Smoke And Stack Quotes

Its hold was loaded with coffee, rice, tea, oil seeds and jute. Black smoke poured from its one stack, darkening the hot cloudless sky. Alexander

Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

Sicarius,” Amaranthe said quietly. He bent low, eyes toward her face. With the men laughing and talking up front, and the lorry clacking and chugging as the stack billowed black smoke into the air, this was scarcely a romantic spot. But maybe it did not matter. His response would not likely be to wrap her in his arms and kiss her. Whatever response he gave — if he gave one at all — she anticipated it would sting. “I…uhm…” Amaranthe forced herself to meet his gaze. “I love you.” A long moment passed. She did not remember breathing. Sicarius nodded infinitesimally. “I know.

I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two. Autumn in Fairyland is all that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland Forest or the morbidity of a Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland. And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly cold air on their snorting, roaring high wheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel to mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

I had lived my entire life up until I began working at Westwind relatively corpse-free. Now I had access to scores of them—stacked in the crematory freezer. They forced me to face my own death and the deaths of those I loved. No matter how much technology may become our master, it takes only a human corpse to toss the anchor off that boat and pull us back down to the firm knowledge that we are glorified animals that eat and shit and are doomed to die. We are all just future corpses.

The bodies were stacked in the reefer with care, with hope that the body van soon would be there . . .

As one man explains, "A lot of us have done okay, but we don't want to lose what we've got, see it given away." When I ask him what he saw as being "given away," it was not public waters given to dumpers, or clean air give to smoke stacks. It was not health or years of life. It was not lost public sector jobs. What he felt was being given away was tax money to support non-working people and non-deserving people--and not just tax money, but honor too.

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

From time to time Eva would venture on deck to gaze at the grey sky,the grey turbulent water and the grey ships with their belching smoke stacks butting and smashing onward through the waves and jagged swells - disappearing in explosions of wintry spume from time to time - gamely making for the British Isles

small pieces and fed the fire. I will not let you go out, he said to himself, to the flames—not ever. And so he sat through a long part of the day, keeping the flames even, eating from his stock of raspberries, leaving to drink from the lake when he was thirsty. In the afternoon, toward the evening, with his face smoke smeared and his skin red from the heat, he finally began to think ahead to what he needed to do. He would need a large woodpile to get through the night. It would be almost impossible to find wood in the dark so he had to have it all in and cut and stacked before the sun went down. Brian made certain the fire was banked with new wood, then went out of the shelter and searched for a good fuel supply. Up the hill from the campsite the same windstorm that left him a place to land the plane—had that only been three, four days ago?—had dropped three large white pines across each other. They were dead now, dry and filled with weathered dry dead limbs

A sweeping vista of Northern sky opens up between the warehouses and hangs motionless above the cobbled streets. It’s a world of unrequited love beneath the smoke stacks and awkward moments in the underpass. A great crashing wave of romantic despair that washes over my dramatic heart, dousing it with a thin grey rinse. I’m James Dean, I’m Albert Camus, I posture in doorways with a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth. My great iron bedstead, my kitchen sink drama, the grainy black and white days of this life...

I could still see the smoke stack. That's where the water would be, healing out to the sea and the peaceful grottoes.

Project Princess Teeny feet rock layered double socks Popping side piping of many colored loose lace ups Racing toe keeps up with fancy free gear slick slide and just pressed recently weaved hair Jeans oversized belie her hips, back, thighs that have made guys sigh for milleni year Topped by an attractive jacket her suit’s not for flacking, flunkies, junkies or punk homies on the stroll. Her hands mobile thrones of today’s urban goddess Clinking rings link dragon fingers no need to be modest. One or two gap teeth coolin’ sport gold initials Doubt you get to her name just check from the side please chill. Multidimensional shrimp earrings frame her cinnamon face Crimson with a compliment if a comment hits the right place Don’t step to the plate with datelines from ‘88 Spare your simple, fragile feelings with the same sense that you came Color woman variation reworks the french twist with crinkle cut platinum frosted bangs from a spray can’s mist Never dissed, she insists: “No you can’t touch this.” And, if pissed, bedecked fists stop boys who must persist. She’s the one. Give her some. Under fire. Smoking gun. Of which songs are sung, raps are spun, bells are rung, rocked, pistols cocked, unwanted advances blocked, well stacked she’s jock. It’s all about you girl. You go on. Don’t you dare stop.

