself, and the eyes of one or two others, searching for a section of the pavement with which we might want to become familiar. We are looking among the concrete slabs for the outline of a home.

One day I watched a man sweep all the yellow leaves off the street in front of his house, and then he proceeded to do the same thing in front of his neighbor's houses on both sides. If I was the neighbor I'd be mad. Leave my leaves alone, I'd think. As soon as the man went back in there was a gust of wind and a couple leaves trickled into his clear pristine black tar, and I laughed out loud, as if I'm not always trying to stave off death and the death of my loved ones.

I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight. The lyric cast of the sun, the teeming fields with tall plants nodding away under the intense midafternoon heat, the squeak of our wooden floors, or the scrape of the clay ashtray pushed ever so lightly on the marble slab that used to sit on my nightstand. I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn't dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but I didn't care to read the mileposts. This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. He could turn out to be a creep; he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip might ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down till nothing but fish bones remained. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I'd always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment.

When was it that first I heard of the grass harp? Long before the autumn we lived in the China tree; an earlier autumn, then; and of course it was Dolly who told me, no one else would have known to call it that, a grass harp. . . If on leaving town you take the church road you soon will pass a glaring hill of bonewhite slabs and brown burnt flowers: this is the Baptist cemetery. . . below the hill grows a field of high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go to see it in the fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows light firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves sighing human music, a harp of voices. . . It must have been on one of those September days when we were there in the woods gathering roots that Dolly said: Do you hear? that is the grass harp, always telling a story -- it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too.

Near the exit to the blue patio, DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin Stick stand by a concrete scale model of the Jungfrau, ... socking the slopes of the famous mountain with red rubber hot-water bags full of ice cubes, the idea being to pulverize the ice for Pirate's banana frappes. With their nights' growths of beard, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, miasmata of foul breath, DeCoverley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier. Elsewhere in the maisonette, other drinking companions disentangle from blankets (one spilling wind from his, dreaming of a parachute), piss into bathroom sinks, look at themselves with dismay in concave shaving mirrors, slab water with no clear plan in mind onto heads of thinning hair, struggle into Sam Brownes, dub shoes against rain later in the day with hand muscles already weary of it, sing snatches of popular songs whose tunes they don't always know, lie, believing themselves warmed, in what patches of the new sunlight come between the mullions, begin tentatively to talk shop as a way of easing into whatever it is they'll have to be doing in less than an hour, lather necks and faces, yawn, pick their noses, search cabinets or bookcases for the hair of the dog that not without provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last night. Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast:flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which-- though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off--- the genetic chains prove labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations. . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects. . . .

[Concerning] phosphorescent bodies, and in particular to uranium salts whose phosphorescence has a very brief duration. With the double sulfate of uranium and potassium ... I was able to perform the following experiment: One wraps a Lumière photographic plate with a bromide emulsion in two sheets of very thick black paper, such that the plate does not become clouded upon being exposed to the sun for a day. One places on the sheet of paper, on the outside, a slab of the phosphorescent substance, and one exposes the whole to the sun for several hours. When one then develops the photographic plate, one recognizes that the silhouette of the phosphorescent substance appears in black on the negative. If one places between the phosphorescent substance and the paper a piece of money or a metal screen pierced with a cut-out design, one sees the image of these objects appear on the negative. One can repeat the same experiments placing a thin pane of glass between the phosphorescent substance and the paper, which excludes the possibility of chemical action due to vapors which might emanate from the substance when heated by the sun's rays. One must conclude from these experiments that the phosphorescent substance in question emits rays which pass through the opaque paper and reduces silver salts. [Although the sun is irrelevant, and he misinterprets the role of phosphorescence, he has discovered the effect of radioactivity.]

For a split second, the space around Werner tears in half, as though the last molecules of oxygen have been ripped out of it. Then shards of stone and wood and metal streak past, ringing against his helmet, sizzling into the wall behind them, and Volkheimer’s barricade collapses, and everywhere in the darkness, things scuttle and slide, and he cannot find any air to breathe. But the detonation creates some tectonic shift in the building’s rubble, and there is a snap followed by multiple cascades in the darkness. When Werner stops coughing and pushes the debris off his chest, he finds Volkheimer staring up at a single sheared hole of purple light. Sky. Night sky. A shaft of starlight slices through the dust and drops along the edge of a mound of rubble to the floor. For a moment Werner inhales it. Then Volkheimer urges him back and climbs halfway up the ruined staircase and begins whaling away at the edges of the hole with a piece of rebar. The iron clangs and his hands lacerate and his six-day beard glows white with dust, but Werner can see that Volkheimer makes quick progress: the sliver of light becomes a violet wedge, wider across than two of Werner’s hands. With one more blow, Volkheimer manages to pulverize a big slab of debris, much of it crashing onto his helmet and shoulders, and then it is simply a matter of scrabbling and climbing. He squeezes his upper body through the hole, his shoulders scraping on the edges, his jacket tearing, hips twisting, and then he’s through.

The back of the house looks out onto a wide lawn and beyond it, a lake. At the bottom of the lawn is a pool, which is lined with slabs of slate so that the water is always cold and clear, even on the hottest days, and in the barn there is an indoor pool and a living room; every wall of the barn can be lifted up and away from the structure, so that the entire interior is exposed to the outdoors, to the tree peonies and lilac bushes that bloom around it in the early spring; to the panicles of wisteria that drip from its roof in the early summer. To the right of the house is a field that paints itself red with poppies in July; to the left is another through which he and Willem scattered thousands of wildflower seeds: cosmos and daisies and foxglove and Queen Anne’s lace.

