Sludge Quotes

She wanted me to betray you guys, and I was like, 'Pfft, right, I'm gonna listen to a face in the potty sludge'.

Wait." Clary was suddenly nervous. "The melted metal-it could be, like, toxic or something." Maia snorted. "I'm from New Jersey. I born in toxic sludge.

If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing.

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

Pretty fucking tragic twist of fate, but you don’t seem to remember that we first met years ago. An issue, since I remember a little too well. I like no one, absolutely no one, but I liked you from the start. I liked you when I didn’t know you, and now that I do know you it’s only gotten worse. Sometimes, often, always, I think about you before falling asleep. Then I dream of you, and when I wake up my head’s still there, stuck on something funny, beautiful, filthy, intelligent that’s all about you. It’s been going on for a while, longer than you think, longer than you can imagine, and I should have told you, but I have this impression, this certainty that you’re half a second from running away, that I should give you enough reasons to stay. Is there anything I can do for you? I’ll take you grocery shopping and fill your fridge when we’re back home. Buy you a new bike and a case of decent reagent and that sludge you drink. Kill the people who made you cry. Is there something you need? Name it. It’s yours. If I have it, it’s yours.

I'm Galladon, from the sovereign realm of Duladel. I'm most recently from Elantris, land of sludge, insanity, and eternal perdition. Nice to meet you.

I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch one. But my honest self revolted at this, hated me for doing this. Sick with conflict, destructive negative emotions, frozen into disintegration I was, refusing to articulate, to spew forth these emotions - they festered in me, growing big, distorted, like pus-bloated sores. Small problems, mentions of someone else's felicity, evidence of someone else's talents, frightened me, making me react hollowly, fighting jealousy, envy, hate. Feeling myself fall apart, decay, rot, and the laurels wither and fall away, and my past sins and omissions strike me with full punishment and import. All this, all this foul, gangrenous, sludge ate away at my insides. Silent, insidious.

You’ll find your one-in-a-million. But you’re sharp enough to know there’s no point in sludging through the first nine hundred, ninety-nine thousand, and ninety-nine to get to him.

Dulce Et Decorum Est Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of disappointed shells that dropped behind. GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime.-- Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

It's because he's an asshole. Asshole brains don't work the same as ours do. Too much brown sludge.

I’m from New Jersey. I was born in toxic sludge.

So, in the first round, we have an expandable duck versus a useless metal cylinder. Our contestants are running very close indeed." ... "Judging has been difficult. We have weighed the merits of Junior's boiling sludge, slag heap and useless metal cylinder against the chain-mail waistcoat, bulletproof tie and Expando-Duck. It was a close call.

Secrets—even in hardened criminals, they were just air pockets lodged under debris at the bottom of an ocean. It might take an earthquake, or you scuba diving down there, sifting through the sludge, but their natural proclivity was always to head straight to the surface—to get out.

I like no one, absolutely no one, but I liked you from the start. I liked you when I didn’t know you, and now that I do know you it’s only gotten worse. Sometimes, often, always, I think about you before falling asleep. Then I dream of you, and when I wake up my head’s still there, stuck on something funny, beautiful, filthy, intelligent that’s all about you. It’s been going on for a while, longer than you think, longer than you can imagine, and I should have told you, but I have this impression, this certainty that you’re half a second from running away, that I should give you enough reasons to stay. Is there anything I can do for you? I’ll take you grocery shopping and fill your fridge when we’re back home. Buy you a new bike and a case of decent reagent and that sludge you drink. Kill the people who made you cry. Is there something you need? Name it. It’s yours. If I have it, it’s yours.

I don’t know if she’s completely unkillable,” he said, “but she cannot be defeated by toilet seats. I can vouch for that. She wanted me to betray you guys, and I was like, ‘Pfft, right, I’m gonna listen to a face in the potty sludge.

The trick in that town was getting through a night at all without stalling in the sludge of your own thoughts.

NEED is an overused word. A swirling human figure erupted from the sand—Leo’s least favorite goddess, the Mistress of Mud, the Princess of Potty Sludge, Gaea herself.

Asshole cunt peepee fuck.” “Ah,” grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, “going to the company store to get some algae chewies, huh?” “Goddamn poopoo,” I would grin back at him.

What I'm feeling, I think, is joy. And it's been some time since I've felt that blinkered rush of happiness, This might be one of those rare events that lasts, one that'll be remembered and recalled as months and years wind and ravel. One of those sweet, significant moments that leaves a footprint in your mind. A photograph couldn't ever tell its story. It's like something you have to live to understand. One of those freak collisions of fizzing meteors and looming celestial bodies and floating debris and one single beautiful red ball that bursts into your life and through your body like an enormous firework. Where things shift into focus for a moment, and everything makes sense. And it becomes one of those things inside you, a pearl among sludge, one of those big exaggerated memories you can invoke at any moment to peel away a little layer of how you felt, like a lick of ice cream. The flavor of grace.

Every book has at least one good thing…Love stories and bad news and evil masterminds, plots as thick as sludge, places and people she wishes she could know in real life, and words whose loveliness and music make her want to cry when she says them aloud.

I’d felt this before, when my granddad was in the hospital before he died. We all camped out in the waiting room, eating our meals together, most of us sleeping in the chairs every night. Family from far-flung places would arrive at odd hours and we’d all stand and stretch, hug, get reacquainted, and pass the babies around. A faint, pale stream of beauty and joy flowed through the heavy sludge of fear and grief. It was kind of like those puddles of oil you see in parking lots that look ugly until the sun hits them and you see rainbows pulling together in the middle of the mess. And wasn’t that just how life usually felt—a confusing swirl of ugly and rainbow?

And the men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths, the men with the eyes of puff adders, took up their load of machine and tube, their case of liquid melancholy and the slow dark sludge of nameless stuff, and strolled out the door.

The slower your path, the muddier your boots?' 'Even so,' Icarium said, nodding. 'Time is nothing like that.' 'Are you so certain? When we must wait, our minds fill with sludge, random thoughts like so much refuse. When we are driven to action, our current is swift, the water seemingly clear, cold and sharp.

