Slug It Out Quotes

I bet if you cut open my stomach, the black slug of depression would slide out.

And then I stand in front of God's Throne squinting up at His blazing glory and He says, 'You had your opportunities, boy. But did you listen? No. You went on heedlesly reading that garbagey magazine with pictures of naked girls in it. How juvenile! I gave geese more sense than that.' Please, God. I'm only fourteen years old. A teenager. Have mercy. Be loving. I was,' says God. 'For eons. And look at what it got me. You.' God turns in disgust, just the way Daddy does. 'Sorry, but I'm the Creator. I take it personally. There are slugs and bugs and night-crawlers I feel better about having created - I mean, there are sparrows - I've got my eye on one right now. Is that sparrow consumed with lust? No. He mates in the spring and that's the end of it. Consider the lilies. Do they think about lily tits all the time? No. They look not and they lust not, and yet I say unto you that you will never be half as attractive as they. Therefore, I say unto you, think not about peckers and boobs and all that nonsense and your Heavenly Father will see that you meet a good woman and marry her, just as I do for the sparrow and walleye - yea verily, even the night-crawler and the eelpout. But I've told you this over and over for nineteen centuries. And now, verily, it's too late. Time's up, buster. Lights out! Game's over!

When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word "depression." Depression, most people know, used to be termed "melancholia," a word which appears in English as the year 1303 and crops up more than once in Chaucer, who in his usage seemed to be aware of its pathological nuances. "Melancholia" would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a blank tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated -- the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer -- had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.

...At least you got Soda. I ain't got nobody.' 'Shoot,' I said, startled out of my misery, 'you got the whole gang. Dally didn't slug you tonight cause you're the pet. I mean, golly, Johnny, you got the whole gang.' 'It ain't the same as having your own folks care about you,' Johnny said simply. 'it just ain't the same.

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial. There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

When I was little, I used to pour salt on slugs. I liked watching them dissolve before my eyes. Cruelty is always sort of fun until you realize that something’s getting hurt. It would be one thing to be a loser if it meant that no one paid attention to you, but in school, it means you’re actively sought out. You’re the slug, and they’re holding all the salt. And they haven’t developed a conscience. There’s a word we learned in social studies: schadenfreude. It’s when you enjoy watching someone else suffer. The real question though, is why? I think part of it is self preservation. And part of it is because a group always feels more like a group when it’s banded together against an enemy. It doesn’t matter if that enemy has never done anything to hurt you-you just have to pretend you hate someone even more than you hate yourself. You know why salt works on slugs? Because it dissolved in the water that’s part of a slug’s skin, so the water on the inside its body starts to flow out. They slug dehydrates. This works with snails, too. And with leeches. And with people like me. With any creature, really, too thin-skinned to stand up for itself.

SinnerThree: … Tell me more about lobster sex, if you want. I’m not picky about sex talk as long as someone’s fucking. I laugh softly. This guy’s funny, I’ll give him that. LobsterShorts: I’m fresh out of lobster sex facts atm. BUT…lemme tell you about sea slugs. SinnerThree: Omg yes. I can’t wait for this. Hold on. Let me undo my pants.

Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It's the first week of October. Season of woolen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.

Let’s say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him. He had been a big, twitchy guy with veiny skin stretched over swollen biceps, a tattoo of a swastika on his tongue. Teeth filed into razor-sharp fangs-you know the type. And you’re chopping off his head because, even with eight bullet holes in him, you’re pretty sure he’s about to spring back to his feet and eat the look of terror right off your face. On the follow-through of the last swing, though, the handle of the ax snaps in a spray of splinters. You now have a broken ax. So, after a long night of looking for a place to dump the man and his head, you take a trip into town with your ax. You go to the hardware store, explaining away the dark reddish stains on the broken handle as barbecue sauce. You walk out with a brand-new handle for your ax. The repaired ax sits undisturbed in your garage until the spring when, on one rainy morning, you find in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug with a bulging egg sac on its tail. Its jaws bite one of your forks in half with what seems like very little effort. You grab your trusty ax and chop the thing into several pieces. On the last blow, however, the ax strikes a metal leg of the overturned kitchen table and chips out a notch right in the middle of the blade. Of course, a chipped head means yet another trip to the hardware store. They sell you a brand-new head for your ax. As soon as you get home, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded earlier. He’s also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed-trimmer line, and it’s wearing that unique expression of “you’re the man who killed me last winter” resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life. You brandish your ax. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, “That’s the same ax that beheaded me!” IS HE RIGHT?

[excerpt] The usual I say. Essence. Spirit. Medicine. A taste. I say top shelf. Straight up. A shot. A sip. A nip. I say another round. I say brace yourself. Lift a few. Hoist a few. Work the elbow. Bottoms up. Belly up. Set ‘em up. What’ll it be. Name your poison. I say same again. I say all around. I say my good man. I say my drinking buddy. I say git that in ya. Then a quick one. Then a nightcap. Then throw one back. Then knock one down. Fast & furious I say. Could savage a drink I say. Chug. Chug-a-lug. Gulp. Sauce. Mother’s milk. Everclear. Moonshine. White lightning. Firewater. Hootch. Relief. Now you’re talking I say. Live a little I say. Drain it I say. Kill it I say. Feeling it I say. Wobbly. Breakfast of champions I say. I say candy is dandy but liquor is quicker. I say Houston, we have a drinking problem. I say the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. I say god only knows what I’d be without you. I say thirsty. I say parched. I say wet my whistle. Dying of thirst. Lap it up. Hook me up. Watering hole. Knock a few back. Pound a few down. My office. Out with the boys I say. Unwind I say. Nurse one I say. Apply myself I say. Toasted. Glow. A cold one a tall one a frosty I say. One for the road I say. Two-fisted I say. Never trust a man who doesn’t drink I say. Drink any man under the table I say. Then a binge then a spree then a jag then a bout. Coming home on all fours. Could use a drink I say. A shot of confidence I say. Steady my nerves I say. Drown my sorrows. I say kill for a drink. I say keep ‘em comin’. I say a stiff one. Drink deep drink hard hit the bottle. Two sheets to the wind then. Knackered then. Under the influence then. Half in the bag then. Out of my skull I say. Liquored up. Rip-roaring. Slammed. Fucking jacked. The booze talking. The room spinning. Feeling no pain. Buzzed. Giddy. Silly. Impaired. Intoxicated. Stewed. Juiced. Plotzed. Inebriated. Laminated. Swimming. Elated. Exalted. Debauched. Rock on. Drunk on. Bring it on. Pissed. Then bleary. Then bloodshot. Glassy-eyed. Red-nosed. Dizzy then. Groggy. On a bender I say. On a spree. I say off the wagon. I say on a slip. I say the drink. I say the bottle. I say drinkie-poo. A drink a drunk a drunkard. Swill. Swig. Shitfaced. Fucked up. Stupefied. Incapacitated. Raging. Seeing double. Shitty. Take the edge off I say. That’s better I say. Loaded I say. Wasted. Off my ass. Befuddled. Reeling. Tanked. Punch-drunk. Mean drunk. Maintenance drunk. Sloppy drunk happy drunk weepy drunk blind drunk dead drunk. Serious drinker. Hard drinker. Lush. Drink like a fish. Boozer. Booze hound. Alkie. Sponge. Then muddled. Then woozy. Then clouded. What day is it? Do you know me? Have you seen me? When did I start? Did I ever stop? Slurring. Reeling. Staggering. Overserved they say. Drunk as a skunk they say. Falling down drunk. Crawling down drunk. Drunk & disorderly. I say high tolerance. I say high capacity. They say protective custody. Blitzed. Shattered. Zonked. Annihilated. Blotto. Smashed. Soaked. Screwed. Pickled. Bombed. Stiff. Frazzled. Blasted. Plastered. Hammered. Tore up. Ripped up. Destroyed. Whittled. Plowed. Overcome. Overtaken. Comatose. Dead to the world. The old K.O. The horrors I say. The heebie-jeebies I say. The beast I say. The dt’s. B’jesus & pink elephants. A mindbender. Hittin’ it kinda hard they say. Go easy they say. Last call they say. Quitting time they say. They say shut off. They say dry out. Pass out. Lights out. Blackout. The bottom. The walking wounded. Cross-eyed & painless. Gone to the world. Gone. Gonzo. Wrecked. Sleep it off. Wake up on the floor. End up in the gutter. Off the stuff. Dry. Dry heaves. Gag. White knuckle. Lightweight I say. Hair of the dog I say. Eye-opener I say. A drop I say. A slug. A taste. A swallow. Down the hatch I say. I wouldn’t say no I say. I say whatever he’s having. I say next one’s on me. I say bottoms up. Put it on my tab. I say one more. I say same again

Thomas stared in horror at the monstrous thing making its way down the long corridor of the Maze. It looked like an experiment gone terribly wrong—something from a nightmare. Part animal, part machine, the Griever rolled and clicked along the stone pathway. Its body resembled a gigantic slug, sparsely covered in hair and glistening with slime, grotesquely pulsating in and out as it breathed. It had no distinguishable head or tail, but front to end it was at least six feet long, four feet thick. Every ten to fifteen seconds, sharp metal spikes popped through its bulbous flesh and the whole creature abruptly curled into a ball and spun forward. Then it would settle, seeming to gather its bearings, the spikes receding back through the moist skin with a sick slurping sound. It did this over and over, traveling just a few feet at a time. But hair and spikes were not the only things protruding from the Griever’s body. Several randomly placed mechanical arms stuck out here and there, each one with a different purpose. A few had bright lights attached to them. Others had long, menacing needles. One had a three-fingered claw that clasped and unclasped for no apparent reason. When the creature rolled, these arms folded and maneuvered to avoid being crushed. Thomas wondered what—or who—could create such frightening, disgusting creatures.

And I felt next to nothing as I walked to the village; I paid my respects to the countryside yet was unable to detect solemn sympathy in its quiet or reproach in its stillness. Usually that road brought me miles of footage from the past: the bright-faced ten-year-old running for the Oxford bus; the lardy pubescent, out on soul-rambles (i.e. sulks), or off for a wank in the woods; the youth, handsomely reading Tennyson on summer evenings, or trying to kill birds with feeble, rusted slug-guns, or behind the hedge smoking fags with Geoffrey, then hawking in the ditch. But now I strode it vacantly, my childhood nowhere to be found.

When grown-ups hear a little dark door creaking in their hearts they turn the telly up. They slug a glass of wine. They tell the cat it was just a door creaking. The cat knows. It jumps down from the sofa and walks out of the room. When that little dark door in a heart starts to go click-clack click-clack click-clack click-clack so loudly and violently their chest shows an actual beat - well, then they say they've got bad cholesterol and they try to quit using butter, they begin to go for walks. When the tiny dark door in her heart creaks open, she will walk right through it. She will lie down and inside her own heart like a bird in the night.

Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk.

We'll teach it that the humblest insect measuring out its miserable days by the pug-wuggery and skull duggery of the old Slug of Time is worth far more than this defecating bubble!

He wanted to slug it out toe to toe with EVIL, like Muhammad Ali against Joe Frazier, the Celtics against the Knicks, Jacob against the Angel.

I can think of something else that would make me feel even better.” She raised her eyebrows. “Oh?” With a nod he gave her a wicked smile. “Yeah. It’s warm…and it feels really good when I’m in it…and I love how it’s always wet for me…” “You think so, huh?” she smirked. “Well yeah. A shower is usually wet when I—” She slugged him in the shoulder and he laughed out loud. "Van!