One Friday, after a particularly shattering day at the office, in which my code reviews had all come back red with snotty comments, and my manager, Peter, had gently inquired about the pace of my refactoring ("perhaps not sufficiently turbo-charged"), I arrived home in a swirl of angst, with petulance and self-recrimination locked in ritual combat to determine which would ruin my night. On the phone with Beoreg, I ordered my food with a rattling sigh, and when his brother arrived at my door, he carried something different: a more compact tub containing a fiery red broth and not one but two slabs of bread for dipping. "Secret spicy," he whispered. The soup was so hot it burned the frustration out of my, and I went to bed feeling like a fresh plate, scalded and scraped clean.

Cortés in his own way helped keep the countryside stirred up by demanding that all of the available gold in the area be brought to Tenochtitlán as tribute. With this tribute, and with other treasure that had belonged to Moctezuma’s father, the Spaniards were kept busy for days just assessing the value of their loot. The small pieces removed from Aztec jewelry alone were valued at 600,000 pesos. Goldsmiths were brought in from a nearby town, and they smelted the gold into slabs. The Spaniards were unable to weigh the treasure accurately, and Cortés suggested that no one take his share until it could be divided more equitably. But the captains and the soldiers had come too far and fought too hard to be put off. They demanded a division of the spoils, and Cortés had to consent.

Then at last, when he could stand it no longer, he would peel back a tiny bit of the paper wrapping at one corner to expose a tiny bit of chocolate, and then he would take a tiny nibble – just enough to allow the lovely sweet taste to spread out slowly over his tongue. The next day, he would take another tiny nibble, and so on, and so on. And in this way, Charlie would make his sixpenny bar of birthday chocolate last him for more than a month. But I haven’t yet told you about the one awful thing that tortured little Charlie, the lover of chocolate, more than anything else. This thing, for him, was far, far worse than seeing slabs of chocolate in the shop windows or watching other children munching bars of creamy chocolate right in front of him. It was the most terrible torturing thing you could imagine, and it was this: In the town itself, actually within sight of the house in which Charlie lived, there was an ENORMOUS CHOCOLATE FACTORY! Just imagine that! And it wasn’t simply an ordinary enormous chocolate factory, either. It was the largest and most famous in the whole world! It was WONKA’S FACTORY, owned by a man called Mr Willy Wonka, the greatest inventor and maker of chocolates that there has ever been. And what a tremendous, marvellous place it was! It had huge iron gates leading into it, and a high wall surrounding it, and smoke belching from its chimneys, and strange whizzing sounds coming from deep inside it. And outside the walls, for half a mile around in every direction, the air was scented with the heavy rich smell of melting chocolate! Twice a day, on his way to and from school, little Charlie Bucket had to walk right past the gates of the factory. And every time he went by, he would begin to walk very, very slowly, and he would hold his nose high in the air and take long deep sniffs of the gorgeous chocolatey smell all around him. Oh, how he loved that smell! And oh, how he wished he could go inside the factory and see what it was like!

But you are not listening, sapperment! great big she-fool that you are—sheep’s-head! Dummkopf! Donnerwetter! you are looking at the chimney-pots when Svengali talks! Look a little lower down between the houses, on the other side of the river! There is a little ugly grey building there, and inside are eight slanting slabs of brass, all of a row, like beds in a school dormitory, and one fine day you shall lie asleep on one of those slabs—you, Drilpy, who would not listen to Svengali, and therefore lost him! … And over the middle of you will be a little leather apron, and over your head a little brass tap, and all day long and all night the cold water shall trickle, trickle, trickle all the way down your beautiful white body to your beautiful white feet till they turn green, and your poor, damp, draggled, muddy rags will hang above you from the ceiling for your friends to know you by; drip, drip, drip! But you will have no friends…. ‘And people of all sorts, strangers, will stare at you through the big plate-glass window—Englanders,

The last time I saw Collin was in 1917, at the foot of Mort-Homme. Before the great slaughter, Collin’d been an avid angler. On that day, he was standing at the hole, watching maggots swarm among blow flies on two boys that we couldn’t retrieve for burial without putting our own lives at risk. And there, at the loop hole, he thought of his bamboo rods, his flies and the new reel he hadn’t even tried out yet. Collin was imaging himself on the riverbank, wine cooling in the current his stash of worms in a little metal box and a maggot on his hook, writhing like… Holy shit. Were the corpses getting to him? Collin. The poor guy didn’t even have time to sort out his thoughts. In that split second, he was turned into a slab of bloody meat. A white hot hook drilled right through him and churned through his guts, which spilled out of a hole in his belly. He was cleared out of the first aid station. The major did triage. Stomach wounds weren’t worth the trouble. There were all going to die anyway, and besides, he wasn’t equipped to deal with them. Behind the aid station, next to a pile of wood crosses, there was a heap of body parts and shapeless, oozing human debris laid out on stretchers, stirred only be passing rats and clusters of large white maggots. But on their last run, the stretcher bearers carried him out after all… Old Collin was still alive. From the aid station to the ambulance and from the ambulance to the hospital, all he could remember was his fall into that pit, with maggots swarming over the open wound he had become from head to toe… Come to think of it, where was his head? And what about his feet? In the ambulance, the bumps were so awful and the pain so intense that it would have been a relief to pass out. But he didn’t. He was still alive, writhing on his hook. They carved up old Collin good. They fixed him as best they could, but his hands and legs were gone. So much for fishing. Later, they pinned a medal on him, right there in that putrid recovery room. And later still, they explained to him about gangrene and bandages packed with larvae that feed on death tissue. He owed them his life. From one amputation and operation to the next – thirty-eight in all – the docs finally got him “back on his feet”. But by then, the war was long over.