If you don't move your body, your brain thinks you're dead. Movement of the body will not only clear out the "sludge," but will also give you more energy

Examining the actual contents of my crying, I found a quailing sludge emotion, with a foul insecticide taste. If it was a peanut, you would spit it out. Yet I was indulging this toxic goo, giving it its head and letting it dictate my actions. People had every good reason to despise me.

Show up for your own life, he said. Don't pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle-feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant-gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you've been given is your own humanity, which is about conciousness, so honor that consciousness. Revere your senses; don't degrade them with drugs, with depression, with wilful oblivion. Try to notice something new everyday, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you're not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like; notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet fell like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is - your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbours, and this planet. Don't pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of disappointed shells that dropped behind. GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime.-- Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Once when I was younger I went out and sat under the sky and looked up and asked it to take me back. What I should have done was gone to the swamp and bog and ask them to bring me back because, if anything is, mud and marsh are the origins of life. Now i think of the storm that made chaos, that the storm opened a door. It tried to make over a world the way it wanted it to be. At school I learned that storms create life, that lightning, with its nitrogen, is a beginning; bacteria and enzymes grow new life from decay out of darkness and water. It's into this that I want to fall, into swamp and mud and sludge and it seems like falling is the natural way of things; gravity needs no fuel, no wings. It needs only stillness and waiting and time.

There was and still is a tremendous fear that poor and working-class Americans might one day come to understand where their political interests reside. Personally, I think the elites worry too much about that. We dumb working folk were clubbed into submission long ago, and now require only proper medication for our high levels of cholesterol, enough alcohol to keep the sludge moving through our arteries, and a 24/7 mind-numbing spectacle of titties, tabloid TV, and terrorist dramas. Throw in a couple of new flavours of XXL edible thongs, and you've got a nation of drowsing hippos who will never notice that our country has been looted, or even that we have become homeless ourselves.

Movie directors often shoot funerals in the rain. The mourners stand in their dark suits under large black umbrellas, the kind you never have handy in real life, while the rain falls symbolically all around them, on grass and tombstones and the roods of cars, generating atmostphere. What they don't show you is how the legs of your suit caked with grass clippings, cling soaked to your shins, how even under umbrellas the rain still manages to find your scalp, running down your skull and past your collar like wet slugs, so that while you're supposed to be meditating on the deceased, instead you're mentally tracking the trickle of water as it slides down your back. The movies don't convey how the soaked, muddy ground will swallow up the dress shoes of the pallbearers like quicksand, how the water, seeping into the pine coffin, will release the smell of death and decay, how the large mound of dirt meant to fill the grave will be transformed into an oozing pile of sludge that will splater with each stab of the shovel and land on the coffin with an audible splat. And instead of a slow and dignified farewell, everyone just wants to get the deceased into the ground and get the hell back into their cars.

But I have burned already down to bone. There is a fire that burns beyond the names Of sludge and filth of which this world is made. Agony sears the dark flesh of the body, And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise Above the earth, above the sacrifice; Until my soul flares outward like a blue Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air: Free of the body’s work of twisted iron.

Many children, early on, acquire a love of places they have never been. Often, such wonder is summarily crushed on the crawl through the sludge of murky, confused adolescence on to the flat, cracked pan of adulthood with its airless vistas ever lurking beyond the horizon. Oh, well, sometimes such gifts of curiosity, delight and adventure do indeed survive the stationary trek, said victims ending up as artists, scholars, inventors and other criminals bent on confounding the commonplace and the platitudes of peaceful living. But never mind them for now, since, for all their flailing subversions, nothing really ever changes unless in service to convenience.

Jason wasn't sure what to expect at the end--a dungeon, a mad scientist’s lab, or maybe a sewer reservoir where all Porta-Potty sludge ends up, forming an evil toilet face large enough to swallow the world.

At the microscopic level, the protein cubes were solid food particles suspended in thick vegetable oil. The food particles compressed to less than half their original size, but the oil was barely affected at all. This changed the volume ratio of solid to liquid dramatically, which in turn made the aggregate act as a liquid. Known as “liquefaction,” this process transformed the protein cubes from a steady solid into a flowing sludge.

By extension, anyone who liked smelling the daisies, and having daisies to smell, and eating mercury-free fish, and who objected to giving birth to three-eyed infants via the toxic sludge in their drinking water was a demon-possessed Satanic minion of darkness, hell-bent on sabotaging the American Way and God’s Holy Oil, which were one and the same.

Ah,” grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, “going to the company store to get some algae chewies, huh?” “Goddamn poopoo,” I would grin back at him.

The sludge caught in the mind's filter, the stuff that refuses to go through, frequently becomes each person's private obsession.

There’s enough mother-shame on this planet to fill oceans with sludge— we don’t need more of it.

Potty Sludge! Dirt Face! THIS IS FOR MY MOTHER, ESPERANZA VALDEZ!” His

twenty-one Gladers in all. Every last one of those who’d stayed behind and fought was covered in Griever sludge and human blood,

How carelessly we used words, thoughtless of the trail of slime and sludge they left behind. Mouth, tongue, teeth, all sullied with the rot of misused words.

We need to lose the mental image of our pre-Christian state as a drowning person helplessly flailing about in the water, hoping upon hope that someone might throw us a life preserver. Outside of Christ we are, in fact, spiritual corpses rotting on the ocean floor among the silt and sludge.