We listened to late-night jazz on the radio and went to jazz clubs, thick with smoke, and drank warm beer. In the daytime I lay on my own bed and read books. I kept a stack by my bed and read them off one by one till they dwindled like a pile of pancakes.

Apology Lately, too much disturbed, you stay trailing in me and I believe you. How could I not feel you were misspent, there by books stacked clean on glass, or outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving. If the explanations amount to something, I will tell you. It is enough, you say, that surfaces grow so distant. Maybe you darken, already too much changed, maybe in your house you would be content where no incident emerges, but for smoke or glass or air, such things held simply to be voiceless. And if you mean me, I believe you. Or if you should darken, this inwardness would be misspent, and flinching I might pause, and add to these meager incidents the words. Some books should stay formal on the shelves. So surely I heard you, in your complication aware, snow holding where it might weightless rest, and should you fold into me—trackless, misspent, too much arranged—I might believe you but swiftly shut, lines of smoke rising through snow, here where it seems no good word emerges. Though it is cold, I am aware such reluctance could lose these blinking hours to simple safety. Here is an inwardless purpose. In these hours when snow shuts, it may be we empty, amounting to something. How could I not wait for those few words, which we might enter

The sky was masked by a column of smoke. New clouds pushed out from the main stack, one over another, higher and higher into the blue. At its upper reach, the cloud began to spread across the sky until it covered the whole of the horizon. Zhou looked up to see it pass overhead. The land grew dark as the cloud covered the sun.

The owner as he crosses the board floor, moving between shelves, past stacked crates and burlap sacks bulging with sugar and flour. “Jessup? It’s Brady! You in back?” The twelve burros crane their scrawny necks in his direction when Brady emerges from the merc. He reaches into his greatcoat, pulls out a tin of Star Navy tobacco, and shoves a chaw between lips and gums gone blackish purple in the last year. “What the hell?” he whispers. When he delivered supplies two weeks ago, this little mining town was bustling. Now Abandon looms listless before him in the gloom of late afternoon, streets empty, snow banked high against the unshoveled plank sidewalks, no tracks as far as he can see. The cabins scattered across the lower slopes lie buried to their chimneys, and with not a one of them smoking, the air smells too clean. Brady is a man at home in solitude, often spending days on the trail, alone in wild, quiet places, but this silence is all wrong—a lie. He feels menaced by it, and with each passing moment, more certain that something.

We may not have been able to ride the front of the bus, but that was not the case when it came to the train. Colored people during this time were seated in the first car of a train. They made us ride in the first car because the smoke from the smoke stack blew soot into the first car. When the ride was over, everyone in the first car was covered in dirt.

You could stack the top two rows without much trouble. The third row would burn you with fire. The fourth row would kill you with toxic smoke. The fifth row would do all that stuff PLUS give you a mild dose of radiation. The sixth row would explode violently, destroying the building in a cloud of radioactive, poisonous fire and dust. Do not build the seventh row.

How happily we explored our shiny new world! We lived like characters from the great books I curled up with in the big Draylon armchair. Like Jack Kerouak, like Gatsby, we created ourselves as we went along, a raggle-taggle of gypsies in old army overcoats and bell-bottoms, straggling through the fields that surrounded our granite farmhouse in search of firewood, which we dragged home and stacked in the living room. Ignorant and innocent, we acted as if the world belonged to us, as though we would ever have taken the time to hang the regency wallpaper we damaged so casually with half-rotten firewood, or would have known how to hang it straight, or smooth the seams. We broke logs against the massive tiled hearth and piled them against the sooty fire back, like the logs were tradition and we were burning it, like chimney fires could never happen, like the house didn't really belong to the poor divorcee who paid the rates and mortgage even as we sat around the flames like hunter gatherers, smoking Lebanese gold, chanting and playing the drums, dancing to the tortured music of Luke's guitar. Impelled by the rhythm, fortified by poorly digested scraps of Lao Tzu, we got up to dance, regardless of the coffee we knocked over onto the shag carpet. We sopped it up carelessly, or let it sit there as it would; later was time enough. We were committed to the moment. Everything was easy and beautiful if you looked at it right. If someone was angry, we walked down the other side of the street, sorry and amused at their loss of cool. We avoided newspapers and television. They were full of lies, and we knew all the stuff we needed. We spent our government grants on books, dope, acid, jug wine, and cheap food from the supermarket--variegated cheese scraps bundled roughly together, white cabbage and bacon ends, dented tins of tomatoes from the bargain bin. Everything was beautiful, the stars and the sunsets, the mold that someone discovered at the back of the fridge, the cows in the fields that kicked their giddy heels up in the air and fled as we ranged through the Yorkshire woods decked in daisy chains, necklaces made of melon seeds and tie-dye T-shirts whose colors stained the bath tub forever--an eternal reminder of the rainbow generation. [81-82]