Even though Jasmine was supposed to try Marcella's Stone Plum Soup tonight, she pulled at her baking cupboard. She wanted chocolate. She wanted oozing, rich, creamy, comforting chocolate. She would throw chops on the grill and toss a salad for dinner. Tonight, she was going to concentrate her efforts on dessert. She pulled out her big bowl and mixer. She took down blocks of chocolate, vanilla, sugar. Poked her head into the refrigerator to count the eggs. Ten. Just enough. Her mouth watered, her tongue repeatedly swallowing the swamp that had become her mouth. Cream? A pint poked from behind the mayonnaise. She smelled it. One day to spare. She padded to the liquor cabinet and examined her choices. Brandy, amaretto, Grand Marnier. Mmm, yes. Grand Marnier, a subtle orange swirl. The chocolate and butter wobbled over the heat of the double boiler. Unctuous and smooth. Jasmine beat the eggs and sugar until lemony light. She poured in the chocolate in a long professional sweep. A few deft turns of the spatula turned the mixture into what she really craved. She stood over the bowl tasting slabs of it from the spatula. A good dash of Grand Marnier. Another taste. And another. She had to discard a number of egg whites to fit with the reduced mixture. She finally tipped the glossy beaten whites into the chocolate.

That baking day was the third day Mrs G had shut herself away in the stillroom, dosing herself with medicinal waters. As I rolled the pastry I lived out a fancy I had nourished, since the first apple blossom pinked in May- the making of the perfect dish. Next day was All Hallows Eve, or Souling Night as we called it, and all our neighbors would gather for Old Ned's cider and Mrs Garland's Soul Cakes. After the stablemen acted out the Souling play, the unmarried maids would have a lark, guessing their husband's name from apple pairings thrown over their shoulders. So what better night, I thought, for Jem to announce our wedding? At the ripe age of twenty-two years, the uncertainties of maidenhood were soon to pass me by. Crimping my tarts, I passed into that forgetfulness that is a most delightful way of being. My fingers scattered flour and my elbows spun the rolling pin along the slab. Unrolling before my eyes were scenes of triumph: of me and Jem leading a cheery procession to the chapel, posies of flowers in my hand and pinned to Jem's blue jacket. In my head I turned over the makings of my Bride Cake that sat in secret in the larder- ah, wouldn't that be the richest, most hotly spiced delight? And all the bitter maidens who put it underneath their pillows would be sorrowing to think that Jem was finally taken, bound and married off to me.

As the Christian faith grew, more and more members of the congregation insisted on being buried in and around the church to reap the benefits of saint proximity. This burial practice spread throughout the empire, from Rome to Byzantium and to what is now present-day England and France. Entire towns grew up around these corpse churches. Demand rose and the churches supplied it—for a fee, of course. The wealthiest church patrons wanted the best spots, nearest the saints. If there was a nook in the church big enough for a corpse, you were sure to find a body in it. There were, without hyperbole, dead bodies everywhere. The preferred locations were the half circle around the apse and the vestibule at the entrance. Beyond those key positions, it was a free-for-all: corpses were placed under the slabs on the floor, in the roof, under the eaves, even piled into the walls themselves. Going to church meant the corpses in the walls outnumbered the living parishioners. Without refrigeration, in the heat of the summer months, the noxious smell of human decomposition in these churches must have been unimaginable. Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini complained that “there are so many tombs in the church, and they are so often opened that this abominable smell is too often unmistakable. However much they fumigate the sacred edifices with incense, myrrh, and other aromatic odors, it is obviously very injurious to those present.

She buys only the best couverture, from a fair trade supplier down near Marseille, and pays for it all in cash. A dozen blocks of each kind, to begin with, she says; but I already know from her eager response that a dozen blocks will not be enough. She used to make all her own stock, so she tells me, and though I'll admit I didn't quite believe it at first, the way she has thrown herself back into the business tells me that she was not exaggerating. The process is deft and peculiarly therapeutic to watch. First comes the melting and tempering of the raw couverture: the process that enables it to leave its crystalline state and take on the glossy, malleable form necessary to make the chocolate truffles. She does it all on a granite slab, spreading out the melted chocolate like silk and gathering it back toward her using a spatula. Then it goes back into the warm copper, the process to be repeated until she declares it done. She rarely uses the sugar thermometer. She has been making chocolates for so long, she tells me, that she can simply sense when the correct temperature has been reached. I believe her; certainly over the past three days I have been watching her, she has never produced a less than flawless batch. During that time I have learned to observe with a critical eye: to check for streaks in the finished product; for the unappealing pale bloom that denotes incorrectly tempered chocolate; for the high gloss and sharp snap that are the indicators of good-quality work.