But here's the thing Ona. Howard wrote that song for you.' Quinn had never been more sure of anything. 'I think he wrote all his songs for you, Ona, for young and lovely you.' 'Now you're talking foolish.' 'He wrote them for you, and you refused them because he didn't know how to give them to you.' How could he, living his shadow of a life, floundering in the sludge of grief and failure? 'Have you been drinking?' 'Listen to me,' he said. 'You 're the glittering girl with the cherry-wood hair. You're the angel's breath and sunlight.' 'Oh, for heaven's sake.' She sat up crossly, her tufted hair seeming to quiver. 'Quinn Porter,' she said, 'I never took you for a romantic.' 'Howard Stanhope loved you,' he declared. 'I thought you should know.' 'Well, all right.' 'I thought you should know, Ona.' 'Thank you.' 'People should know these things

Our bodies should be seen as temporary sacred temples of the soul and our duty to keep our individual one clean. Both internally and externally. Internally this is done by eating the right food; fruit. Thus avoiding any foods that sludge and sully the interior (especially animal products and cooked foods of any kind!). Externally, regular bathes in water will normally suffice, but all fruits can also be massaged into the skin with benefits. The skins of mangos and papaya feel especially pleasant, as does a head/hair bath in lemon juice

You Don't Know What Love Is But you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to wash off the sludge, the stench of our past. How to start clean. This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps. Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want to get into the fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear. You know where she's headed, you know she'll wake up with an ache she can't locate and no money and a terrible thirst. So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

Jack Miller aimed his shotgun at the monster’s grey-skinned head and pulled the trigger. Green sludge and bits of bone and flesh splattered through the air to land on the street, the gory aftermath releasing a noxious, sulfurous odor.

Nite-Owl: Look, I just meant we took enough unnecessary risks retrieving your outfit this morning... Rorschach: Unnecessary? Cowering down here in sludge and pollution, conjuring names on screens, learning nothing: that is unnecessary. Give me smallest finger on man's hand. I'll produce information. Computer unnecessary. This face, all that's necessary... all I need.

One day, the lotus spoke again. "You remember me? The flower that grows through the mud?" I did. I said as much. "Have you ever considered my significance? I'm everywhere - art, religion, nature.... Have you ever wondered why?" ... It spoke, "Nothing touches me. I radiate beauty. You can do the same." "How?" I asked. "Easy," it said. "I grow in a pond. I take the water and nutrients I need to grow, and let the rest sink to the bottom. What's in mud, anyway? Water, nutrients, life and a little bit of sludge. Let the sludge go like I do. Then stand tall above the leaves.

I saw things in that war that a man shouldn't ever have see. Things that make you forget we're human and not just a bunch of beasts crawling out of the sludge somewhere. And the damnedest part of it all is, I couldn't for the life of me remember what we were fighting for in the first place.

Is there anything I can do for you? I’ll take you grocery shopping and fill your fridge when we’re back home. Buy you a new bike and a case of decent reagent and that sludge you drink. Kill the people who made you cry. Is there something you need? Name it. It’s yours. If I have it, it’s yours.

Moral goodness might be more like a precious metal than an abundant element in human nature, and even after the ore has been processed and refined in accordance with the prescriptions of the CEV proposal, who knows whether the principal outcome will be shining virtue, indifferent slag, or toxic sludge?

At some point in this course, perhaps even tonight, you will read something difficult, something you only partially understand, and your verdict will be this is stupid. Will I argue when you advance that opinion in class the next day? Why would I do such a useless ting? My time with you in short, only thirty-four weeks of classes, and I will not waste it arguing about the merits of this short story or that poem. Why would I, when all such opinions are subjective, and no final resolution can ever be reached?' Some of the kids - Gloria was one of them - now looked lost, but Pete understood exactly what Mr. Ricker, aka Ricky the Hippie, was talking about... 'Time is the answer," Mr Ricker said on the first day of Pete's sophomore year. He strode back and forth, antique bellbottoms swishing, occasionally waving his arms. "Yes! Time mercilessly culls away the is-stupid from the not-stupid." ... "It will occur for you, young ladies and gentlemen, although I will be in your rear-view mirror by the time it happens. Shall I tell you how it happens? You will read something - perhaps 'Dulce et Decorum Est,' by Wilfred Owen. Shall we use that as an example? Why not?' Then, in a deeper voice that sent chills up Pete's back and tightened his throat, Mr. Ricker cried, " 'Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge...' And son on. Cetra-cetra. Some of you will say, This is stupid." .... 'And yet!" Up went the finger. "Time will pass! Tempus will fugit! Owen's poem may fall away from your mind, in which case your verdict of is-stupid will have turned out to be correct. For you, at least. But for some of you, it will recur. And recur. Each time it does, the steady march of your maturity will deepen its resonance. Each time that poem sneaks back into your mind, it will seem a little less stupid and a little more vital. A little more important. Until it shines, young ladies and gentlemen. Until it shines.

Every world crowns its own kings, laurels it own gods. A Hans Anderson book cover opens its worlds: the snowqueen, bluewhite as ice, flies in a sleigh through her snow-thick air: our hearts are ice. Always: sludge, offal, shit against palaces of diamond. That man could dream god and heaven: how mud labors. We burn in our own fire.

Some nights are three nights long, some days a mere noon hour, then whistled back to work, the heart dredging sludge.

Pfft, right, I’m gonna listen to a face in the potty sludge.

I'm often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the day's work--and not with some enjoyment.

Kara nodded, and then watched with surprise as her mind leaked a thought she didn't even know she had into the ground. There is good in everyone. It slipped into the sludge and flowed away.

What's that?" "My friend St. Clair bought it for me. So I wouldn't feel out of place." She raises her eyebrows as she pulls back onto the road. "Are there a lot of Canadians in Paris?" My face warms. "I just felt,you know, stupid for a while. Like one of those lame American tourists with the white sneakers and the cameras around their necks? So he bought it for me, so I wouldn't feel....embarrassed. American." "Being American is nothing to be ashamed of," she snaps. "God,Mom,I know.I just meant-forget it." "Is this the English boy with the French father?" "What does that have anything to do with it?" I'm angry. I don't like what she's implying. "Besides,he's American. He was born here? His mom lives in San Francisco. We sat next to each other on the plane." We stop at a red light.Mom stares at me. "You like him." "OH GOD,MOM." "You do.You like this boy." "He's just a friend.He has a girlfriend." "Anna has a boooy-friend," Seany chants. "I do not!" "ANNA HAS A BOOOY-FRIEND!" I take a sip of coffee and choke. It's disgusting. It's sludge. No, it's worse than sludge-at least sludge is organic. Seany is still taunting me. Mom reaches around and grabs his legs,which are kicking her seat again.She sees me making a face at my drink. "My,my. Once semester in France, and suddenly we're Miss Sophisticated. Your father will be thrilled." Like it was my choice! Like I asked to go to Paris! And how dare she mention Dad. "ANNNN-A HAS A BOOOY-FRIEND!" We merge back onto the interstate. It's rush hour,and the Atlanta traffic has stopped moving. The car behind ours shakes us with its thumping bass. The car in front sprays a cloud of exhaust straight into our vents. Two weeks.Only two more weeks.s

Mitochondria manipulate oxygen in a way that liberates energy from foodstuffs. Without this niftily facilitating trick, life on Earth today would be nothing more than a sludge of simple microbes.