After changing shape several times, the ball eventually turned into a huge face. It floated alongside the air-car. This time, time instead of sending him a mental message, the face spoke out aloud and the whole air-car vibrated with its intensity. “If you are foolish enough to renege on your contract, you will be severely punished. For your sake, I hope you wouldn’t do such a thing.” When Tarmy made no attempt to respond, the face turned and pressed itself against the millipede-free window. A moment later, Tarmy felt the fat slug entering his mind, the sign that the face was attempting to use its powers to obtain his response by other means. But as the slug dug deeper, Samantha’s cover stories began springing out of the corners of his mind. Instead of obtaining Tarmy’s agreement, all that the face saw was a burning army transporter surrounded by bodies. Undeterred, the face continued its assault. Samantha had anticipated that Tarmy might come up against an adept, so the mental images of death and destruction flowed unchecked. After failing to break Tarmy’s defences, the face removed the slug and tried reason. “You can’t win, Mr Tarleton, so why don’t you do yourself a favour and cooperate? It will be better for you in the long run. Now, where is the miniature pulse drive engine?” Tarmy realised why the millipedes hadn’t been allowed to attack. It was obvious that the Great Ones were hoping to retrieve the engine. When Tarmy didn’t respond, the face said, “I am prepared to overlook your desertion if you agree to tell us where the engine is and also honour your contract by showing us how to convert the engine into a bomb.

My case is not unique : I am afraid of dying and distressed at being in this world. I haven’t worked, I haven’t studied. I have wept, I have cried out in protest. These tears and cries have taken up a great deal of my time. I am tortured by all the time lost whenever I think about it. I cannot think about things for long, but I can find pleasure in a withered lettuce leaf offering me nothing but regrets to chew over. There is no sustenance in the past. I shall depart as I arrived. Intact, loaded down with the defects that have tormented me. I wish I had been born a statue : I am a slug under my dunghill. Virtues, good qualities, courage, meditation, culture. With arms crossed on my breast I have broken myself against those words.

Hagrid’s hut loomed out of the darkness. There were no lights, no sound of Fang scrabbling at the door, his bark booming in welcome. All those visits to Hagrid, and the gleam of the copper kettle on the fire, and rock cakes and giant grubs, and his great bearded face, and Ron vomiting slugs, and Hermione helping him save Norbert . . .

Hear him now as he toils. He has a long garden-implement in his hand, and he is sending up the death-rate in slug circles with a devastating rapidity.             "Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay              Ta-ra-ra BOOM—" And the boom is a death-knell. As it rings softly out on the pleasant spring air, another stout slug has made the Great Change.

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day—if you live long enough—most people get what they deserve.

Dad slugged back the Rolling Rock. He used to only drink Budweiser until those commercials with the frogs came out. He’d said, “Welp. Can’t drink moron beer,” finished the rest of his Budweiser that night and, as far as Dan knew, had yet to touch another

Honour is kind of what you get when you weaponise manners, but if you’re brought up in a system where honour is valued more than life itself it makes a lot more sense. Some. A bit. Anyway: they attacked me as they were honour bound to do, and I defended myself as I was bound to do, but killed them in self-defence. I think it was what Gareth had planned. He had dishonoured himself by kidnapping Perkins in the first place and causing our tribes to fall out, then been the cause of me dishonouring myself, which then brought dishonour upon himself. By attacking me, he allowed me to restore my lost honour by killing him, and, odd as it might seem, his honour as well. He died with honour, and I thank and respect him for it. We didn’t leave them to the slugs at all, and instead buried them with tribal honours, which is why we were kind of delayed. The ground was hard and we had to ride for miles to find a shovel.

God In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned! His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls. The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power, On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry, He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more. But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze, Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws, And he would weigh the heavier on those after. Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealth Is but his cunning to make death more hard. Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking. And he has made the market for your beauty Too poor to buy, although you die to sell. Only that he has never heard of sleep; And when the cats come out the rats are sly. Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots, And in the morning some pale wonder ceases. Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful. Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost Out of us, but it is as hair of us, And only in the hush no wind stirs it. And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes, And restlessness still shadows the lost ways. The fingers shut on voices that pass through, Where blind farewells are taken easily .... Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!

Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether you admitted it or not, we come from you we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly. We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside-down on the prairies, our hair wild as spiders' legs, our feet rooted nowhere. We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting. Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemetaries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt.

No," Foyle roared. "Let them hear this. Let them hear everything." "You're insane, man. You've handed a loaded gun to children." "Stop treating them like children and they'll stop behaving like children. Who the hell are you to play monitor?" "What are you talking about?" "Stop treating them like children. Explain the loaded gun to them. Bring it all out into the open." Foyle laughed savagely. "I've ended the last star-chamber conference in the world. I've blown that last secret wide open. No more secrets from now on.... No more telling the children what's best for them to know.... Let 'em all grow up. It's about time." "Christ, he is insane." "Am I? I've handed life and death back to the people who do the living and the dying. The common man's been whipped and led long enough by driven men like us.... Compulsive men... Tiger men who can't help lashing the world before them. We're all tigers, the three of us, but who the hell are we to make decisions for the world just because we're compulsive? Let the world make its own choice between life and death. Why should we be saddled with the responsibility?" "We're not saddled," Y'ang-Yeovil said quietly. "We're driven. We're forced to seize responsibility that the average man shirks." "Then let him stop shirking it. Let him stop tossing his duty and guilt onto the shoulders of the first freak who comes along grabbing at it. Are we to be scapegoats for the world forever?" "Damn you!" Dagenham raged. "Don't you realize that you can't trust people? They don't know enough for their own good." "Then let them learn or die. We're all in this together. Let's live together or die together." "D'you want to die in their ignorance? You've got to figure out how to get those slugs back without blowing everything wide open." "No. I believe in them. I was one of them before I turned tiger. They can all turn uncommon if they're kicked awake like I was.

Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn't matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that. She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window. She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies. Enemies were: The Devil (in his many forms) Next Door Sex (in its many forms) Slugs Friends were: God Our dog Auntie Madge The Novels of Charlotte Bronte Slug pellets and me, at first.

Lawlessness doesn’t mean there’s no law, you know, it just means that there are a lot of different laws slugging it out in the streets, and none of them have come out on top yet.

(Vane) laughed at his brother who was slugging it out with another Daimon. "How about I grab one leg, you grab the other and we make a wish and pull?

Just out of curiosity, what does pinche puto whatever-he-said mean?” “Fucking faggot pubic hair slugs.

Harry would have pointed out that trouble didn’t come much worse than having slugs pouring out of your mouth, but he couldn’t; Hagrid’s treacle toffee had cemented his jaws together.

To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out while he himself puts them on like a sock over a foot onto the stub of himself--his extra sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye which extrudes, expands, winces and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again. Bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way; this journey into a darkness that is composed of women--a woman--who can see in darkness while he himself strains blindly forward.

1 The summer our marriage failed we picked sage to sweeten our hot dark car. We sat in the yard with heavy glasses of iced tea, talking about which seeds to sow when the soil was cool. Praising our large, smooth spinach leaves, free this year of Fusarium wilt, downy mildew, blue mold. And then we spoke of flowers, and there was a joke, you said, about old florists who were forced to make other arrangements. Delphiniums flared along the back fence. All summer it hurt to look at you. 2 I heard a woman on the bus say, “He and I were going in different directions.” As if it had something to do with a latitude or a pole. Trying to write down how love empties itself from a house, how a view changes, how the sign for infinity turns into a noose for a couple. Trying to say that weather weighed down all the streets we traveled on, that if gravel sinks, it keeps sinking. How can I blame you who kneeled day after day in wet soil, pulling slugs from the seedlings? You who built a ten-foot arch for the beans, who hated a bird feeder left unfilled. You who gave carrots to a gang of girls on bicycles. 3 On our last trip we drove through rain to a town lit with vacancies. We’d come to watch whales. At the dock we met five other couples—all of us fluorescent, waterproof, ready for the pitch and frequency of the motor that would lure these great mammals near. The boat chugged forward—trailing a long, creamy wake. The captain spoke from a loudspeaker: In winter gray whales love Laguna Guerrero; it’s warm and calm, no killer whales gulp down their calves. Today we’ll see them on their way to Alaska. If we get close enough, observe their eyes—they’re bigger than baseballs, but can only look down. Whales can communicate at a distance of 300 miles—but it’s my guess they’re all saying, Can you hear me? His laughter crackled. When he told us Pink Floyd is slang for a whale’s two-foot penis, I stopped listening. The boat rocked, and for two hours our eyes were lost in the waves—but no whales surfaced, blowing or breaching or expelling water through baleen plates. Again and again you patiently wiped the spray from your glasses. We smiled to each other, good troopers used to disappointment. On the way back you pointed at cormorants riding the waves— you knew them by name: the Brants, the Pelagic, the double-breasted. I only said, I’m sure whales were swimming under us by the dozens. 4 Trying to write that I loved the work of an argument, the exhaustion of forgiving, the next morning, washing our handprints off the wineglasses. How I loved sitting with our friends under the plum trees, in the white wire chairs, at the glass table. How you stood by the grill, delicately broiling the fish. How the dill grew tall by the window. Trying to explain how camellias spoil and bloom at the same time, how their perfume makes lovers ache. Trying to describe the ways sex darkens and dies, how two bodies can lie together, entwined, out of habit. Finding themselves later, tired, by a fire, on an old couch that no longer reassures. The night we eloped we drove to the rainforest and found ourselves in fog so thick our lights were useless. There’s no choice, you said, we must have faith in our blindness. How I believed you. Trying to imagine the road beneath us, we inched forward, honking, gently, again and again.

They set out together in the moonlight. They had gone a good way along the hedge when they came upon an old box lying in the ditch. Sitting on top of the box was Yona the hedgehog. His prickles were stuck all over with dog-rose petals and he was making an extraordinary squeaking, grunting noise and waving his black paws. They stopped and looked at him. “Whatever are you doing, Yona?” asked Hufsa in astonishment. “Singing to the moon,” answered Yona. “All hedgehogs have to sing to the moon to make the slugs come, surely you know that? ‘O Slug-a-Moon, O Slug-a-Moon, O grant thy faithful hedgehog’s boon!

XXIV. And more than that - a furlong on - why, there! What bad use was that engine for, that wheel, Or brake, not wheel - that harrow fit to reel Men's bodies out like silk? With all the air Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel. XXV. Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood - Bog, clay and rubble, sand, and stark black dearth. XXVI. Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soil's Broke into moss, or substances like boils; Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils. XXVII. And just as far as ever from the end! Naught in the distance but the evening, naught To point my footstep further! At the thought, A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom friend, Sailed past, not best his wide wing dragon-penned That brushed my cap - perchance the guide I sought. XXVIII. For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains - with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. How thus they had surprised me - solve it, you! How to get from them was no clearer case. XXIX. Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick Of mischief happened to me, God knows when - In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shuts - you're inside the den. XXX. Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left a tall scalped mountain ... Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sight! XXXI. What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf He strikes on, only when the timbers start. XXXII. Not see? because of night perhaps? - why day Came back again for that! before it left The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, - Now stab and end the creature - to the heft!' XXXIII. Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears Of all the lost adventurers, my peers - How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years. XXXIV. There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! In a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, And blew. 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.

the days of the bosses, yellow men with bad breath and big feet, men who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk as if melody had never been invented, men who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and profit, men with expensive wives they possess like 60 acres of ground to be drilled or shown off or to be walled away from the incompetent, men who'd kill you because they're crazy and justify it because it's the law, men who stand in front of windows 30 feet wide and see nothing, men with luxury yachts who can sail around the world and never get out of their vest pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men like slugs, and not as good... - something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you...