If a man in a smoking jacket in a coal-fire-heated library in his manor house in London can understand that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, then how can it be denied by a man pulling a sledge stacked with frozen meat and furs across an unnamed island, through the Arctic night under a sky gone mad, towards a frozen sea a thousand miles and more from any civilised hearth?

stop at the railroad crossing, I saw that most of the passengers were smoking. The atmosphere in there must have been roughly akin to the atmosphere of Saturn. Once the bus had gone on its way (leaving behind a smell of half-cooked diesel to mix with the rotten-egg stench belching from the Worumbo’s stacks), I crossed the street, wondering briefly what would happen if I were hit by a car. Would I blink out of existence? Wake up

The train? Pulled off on a spur in the warming grass, it was old, yes, and welded tight with rust, but it looked like a titanic magnet that had collected to itself, from locomotive boneyards across three continents, drive shafts, fly-wheels, smoke stacks, and hand-me-down second-rate nightmares. It did not cut a black and mortuary silhouette. It asked permission but to lie dead in autumn strewings, so much tired steam and iron gunpowder blowing away.

Oak is peering at the lock on the chest. “Once, the Bomb told me a story about poisonous spiders kept inside a trunk. When the thief opened it, he was bitten all over. Died badly. I believe she was trying to dissuade me from stealing sweets.” Tiernan kicks the stack of wood with one snow-covered boot. The logs rumble out of formation. “I am going to make a fire.” I lift the fur and turn it inside out, brushing my hand over the lining to check for rot or bugs. There’s nothing. No discoloration, either, as there might be from poison. The only odor it contains is the faint smell of the smoke used to tan the hide. A few uniforms from a long-disbanded army are in a gray woolen heap. I shake them out and assess them while Oak tries to pry apart the rusty chest. “There probably aren’t any spiders,” he says when I look in his direction. Inside is a waxed wheel of cheese and ancient rolls, along with a skin of slushy wine. He appears disappointed.

Could be just the local boys holding a moonlight circle-jerk up on the hill or sitting around on the tombstones smoking grass. Mostly he'd run into them over in Cumberland, on the checkout line at the supermarket, each with two or three little kids and a little underage wife - who already looks as though life has passed her by - with poor coloring and a pregnant belly pushing a cart piled with popcorn, cheese bugles, sausage rolls, dog food, potato chips, baby wipes, and twelve-inch-round pepperoni pizzas stacked up like money in a dream.

one summer hornets made a nest deep in the garage and my aunt said we’d have to empty the whole thing in order to find where they were coming from my grandfather refused and I don’t think I need to say too much in order for you to understand that he wasn’t willing to empty the container of his body either he would rather let a threat linger between tightly packed muscles if it meant he never had to pull the pain out stack it in the driveway let the neighbors and god catch a glimpse or, sweet baby Jesus, ever send someone in to smoke out the harm

A. There are people who collect elements. These collectors try to gather physical samples of as many of the elements as possible into periodic-table-shaped display cases.1 Of the 118 elements, 30 of them—like helium, carbon, aluminum, and iron—can be bought in pure form in local retail stores. Another few dozen can be scavenged by taking things apart (you can find tiny americium samples in smoke detectors). Others can be ordered over the Internet. All in all, it’s possible to get samples of about 80 of the elements—90, if you’re willing to take some risks with your health, safety, and arrest record. The rest are too radioactive or short-lived to collect more than a few atoms of them at once. But what if you did? The periodic table of the elements has seven rows.2 You could stack the top two rows without much trouble. The third row would burn you with fire. The fourth row would kill you with toxic smoke. The fifth row would do all that stuff PLUS give you a mild dose of radiation. The sixth row would explode violently, destroying the building in a cloud of radioactive, poisonous fire and dust. Do not build the seventh row.

Tank's body is stacked with the others by the hangar doors to be disposed. He's loaded onto the transport for the final leg of his journey to the incinerators, where he will be consumed in fire, his ashes mixing with the gray smoke and carried aloft in a column of superheated air, eventually to settle over us in particles too find to see or feel. He'll stay with us - on us - until we shower that night, washing what's left of Tank into the drains connected to the pipes connected to the septic tanks, where he will mix with our excrement before leaching into the ground.