I started a band because I actually thought I could be Bon Jovi, and now here I am, sitting in a puddle of sludge in an abandoned car park with a bloody nose and soggy underpants, covered in sick.

I closed my eyes, letting my fear wash over me. I had to bathe in it, accept it, drink it down, let it cover me like sludge, so it became nothing so extraordinary, nothing so fearsome—and I could think.

Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.

The world is like a river with sludge lying at the bottom. On sunny days, the water appears to be clear and inviting, but inevitably, a storm comes along, forcing the sludge to the surface, muddying the water. When that happens, you become aware of it and perceive it as bad, but in reality, it is an opportunity to remove it...to heal it. If you don’t, the sludge settles to the bottom where it remains until the next storm comes along

I cannot fold any of their respects into my dress's pockets. I cannot tie these respects together into a bouquet to lay at my father's headstone. Their respects are quick-footed & I am sludging through this hardened mud of loss.

Revere your senses; don't degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Try to notice something new every day, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you're not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like, notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet feel like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is - your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbors, and this planet. Don't pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge. You can never become a real man if you have a careless and destructive attitude, Eustace said, but maturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night.

And the men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths, the men with the eyes of puff-adders, took up their load of machine and tube, their case of liquid melancholy and the slow dark sludge of nameless stuff, and strolled out the door.

I picture myself confined within my clinical cell, time slowly dripping down the four walls, forming puddles of dirty sludge that will slowly come up to drown me. Until then, I am existing in an infinite space where delusion is married to reality.

The arts are obsessional, and obsession is dangerous. It's like a knife in the mind. In some cases—Dylan Thomas comes to mind, and Ross Lockridge and Hart Crane and Sylvia Plath—the knife can turn savagely upon the person wielding it. Art is a localized illness, usually benign—creative people tend to live a long time—sometimes terribly malignant. You use the knife carefully, because you know it doesn't care who it cuts. And if you are wise you sift the sludge carefully . . . because some of that stuff may not be dead.

It dishonors the deaths of our loved ones to shut out happiness. We throw away what we could have been and waste our opportunities. We each have a purpose, a destiny, and to realize it, we must reach beyond what we think we are capable of... A wise woman once told me that I needed to learn the lesson of the lotus flower: All of our human experience, both the good and the bad, grounds us like the sludge in a river. We may be rooted in pain or suffering but our job is to rise above it, find the sun, and bloom. Only then can you brighten the world for others.

On some intuitive level, I knew that learning had to be more than the mastery of facts. I've experienced it as an adult. I become consumed with a subject like quilting or preparing yogurt cultures, and that topic takes over my life - fabric scraps scattered on the floor, little jars of white sludge cuddled by blankets on my kitchen countertops. When I learned to play guitar in my thirties, no one had to schedule my practices. My guitar lived on a stand in the living room and I tormented our ears multiple times a day until my fingers bled. Passion for learning has that fiery, consuming, can't-stop quality.

Thermophilic composting requires no electricity and therefore no coal combustion, no acid rain, no nuclear power plants, no nuclear waste, no petrochemicals and no consumption of fossil fuels. The composting process produces no waste, no pollutants and no toxic by-products. Thermophilic composting of humanure can be carried out century after century, millennium after millennium, with no stress on our ecosystems, no unnecessary consumption of resources and no garbage or sludge for our landfills. And all the while it will produce a valuable resource necessary for our survival while preventing the accumulation of dangerous pathogenic waste.

heart bleeds into itself; the heart muscle softens and has hemorrhages into its chambers, and blood squeezes out of the heart muscle as the heart beats, and it floods the chest cavity. The brain becomes clogged with dead blood cells, a condition known as sludging of the brain. Ebola attacks the lining of the eyeball, and the eyeballs may fill up with blood: you may go blind. Droplets of blood stand out on the eyelids: you may weep blood. The blood runs from your eyes down your cheeks and refuses to coagulate. You may have a hemispherical stroke, in which one whole side of the body is paralyzed, which is invariably fatal in a case of Ebola. Even while the body’s internal organs are becoming plugged with coagulated blood, the blood that streams out of the body cannot clot; it resembles whey being squeezed out of curds. The blood has been stripped of its clotting factors. If you put the runny Ebola blood in a test tube and look at it, you see that the blood is destroyed. Its red cells are broken and dead. The blood looks as if it has been buzzed in an electric blender. Ebola kills a great deal of tissue while the host is still alive. It triggers a creeping, spotty necrosis that spreads through all the internal organs. The liver bulges up and turns yellow, begins to liquefy, and then it cracks apart. The cracks run across the liver and deep inside it, and the liver completely dies and goes putrid. The kidneys become jammed with blood clots and dead cells, and cease functioning. As the kidneys fail, the blood becomes toxic with urine. The spleen turns into a single huge, hard blood clot the size of a

I can hear cars on the freeway, it’s like a distant sea sludged with people while over my other shoulder, far over on 7th street near Western is the hospital, that house of agony— sheets and bedpans and arms and heads and expirations; everything is so sweetly awful, so continuously and sweetly awful: the art of consummation: life eating life…

Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects? I usually answer this with another question: Why do you assume that I have a choice? Writing is a catch-as-catch-can sort of occupation. All of us seem to come equipped with filters on the floors of our minds, and all the filters have differing sizes and meshes. What catches in my filter may run right through yours. What catches in yours may pass through mine, no sweat. All of us seem to have a built-in obligation to sift through the sludge that gets caught in our respective mind-filters, and what we find there usually develops into some sort of sideline. The accountant may also be a photographer. The astronomer may collect coins. The school-teacher may do gravestone rubbings in charcoal. The sludge caught in the mind's filter, the stuff that refuses to go through, frequently becomes each person's private obsession. In civilized society we have an unspoken agreement to call our obsessions “hobbies.” Sometimes the hobby can become a full-time job. The accountant may discover that he can make enough money to support his family taking pictures; the schoolteacher may become enough of an expert on grave rubbings to go on the lecture circuit. And there are some professions which begin as hobbies and remain hobbies even after the practitioner is able to earn his living by pursuing his hobby; but because “hobby” is such a bumpy, common-sounding little word, we also have an unspoken agreement that we will call our professional hobbies “the arts.” Painting. Sculpture. Composing. Singing. Acting. The playing of a musical instrument. Writing. Enough books have been written on these seven subjects alone to sink a fleet of luxury liners. And the only thing we seem to be able to agree upon about them is this: that those who practice these arts honestly would continue to practice them even if they were not paid for their efforts; even if their efforts were criticized or even reviled; even on pain of imprisonment or death. To me, that seems to be a pretty fair definition of obsessional behavior. It applies to the plain hobbies as well as the fancy ones we call “the arts”; gun collectors sport bumper stickers reading YOU WILL TAKE MY GUN ONLY WHEN YOU PRY MY COLD DEAD FINGERS FROM IT, and in the suburbs of Boston, housewives who discovered political activism during the busing furor often sported similar stickers reading YOU'LL TAKE ME TO PRISON BEFORE YOU TAKE MY CHILDREN OUT OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD on the back bumpers of their station wagons. Similarly, if coin collecting were outlawed tomorrow, the astronomer very likely wouldn't turn in his steel pennies and buffalo nickels; he'd wrap them carefully in plastic, sink them to the bottom of his toilet tank, and gloat over them after midnight.

A serious rest. My mouth watered. Good strong American sleep. Those pills would scrape out the sludge of Infermiterol left in my mind. Then I’d feel better. Then I’d be set. I’d live easy. I’d think easy. My brain would glide. I looked at the assortment of pills in my palm. Good-bye, bad dream. I wished I had my Polaroid camera to document the scene.

Doublespeak turns lies told by politicians into "being economical with the truth," sewage sludge into "regulated organic nutrients" that do not stink but "exceed the odor threshold," the death of a patient in a hospital into "negative patient care outcome," an explosion and fire in a nuclear power plant into an "energetic disassembly" and "rapid oxidation.

You have two choices,” Sophie decided, placing her hands on her hips—even though most of her torso was under the mud, so the effect was somewhat muted. “You can wade in now on your own. Or I can have Sandor pick you up and toss you in.” “Everyone votes for option B, right?” Dex asked. The chorus of “yes” was definitely unanimous. “I hate all of you,” Stina informed them as Sandor stalked toward her with a smile that looked downright gleeful. “Fine. I’ll do it on my own—back off!” She moved to the edge of the mud again. And then she just stood there. “Ten seconds,” Sophie warned. “Then it’s Sandor dunk time! Ten… nine… eight…” Biana, Dex, and Wylie joined in the countdown as Stina made a noise that was part growl, part moaning whale. “Four… three…” Stina muttered a string of words that would’ve made Ro proud. Then she shuffled into the mud, trying to move slowly and carefully. But two steps in, she lost her footing and… SPLASH! “For the record,” Dex said as Stina burst back to the surface looking like a sludge beast and screaming like a banshee, “this might be the greatest moment of my life.

Any chance I can convince either of you goblins to carry me?” Keefe asked, the third time he ended up knee-deep in sludge. “No, but I’d be happy to carry Sophie,” Sandor offered. Keefe clutched his heart. “That hurts, Gigantor. I bet Ro would carry me.” “And probably bang your head into all the trees,” Grizel added. “No one needs to carry anyone,” Mr. Forkle told them.

Everything, she thought, is in suspended animation; if she moved, dislodged one single pebble, the whole world would come rushing down. And as she stood there, she saw what the rain and the mountain and the sharply etched morning had conspired to bring her: a bright object, half-buried in the sludge, catching the rays of a sun no one had truly seen for weeks. It was a skull, human.

Don't think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing. For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

rotten fruits and vegetables n. distressed produce sewage plant n. wastewater conveyance facility sewage sludge n. 1. regulated organic ingredients 2. bioslurp 3. organic biomass Some people may call the residue of treated sewage "sludge," but to John Gonzales of the Reno-Sparks, Nevada, sewage treatment plant it's "organic biomass." 4. biosolids It might look like sludge to you, but others call it "biosolids." 5. regulated wastewater residuals

Green Capitalism", even if products are produced using the utmost environmental care and designed for easy reuse, offers not way out of a system that must expand exponentially and thus, continue to ratchet up its use of natural resources, its chemical pollution, its contaminated sewage sludge, its garbage, and its many other toxic substances. Some of these "fixes" will probably slow down the rate of environmental destruction, but the magnitude of the needed changes dwarfs these approaches.

This sludge oozes like a dying sea snake, though it tastes like it's already dead. Some evil force made up this concoction, intending to release it to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world. But the creator made the mistake of tasting his creation and passed on. The world was saved for a moment. Still, like the black plague, this thing refused to fade out forever. I'm sad to report that our good friend Cliff behind the bar rediscovered it. Now it's spreading around the world as if carried by rats.