Anyway, maybe there weren’t any solutions. Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk.

Emshwiller stepped out of the pickup wielding a matte-black rifle with a large scope (it was actually an airgun that fired 6.26-mm slugs). She was wearing her most elegant blue dress and a backward baseball cap. “I wanted to look freaky,” she says.

Our guy has a property office, John. And I don't mean the Property Office here in One PP. I mean the huge fucking storage facility. A guy in there, with access to thousands of fucking handguns. Even the ones that other people would be keeping an eye on, like Son of Sam's piece, for fuck's sake - a guy in there who'll just boost them and give them to our guy to kill people with. And if the guns are too famous, he'll cut his own slugs out of the bodies and walk away. This guy, our guy, he's actually starting to scare me a bit right now." "A couple of hundred kills to his name didn't do that?" "Meh. I dream about killing two hundred people every fucking night." "You know," said Tallow, "whenever I'm in danger of forgetting you're CSU, you always find a way to remind me.

The first woman was given antlers on her head to branch her power out into the world,” he said, digging the rake in deeper. “Slugs are frightened of that power because they are spineless creatures, and all spineless creatures are frightened of a woman’s power.

WHAT WE WANT of course is the same old story. The trees pushing out their leaves, fluttering them, shucking them off, the water thrashing around in the oceans, the tweedling of the birds, the unfurling of the slugs, the worms vacuuming dirt. The zinnias and their pungent slow explosion. We want it all to go on and go on again, the same thing each year, monotonous and amazing, just as if we were still behaving ourselves, living in tents, raising sheep, slitting their throats for God’s benefit, refusing to invent plastics. For unbelief and bathrooms you pay a price. If apples were the Devil’s only bait we’d still be able to call our souls our own, but then the prick threw indoor plumbing into the bargain and we were doomed. Now we use up a lot of paper telling one another how to conserve paper, and the sea fills up with killer coffee cups, and we worry about the sun and its ambivalent rays.

Then what’s wrong?” He couldn’t be that obtuse. “You’re kidding, right?” “Ah, yeah, gotcha. Modesty issue, huh?” He drove in a deceptively relaxed way. “Look, yours isn’t the first tail I’ve ever seen, okay?” Fury stole Priss’s breath. She reacted without thinking, slugging his hard in the shoulder. “Ow!” He grabbed her wrist and tossed her hand back at her. “I was trying to comfort you, woman.” “Comfort!” He couldn’t be serious. No man could be that dense. “You’re a . . . a Neanderthal!” “Am not.” Flattened by his careless attitude, Priss stared at him in disbelief. He was a gorgeous guy, but still a jerk. Shaggy blond hair, darker and more unkempt than Trace’s, piercing green eyes, a strong jaw and . . . she peeked at his naked chest . . . Built. Her chin lifted. “Where in the world did they even find you?” It had to be under a rock. Or deep in a cave. He glared at her. “They who?” “Trace and Dare.” Giving her a cautious frown, Jackson rubbed at one bloodshot, swollen eye. “That’s top secret.” That’s top secret, she mouthed, making fun of him, lashing out in her embarrassment. He went rigid with affront. “Goddamn it, woman, you blinded me, nutted me, and damn near clubbed me to death. Now you have to ridicule me, too?” He dared to complain to her? “You snuck into my bathroom. You saw me naked!” “Yeah.” His mouth twitched. He nodded just a little. “Yeah, I did.” As he turned on his headlights and pulled onto the street, he said in an aside, “Sorry ’bout that.” He did not sound sorry, not in the least. “Didn’t mean to stare.” He’d been staring? She should kill him. She really shoulder. But . . . she might need him for protection. And Trace probably wouldn’t like it if she offed one of his operatives. “Naked woman and all.” Jackson gestured lamely. “It’s instinct, ya know? Guy’s gotta look.

A man described by authorities as one evolutionary step above a banana slug has recently admitted to having been locked in the Sacajawea Junior High biology lab over a long weekend nearly sixteen years ago when he fell asleep and was mistaken as a cadaver. Though the man is incapable of human speech, he was able, over a period of weeks, to chisel out his story in hieroglyphics on the bathroom wall of the insane asylum where he now resides. He claims that toward the end of the second day of his accidental captivity, he got downright lonely and sought companionship at his own intellectual level. He found that companionship in a petri dish.

You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper in the earth, where it will last longer than your dust. Your life to mine is a slug track on stone. A thin silver mucus track in and out of the letters on my monument.

... I wondered what my husband was doing right then and I wondered what he'd ever do now that we'd both have to do things in this new kind of without, the kind of without that was final, the kind that meant there would be no apologies, no forgiveness, and now we'd each have to go about the slug of waking, bathing, eating, without the other as a witness, this person we'd split so much of our lives with, a person who housed entire armies of information about the other and who, I wondered, who would we thumb over our pasts with and who would notice how golden my husband's pale skin became in the lamplight in his office so late at night when his mind would move chalk sticks across, across, across, creating problems and solutions and problems and solutions and if there was no one to notice these things about my husband would my husband even exist anymore? And where would all the me that he had housed in himself go if I wasn't there to be with him and see what he kept of me in him, and did the versions of each of us that we had crafted so exactly and precisely for the other person, did those versions just evaporate, just die, just disappear, just fall out of a building somewhere in each of our brains and if they did then why didn't we get to have funerals for them? I loved the he that he was to me. I loved him and he is dead and I want a black moment for that man. Give me a black moment for that.

They rang the bell; the thug lashed out at them as soon as he opened the door, but Ove’s fist struck the bridge of his nose. The man lost his footing, got up, grabbed a kitchen knife, and ran at Ove. He never got there. Rune’s massive fist slugged him like a mallet. In his heyday he was quite a piece, that Rune. Highly unwise to get involved in fisticuffs with him.

A budget?" He'd expected an explosion.Even, perversely,hoped for one.Margo's tantrums were always so..stimulating.It didn't appear that he was going to be disappointed. "A budget?" she repeated,storming to him. "Of all the unbelievable,bloody nerve.You arrogant son of a bitch. Do you think I'm going to stand here and let you treat me like some sort of brainless bimbo who needs to be told how much she can spend on face powder?" "Face powder." Deliberately, he scanned the papers,took a pen out of his pocket,and made a quick note. "That would come under 'Miscellaneous Luxuries.' I think I've been very generous there. Now,as to your clothing allowance-" "Allowance!" She used both hands to shove him back a step. "Just let me tell you what you can do with your fucking allowance." "Careful,duchess." He brushed the front of his shirt. "Turnbill and Asser." The strangled sound in her throat was the best she could do.If there had been anything at all to throw,she'd have heaved it at his head. "I'd rather be picked apart,alive, by vultures than let you handle the money." "You don't have any money," he began, but she barreled on as she whirled around the room. Watching her, he all but salivated. "I'd rather be gang-raped by midgets, staked naked to a wasp nest,be force-fed garden slugs." "Go three weeks without a manicure?" he put in and watched her hands curl into claws. "You go after my face with those, I'll have to hurt you." "Oh,I hate you." "No,you don't.

...And you probably have little idea of how delicious - how toothsome - how scrumptious - they are when eaten fresh. Of course, I have my worm larder -" He corrected himself. "Worm larders, well stocked, but the earthworm pursued, or promptly pounced upon, and eaten fresh - as I've said - Ah! the earthworm, there's nothing like it! You can have your slugs and your wireworms and your leatherjackets and as many ground beetles as you like to eat - snap! crackle! crunch! You can have them all! There's nothing to equal the near liquefaction of worm meat as I pass its length through my fingers, sieving out the earth granules from the creature's incessant feeding. Or alternatively tear it to eat at once in great guzzling, gulping chunks.

She was a gardener of the ruthless type, and went for any small green thing that incautiously showed a timid spike above the earth, suspecting it of being a weed. She had had a slight difference with the professional gardener who had hitherto worked for her on three afternoons during the week, and had told him that his services were no longer required. She meant to do her gardening herself this year, and was confident that a profusion of beautiful flowers and a plethora of delicious vegetables would be the result. At the end of her garden path was a barrow of rich manure, which she proposed, when she had finished the slaughter of the innocents, to dig into the depopulated beds. On the other side of her paling her neighbour Georgie Pillson was rolling his strip of lawn, on which during the summer he often played croquet on a small scale. Occasionally they shouted remarks to each other, but as they got more and more out of breath with their exertions the remarks got fewer. Mrs. Quantock's last question had been "What do you do with slugs, Georgie?" and Georgie had panted out, "Pretend you don't see them.

[Stice's] parents had met and fallen in love in a Country/Western bar in Partridge KS — just outside Liberal KS on the Oklahoma border — met and fallen in star-crossed love in a bar playing this popular Kansas C/W-bar-game where they put their bare forearms together and laid a lit cigarette in the little valley between the two forearms' flesh and kept it there till one of them finally jerked their arm away and reeled away holding their arm. Mr. and Mrs. Stice each discovered somebody else that wouldn't jerk away and reel away, Stice explained. Their forearms were still to this day covered with little white slugs of burn-scar. They'd toppled like pines for each other from the git-go, Stice explained. They'd been divorced and remarried four or five times, depending on how you defined certain jurisprudential precepts. When they were on good domestic terms they stayed in their bedroom for days of squeaking springs with the door locked except for brief sallies out for Beefeater gin and Chinese take-out in little white cardboard pails with wire handles, with the Stice children wandering ghostlike through the clapboard house in sagging diapers or woolen underwear subsisting on potato chips out of econobags bigger than most of them were, the Stice kids. The kids did somewhat physically better during periods of nuptial strife, when a stony-faced Mr. Stice slammed the kitchen door and went off daily to sell crop insurance while Mrs. Stice —whom both Mr. Stice and The Darkness called 'The Bride' —while The Bride spent all day and evening cooking intricate multicourse meals she'd feed bits of to The Brood (Stice refers to both himself and his six siblings as 'The Brood') and then keep warm in quietly rattling-lidded pots and then hurl at the kitchen walls when Mr. Stice came home smelling of gin and of cigarette-brands and toilet-eau not The Bride's own. Ortho Stice loves his folks to distraction, but not blindly, and every holiday home to Partridge KS he memorizes highlights of their connubial battles so he can regale the E.T.A. upperclass-men with them, mostly at meals, after the initial forkwork and gasping have died down and people have returned to sufficient levels of blood-sugar and awareness of their surroundings to be regaled.

Arguing with the person you love is its own peculiar torment. The self divides against itself. Love slugs it out with its Freudian opposite. And if death wins and love dies, who gives a damn? You do, which enrages you and makes you more reckless yet. There's intrinsic exhaustion too. Both know, or think they know, that a reconciliation must happen, though it could take days, even weeks.