It must be an old photograph of you, out in the yard, looking almost afraid in the crisp, raking light that afternoons in the city held in those days, unappeased, not accepting anything from anybody. So what else is new? I’ll tell you what is: you are accepting this now from the invisible, unknown sender, and the light that was intended, you thought, only to rake or glance is now directed full in your face, as it in fact always was, but you were squinting so hard, fearful of accepting it, that you didn’t know this. Whether it warms or burns is another matter, which we will not go into here. The point is that you are accepting it and holding on to it, like love from someone you always thought you couldn’t stand, and whom you now recognize as a brother, an equal. Someone whose face is the same as yours in the photograph but who is someone else, all of whose thoughts and feelings are directed at you, falling like a gentle slab of light that will ultimately loosen and dissolve the crusted suspicion, the timely self-hatred, the efficient cold directness, the horrible good manners, the sensible resolves and the senseless nights spent waiting in utter abandon, that have grown up to be you in the tree with no view; and place you firmly in the good-natured circle of your ancestors’ games and entertainments.

Reality for a young African American male in Richmond is measured by two things: If a day ends without his either killing someone or lying naked himself on a slab in the Contra Costa County coroner’s office, it is a success.

over her at night. It feels nice to have someone, anyone, protecting her again. But. She thinks. It troubles Nassun that Schaffa has damaged himself in the eyes of his fellow Guardians by choosing not to kill her. It troubles her more that he suffers, gritting his teeth and pretending that this is another smile, even as she sees the silver flex and burn within him. It never stops doing so now, and he will not let her ease his pain because this makes her slow and tired the next day. She watches him endure it, and hates the little thing in his head that hurts him so. It gives him power, but what good is power if it comes on a spiked leash? “Why?” she asks him one night as they camp on a flat, elevated white slab of something that is neither metal nor stone and which is all that remains of some deadciv ruin. There have been some signs of raiders or commless in the area, and the tiny comm they stayed at

shatter when they fall to the floor, that people curse the days the drops dare to tap on their doors. I am a raindrop. My parents emptied their pockets of me and left me to evaporate on a concrete slab. The window tells me we’re

He showed me how each wheel was stamped with the month and year, and then he cracked the first one open to reveal its pale cream-colored interior. He chipped off a hefty shard and handed it to me. I took a bite, and my mouth filled with the hopeful taste of fresh green grass and young field flowers welcoming the sun. "That's the spring cheese." Sal was cracking the next wheel, which was stamped with an autumn date; he chipped off a little piece. The color was deeper, almost golden, the texture heavier and nubbier. When I put the cheese in my mouth it was richer, and if I let it linger on my tongue I could taste the lush fields of late summer, just as the light begins to die. Sal sliced off a slab of winter cheese and put that into my mouth. It felt different on my tongue, smoother somehow, the flavor sharper. "It's like a different cheese." I was savoring it. I tasted again; there was a familiar flavor. "It tastes like hay!" "Yes!" Sal was openly delighted. "I knew you were going to be able to taste how different this cheese is! Most Americans don't even notice, but that cheese is so different that, back in the old days, it was sold under a different name. The Parmesan made from December to March, when the cows were in the barn, was called 'invernengo'- winter cheese- because the flavor is so distinct.

Loretta snuggled deeply into silken furs, trying to escape the persistent hand that shook her shoulder and the voice that called to her. Not her name, anyway. Blue Eyes. What kind of name was that? “Blue Eyes, you will be awake now. Home…you wish for home?” Home. Amy and Aunt Rachel. The gray down quilt. Pork slab and eggs for breakfast. Coffee on the porch when the sun peeked over the horizon and streaked the sky with crimson. Home. To laughter and love and safety. Oh, yes, she wished for home. “Be awake, little one. This Comanche will take you back. Loh-rhett-ah? Wake up, Hoos-cho Soh-nips, Bird Bones, you must eat and grow strong so you can go home. To your people and your wooden walls.” Loretta opened her eyes. She rolled onto her back and blinked. A dark face swam above her. Funny, but blinking didn’t bring him into focus. She reached out, curious, then thought better of it. “You will make the honey talk with me? We will make a treaty between us, one with no tiv-ope, writing. You will eat and grow strong, and I will take you to your people.” Honey talk. All lies, according to Hunter. Loretta peered up. She ran her tongue across her lips and tried to swallow. “H-home?” she croaked. “Huh, yes, Blue Eyes. Home. But you must eat so you can live to go back. And drink. For three days. Until you are strong again.” His fingertips grazed her cheek and trailed lightly into her hair. “Then this Comanche will take you.” “You will?” she rasped. “It is a promise I make. You will eat and drink?” Loretta closed her eyes. She had to be dreaming. But oh, what a lovely dream it was. To go home. To have Hunter volunteer to take her there. No need to worry that his wrath would rain upon her family. “No tricks. You swear it?” “No tricks.” His voice echoed and reechoed inside her head, loud, then like a whisper. She fought to open her eyes. The darkness was surrounding her again. “Then I will eat.

It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in under-cities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be—all those invisible individuals who every day find themselves faced with dilemmas not unlike the one Abdul confronted, stone slab in hand, one July afternoon when his life exploded.