There’s a large living area that opens into the kitchen at the far end, with tall windows that look over the wide expanse of sky and sea. The white linen couch and armchairs are rumpled and so soft, they threaten to swallow you when you drop into them. Braided rugs lie higgledy-piggledy, a patchwork of color over wide knotted floorboards. A fireplace is set into a brick wall, painted white and stained with smoke from years of use. There’s a stack of logs on one side and a vintage steamer trunk that’s full of blankets on the other. An upright piano stands under the staircase that leads to the second floor.

Harry had never in all his life had such a Christmas dinner. A hundred fat, roast turkeys; mountains of roast and boiled potatoes; platters of chipolatas; tureens of buttered peas, silver boats of thick, rich gravy and cranberry sauce — and stacks of wizard crackers every few feet along the table. These fantastic party favors were nothing like the feeble Muggle ones the Dursleys usually bought, with their little plastic toys and their flimsy paper hats inside. Harry pulled a wizard cracker with Fred and it didn’t just bang, it went off with a blast like a cannon and engulfed them all in a cloud of blue smoke, while from the inside exploded a rear admiral’s hat and several live, white mice.

Harry had never in all his life had such a Christmas dinner. A hundred fat, roast turkeys; mountains of roast and boiled potatoes; platters of chipolatas; tureens of buttered peas, silver boats of thick, rich gravy and cranberry sauce — and stacks of wizard crackers every few feet along the table. These fantastic party favors were nothing like the feeble Muggle ones the Dursleys usually bought, with their little plastic toys and their flimsy paper hats inside. Harry pulled a wizard cracker with Fred and it didn’t just bang, it went off with a blast like a cannon and engulfed them all in a cloud of blue smoke, while from the inside exploded a rear admiral’s hat and several live, white mice. Up at the High Table, Dumbledore had swapped his pointed wizard’s hat for a flowered bonnet, and was chuckling merrily at a joke Professor Flitwick had just read him. Flaming

The peace boys talk, smoke, rant, make their jokes, strum guitars, run their silky white hands through their stringy long hair. They spread their legs when they talk, they spread out, their legs open up and they spread them wide and their sentences spread all over and their words come and come and their gestures get bigger and they got half erect cocks all the time when they talk, the denim of their dirty jeans is pulled tight across their cocks because of how they spread their legs and they always finger themselves just lightly when they talk so they are always excited by what they have to say. Somehow they are always half reclining, on chairs, on desks, on tables, against walls or stacks of boxes, legs spread out so they can talk, touching themselves with the tips of their fingers or the palms of their spread hands, giggling, smoking, they think they are Che.

And Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the difference that caste makes between man and man. When the potter’s donkey slipped in the clay pit, Mowgli hauled it out by the tail, and helped to stack the pots for their journey to the market at Khanhiwara. That was very shocking, too, for the potter is a low-caste man, and his donkey is worse. When the priest scolded him, Mowgli threatened to put him on the donkey too, and the priest told Messua’s husband that Mowgli had better be set to work as soon as possible; and the village head-man told Mowgli that he would have to go out with the buffaloes next day, and herd them while they grazed. No one was more pleased than Mowgli; and that night, because he had been appointed a servant of the village, as it were, he went off to a circle that met every evening on a masonry platform under a great fig-tree. It was the village club, and the head-man and the watchman and the barber, who knew all the gossip of the village, and old Buldeo, the village hunter, who had a Tower musket, met and smoked. The monkeys sat and talked in the upper branches, and there was a hole under the platform where a cobra lived, and he had his little platter of milk every night because he was sacred; and the old men sat around the tree and talked, and pulled at the big huqas (the water-pipes) till far into the night. They told wonderful tales of gods and men and ghosts; and Buldeo told even more wonderful ones of the ways of beasts in the jungle, till the eyes of the children sitting outside the circle bulged out of their heads. Most of the tales were about animals, for the jungle was always at their door. The deer and the wild pig grubbed up their crops, and now and again the tiger carried off a man at twilight, within sight of the village gates.