All the giants of the spirit whom I’ve broken. I don’t think anybody ever realized how much I enjoyed doing it. It’s a kind of lust. I’m perfectly indifferent to slugs like Ellsworth Toohey or my friend Alvah, and quite willing to leave them in peace. But just let me see a man of a slightly higher dimension—and I’ve got to make a sort of Toohey out of him. I’ve got to. It’s like a sex urge.

Have you lost your teeny tiny mind, you too-tall, too-skinny, too-crazy jerk?” “Oh, look who’s talking, Miss Let’s Blunder Around the Time Stream and Hang the Consequences! Thanks to you, we’ve got a dead Marc and a live Marc in the same timeline . . . in the same house! Thanks to you, I got chomped on by a dim, blonde, undead, selfish, whorish, blood-sucking leech when I was minding my own business in the past.” “Don’t you call me dim!” “Um. Everyone. Perhaps we should—” Tina began. “Wait, when did this happen?” Marc asked. He had the look of a man desperately trying to buy a vowel. “Past, an hour ago? Past, last year? Help me out.” “Oh, biiiiig surprise!” Laura threw her (perfectly manicured) hands in the air. “Let me guess, you were soooo busy banging your dead husband that you haven’t had time to tell anybody anything.” “I was getting to it,” I whined. “Then after not telling anyone anything and not being proactive—or even active!—you grow up to destroy the world and bring about eternal nuclear winter or whatever the heck that was and how do you deal with your foreknowledge of terrible events to come? Have sex!” “An affirmation of life?” Sinclair suggested. Never, I repeat, never had I loved him more. I was torn between slugging my sister and blowing my husband. Hmm. Laura might have a point about my priorities . . . but jeez. Look at him. Yum. “—even do it and what do you have to say for yourself? Huh?” “You’re just uptight, repressed, smug, antisex, and jealous, you Antichristing morally superior, fundamentally evil bitch.” Laura and Marc gasped. My husband groaned.

The Father wipes the silver chalice with a beautiful linen rag large as a small tablecloth, turns the cup two inches each time to keep you from having to drink where the last worshipper lipped it, as if that takes care of the germs. But I don’t care, I always reach out very piously—that’s to say, in slow motion, the way you move for some reason to take and eat the body of Our Savior—reach out and lay my hand over the Father’s in somber reverence to the moment and then press down as the silver rim clears my upper lip and suck a slug of wine that should have fed six communers. I have to, because the bread of His body is stuck to the roof of my mouth like a rubber tire patch, and if I can’t wash it loose by swishing His blood around, I’m going to have to dig it off with a finger, in slow motion, and possibly gag. When

Most people can recall schoolyard confrontations with with bullies. Boys were expected to deal with them by standing their ground and slugging it out, even, as one man told me, "if you knew you were going to get your head bashed in. You had to show you could take it, and you'd die rather than cry." But for girls, the surest and safest way to avoid being picked on or terrorized is to get the bully to like you.

Leaving me to plant the rest of the garlic, Mrs. Fitz sailed away like a galleon, young Alec bobbing in her wake. I worked contentedly through the morning, planting garlic, pinching back dead flower heads, digging out weeds and carrying on the gardener’s never-ending battle against snails, slugs, and similar pests. Here, though, the battle was waged bare-handed, with no assistance from chemical antipest compounds.

I like big men,” she said. Her voice was raspy, like she had a cold. She came up to me and grabbed my arm. Her fingers hurt the muscles. I could smell her perfume. She came close to me. I thought I knew what she wanted. I tried to kiss her. She jerked away. “No.” “I’m sorry.” She slapped me. She was strong, my cheek stung. She moved in, swinging both arms. Now she had her fists closed. She hit my arms and my chest. I tried to hold her. “Hit me!” she said. It was goddam queer. I held her arms, but she got loose. She struck my chest. She said: “Hit me.” I hit her easy on the ribs. “That’s right! That’s right!” She hit me a couple of hard blows. Her eyes were wild. She hit me a hard punch on the neck. I hit her in the belly. I heard the breath go out: ouf! It didn’t stop her. She kept coming in, punching hard. I gave her one over the kidneys. She grunted and clinched with me. She bit my arm until the blood came. I slapped her. She put her knee in my groin. It hurt. I lost my balance, grabbed for her, and we both went down. We rolled around on the dirty floor of the shack, both panting. She was hard to hold, and every time she got loose she’d hit or kick or bite me. I got over her, holding her down on the floor. She looked beautiful and wild. She bit my arm again and I slugged her in the ribs. She moaned, and then struggled free. My hand caught in the scarlet shirt. The silk tore to her navel. “Yes,” she said. I got the idea. I ripped the shirt off her, she fighting all the time and liking it. I ripped at her clothes, not caring how much I hurt her. She squirmed on the dirty floor, panting. There was blood on her mouth. I don’t know if it was mine or hers. It tasted sweet. Suddenly she stopped moving. “Now,” she said. “Now, goddam you. Now!” Later we lay on the floor. “I don’t understand you,” I said. “It’s fun, isn’t it?” “Yes.” “Then what do you care?

The toad looked embarrassed. “I don’t know,” it said. “It’s all a bit…foggy. I just know I’ve been a person. At least, I think I know. It gives me the willies. Sometimes I wake up in the night and I think, was I ever really human? Or was I just a toad that got on her nerves and she made me think I was human once? That’d be a real torture, right? Supposing there’s nothing for me to turn back into?” The toad turned worried yellow eyes on her. “After all, it can’t be very hard to mess with a toad’s head, yeah? It must be much simpler than turning, oh, a one-hundred-and-sixty-pound human into eight ounces of toad, yes? After all, where’s the rest of the mass going to go, I ask myself? Is it just sort of, you know, left over? Very worrying. I mean, I’ve got one or two memories of being a human, of course, but what’s a memory? Just a thought in your brain. You can’t be sure it’s real. Honestly, on nights when I’ve eaten a bad slug, I wake up screaming, except all that comes out is a croak. Thank you for the milk, it was very nice.

They went silently along over the trace of the quarry road, the sledge whispering, the gaunt dog padding, past the quarryhole with its vaporous green waters and the woods again, the limestone white against the dark earth, a populace of monstrous slugs dormant in a carbon forest. Groups of trees turned slowly like masted carousels , blending shadows and parting in the darkness and wonder. The rain stopped falling. They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.

So, the first question we must ask ourselves is, what is a boggart?” Hermione put up her hand. “It’s a shape-shifter,” she said. “It can take the shape of whatever it thinks will frighten us most.” “Couldn’t have put it better myself,” said Professor Lupin, and Hermione glowed. “So the boggart sitting in the darkness within has not yet assumed a form. He does not yet know what will frighten the person on the other side of the door. Nobody knows what a boggart looks like when he is alone, but when I let him out, he will immediately become whatever each of us most fears. “This means,” said Professor Lupin, choosing to ignore Neville’s small sputter of terror, “that we have a huge advantage over the boggart before we begin. Have you spotted it, Harry?” Trying to answer a question with Hermione next to him, bobbing up and down on the balls of her feet with her hand in the air, was very off-putting, but Harry had a go. “Er — because there are so many of us, it won’t know what shape it should be?” “Precisely,” said Professor Lupin, and Hermione put her hand down, looking a little disappointed. “It’s always best to have company when you’re dealing with a boggart. He becomes confused. Which should he become, a headless corpse or a flesh-eating slug? I once saw a boggart make that very mistake — tried to frighten two people at once and turned himself into half a slug. Not remotely frightening. “The charm that repels a boggart is simple, yet it requires force of mind. You see, the thing that really finishes a boggart is laughter. What you need to do is force it to assume a shape that you find amusing.

Hagrid!” said Harry loudly. “There’s an owl —” “Pay him,” Hagrid grunted into the sofa. “What?” “He wants payin’ fer deliverin’ the paper. Look in the pockets.” Hagrid’s coat seemed to be made of nothing but pockets — bunches of keys, slug pellets, balls of string, peppermint humbugs, teabags . . . finally, Harry pulled out a handful of strange-looking coins. “Give him five Knuts,” said Hagrid sleepily. “Knuts?” “The little bronze ones.” Harry counted out five little bronze coins, and the owl held out his leg so Harry could put the money into a small leather pouch tied to it. Then he flew off through

If you mean how come I lived so long, it’s because I never had no dratted fool of a husband to aggravate me into kickin’ the bucket. Clean livin’ an’ high thinkin’ an’ a slug o’ my own homemade damson gin at suppertime’s as good an answer as any if you got to write somethin’. It’s them vitamins in the gin, see? Blasts open the arteries an’ keeps the blood circulatin’. Wouldn’t hurt you to try some, sonny. You look kind o’ peaked to me. Trouble with you young’uns nowadays, settin’ around on your backsides pesterin’ folks that’s got work to do so’s you can dish out tripe for the papers ’stead o’ doin’ a decent hand’s turn yourselves now and then.

When we pulled up to Marlboro Man’s house, I saw my Camry sitting in his driveway. I didn’t expect it to be there; I figured it was still on Marlboro Man’s parents’ road, sitting all crooked in the ditch where I’d left it the night before. Marlboro Man had already fixed it, fishing it out of the ditch and repairing the mangled tires and probably, knowing him, filling the tank with gas. “Oh, thank you so much,” I said as we walked toward the front door. “I thought maybe I’d killed it.” “Aw, it’s fine,” he replied. “But you might want to learn to drive before you get in it again.” He flashed his mischievous grin. I slugged him in the arm as he laughed.

How many did you eat?” I asked. “Eight,” Slug answered, breathing heavily. “Eight quesadilla triangles?” I said, grossed out. Slug shook his head. “No… eight full quesadillas,” he said, again pronouncing it wrong. “Dude,” I said, my jaw dropping to the floor. “That’s, like, um… four times eight… thirty four slices!” Naomi quickly corrected me. “Thirty two slices.” “Thirty two slices!” I repeated. “This kid can pack ‘em away!” Wyatt said, bringing another plate of quesadillas to the group. “Gidgy…” Slug said, reaching for his twin sister, who was scooting away from his greasy fingers. “I might need a stomach transplant after this.” “Gross,” she said. “Don’t touch me. And stomach transplants aren’t a real thing.” “Giiiiidgy!” Slug groaned. “We’re twins! Your stomach is an exact match for mine! Only you can save me! I only need half of it. The other half’ll grow back!” “Dude,” Gidget said, raising an eyebrow. “You can’t have my stomach.” “But what if I need it?” Slug whined, sliding lower in his chair. “You’re just gonna—” And then Slug let out the grossest burp I’d ever heard in my life. It was loud, and it was bad. Like, my eyes started watering. Slug instantly sat up in his seat with a smile beaming across his face. “All better,” he said, reaching for another quesadilla on Wyatt’s plate. “Mmmm, gimme, gimme, gimme!

and nothing, and nothing. the days of the bosses, yellow men with bad breath and big feet, men who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk as if melody had never been invented, men who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and profit, men with expensive wives they possess like 60 acres of ground to be drilled or shown-off or to be walled away from the incompetent, men who’d kill you because they’re crazy and justify it because it’s the law, men who stand in front of windows 30 feet wide and see nothing, men with luxury yachts who can sail around the world and yet never get out of their vest pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men like slugs, and not as good

Then there was the night Mother and Father took us up to the roof to point out constellations and tell us their tales. Lucy kept interrupting them, telling them what scientists had discovered about the universe and how the stars in each constellation were actually billions of light years away from one another, so even though they looked close enough to make pictures, they most certainly were not. “And,” she said, “to top it off, whoever made up those constellations was obvious prejudiced against amphibians. There’s not even one up there!” So she decided to tell her own story about George the Great, who saved Lalverton from an infestation of giant man-eating slugs.