I carved a name on a slab and placed it there. I knew not the day of his birth, but gave that of his death. His name, too, I placed there, although the place a man leaves is in the hearts of those he leaves behind, and in his work, not upon a slab …

then at some point in that serious life, finding oneself searching for calories. Knowing what time of day the restaurant tosses its leftover steamed pork buns. Not in a position to turn down any food, however obtained, eyeing the markdown bins in the ninety-nine-cent store, full of dense, sugary bricks and slabs and disk-sized cookies, not food really, really only meant for children, something to fill the belly of a person who once took himself seriously. Buying this food without hesitation, necessity overcoming any shame in simply eating it, and not just eating it, swallowing it down more quickly than intended, a young man’s dignity replaced by a newly acquired clumsiness, the hands and mouth and belly knowing what the heart and head had not yet come to terms with: hunger. Nothing like an empty stomach to remind you what you are.

In my little house I have my worktable, I have my Smith-Corona, my mattress, my box springs, my bed frame. I have a couch I found on the street in Pacific Grove. I have kitchen utensils—a pot, a teakettle, a frying pan. I have one spoon and one fork. I have a knife. I have no TV, no radio, no stereo. This is before computers, so no email, no Instagram, no social media. I have no correspondents. I write to nobody—not friends, not family. Nobody. And nobody writes to me. My day goes like this. I wake before dawn, eat a breakfast for a lumberjack. Four eggs, raw milk, potatoes, tomatoes. Bacon or sausage are too weak for me. Liver. A big slab for power. I walk for an hour. The sun is coming up now.

Carol I must not be confused with his nephew’s son, Carol II. Whereas the latter was undisciplined and sensual, the former was an anal-retentive Prussian of the family of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who, in the course of a forty-eight-year rule (1866–1914), essentially built modern Romania, complete with nascent institutions, from an assemblage of regions and two weak principalities. Following 1989, he had become the default symbol of legitimacy for the Romanian state. Whereas Carol I signified realism and stability, the liberal National Peasant Party leader Iuliu Maniu, a Greek Catholic by upbringing, stood for universal values. As a mid-twentieth-century local politician in extraordinarily horrifying circumstances, Maniu had agitated against the assault on the Jews and in favor of getting Antonescu to switch sides against the Nazis; soon after, during the earliest days of the Cold War, he agitated against the Soviets and their local puppets. Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop once demanded Maniu’s execution. As it turned out, the Communist Gheorghiu-Dej regime later convicted Maniu in a show trial in 1947. Defying his accusers, he spoke up in court for free elections, political liberties, and fundamental human rights.16 He died in prison in 1953 and his body was dumped in a common grave. Maniu’s emaciated treelike statue with quotations from the Psalms is, by itself, supremely moving. But there is a complete lack of harmony between it and the massive, adjacent spear pointing to the sky, honoring the victims of the 1989 revolution. The memorial slabs beside the spear are already chipped and cracked. Piaţa Revoluţiei in 1981 was dark, empty, and fear-inducing. Now it was cluttered with memorials, oppressed by traffic, and in general looked like an amateurish work in progress. But though it lacked any

For centuries now, explorers have been trying to find this fabled land of barter- none with success. Adam Smith set his story in aboriginal North America (others preferred Africa or the Pacific). In Smith’s time, at least it could be said that reliable information on Native American economic systems was available in Scottish libraries. But by mid-century, Lewis Henry Morgan’s descriptions of the six nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published- and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women’s councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat. Economists simply ignored this information. Stanley Jevons, for example, who in 1871 wrote what has come to be considered the classic book on the origins of money, took his examples straight from Smith, with Indians swapping venison for elk and beaver hides, and made no use of actual descriptions of Indian life that made it clear that Smith had simply made this up. Around that same time, missionaries, adventurers, and colonial administrators were fanning out across the world, many bringing copies of Smith’s book, expecting to find the land of Barter. None ever did. They discovered and almost endless variety of economic systems. But to this day, no one has been able to locate a part of the world where the ordinary mode of economic transition between neighbours takes the form of “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.

Even if you bury me underground and put a concrete slab over the hole – one day you will wake up to find a crack in the concrete with a tiny green sprout shooting through. When you see that shoot – that will be me!

grams kosher salt 2 teaspoons/14 grams pink salt 1⁄4 cup/50 grams maple sugar or packed dark brown sugar 1⁄4 cup/60 milliliters maple syrup One 5-pound/2.25-kilogram slab pork belly, skin on 1. Combine the salt, pink salt, and sugar in a bowl and mix so that the ingredients are evenly distributed. Add the syrup and stir to combine. 2. Rub the cure mixture over the entire surface of the belly. Place skin side down in a 2-gallon Ziploc bag or a nonreactive container just slightly bigger than the meat. (The pork will release water into the salt mixture, creating a brine; it’s important that the meat keep in contact with this liquid throughout the curing process.) 3. Refrigerate, turning the belly and redistributing the cure every other day, for 7 days, until the meat is firm to the touch. 4. Remove the belly from the cure, rinse it thoroughly, and pat it dry. Place it on a rack set over a baking sheet tray and dry in the refrigerator, uncovered, for 12 to 24 hours. 5. Hot-smoke the pork belly (see page 77) to an internal temperature of 150 degrees F./65 degrees C., about 3 hours. Let cool slightly, and when the belly is cool enough to handle but still warm, cut the skin off by sliding a sharp knife between the fat and the skin, leaving as much fat on the bacon as possible. (Discard the skin or cut it into pieces and save to add to soups, stews or beans, as you would a smoked ham hock.) 6. Let the bacon cool, then wrap in plastic and refrigerate or freeze it until ready to use. Yield: 4 pounds/2 kilograms smoked slab bacon A slab of pork belly should have equal proportions of meat and fat. This piece has been squared off and is ready for the cure. To cure bacon, the salts, sugars, and spices are mixed and spread all over the meat. The bacon can be cured in a pan or in a 2-gallon Ziploc bag. SMOKED HAM HOCKS