And now it is said of me That my love is nothing because I have borne no children, Or because I have fathered none; That I twisted the twig in my hands And cut the blossom free too soon from the seed; That I lay across the fire, And snuffed it dead sooner than draft or rain. But I have turned away, and drawn myself Upright to walk along the room alone. Across the dark the spines of cactus plants Remind me how I go—aloof, obscure, Indifferent to the words the children chalk Against my house and down the garden walls. They cannot tear the garden out of me, Nor smear my love with names. Love is a cliff, A clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars, smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea Till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more, Till the rock’s heart is found and shaped again. I keep the house and say no words, the evening Falls like a petal down the shawl of trees. I light the fire and see the blossom dance On air alone; I will not douse that flame, That searing flower; I will burn in it. I will not banish love to empty rain. For I know that I am asked to hate myself For their sweet sake Who sow the world with child. I am given to burn on the dark fire they make With their sly voices. But I have burned already down to bone. There is a fire that burns beyond the names Of sludge and filth of which this world is made. Agony sears the dark flesh of the body, And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise Above the earth, above the sacrifice; Until my soul flares outward like a blue Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air: Free of the body’s work of twisted iron.

Everything we've consigned to the world of things, everything we've presumed dead, is revealing itself now to be in possession of a terrible agency, a higher-order control beyond what we ever could have imagined. Their inanimateness has been little more than a clever veil. They are autocrats at base, incapable of negotiation. The crust and the sky; the sludge, sea, and dust: these are are always have been the true subjects. It is we who are the objects now, intermediaries for their massive churn. And as we dig them up, they bury us—so slowly we barely notice.

What did we talk about? I don't remember. We talked so hard and sat so still that I got cramps in my knee. We had too many cups of tea and then didn't want to leave the table to go to the bathroom because we didn't want to stop talking. You will think we talked of revolution but we didn't. Nor did we talk of our own souls. Nor of sewing. Nor of babies. Nor of departmental intrigue. It was political if by politics you mean the laboratory talk that characters in bad movies are perpetually trying to convey (unsuccessfully) when they Wrinkle Their Wee Brows and say (valiantly--dutifully--after all, they didn't write it) "But, Doctor, doesn't that violate Finagle's Constant?" I staggered to the bathroom, released floods of tea, and returned to the kitchen to talk. It was professional talk. It left my grey-faced and with such concentration that I began to develop a headache. We talked about Mary Ann Evans' loss of faith, about Emily Brontë's isolation, about Charlotte Brontë's blinding cloud, about the split in Virginia Woolf's head and the split in her economic condition. We talked about Lady Murasaki, who wrote in a form that no respectable man would touch, Hroswit, a little name whose plays "may perhaps amuse myself," Miss Austen, who had no more expression in society than a firescreen or a poker. They did not all write letters, write memoirs, or go on the stage. Sappho--only an ambiguous, somewhat disagreeable name. Corinna? The teacher of Pindar. Olive Schriener, growing up on the veldt, wrote on book, married happily, and ever wrote another. Kate Chopin wrote a scandalous book and never wrote another. (Jean has written nothing.). There was M-ry Sh-ll-y who wrote you know what and Ch-rl-tt- P-rk-ns G-lm-an, who wrote one superb horror study and lots of sludge (was it sludge?) and Ph-ll-s Wh--tl-y who was black and wrote eighteenth century odes (but it was the eighteenth century) and Mrs. -nn R-dcl-ff- S-thw-rth and Mrs. G--rg- Sh-ld-n and (Miss?) G--rg-tt- H-y-r and B-rb-r- C-rtl-nd and the legion of those, who writing, write not, like the dead Miss B--l-y of the poem who was seduced into bad practices (fudging her endings) and hanged herself in her garter. The sun was going down. I was blind and stiff. It's at this point that the computer (which has run amok and eaten Los Angeles) is defeated by some scientifically transcendent version of pulling the plug; the furniture stood around unknowing (though we had just pulled out the plug) and Lady, who got restless when people talked at suck length because she couldn't understand it, stuck her head out from under the couch, looking for things to herd. We had talked for six hours, from one in the afternoon until seven; I had at that moment an impression of our act of creation so strong, so sharp, so extraordinarily vivid, that I could not believe all our talking hadn't led to something more tangible--mightn't you expect at least a little blue pyramid sitting in the middle of the floor?

Dulce et Decorum Est Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-nines that dropped behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime … Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, – My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

I arrange to meet Kimmie and Wes before homeroom the following day. The cafeteria serves breakfast for early risers in the form of stale toast, oatmeal sludge, and watered-down orange juice. “This had better be worth it,” Wes says. “By my calculation, I’d say you’re denying us at least thirty minutes of sleep.” “Not to mention precious primping time.” Kimmie motions to her outfit: a black leather poodle skirt paired with a glittery pink T that reads DEMON IN TRAINING. “Like it? I also have a coordinating pitchfork, but in all this rush I forgot it at home.” “Along with your sense of style,” Wes jokes, resting his cheek against her shoulder.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS but you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to wash off the sludge, the stench of our past. How to start clean. This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps. Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear. You know where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up with an ache she can’t locate and no money and a terrible thirst. So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

bleeds into itself; the heart muscle softens and has hemorrhages into its chambers, and blood squeezes out of the heart muscle as the heart beats, and it floods the chest cavity. The brain becomes clogged with dead blood cells, a condition known as sludging of the brain. Ebola attacks the lining of the eyeball, and the eyeballs may fill up with blood: you may go blind. Droplets of blood stand out on the eyelids: you may weep blood. The blood runs from your eyes down your cheeks and refuses to coagulate. You may have a hemispherical stroke, in which one whole side of the body is paralyzed, which is invariably fatal in a case of Ebola. Even while the body’s internal organs are becoming plugged with coagulated blood, the blood that streams out of the body cannot clot; it resembles whey being squeezed out of curds. The blood has been stripped of its clotting factors. If you put the runny Ebola blood in a test tube and look at it, you see that the blood is destroyed. Its red cells are broken and dead. The blood looks as if it has been buzzed in an electric blender. Ebola kills a great deal of tissue while the host is still alive. It triggers a creeping, spotty necrosis that spreads through all the internal organs. The liver bulges up and turns yellow, begins to liquefy, and then it cracks apart. The cracks run across the liver and deep inside it, and the liver completely dies and goes putrid. The kidneys become jammed with blood clots and dead cells, and cease functioning. As the kidneys fail, the blood becomes toxic with urine. The spleen turns into a single huge, hard blood clot the size of a

Cow's milk has four times the protein and only half the carbohydrate content of human milk; pasteurization destroys the natural enzyme in cow's milk required to digest its heavy protein content. This excess milk protein therefore putrefies in the human digestive tract, clogging the intestines with sticky sludge, some of which seeps into the bloodstream. As this putrid sludge accumulates from daily consumption of dairy products, the body forces some of it out through the skin (acne, blemishes) and lungs (catarrh), while the rest of it festers inside, forms mucous that breeds infections, causes allergic reactions, and stiffens joints with calcium deposits. Many cases of chronic asthma, allergies, ear infections, and acne have been totally cured simply by eliminating all dairy products from the diet.