Every action flick depicts the destruction of civilization as some kind of crash-boom-bang, a nuclear war or hurtling comet or a self-aware-cyborg uprising, but the true cataclysm may already be creeping up right under our eyes: because of rampant obesity, one in three children born in the United States is at risk of diabetes—meaning, we could be the first generation of Americans to outlive our own children. Maybe the ancient Hindus were better crystal-ball-gazers than Hollywood when they predicted the world would end not with a bang but with a big old yawn. Shiva the Destroyer would snuff us out by doing … nothing. Lazing out. Withdrawing his hot-blooded force from our bodies. Letting us become slugs. Coach

The Dying Man" in memoriam W.B. Yeats 1. His words I heard a dying man Say to his gathered kin, “My soul’s hung out to dry, Like a fresh salted skin; I doubt I’ll use it again. “What’s done is yet to come; The flesh deserts the bone, But a kiss widens the rose I know, as the dying know Eternity is Now. “A man sees, as he dies, Death’s possibilities; My heart sways with the world. I am that final thing, A man learning to sing. 2. What Now? Caught in the dying light, I thought myself reborn. My hand turn into hooves. I wear the leaden weight Of what I did not do. Places great with their dead, The mire, the sodden wood, Remind me to stay alive. I am the clumsy man The instant ages on. I burned the flesh away, In love, in lively May. I turn my look upon Another shape than hers Now, as the casement blurs. In the worst night of my will, I dared to question all, And would the same again. What’s beating at the gate? Who’s come can wait. 3. The Wall A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn! The figure at my back is not my friend; The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn. I found my father when I did my work, Only to lose myself in this small dark. Though it reject dry borders of the seen, What sensual eye can keep and image pure, Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn? A slow growth is a hard thing to endure. When figures our of obscure shadow rave, All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave. The wall has entered: I must love the wall, A madman staring at perpetual night, A spirit raging at the visible. I breathe alone until my dark is bright. Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun. 4. The Exulting Once I delighted in a single tree; The loose air sent me running like a child– I love the world; I want more than the world, Or after image of the inner eye. Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone; I die into this life, alone yet not alone. Was it a god his suffering renewed?– I saw my father shrinking in his skin; He turned his face: there was another man, Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid. He quivered like a bird in birdless air, Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere. Fish feed on fish, according to their need: My enemies renew me, and my blood Beats slower in my careless solitude. I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed. I think a bird, and it begins to fly. By dying daily, I have come to be. All exultation is a dangerous thing. I see you, love, I see you in a dream; I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum, And that slow humming rises into song. A breath is but a breath: I have the earth; I shall undo all dying with my death. 5. They Sing, They Sing All women loved dance in a dying light– The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon! Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one, Then settles back to shade and the long night. A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn, And that cry takes me back where I was born. Who thought love but a motion in the mind? Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing? I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing; Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend. I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds, They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds. I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone: What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!– Eternity defined, and strewn with straw, The fury of the slug beneath the stone. The vision moves, and yet remains the same. In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am. The edges of the summit still appall When we brood on the dead or the beloved; Nor can imagination do it all In this last place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.

These domestic accounts—which take up a lot of the nearly six-hundred-page compilation of his travel, war, and domestic diaries published in 2009—stand out in his work as records of something almost antithetical to the subjects of a political writer: places in which nothing was seriously wrong and no conflicts raged. The minor troubles—a jackdaw hanging around the chicken coops, potatoes rotted by frost, goats terrified by thunder, birds eating the strawberries, greenfly on the roses, and lots of slugs—worked against the gardener’s agenda but not against any law of nature or morality. The majority of his entries are concerned with his own activity with his domesticated plants and animals, but he makes notes as well on the agricultural fields beyond and the wild things around him. Occasional speculations and small experiments are also recorded.

Peter and I are standing in line for popcorn at the movies. Even just this mundane thing feels like the best mundane thing that’s ever happened to me. I check my pocket to make sure I’ve still got my ticket stub. This I’ll want to save. Gazing up at Peter, I whisper, “This is my first date.” I feel like the nerdy girl in the movie who lands the coolest guy in school, and I don’t mind one bit. Not one bit. “How can this be your first date when we’ve gone out plenty of times?” “It’s my first real date. Those other times were just pretend; this is the real thing.” He frowns. “Oh, wait, is this real? I didn’t realize that.” I move to slug him in the shoulder, and he laughs and grabs my hand and links my fingers with his. It feels like my heart is beating right through my hand. It’s the first time we’ve held hands for real, and it feels different from those fake times. Like electric currents, in a good way. The best way.

up for it, and I’m sorry. That’s not enough. You’re going to search until you find something, and you’re going to tell me. Right now. Sheri. Please. You do it now or we’re gone. You give me some way to have some sympathy for you as I stand in this nice house, all lovingly redone, and think about the broken house you left us in, with its leaky roof and no heat and no insulation and nothing. Tell your sob story about the fucking war, whatever it was that my mom thought you were so broken about. My grandfather closed his eyes. No story ever explains. But I’ll give you what you want. I think I know the moment you want, because I made a kind of decision. There was some change. But I can’t start the story at the beginning. I’ve never been able to do that. I have to start at the end and then go back, and it doesn’t finish, because you can go back forever. Do it, my mother said. I don’t think Caitlin should hear. She can hear. Okay. You’re her mother. That’s right. So I won’t give the awful details, but I was lying in a pile of bodies. My friends. The closest friends I’ve ever had. Not piled there on purpose, but just the way it ended up because I had been working on the axle, lying on the ground. And the thing is, the war was over. It had been over for days, and we were laughing and a bit drunk, telling jokes. There was something unbearable about the fact that we’d all be going our separate ways now. The truth is that we didn’t want to leave. We wanted the war over, but we didn’t want what we had together to be over. I think we all had some sense that this was the closest we’d ever be to anyone, and that our families might feel like strangers now. So that’s it? You couldn’t be a father and husband because you weren’t done being a buddy? No. No. It’s the way it happened, in a moment that was supposed to be safe. After every moment of every day in fear for years, we were finally safe, and that’s when the slugs came and I watched my friends torn apart and landing on me, dying. That’s the point. We were supposed to be safe. And with your mother, too, I was supposed to be safe. A wife, a family. The story doesn’t make any sense unless you know every moment before it, every time we thought we were going to die, all the times we weren’t safe. You can’t just be told about that. You have to feel it, how long one night can be, and then all of them put together, hundreds of nights and then more, and there’s a kind of deal that’s made, a deal with god. You do certain terrible things, you endure things, because there’s a bargain made. And then when god says the deal’s off later, after you’ve already paid, and you see your friends ripped through, yanked like puppets on a day that was safe, and you find out your wife is going to die young, and you get to watch her dying, something that again is going to be for years, hundreds of nights more, all deals are off.

People change, though, don't you think?" Hatsumi asked. "You mean, like, they go out into society and get a kick up the arse and grow up?" "Yeah. And if he's away from me for a long time, his feelings for me could change, don't you think?" "Maybe, if he were an ordinary guy," I said. "But he's different. He's incredibly strong-willed - stronger than you or I can imagine. And he only makes himself stronger with every day that goes by. If something smashes into him, he just works to make himself stronger. He'd eat slugs before he'd back down to anyone. What do you expect to get from a man like that?" "But there's nothing I can do but wait for him," said Hatsumi with her chin in her hand. "You love him that much?" "I do," she answered without a moment's hesitation. "Oh boy," I said with a sigh, drinking down the last of my beer. "It must be a wonderful thing to be so sure that you love somebody." "I'm a stupid, old-fashioned girl," she said. "Have another beer?

Look around you, piglet. What do you see? Same thing you see in the mirror—fat, weak, lazy slugs. The gene pool so diluted that you can barely recognize these pale blobs as human, all their juice watered down. We did this to ourselves, piglet. Back before you and me were born, all the politicians got scared about all the crime, and all the wars, so they pumped everybody full of antidepressants and soy and estrogen, trying to dull that fire, that natural fire that’s supposed to burn inside all of us. They gave all the men porn and video games, to soak up their conqueror instincts. Worked like a charm—crime went way down, rape went way down, pregnancy went way down. And the only price was they turned all the men into fat little toothless blobs and the girls into arrogant, squealing little piglets, like you. Puttin’ that fire out forever, that natural fire that comes from the balls. The fire that built this world. Well, I’m here to tell you, there are still some men left. So no, there’s not gonna be no negotiation. The lion don’t negotiate with the gazelle.” He

play the game of Vogon Civil Service politics, and play it well, and waterproof enough for him to survive indefinitely at sea depths of down to a thousand feet with no ill effects. Not that he ever went swimming of course. His busy schedule would not allow it. He was the way he was because billions of years ago when the Vogons had first crawled out of the sluggish primeval seas of Vogsphere, and had lain panting and heaving on the planet’s virgin shores … when the first rays of the bright young Vogsol sun had shone across them that morning, it was as if the forces of evolution had simply given up on them there and then, had turned aside in disgust and written them off as an ugly and unfortunate mistake. They never evolved again: they should never have survived. The fact that they did is some kind of tribute to the thick-willed slug-brained stubbornness of these creatures. Evolution? they said to themselves, Who needs it?, and what nature refused to do for them they simply did without until such time as they were able to rectify the gross anatomical inconveniences with surgery. Meanwhile, the natural forces on the planet Vogsphere had been working overtime to make up for their earlier blunder. They brought forth scintillating jeweled scuttling crabs, which the Vogons ate, smashing their shells with iron mallets;

I’m sorry,” said the kitty. “I’ve wrecked your broomstick ride.” “No matter,” said Witch Mildred. “We’re here. Let’s go inside!” The clock atop the castle read twenty after eight, but the promised buffet table held only emptied plates! “No eye or newt? No sautéed slug? No pickleworm pate? No casserole of cockroach! No spiderweb soufflé! Those greedy gobbling goblins left zilch for us to eat.” Said the starving skeleton, “Why don’t we trick-or-treat?” They passed a lighted cottage, from which rose song and laughter. The mummy boldly rang the bell, All others traipsing after. The children squealed and giggled as they greeted their new guests, for of all the trick-or-treaters, these costumes were the best! The hostess asked the callers to join them at their party. “Check out this spread!” the mummy said. The hostess said, “Eat hearty.” “Taffy apples! Candy corn! Purple punch, ice-cold! My tongue’s not touched such tastiness since I was six years old!” In the corner of the kitchen Witch Mildred found a mop. “I think this will do nicely while my broom is in the shop.” “May I, please?” asked Mildred, and seated her new friends. With a loud “Thank you!” away they flew, in loopy swoops and bends. That night Witch Mildred dreamed of cakes and lemonade, but far more sweet than party treats were the friendships she had made!