What do I smell?" interrupted Carl, sniffing. They all smelled it now. A most delectable odour came floating up on the still evening air from the direction of the little woodsy dell below the manse hill. "That makes me hungry," said Jerry. "We had only bread and molasses for supper and cold ditto for dinner," said Una plaintively. Aunt Martha's habit was to boil a large slab of mutton early in the week and serve it up every day, cold and greasy, as long as it lasted. To this Faith, in a moment of inspiration, had give the name of "ditto", and by this it was invariably known at the manse. "Let's go and see where that smell is coming from," said Jerry. They all sprang up, frolicked over the lawn with the abandon of young puppies, climbed a fence, and tore down the mossy slope, guided by the savory lure that ever grew stronger.

Yeah, world peace would be all right, but what about a day off in a slab of ham the size of my head.

We all have an essential self, but if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab, and selling it by the pound, soon you’ll find you’ve become a butcher. And if you don’t want to become a butcher (and why would you?), you’re going to have to cut right through to the bare bones of your own character in the hope of finding out who you really are. Which bloody hurts.

The Lums’ grocery was located on the corner of Bruce and Railroad Streets, next to the rail line. On one side of the grocery was the train depot and on the other side were two cobblers, a barber, a restaurant, and a laundry. Just south of the train depot, a short walk along the tracks, was the town’s ice plant. There, great slabs of ice were loaded into insulated boxcars. Fishermen, boots caked with the mud of the Arkansas, White, and Mississippi Rivers, heaved crates of buffalo and catfish onto waiting trains. Packed tight with ice, the fish then shipped up to Chicago, as many as three express carloads a day.

The light filtered through the slabs of mildewed tombs and no eyelashes could close against it, no tears could blur it, no eyelids could curtain it off, no sleep could dissolve it, no for­getfulness could deliver one from this place where there was neither night nor day. Fish, plant, woman, equally aware, with eyes forever open, confounded and confused in communion, in an ecstasy without repose.

Iwas glad Saturday was in the rearview mirror. The shop had been insane with customers, and I had zero time to check in with Gage about the investigation. Now that it was finally Sunday, and in my opinion the best day of the week, I could relax. I always had breakfast with Aunt Mimi and Nate. Sometimes, if I got lucky, she’d make her legendary Belgian waffles and a thick slab bacon. But today I was bringing over the big book, and Milo was going with me. She was going to help me work on the next spell and practice the first three I had sort of learned. I dressed quickly, called to Milo that we needed to hurry, and when he didn’t appear, I went looking for him. 

The Zombie Firetruck by Stewart Stafford Sirens moan, grave duty's flash of red, A mortuary whiff of something dead, Hoses trained with brains they suck, Your friendly neighbourhood zombie firetruck! All that remained of the human fire team, From the zombie pandemic of 2017, Still in their uniforms, their only treasures, Apocalyptic times call for end-time measures. When they reached the fire, people did scoff, They lurched, staggered, body parts fell off, As they wandered around, fire hoses forlorn, These knightly living dead faced a blazing dawn. The chief, hat off to his skeleton crew, In a voice once alive, now croaky like flu: 'To the hydrant, my ghouls, let's save Gothik Town, Or they'll call Ghostbusters, we'll be the clowns!' A glowering inferno, a cremation scene, Zombie firefighters, brave and light green. Through smoke and ash, they gravely stand, Composed decomposition with skeletal hand. Axeman Bony Ed led their clattering charge, Into the smoke, his cadavers did barge, The townsfolk looked on in dead of night, And disbelief, tiredness and mild fright. There soon followed medic Cemetery Phil, Decaying Murphy, Old Salty, and Dead Drill, Slab Stevens, Madly Hyde and Molly Voodoo, Determined to shake their initial hoodoo. A mother and baby backed by burning drapes, Team Macabre charged up the fire escape, Saving both and getting everyone out, Drank Brainer Ade as they leaked like a spout. Somehow, undead teamwork saved the day, No lives were lost as the water sprayed, Doused the flames, cool flatlined heroes, Much zombie kudos, no longer scary zeroes. The crowd cheered, did they ever doubt it? High fives lost hands but new ones sprouted, Frankenstein proud in their flapping flesh, Sure to get medals at the HalloweenFest. With a final groan and a clatter of bones, The zombie firetruck headed back home. Rotten yet proud, in their reanimated way, The risen would fight fires another day. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

My sister is the beautiful day. Oh beautiful day, my sister, wipe my nose, swaddle me in fresh-smelling garments. I nurse at the adamantine nipple of the beautiful day, I quaff the milk of the beautiful day, and for the first time since 1956, I cheese on the shoulder of the beautiful day. Oh beautiful day, wash me in your lake of cloudless azure. I have overdosed on television, I am unresponsive and cyanotic, revive me in your shower of gelid light and walk me through your piazza which is made of elegant slabs of time. Oh beautiful day, kiss me. Your mouth is like Columbus Day. You are the menthol of autumn. My lungs cannot quench their thirst for you. Resuscitate me—I will never exhale your tonic gasses. Inflate me so that I may rise into the sky and mourn the monotonous topography of my life. Oh beautiful day, my sister, wipe my nose and adorn me in your finery. Let us lunch alfresco. Your club sandwiches are made of mulch and wind perfumed with newsprint. Your frilly toothpicks are the deciduous trees of school days.