I can begin to see the compulsion for admitting original sin, for adoring Hitler, for taking opium. I have long wanted to read and explore the theories of philosophy, psychology, national, religious, & primitive consciousness, but it seems now too late for anything - I am a conglomerate garbage heap of loose ends - selfish, scared, contemplating devoting the rest of my life to a cause - going naked to send clothes to the needy, escaping to a convent, into hypochondria, into religious mysticism, into the waves - anywhere, anywhere, where the burden, the terrifying hellish weight of self-responsibility and ultimate self-judgment is lifted. I can see ahead only into dark, sordid alleys, where the dregs, the sludge, the filth of my life lies, unglorified, unchanged - transfigured by nothing: no nobility, not even the illusion of a dream.

Perhaps it was the weeks in the cage alone. Perhaps it was the lack of control. Perhaps it was the heat and the fire and the fear. Her instincts would have told her to go to water perhaps. I don't know. All I know is that she's done this thing that she's been too scared to do for all the years she's been here, sitting for endless hours at her beach. I am so proud of her, it swells in my throat and I find it difficult to swallow. All I can see is the back of her head, brown in the sun, splattered with water droplets and lagoon sludge, the slick pale tips of her ears and the dark tuft of her tail swishing through the water. Everything that I feel for her swells up too, unexpected and completely flooring. I'm absolutely wrecked, my body broken and my mind shattered. Is this love? I don't know. All I know is that I've never felt anything like this before in my life.

The Rev, and the whole Church, and their religious joined-at-the-hippers like the Known Fruits, and their political pals–they were all death on ecofreaks. Their ads featured stuff like a cute little blond girl next to some particularly repellent threatened species, such as the Surinam toad or the great white shark, with a slogan saying: This? or This? Implying that all cute little blond girls were in danger of having their throats slit so the Surinam toads might prosper. By extension, anyone who liked smelling the daisies, and having daisies to smell, and eating mercury-free fish, and who objected to giving birth to three-eyed infants via the toxic sludge in their drinking water was a demon-possessed Satanic minion of darkness, hell-bent on sabotaging the American Way and God’s Holy Oil, which were one and the same. And Bearlift, despite its fuzzy reasoning and its clumsy delivery system, was in a geographical area where more oil might well be discovered, or through which it might well be piped, with the usual malfunctions, spills, and coverups.

Because I was reading today in the science section of the paper that passionate love lasts only a year, maybe two, if you're lucky. Because I want to be extra lucky. Because the article apologized specifically to poets - sorry, you hopeless saps - as though we automatically believe in love more than anyone else (more than kindergarten teachers, long-haired carpenters) & have been pushing this Non-Truth on everyone. Because who knows what will happen, but I want to, baby, want to believe it's always possible to love bigger & madder, even after two, three, four years, four decades. I want a love as dirty as a snowball fight in the sludge, under grimy yellow lights. I want this winter inside my lungs. Inside my brain & dream. I want to eat the unplowed street & fog that's been erasing evergreens. I want to eat the fog only to discover it's some giant's lost silver blanket. I want to find the giant & return to him his treasure. I want the journey to be long. & strange, like a map drawn in snow by our shadows shivering. I want to shiver against you, into you.

That story, of course, isn’t unique to California, or to beavers. Europeans began despoiling North American ecosystems the moment they set boots on the stony shore of the New World. You’re probably familiar with most of the colonists’ original environmental sins: They wielded an ax against every tree, lowered a net to catch every fish, turned livestock onto every pasture, churned the prairie to dust. In California’s Sierra Nevada, nineteenth-century gold miners displaced so much sediment that the sludge could have filled the Panama Canal eight times.14 We are not accustomed to discussing the fur trade in the same breath as those earth-changing industries, but perhaps we should. The disappearance of beavers dried up wetlands and meadows, hastened erosion, altered the course of countless streams, and imperiled water-loving fish, fowl, and amphibians—an aquatic Dust Bowl. Centuries before the Glen Canyon Dam plugged up the Colorado and the Cuyahoga burst into flame, fur trappers were razing stream ecosystems. “[Beavers’] systematic and widespread removal,” wrote Sharon Brown and Suzanne Fouty in 2011, “represents the first large-scale Euro-American alteration of watersheds.

Free will and the choices that we make every day provides for self-identification. We all hold the plenary powers of discretion to script who and what we are. Self-determination comes from refusal to passively accept whatever doctrine is convenient and move beyond glib answers and popular canons to staunch the torrent of life’s abuses. Intensely pushing forward into troubled waters the clear becomes murky, the certain become problematic, and the real become ethereal. Striping our consciousness of all familiar handholds can lead to dissolution of the sense of a transient self. Disintegration of a preconceived notion of self-identity can lead to either psychosis or a degree of self-mastery, depending upon an individual’s ability to absorb and integrate the secret reserves of their psyche power. Self-awareness comes at a high price but it has distinct rewards. Shrewdly shredded of all falsities we can see what is apparent. Brusquely scouring our brain of layers of toxic emotional sludge reveals a sterling center point. Starting anew we can launch ourselves in a more charming and cheerful image that is both natural and necessary to build upon in order to achieve and sustain our robust constitutional fortitude.