When we pulled up to Marlboro Man’s house, I saw my Camry sitting in his driveway. I didn’t expect it to be there; I figured it was still on Marlboro Man’s parents’ road, sitting all crooked in the ditch where I’d left it the night before. Marlboro Man had already fixed it, fishing it out of the ditch and repairing the mangled tires and probably, knowing him, filling the tank with gas. “Oh, thank you so much,” I said as we walked toward the front door. “I thought maybe I’d killed it.” “Aw, it’s fine,” he replied. “But you might want to learn to drive before you get in it again.” He flashed his mischievous grin. I slugged him in the arm as he laughed. Then he lunged at me, grabbing my arms and using his leg to sweep my supporting leg right out from under me. Within an instant, he had me on the ground, right on the soft, green grass of his front yard. I shrieked and screamed, trying in vain to wrestle my way out of his playful grasp, but my wimpy upper body was no match for his impossible strength. He tickled me, and being the most ticklish human in the Northern Hemisphere, I screamed bloody murder. Afraid I’d wet my pants (it was a valid concern), I fought back the only way I knew how--by grabbing and untucking his shirt from his Wranglers…and running my hand up his back, poking at his rib cage. The tickling suddenly stopped. Marlboro Man propped himself on his elbows, holding my face in his hands. He kissed me passionately and seriously, and what started as a playful wrestling match became an impromptu make-out session in his front yard. It was an unlikely place for such an event, and considering it was at the very beginning of our night together, an unlikely time. But it was also strangely perfect. Because sometime during all the laughing and tickling and wrestling and rolling around in the grass, my worry and concern over my parents’ troubles had magically melted away. Only when the chiggers began biting did Marlboro Man suggest an alternate plan. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “I’m cooking dinner.” Yummy, I thought. That means steak. And as we walked into the house, I smiled contentedly, realizing that the stress of the previous twenty-four hours had all but disappeared from view. And I knew it, even then: Marlboro Man, not only that night but in the months to come, would prove to be my savior, my distraction, my escape in the midst of troubles, my strength in the face of upheaval, my beauty in times of terrible, heartbreaking ugliness. He held my heart entirely in his hands, this cowboy, and for the first time in my life, despite everything I’d ever believed about independence and feminism and emotional autonomy, I knew I’d be utterly incomplete without him. Talk about a terrifying moment.

news?” “What news?” “I have my own name. From now, I am Slug!”, the tortoise boasted with joy. “And when I become a grown-up, my name will be ‘Slug On Time’.” And the tortoise, from his own position of significance, pushed his head out farther than usual from his shell. “Hedgehog, please tell us, why the beaver has such an unusual name, ‘Snivel’. Isn’t it offensive for him?” “Not at all. Why do you consider it offensive? His nose is always wet and it seems that snivels are flowing from it. The children’s noses are wet and, on the contrary, the beaver children’s noses are dry if they are ill. Beavers are rarely ill as they evenly tempered and, moreover, their skin is warm. These are facts, brother!” “You are so clever, hedgehog!” the tortoise Slug exclaimed. At that moment, a little fox came upon them and they all began to chat. Their talk lasted for a long time as the beasts had not seen each other for a quite a long time. For an entire year they had been studying in theirs schools; the fox had been studying in fox’s school, the hedgehog had been studying in hedgehog’s school, and the tortoise, of course, had been studying in tortoise’s school. They are taught how to obtain food in the schools, even when each beast eats different food. Also, they are taught how to seek shelter from bad weather, how to build houses and, of course, how to be polite and kind. Slug looked up and said: “Friends, do you know why the sky is blue?

Mike continued to walk unhurriedly toward the crowd until he loomed up in the stereo tank in life size, as if he were in the room with his water brothers. He stopped on the grass verge in front of the hotel, a few feet from the crowd. "You called me?" He was answered with a growl. The sky held scattered clouds; at that instant the sun came out from behind one and a shaft of golden light hit him. His clothes vanished. He stood before them, a golden youth, clothed only in his own beauty, beauty that made Jubal's heart ache, thinking that Michelangelo in his ancient years would have climbed down from his high scaffolding to record it for generations unborn. Mike said gently, "Look at me. I am a son of man." . . . . "God damn you!" A half brick caught Mike in the ribs. He turned his face slightly toward his assailant. "But you yourself are God. You can damn only yourself and you can never escape yourself." "Blasphemer!" A rock caught him just over his left eye and blood welled forth. Mike said calmly, "In fighting me, you fight yourself... for Thou art God and I am God * . . and all that groks is God-there is no other." More rocks hit him, from various directions; he began to bleed in several places. "Hear the Truth. You need not hate, you need not fight, you need not fear. I offer you the water of life-" Suddenly his hand held a tumbler of water, sparkling in the sunlight. "-and you may share it whenever you so will . . . and walk in peace and love and happiness together." A rock caught the glass and shattered it. Another struck him in the mouth. Through bruised and bleeding lips he smiled at them, looking straight into the camera with an expression of yearning tenderness on his face. Some trick of sunlight and stereo formed a golden halo back of his head. "Oh my brothers, I love you so! Drink deep. Share and grow closer without end. Thou art God." Jubal whispered it back to him. . . . "Lynch him! Give the bastard a nigger necktie!" A heavy-gauge shotgun blasted at close range and Mike's right arm was struck off at the elbow and fell. It floated gently down, then came to rest on the cool grasses, its hand curved open in invitation. "Give him the other barrel, Shortie-and aim closer!" The crowd laughed and applauded. A brick smashed Mike's nose and more rocks gave him a crown of blood. "The Truth is simple but the Way of Man is hard. First you must learn to control yourself. The rest follows. Blessed is he who knows himself and commands himself, for the world is his and love and happiness and peace walk with him wherever he goes." Another shotgun blast was followed by two more shots. One shot, a forty-five slug, hit Mike over the heart, shattering the sixth rib near the sternum and making a large wound; the buckshot and the other slug sheered through his left tibia five inches below the patella and left the fibula sticking out at an angle, broken and white against the yellow and red of the wound. Mike staggered slightly and laughed, went on talking, his words clear and unhurried. "Thou art God. Know that and the Way is opened." "God damn it-let's stop this taking the Name of the Lord in vain!"- "Come on, men! Let's finish him!" The mob surged forward, led by one bold with a club; they were on him with rocks and fists, and then with feet as he went down. He went on talking while they kicked his ribs in and smashed his golden body, broke his bones and tore an ear loose. At last someone called out, "Back away a little so we can get the gasoline on him!" The mob opened up a little at that waning and the camera zoomed to pick up his face and shoulders. The Man from Mars smiled at his brothers, said once more, softly and clearly, "I love you." An incautious grasshopper came whirring to a landing on the grass a few inches from his face; Mike turned his head, looked at it as it stared back at him. "Thou art God," he said happily and discorporated.

When we pulled up to Marlboro Man’s house, I saw my Camry sitting in his driveway. I didn’t expect it to be there; I figured it was still on Marlboro Man’s parents’ road, sitting all crooked in the ditch where I’d left it the night before. Marlboro Man had already fixed it, fishing it out of the ditch and repairing the mangled tires and probably, knowing him, filling the tank with gas. “Oh, thank you so much,” I said as we walked toward the front door. “I thought maybe I’d killed it.” “Aw, it’s fine,” he replied. “But you might want to learn to drive before you get in it again.” He flashed his mischievous grin. I slugged him in the arm as he laughed. Then he lunged at me, grabbing my arms and using his leg to sweep my supporting leg right out from under me. Within an instant, he had me on the ground, right on the soft, green grass of his front yard. I shrieked and screamed, trying in vain to wrestle my way out of his playful grasp, but my wimpy upper body was no match for his impossible strength. He tickled me, and being the most ticklish human in the Northern Hemisphere, I screamed bloody murder. Afraid I’d wet my pants (it was a valid concern), I fought back the only way I knew how--by grabbing and untucking his shirt from his Wranglers…and running my hand up his back, poking at his rib cage. The tickling suddenly stopped. Marlboro Man propped himself on his elbows, holding my face in his hands. He kissed me passionately and seriously, and what started as a playful wrestling match became an impromptu make-out session in his front yard. It was an unlikely place for such an event, and considering it was at the very beginning of our night together, an unlikely time. But it was also strangely perfect. Because sometime during all the laughing and tickling and wrestling and rolling around in the grass, my worry and concern over my parents’ troubles had magically melted away. Only when the chiggers began biting did Marlboro Man suggest an alternate plan. “Let’s go inside,” he said.

I was thinking, The last thing I want to do is get in a wreck and lose another limb. I completely lost it and blew up at my father. “Why did you do that? I can’t get injured again! Pull over. I’ll drive!” I screamed. Dad is not the kind of person who would have ever taken that kind of behavior from me in the past, but I think he understood the paranoia. I’d asked him while I was in the hospital, “Did you ever think one of your kids would ever lose a limb?” And he said, “No, it never crossed my mind. I was always more afraid I would lost another limb.” It wasn’t until later that I realized how great it was of him that he kept his cool and understood where I was coming from. He just let me freak out and let me drive. I think in some ways it was the same kind of lesson he taught me as a child without ever saying a word. I watched him just get on with things with one arm. He never made a fuss about it. It was an example that growing up I didn’t know I’d need eventually. So I got in the driver’s seat and we continued on our way. After a while we stopped at a gas station to stretch our legs and get some snacks. I grabbed a lemon-line Gatorade and Dad grabbed something to drink and we got back in the car. I turned the car on, so the air and the radio were going as I tried and tried to get my Gatorade bottle open, but the top was too big and I couldn’t quite get my fingers to grab it, hold it, and twist it open. My finger strength just wasn’t there yet. So I put it between my legs and tried to hold it still while I twisted the top. I heard the creak of release as I managed to break the seal of the plastic orange cap but my legs were squeezing the bottle so hard that the bright yellow liquid squirted all over me. “Crap!” I yelled. I heard my dad snicker. I turned to look at him and he smirked while holding a can of Coke in his hand. “And that’s why I drink out of a can,” he declared with a smug grin. Click. Fizzzz. With one hand, Dad popped that can open and took a big slug of his soda.