Father opened the bigger of the white boxes. “It’s easy. Everything needed is in here.” Eggs hung in the door, bottles with colored fluids stood on a shelf. There were beans, spinach and oranges in one drawer, slabs of meat in another. Peeking inside, Shirley got goose bumps from the cold. But she couldn’t find the window. She tugged at Father’s coat. “I don’t see the window to the outside,” she said. Father laughed. “This, Shirley Temple Wong, is an ice box. A machine that cools food and keeps it from spoiling. In America you only have to market once a week, not every day.” “And I suppose,” Mother said, “in America the wife does that, too.” “That’s right.

Those in the North Caucasus hang vacant, since ‘our people’, an old caretaker tells me, ‘are still dying there’, and deaths in Syria stand at four. I wonder bleakly if these scrupulous slabs will one day confess to casualties in Ukraine.

​Four hundred feet to the north-northwest, beside a narrow bridge and barely above sea level, rises another thin, 19 foot-tall slab named the Watch Stone; thirty feet to the southwest lies the stump of its forgotten twin. Like similar standing stones from Brittany to Britain, they are said to enjoy going for a walk at night, and these two were no exception: on New Year’s Day they were believed “to wrench themselves out of their places and roll down the slope to the sea. There having dipped themselves, they return and resume their accustomed position.”[6]

WHEN PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES, they think they’re ending the pain, but all they’re doing is passing it on to those they leave behind. For months after Helen’s death, pain laid so dark and heavy on me, like a big slab of lead, that most days I wouldn’t have gotten out of bed if I hadn’t had kids to teach. The idea of riding horses—much less racing—playing cards, or driving the Flivver out into the country seemed so pointless as to be repulsive. Everything got on my nerves: kids yelling or even just laughing in the school yard, church bells ringing, birds chirping. What the hell was there to chirp about?

He’s got hold of a secretary for me. You never saw such a woman! Forty, if she’s a day, wears pince-nez and sensible boots and an air of brisk efficiency that will be the death of me. A regular slab-faced woman.

The stone from quarries like the Kehoes’ had been carved into skyscrapers in New York and monuments in Washington, DC—places most people around here would never see. It had been used to build temples to the glory of commerce these folks didn’t enjoy, for centers of learning they wouldn’t attend, and for places of worship where they would never kneel. Stone from the next county had been crafted into state houses and courthouses across the country, and even sent to fix up the Pentagon after 9/11. The ground beneath them had been chiseled out and carted away for the far-off business of other places. Close to home, you didn’t see the pretty white stone from their hills turned into monuments to beauty or progress. It was the rubble lining your garden path or maybe, at the end of your days, a slab might mark the resting place of your bones.

Though it lay several miles to the west, she felt the high school as she passed by. Without even laying eyes on that place, she could feel it like an ache. Some institutional slab of crap architecture with that sixties-era authoritarian aura to its brick Lego look. She marveled at the power the American high school experience holds on the imagination. She’d always noticed how people tended to view their high school days as foundational even if they didn’t realize it. Get them talking about those years, and they suddenly had all these stories of dread and wonder you could wrap whole novels around.

I make another trip to Rick's bakehouse to show people how he makes his pain au chocolat, that magical, flaky pastry filled with heavenly bites of chocolate. I shoot video of Rick laminating croissant dough, rolling and flattening and folding the butter-filled slab of pastry until the dough is as long as a beach towel and stratified with butter like canyon rock. He cuts it into rectangles and stuffs each one with two fat chunks of bittersweet chocolate inside. He bakes off five sheets in his convection oven, and when the croissants emerge, their golden tops glistening, I have to restrain myself from reaching out from behind the camera to stuff three or five into my face. As soon as the newsletter goes out the next week, Rick's customer base goes crazy. People line up and down the market thoroughfare, undeterred by the stifling July heat, clamoring for flaky pain au chocolat and crusty sourdough loaves. Day after day, he sells out everything at least thirty minutes before closing, and the chocolate croissants sell out in the first hour.

And really, does anybody believe that Michelangelo just decided to carve the David one day and went out and bought a slab of marble?

Nobody else knew it, but the creek was magic. There was one bend in particular where the banks widened to form a craggy circle; the bed beneath had been formed millions of years ago when the earth sighed and shifted and great rock slabs were brought together jaggedly, so what was shallow at the rims deepened and darkened suddenly at its center. And that's where Vivien had made her discovery. She'd been fishing with the glass jars she'd pilfered from Mum's kitchen and kept now in the rotten log behind the ferns. Vivien stored all her treasures inside that log. There was always something to find within the creek's waters: eels and tadpoles, rusted old buckets from the gold-rush days. Once, she'd even found a set of false teeth.

Seto Kaiba [to Ishizu]: How do I know you didn't just make this slab a few days ago?! There's no proof it's 3,000 years old! Even carbon dating doesn't work perfectly on rocks!