Stupendous carnage was painted on the canvas, A depiction of repulsion was executed around the structure. It revealed its dark emblem by painting its sinister Red. Three intertwined bloated eyes are encrusted together, awfully deformed - the horrendous stench of decay can be smelt from it, for it exudes a sulfurous aroma of rotting animals. A torn torso of a butchered rabbit laid on the eye sockets, with all its arms, legs, and head severed off. A sludge-like, bubbling, dripping fluid oozed from the abnormally large eyes, leaving the ground deserted to rust and becoming the midst of a terrible famine. Blood Gushes from the slashes of each hideous eye, gouging out gore from the torn skin, spluttering and erupting gasping cries as it struggles in its own twisted misery of giving birth, as it was preparing to give shape-shifting life to a black-glass body, horn-like entity, unlike any childbirth you have ever witnessed. Satanic was this creature, whose muscle mass was disintegrated. All of his blood was squeezed out, forlorn and cold to the touch. The thorns on his head were intertwined into horns. A serpent's nose and wolf-like fangs were all this child had, as he had no gift of sight or hearing, he had only the smell of terror as his power.

Old Hubert must have had a premonition of his squalid demise. In October he said to me, ‘Forty-two years I’ve had this place. I’d really like to go back home, but I ain’t got the energy since my old girl died. And I can’t sell it the way it is now. But anyway before I hang my hat up I’d be curious to know what’s in that third cellar of mine.’ The third cellar has been walled up by order of the civil defence authorities after the floods of 1910. A double barrier of cemented bricks prevents the rising waters from invading the upper floors when flooding occurs. In the event of storms or blocked drains, the cellar acts as a regulatory overflow. The weather was fine: no risk of drowning or any sudden emergency. There were five of us: Hubert, Gerard the painter, two regulars and myself. Old Marteau, the local builder, was upstairs with his gear, ready to repair the damage. We made a hole. Our exploration took us sixty metres down a laboriously-faced vaulted corridor (it must have been an old thoroughfare). We were wading through a disgusting sludge. At the far end, an impassable barrier of iron bars. The corridor continued beyond it, plunging downwards. In short, it was a kind of drain-trap. That’s all. Nothing else. Disappointed, we retraced our steps. Old Hubert scanned the walls with his electric torch. Look! An opening. No, an alcove, with some wooden object that looks like a black statuette. I pick the thing up: it’s easily removable. I stick it under my arm. I told Hubert, ‘It’s of no interest. . .’ and kept this treasure for myself. I gazed at it for hours on end, in private. So my deductions, my hunches were not mistaken: the Bièvre-Seine confluence was once the site where sorcerers and satanists must surely have gathered. And this kind of primitive magic, which the blacks of Central Africa practise today, was known here several centuries ago. The statuette had miraculously survived the onslaught of time: the well-known virtues of the waters of the Bièvre, so rich in tannin, had protected the wood from rotting, actually hardened, almost fossilized it. The object answered a purpose that was anything but aesthetic. Crudely carved, probably from heart of oak. The legs were slightly set apart, the arms detached from the body. No indication of gender. Four nails set in a triangle were planted in its chest. Two of them, corroded with rust, broke off at the wood’s surface all on their own. There was a spike sunk in each eye. The skull, like a salt cellar, had twenty-four holes in which little tufts of brown hair had been planted, fixed in place with wax, of which there were still some vestiges. I’ve kept quiet about my find. I’m biding my time.

Through the buzzing in her ears, she heard new sounds from outside, shouting and cursing. All of a sudden the carriage door was wrenched open and someone vaulted inside. Evie squirmed to see who it was. Her remaining breath was expelled in a faint sob as she saw a familiar glitter of dark golden hair. It was Sebastian as she had never seen him before, no longer detached and self-possessed, but in the grip of bone-shaking rage. His eyes were pale and reptilian as his murderous gaze fastened on Eustace, whose breath began to rattle nervously behind the pudgy ladder of his chin. “Give her to me,” Sebastian said, his voice hoarse with fury. “Now, you pile of gutter sludge, or I’ll rip your throat out.” Seeming to realize that Sebastian was eager to carry out the threat, Eustace released his chokehold on Evie. She scrambled toward Sebastian and took in desperate pulls of air. He caught her with a low murmur, his hold gentle but secure. “Easy, love. You’re safe now.” She felt the tremors of rage that ran in continuous thrills through his body. Sebastian sent a lethal glance to Eustace, who was trying to gather his jellylike mass into the far end of the seat. “The next time I see you,” Sebastian said viciously, “no matter what the circumstances, I’m going to kill you. No law, nor weapon, nor God Himself will be able to stop it from happening. So if you value your life, don’t let your path cross mine again.” Leaving Eustace in a quivering heap of speechless fear, Sebastian hauled Evie from the vehicle. She clung to him, still trying to regain her breath as she glanced apprehensively around the scene. It appeared that Cam had been alerted to the fracas, and was keeping her two uncles at bay. Brook was on the ground, while Peregrine was staggering backward from some kind of assault, his beefy countenance turning ruddy from enraged surprise. Swaying as her feet touched the ground, Evie turned her face into her husband’s shoulder. Sebastian was literally steaming, the chilly air striking off his flushed skin and turning his breath into puffs of white. He subjected her to a brief but thorough inspection, his hands running lightly over her, his gaze searching her pale face. His voice was astonishingly tender. “Are you hurt, Evie? Look up at me, love. Yes. Sweetheart… did they do you any injury?” “N-no.” Evie stared at him dazedly. “My uncle Peregrine,” she whispered, “he’s very p-powerful—” “I’ll handle him,” he assured her, and called out to Cam. “Rohan! Come fetch her.” The young man obeyed instantly, approaching Evie with long, fluid strides. He spoke to her with a few foreign-sounding words, his voice soothing her overwrought nerves. She hesitated before going with him, casting a worried glance at Sebastian. “It’s all right,” he said without looking at her, his icy gaze locked on Peregrine’s bullish form. “Go.