Kell skimmed the spell and frowned. “An eternal flame?” Rhy absently plucked one of the lin from the floor and shrugged. “First thing I grabbed.” He tried to sound as if he didn’t care about the stupid spell, but his throat was tight, his eyes burning. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, skipping the coin across the ground as if it were a pebble on water. “I can’t make it work.” Kell shifted his weight, lips moving silently as he read over the priest’s scrawl. He held his hands above the paper, palms cupped as if cradling a flame that wasn’t even there yet, and began to recite the spell. When Rhy had tried, the words had fallen out like rocks, but on Kell’s lips, they were poetry, smooth and sibilant. The air around them warmed instantly, steam rising from the penned lines on the scroll before the ink drew in and up into a bead of oil, and lit. The flame hovered in the air between Kell’s hands, brilliant and white. He made it look so easy, and Rhy felt a flash of anger toward his brother, hot as a spark—but just as brief. It wasn’t Kell’s fault Rhy couldn’t do magic. Rhy started to rise when Kell caught his cuff. He guided Rhy’s hands to either side of the spell, pulling the prince into the fold of his magic. Warmth tickled Rhy’s palms, and he was torn between delight at the power and knowledge that it wasn’t his. “It isn’t right,” he murmured. “I’m the crown prince, the heir of Maxim Maresh. I should be able to light a blasted candle.” Kell chewed his lip—Mother never chided him for the habit—and then said, “There are different kinds of power.” “I would rather have magic than a crown,” sulked Rhy. Kell studied the small white flame between them. “A crown is a sort of magic, if you think about it. A magician rules an element. A king rules an empire.” “Only if the king is strong enough.” Kell looked up, then. “You’re going to be a good king, if you don’t get yourself killed first.” Rhy blew out a breath, shuddering the flame. “How do you know?” At that, Kell smiled. It was a rare thing, and Rhy wanted to hold fast to it—he was the only one who could make his brother smile, and he wore it like a badge—but then Kell said, “Magic,” and Rhy wanted to slug him instead. “You’re an arse,” he muttered

And then, with a shock like high-voltage coursing through me, the phone beside me started pealing thinly. I just stood there and stared at it, blood draining from my face. A call to a tollbooth? It must, it must be a wrong number, somebody wanted the Information Booth or-! It must have been audible outside, with all I had the slide partly closed. One of the redcaps passing by turned, looked over, then started coming across toward where I was. To get rid of him I picked up the receiver, put it to my ear. 'You'd better come out now, time's up,' a flat, deadly voice said. 'They're calling your train, but you're not getting on that one - or any other.' 'Wh-where are talking from?' 'The next booth to yours,' the voice jeered. 'You forgot the glass inserts only reach halfway down.' The connection broke and a man's looming figure was shadowing the glass in front of my eyes, before I could even get the receiver back on the hook. I dropped it full-length, tensed my right arm to pound it through his face as soon as I shoved the glass aside. He had a revolver-bore for a top vest-button, trained on me. Two more had shown up behind him, from which direction I hadn't noticed. It was very dark in the booth now, their collective silhouettes shut out all the daylight. The station and all its friendly bustle was blotted out, had receded into the far background, a thousand miles away for all the help it could give me. I slapped the glass wearily aside, came slowly out. One of them flashed a badge - maybe Crow had loaned him his for the occasion. 'You're being arrested for putting slugs in that phone. It won't do any good to raise your voice and shriek for help, try to tell people different. But suit yourself.' I knew that as well as he; heads turned to stare after us by the dozens as they started with me in their midst through the station's main-level. But not one in all that crowd would have dared interfere with what they mistook for a legitimate arrest in the line of duty. The one with the badge kept it conspicuously tilted in his upturned palm, at sight of which the frozen onlookers slowly parted, made way for us through their midst. I was being led to my doom in full view of scores of people. ("Graves For The Living")

It was getting difficult to see exactly what was going on in the pool and a fourth officer jumped in as one came up with the unconscious form of the first cop. While others pulled the half-drowned man from the pool, three more wrestled Skorzeny to the surface and dragged him to the steps at the shallow end of the pool. He wasn't struggling any longer. Nor was he breathing with any apparent difficulty. The biggest of the three cops later admitted to punching him as hard as he could in the stomach and Skorzey doubled over. Another half-dragged him, still on his feet, shirt torn, jacket ripped, out of the pool and put a handcuff on his left wrist. Skorzeny pulled his arm away from the cop and, suddenly straightening, elbow-jabbed him in the gut, sending him sprawling and rolling back into the pool. Skorzeny turned toward the back fence and was now between the pool and a small palm tree. Before him were two advancing officers, pistols leveled. Behind him two more circled the pool. Skorzeny lunged forward and all fired simultaneously. The noise was deafening. Lights in neighboring houses began to go on. Skorzeny's body twitched and bucked as the heavy slugs ripped through his body. His forward momentum carried him into the officers ahead of him and he half-crawled, half-staggered to the southeast corner of the yard where another gate was set into the fiberglass fencing. Two more officers, across the pool, cut loose with their pistols, emptying them into this writing body which danced like a puppet. Another cop fired two shots from his pump-action shotgun and Skorzeny was lifted clean off his feet and slammed against the gate, sagging to the ground. En masse from both ends of the pool they advanced, when he gave out with a terrible hissing snarl and started to rise once more. All movement ceased as the cops, to a man, stood frozen in their tracks. Skorzeny stood there like some hideous caricature, his shredding clothing and skin hanging like limp rags from his scarecrow form. His flesh was ripped in several places and he was oozing something that looked like watered-down blood. It was pinkish and transparent. He stood there like a living nightmare. Then he straightened and raised his fist with the cuff still dangling from it like a charm bracelet. 'Fools!' he shrieked. 'You can't kill me. You can't even hurt me.' Overhead, the copter hovered, the copilot giving a blow-by-blow description of the fight over the radio. The police on the ground were paralyzed. Nearly thirty shots had been fired (the bullets later tallied in reports turned in by the participating officers) and their quarry was still as strong as ever. He'd been hit repeatedly in the head and legs, so a bulletproof vest wasn't the answer. And at distances sometimes as little as five feet, they could hardly have missed. They'd seen him hit. They stood frozen in an eerie tableau as the still roiling pool water threw weird reflections all over the yard. Then Skorzeny did the most frightening thing of all. He smiled. A red-rimmed, hideous grin revealing fangs that 'would have done justice to a Doberman Pinscher.

Sung was a land which was famous far and wide, simply because it was so often and so richly insulted. However, there was one visitor, more excitable than most, who developed a positive passion for criticizing the place. Unfortunately, the pursuit of this hobby soon lead him to take leave of the truth. This unkind traveler once claimed that the king of Sung, the notable Skan Askander, was a derelict glutton with a monster for a son and a slug for a daughter. This was unkind to the daughter. While she was no great beauty, she was definitely not a slug. After all, slugs do not have arms and legs - and besides, slugs do not grow to that size. There was a grain of truth in the traveler's statement, in as much as the son was a regrettable young man. However, soon afterwards, the son was accidentally drowned when he made the mistake of falling into a swamp with his hands and feet tied together and a knife sticking out of his back. This tragedy did not encourage the traveler to extend his sympathies to the family. Instead, he invented fresh accusations. This wayfarer, an ignorant tourist if ever there was one, claimed that the king had leprosy. This was false. The king merely had a well-developed case of boils. The man with the evil mouth was guilty of a further malignant slander when he stated that King Skan Askander was a cannibal. This was untrue. While it must be admitted that the king once ate one of his wives, he did not do it intentionally; the whole disgraceful episode was the fault of the chef, who was a drunkard, and who was subsequently severely reprimanded. .The question of the governance, and indeed, the very existence of the 'kingdom of Sung' is one that is worth pursuing in detail, before dealing with the traveler's other allegations. It is true that there was a king, his being Skan Askander, and that some of his ancestors had been absolute rulers of considerable power. It is also true that the king's chief swineherd, who doubled as royal cartographer, drew bold, confident maps proclaiming that borders of the realm. Furthermore, the king could pass laws, sign death warrants, issue currency, declare war or amuse himself by inventing new taxes. And what he could do, he did. "We are a king who knows how to be king," said the king. And certainly, anyone wishing to dispute his right to use of the imperial 'we' would have had to contend with the fact that there was enough of him, in girth, bulk, and substance, to provide the makings of four or five ordinary people, flesh, bones and all. He was an imposing figure, "very imposing", one of his brides is alleged to have said, shortly before the accident in which she suffocated. "We live in a palace," said the king. "Not in a tent like Khmar, the chief milkmaid of Tameran, or in a draughty pile of stones like Comedo of Estar." . . .From Prince Comedo came the following tart rejoinder: "Unlike yours, my floors are not made of milk-white marble. However, unlike yours, my floors are not knee-deep in pigsh*t." . . .Receiving that Note, Skan Askander placed it by his commode, where it would be handy for future royal use. Much later, and to his great surprise, he received a communication from the Lord Emperor Khmar, the undisputed master of most of the continent of Tameran. The fact that Sung had come to the attention of Khmar was, to say the least, ominous. Khmar had this to say: "Your words have been reported. In due course, they will be remembered against you." The king of Sung, terrified, endured the sudden onset of an attack of diarrhea that had nothing to do with the figs he had been eating. His latest bride, seeing his acute distress, made the most of her opportunity, and vigorously counselled him to commit suicide. Knowing Khmar's reputation, he was tempted - but finally, to her great disappointment, declined. Nevertheless, he lived in fear; he had no way of knowing that he was simply the victim of one of Khmar's little jokes.

The men are ready to ride,” Ioan said as he came up the stairs behind him. Christian nodded. “Knowing Adara, I’m sure we’re already packed as well. I just need to don my armor and I, too, will be ready.” Ioan was about to leave him when they heard something shatter inside Christian’s room. A heartbeat later, Adara screamed. Terror, panic, and anger descended on Christian as he swung open the door to find her in the room with two other men who were trying to hold her down. “I’ll make you pay for that, bitch,” the one holding her said as he tore open her gown. Christian flew across the room, ready to kill them both. He grabbed the one holding his wife and knocked him against the wall, then turned to knock the other one back. But when the one who had touched her came back to swing at him, he lost all control. All he could see was the man ripping Adara’s gown, the terror on her face. He slugged her assailant repeatedly, then grabbed his head and banged it against the floor until he felt Ioan pulling him back. “Christian, stop! You’re going to kill him.” Enraged beyond reason, he slammed the man’s head against the floor one last time, then turned on the other, who was pushing himself up from the floor. His lip was busted as he stared at Christian in disbelief. “Go see to Adara,” Ioan snapped, pulling him away from the other attacker. Needing to make sure she was all right, Christian went to her. She was huddled on the floor, weeping. “Shhh,” he said soothingly as he pulled her into his arms. She looked up at him, her lips quivering, to show him her battered face. It was more than he could stand. Rising, he went after her attackers again, only to find Ioan blocking his way. “Get out of my way, Ioan, or I’ll thrash you, too. I mean it.” Ioan refused to budge. “Let the sheriff handle this.” “Why are you so angry?” the taller attacker asked. “You are one of us. ’Tis only fair we take a Saracen whore—” Christian shoved Ioan away from him as he lunged for the man and cut his words off with a vicious backhand. “That is my wife you speak of, you bastard. My wife you attacked.” The color faded from the man’s face. Suddenly Phantom was there, pulling him back as Ioan came forward. “Let go of me!” Christian shouted. “I want justice.” “I can’t let you hurt them, Christian,” Ioan said apologetically. “They are the ones who have just come back with Agbert and Dagger. They spent the past seven years in a Saracen prison.” Still, he fought against Phantom’s hold. “It doesn’t give them the right to attack an innocent woman, and most especially not mine.” “Nay, it doesn’t,” Ioan agreed. “I will see them into the sheriff’s custody.” Far from appeased, Christian finally succeeded in shoving Phantom away from him to return to Adara’s side.

Or should I say, she’s why we’re out here.” Connell refused to give his friend the satisfaction of an answer. “Word’s going around town that she got the best of two big men last night. Jimmy Neil and another strong man, who happens to be standing in the middle of Main Street, ogling at her—” “I’m not ogling at her.” Connell looked far off to the south, to the puffs of black smoke billowing in the air, the distant signal that the train—a branch of the Flint and Pere Marquette Railroad—would make its daily appearance in Harrison. “And she didn’t get the best of me.” Stuart slugged him in the arm. The point of Stuart’s middle knuckle jabbed Connell hard enough to throw him off balance. Stuart wasn’t a big man. In fact, everything about him was thin. His face was a narrow oval covered with a scraggly beard. His arms and legs were as skinny as the branches of a sapling. If Connell hadn’t witnessed the man’s enormous appetite on occasion, he would have guessed Stuart wasn’t getting enough to eat. “Sounds like she’s got quite the spirit if she can get the best of you.” “I was rescuing her from Jimmy, and she fell on top of me.” “Rescuing?” Stuart gave a snort. “From the way I heard it, she did a pretty good job taking care of herself.” “No telling what could have happened to her if I hadn’t stepped in when I did.” Stuart laughed. “Okay, big guy. Whatever you say.