Lily heard feet padding along the landing outside her room and then her mother pushed open the door without knocking, carrying a breakfast tray: bread and jam, a glass of pomegranate juice, and a pot of tea. Yesterday, Lily couldn't drink the milk. It was warm, tasted too much like cow, and the egg yolks were bright orange, so she just ate the naan. She had never before eaten flatbread like this- baked on hot stones, dimpled and crusty, it tasted sour and earthy and so delicious, she could eat an entire slab.

A Mississippi summer is an awesome and boggling thing, a slab of steaming time, a hundred cubed: a hundred days at a hundred degrees and a hundred percent humidity.

Metroplex Foundation Repair Company is a family owned and operated business with over 45 years in the Foundation Repair Industry. We're the single solution for residential and commercial foundation repair needs in Dallas Texas, specializing in pier and beam and slab foundation repair. No project is too big or small! Contact us today to schedule a No-Cost estimate, and SAVE $1000 on your foundation repair. For your convenience we are available 7 days a week.

There’s the famous Legoland, known for its plastics, and during the holidays, we Roncallis build our own version, Tupperware Land. After the table is cleared, the dishes are done, the silver is carefully placed into its chamois sleeves, and the piles of shells from the nuts are swept off the tablecloth, we disburse the leftovers in various plastic containers, which are handed out as guests, three to five pounds heavier than when they arrived, depart. Our family never leaves a dinner party without providing a full takeout meal to reheat and serve the following day. For the ride home, you can count on our additional to-go snacks: a napkin shaped like a cone and filled with cookies, or a slab of cake in a sheet of tinfoil, or a paper sack filled with dinner rolls, just a little something to tide us over until the next food tsunami. I went home with a tray of manicotti to freeze and a bag of biscotti for breakfast. Aunt Feen asked for cannoli, so she got a container of shells dipped in chocolate and nuts, with another snap lid bowl with the extra filling.

How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

Don was the one who figured out how we would make our code quick. One day, a month or two after the Black Slab Encounter, he called me into his office and asked me to create a test program to measure browser speed. He envisioned an automated tool that would launch our browser app and command it to load a suite of web pages, one after the other, in rapid succession. Over the next couple days, I wrote the code to do just that. I named it the Page Load Test, but we soon took to calling the PLT.

And I saw the roof of the shack in Hanoi where my mother lived. Sheet metal patched together with tar paper. On rainy days, the roof leaked. In the heat of summer, the acrid smell of tar was overpowering, nauseating. All around, the gutters, gurgling under slabs of cement, flowed from one house to the next. Children played in this filthy black water, sailing their little white paper boats. The few mangy patches of grass were at the foot of the wall where men drunk on too much beer came to relieve themselves. The place reeked of urine. This was my street. I had grown up here.

Describe them in the order in which they appear, granny." "This is a phallus, my child." "Linga, you mean? Siva stone?" "A phallus is just a phallus. No Siva or any one else. This would not have been there all by itself. There should have been something besides. I can see a dark cave before me and behind it stands a smaller cave. In that small cave this stone was kept on a hollowed out slab." "A panipitha or pedestal, you mean?" "Not necessarily. Probably you are carried away by their resemblance to a pestle and mortar. This, you see, is a symbol of the male principle. In fact, a penis. What was left in the smaller cave would be its counterpart, a vagina-like piece. People used to worship these two objects together." "As Siva?" "Nothing of the sort. As phallus and vagina, pure and simple. I feel like laughing. But no- on second thoughts it seems to me there is nothing to laugh at. Creation became possible with male and female principles. Human beings thought God created all things in the same fashion. Birds and animals are all born in the same way. Whenever I went to any Siva temple, at the sight of the linga and its pedestal surprise used to seize me, and l never felt inclined to salute those symbols. When I visit temples what i feel is not devotion but utter wonder. I have never felt like begging God to give me this and that. Begging seems to me the most foolish thing to do. Extending your palms for some thing before one who created water, air, fire, the earth and the sky, in fact one who gave us life itself, betrays total lack of intelligence. Suppose the creator Brahma hits back saying, 'What did you do with the things I have already given?' what would you say?" Her philosophy was beyond me and so I said "Granny... How did they worship this? Did they bathe it? Did they offer flowers and fruits as we do now...?" "That I didn't think of. Probably I would have got at it, had I intensely thought of it" She thought for a while and burst out laughing. "Why the laughter?" "My guess was right. What I saw earlier was right." "What was it?" "I told you it was a phallus, and left behind in the cave is its counterpart. Quite a number of people are gathered around it. In a way, the whole scene is obscene. Of course, there are no children around. Young men and women are copulating there. For a while it looked obscene. That is because of a false sense of values. These people are playing the game, which God had desired them to play here. In a sense, I can read a sort of reverence for the thing they are doing. These people are not begging God to give them anything, unlike the priest I came across the other day...But when I hold this object, I feel no hesitation or shyness. Others may feel so. But why should I? To be born is no ugly thing; to live is not ugly; death too, is not ugly. Should creation alone be deemed ugly? "How can the spirit that unites man and woman for good or bad, sorrow or joy, seem dirty?

But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present. I have seen men consumed by their dreams, and it is a sour business. If you cling too tightly to a dream—a poodle bitch or a personal sausage chef or whatever—then you miss the felicity of your heart beating and the smell of the grass growing and the sounds lizards make when you run through the neighborhood with your friend. Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you’ve eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, when the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you chew on the next one.