An SJH, in ballistics shorthand. It was a brutally efficient piece of ordnance. Not exactly a dum-dum, named after Dum-Dum, India, where a British army officer had invented a bullet that mushroomed out on impact and acted as a miniature wrecking ball inside the body. Innovation wasn’t always good for you. The .45 SJH had blown right through the front of Cassie Decker’s skull and ended up lodged deep in her brain. It had been dug out of her during the autopsy and the slug preserved as evidence in her murder investigation. It had retained enough of its shape

Ah, Aden—” Bishop pushed open the door and rounds snapped through the air. He threw himself backward into the safety of the stairwell. Heavy-caliber projectiles slapped into the door, punching through the wood in a shower of splinters. The pair beat a hasty retreat back down the stairwell as slugs bounced off the walls. “Don’t even think about saying it,” said Bishop. “It’s OK, we’ll find another way out.” Mirza patted the rocket launcher. “Or we can always ‘make’ a way out.

one way to find out. I drew my Colt and spurred my horse forward, my guiding Cisco and the mare between the wagons, buckboards and riders blocking my path to the saloon. Bryce didn’t see me coming. He took a long pull on the cigar and then contentedly exhaled the smoke through pursed lips. I was close now and could have shot him easily. But I knew that wouldn’t satisfy me. I wanted to look into his eyes, to see the shock and the pain in them as he felt my slug rip through him, so I held my fire.  It was a costly mistake. For in the next moment Bryce must have heard my horse coming and turned toward me. He instantly recognized me and in one continuous move whirled around and dived through the saloon swing-doors. I didn’t bother to dismount. Dropping the mare’s reins, so I wasn’t hampered by her, I spurred my horse onto the red-brick sidewalk and without stopping, ducked my head and rode into the saloon. A dozen shots greeted me. I heard Cisco grunt and knew he’d been hit. By then I had spotted the Guthrie brothers firing around the sides of upturned tables, and opened fire on them. I saw the oldest brother, Doke, grab his arm up by his shoulder and spin around, while my other shots forced Gibby and Bryce to pull back behind their tables. By now the panicked customers had scattered in different directions and both barkeeps had ducked below the bar. But they weren’t safe there. A wild shot smashed the mirror above the back-bar and shards of glass showered over them.

opened fire on the sheriff's office and jail while the others shot through the bank's front windows until everybody inside was either dead or wounded. They went in then and cleaned out the cash drawers and the vault and...and finished off the wounded." "The vault was open?" Braddock asked. Deputy Bell shrugged and said, "This is a little town. Nothing like this ever happened here. Nobody figured it ever would." Bell paused and swallowed hard. "They didn't have to kill everybody. They could have gone in, held up the place at gunpoint, and gotten the money if that was all they were after. It was like they...they wanted to slaughter innocent people." "This gang...was the leader named Fenner? Clete Fenner?" Bell's shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. "Mister, I just couldn't tell you. I don't know if anybody heard any of them call the others by name. I've been askin' questions, but it all happened so fast, and like I told you, nobody ever expected anything like this..." Braddock held up a hand to stop Bell before the deputy could force himself to go on. Bell might be fine for serving legal papers or guarding prisoners, but when faced with a real catastrophe, he didn't seem like much of a lawman. But maybe he shouldn't judge people, Braddock told himself. After all, at least Bell had a legal right to wear his badge. "You say the sheriff was killed?" "Yes, sir. When he heard the commotion going on outside, he stepped through the door to find out what it was all about and caught a couple of slugs in the chest right away. He fell in the doorway and I was able to get hold of his shirt and drag him the rest of the way back inside without getting shot myself." Bell shook his head. "Wasn't anything I could do for him, though. He was already gone. All I could do was fort up at one of the windows and try to wing some of that bunch, but I don't know if I did or not. They made it pretty hot for me." "Who else was killed?" "Like I said, the folks in the bank. Mr. McLemore, the president, and Ben Horton,

As long as they aren’t close to somethin’ that can hurt them or somethin’ breakable, we let ’em duke it out,” Tack had told me. I wasn’t certain this was an optimal parental choice but I’d never seen bikers raised from womb to badass. It was probably good they knew their way around a slug fest from a young age.

Where do I find Simeon Isayev?” He pointed the weapon directly at the chief enforcer’s face. “Fuck you!” the man slurred, his jaw broken. The pistol sneezed and the Russian screamed as the heavy slug tore his kneecap out. He collapsed to the ground. Ice had his own pistol out and was covering the other men. “You’ve got another knee, then I start on the elbows. We can do this all day,” said Bishop. “He’s at the office; it’s in the industrial area,” the man whimpered. “What’s the address?” The Russian rattled it off.

And then it actually becomes the most interesting thing in the world. A single word is embossed in fancy calligraphy letters. A single word that makes it feel like the whole room is spinning. Harksbury. What in God’s name? “What is this?” I point at it and shout in Mindy’s ear. She scrunches her eyebrows. “A coaster?” I groan. “No, I mean, the name. Harksbury.” “Oh. It’s the name of the club. I don’t know what it means, though.” I do. It’s the name of a dukedom. I wonder if that means some relative of Alex’s invested in this place or something. Or if someone borrowed their name. Or what. But it has to mean Harksbury is real, that it existed. I stare down at the word again. If the shoes weren’t enough…It has to be real. And seeing it like this reminds me of how I felt there. How it felt to be Rebecca. I tuck the coaster into my back pocket and try to ignore the stare Angela is giving me. She probably thinks I’m totally nuts, stealing a paper coaster. But it’s the closest I’ll get to a souvenir of my time-bending trip. And having it on me makes me feel stronger, somehow, like I can always be that girl at the ball. I look up when the boys file in and sit down on a bright orange couch shaped like a slug. “Ladies. This is Grant, Tim, and Alex,” door-boy says. He doesn’t even introduce himself. I guess I’m supposed to know who he is. I smile at Grant and nod at Tim, but when I get to Alex, I only stare. Alex. The Alex. No, no it can’t be. His hair is shorter, his skin smooth and shaven. He’s got on a green button-up, left open at the collar, which brings out the intense emerald shade of his eyes. There’s something different. The contour of his lips, the line of his nose. It’s almost him, but not quite. And he’s staring back at me. Does he know who I am? No, that’s silly. It’s not really him. Not Alex Thorton-Hawke, the Duke of Harksbury. Just Alex, the twenty-first-century guy standing in front of me. In a nightclub. In real life. Mindy jabs me with her elbow. “This is--” “Callie,” I say, standing and reaching my hand out. “My name is Callie.” It feels so good to say that. To be me. I grin involuntarily at the realization. He smiles and shakes it. “Hey.” For a second neither of us says anything else. We just keep shaking hands and staring at each other. My heart hammers out of control. I feel sweaty already. But it’s adrenaline. Excitement. I’m not terrified anymore. Not of Angela, not of Alex. I can do this. “Do you want to dance?” I ask. Did I really just say that out loud? That couldn’t have been me. That was someone else. “Huh?” He can’t hear me over the music. “Do you want to dance?” I say, louder this time, with a little more conviction. For emphasis, I nod my head toward the floor. I’m really doing this. “Yeah.” I’m not sure I’ve heard him correctly, but then he grabs my hand and leads me away, and I risk a glance back at the group. They’re just staring. For once in my life, I’ve upstaged them. I grin back and then turn my attention to Alex. I’ve thought about getting close to him for a month. I’m about to get my chance.

Give him a minute,” Gidget said. After a second, Slug stretched his arms out and drifted back to sleep. “He’ll be in and out for the rest of the night,” Gidget said. “He’ll wake up around midnight and complain about how he can’t sleep. Then he’ll play videogames until about four or five in the morning. Then he’ll sleep like a brick until it’s time to go to school.

against the back of Mom’s seat and put two slugs into it. The girl went ape, screaming and pounding on me. I pushed myself off her. Once I was sitting up, I bounced her head off her door window. The window cracked, but didn’t break. She slumped, out cold. All the windows were shut because of the air conditioner, and it was so smoky in there you’d think we each had our own cigars. If you ask me, gunsmoke smells a lot better than cigar smoke. Love it. But I was afraid people driving by might worry if they saw all that smoke, so I put my window down to let it out.

Those thoughts she had kept weak and pale and hidden in the recesses of her brain, just out of thinking vision, came out into the open, and she saw that they were not foul and loathesome like slugs, as she had always believed, but somehow light and gay and holy.

Yeah.’ Roper sighed again. ‘We’d better get over there. Don’t think this is going to be a pretty one, but Smith wants us on it. Take what we can get, I suppose.’ The phone crackled as he put it down, the hiss of deodorant being sprayed in the background humming in her ear. He picked it up again, breathing into the mouthpiece. ‘I’m heading out now. I’ll send you the case link and meet you there? Or do you want me to pick you up?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m good.’ She didn’t like him being behind the wheel after a night like he’d had. At least not with her in the car. Though she never said it. ‘I’ll see you there.’ ‘Probably take me an hour,’ he grumbled. ‘Traffic’ll be a bitch at this time.’ ‘I’ll see you when I see you.’ He didn’t say anything else before he hung up.  She exhaled slowly and rubbed her head. Henley Smith was the DCI and the unit he ran had a couple of cases going on just then. A homeless heroin addict turning up in a river wasn’t at the top of the priorities list. Roper may have seen it as a win — a way to get back in good with Smith and claw his way back into the meat of things. But all she could think about was some poor homeless kid getting his fingernails ripped off.  She didn’t know why it had happened, but she knew that this city could be brutal. And that it rarely gave an inch. In fact, if you let it, it would eat you alive.  She turned back to the office, ready to tell Cake that she couldn’t stick around, and found him holding out her coffee cup. ‘I put milk in — skimmed, don’t worry — should be cool enough to drink.’ ‘Thanks,’ she said, taking it. ‘Sorry, I’ve gotta go.’ He nodded. ‘I get it. Same time tomorrow?’ She slugged the coffee. ‘Can I let you know?’ ‘Of course.’ Jamie tapped a button on her watch to start tracking her run, and turned for the door. She still needed to get her daily quota in. ‘I can give you a lift if you want?’ Cake offered. ‘No, it’s fine. Probably be faster if I run.’ ‘Probably.’ She nodded to him and then dipped through the door, shaking out her legs as she walked, the sweat on her neck and collarbones already cool in the early-morning air.  Outside the sun was barely up, but the city was churning to life.  Smog was already hanging in the air and the echo of a thousand engines buzzed in the streets like a wasp nest.  She took a few breaths, oxygenating her muscles, and then took off, clenching her fists against the cold.

Clever feller,” a leather-skinned officer muttered before spitting out a slug of tobacco juice. He had a few marks of rank on his dark-blue United States Army uniform and was obviously the man in charge.  His matching cavalry hat had a few dirt streaks on it, but the distinct golden tassel still stood out proudly.  The week-old stubble on his face was a patchwork of gray and light brown.  He scratched his neck while considering the next move.

Dad slugged back the Rolling Rock. He used to only drink Budweiser until those commercials with the frogs came out. He’d said, “Welp. Can’t drink moron beer,” finished the rest of his Budweiser that night and, as far as Dan knew, had yet to touch another.