Did you bring money with you, or shall we play for markers?" She flipped the stack of cards to the table with a professional twist of her wrist. "I don't play for less than a guinea a hand." His lips twitched. "The question is not if I have money. The question is, do you?" "I don't need funds, as I don't plan on losing," she said, her gaze mocking. For a moment, he thought he'd heard her incorrectly. Slowly, he said, "I beg your pardon, but are you saying you could beat me at a game of chance?" A dismissive smile rested on her lips. "Please, Dougal, let's speak frankly," she drawled softly. "Naturally, I expect to win; I was taught by a master." Dougal was entranced. He'd been challenged to many things before, but no one had so blatantly dismissed his chances of winning. "A giunea a hand?" "At least." "I didn't realize I'd need a note from my banker, or I'd have brought one with me." Her eyes sparkled with pure mischief, which inflamed him more. "If you've no money with you, then perhaps there are other things we can play for." The words hung in the room, as thick as the smoke that seeped from the fireplace. Like a blinding bolt of light from a storm-black sky, everything fell into place. This was why she and her minions had worked so hard to convince him that the house was worthless. If he thought it of low value, he'd be eager to wager the deed. Of all the devious plots! Yet Dougal found himself fighting a grin. He'd been feted and petted, fawned upon and sought out, but until now, no one had gone to such lengths to fleece him. Dugal couldn't look away from Sophia. He knew his own worth; women had paid attention to him for so long that he took it for granted. He'd dallied and toyed, taken and enjoyed. But never, in all of his years, had he so desired any woman as he did this one. The irony of it was that she desired him,too-but only for the contents of his pocket. Dougal didn't know whether to laugh or fume. He should be insulted, but instead he found himself watching her with new appreciation.

The variety of wares was staggering: stacks of brown haddock fried in batter, pea soup crowded with chunks of salt pork, smoking-hot potatoes split and doused with butter, oysters roasted in the shell, pickled whelks, and egg-sized suet dumplings heaped in wide shallow bowls. Meat pasties had been made in half-circle shapes convenient for hand carrying. Dried red saveloy and polony sausages, cured tongue, and cuts of ham seared with white fat were made into sandwiches called trotters. Farther along the rows, there was an abundance of sweets: puddings, pastries, buns crossed with fat white lines of sugar, citron cakes, chewy gingerbread nuts dabbed with crackled icing, and tarts made with currants, gooseberries, rhubarbs, or cherries. Ransom guided Garrett from one stand to the next, buying whatever caught her interest: a paper cone filled with hot green peas and bacon, and a nugget of plum dough. He coaxed her to taste a spicy Italian veal stew called stuffata, which was so delicious that she ate an entire cup of it.

He leaned in, held his breath so as not to make a noise, went close to her, inhaled the scent that emanated from the pores of her forehead; inhaled the air that bounced back from her head. He stopped there, listening intently to the blood flowing, heart beating, pulse pulsating, her hair drifting slowly below her ear resting where the carotid artery was. He closed his eyes as if picturing everything. Like a dexterous doctor discerning the malfunction in a patient or an adroit maestro listening to every note to discern where the one note is missing. He stacked everything neatly in his head, still the intent hearing continued. Finally, a smile came to his face just as easily as breath came to him. A ecstatic smoke rose in his head, he had heard the murmur of her thoughts, she was in a peaceful world now. She had drifted into slumber, through the doors to the dream worlds, nothing was troubling her now. He was filled with an air of comfort and triumph, he was there when she needed it. He was happy that nothing bothered her anymore, how he wanted to ostracize the world just a few moments before!? He wanted to drag this drab world out of her dreamy gleaming eyes, petal covered, almond eyes. She was stumbling in her own world now, as he sat beside her bed. He kissed her forehead, whisked the world with those thin lips of his; he whisked that pile of rubble. He leaned to the side and below, not knowing which side; right or left, it didn't matter; whispered in her ear: "I love you". A smile played on her lips as if she heard that. Again he kissed her forehead, had a good look at her closed eyes. His taverns, he thought; where he got drunk, placed so adjacent to each other. He was happy, that she was happy, she was happy so he was happy. The rest of the world didn't matter; No! No! There was no "Rest" she was his world the whole and entire of it, there was no "Rest of the world". He got up collected his phone, which played slow Beethoven, turned it off, switched the lamp off, pulled the blanket over her, got up, patted the dog along, made out of her room; into her balcony. He didn't want to go yet, he stood there as many thoughts danced in front of him, slow in the moonlight.

As we made our halting, laborious way forward, away from the flying smuts of the smoke stack, we were alternately jostled together, then strained, nearly sundered, arms and fingers interlocked as I held the rail and Julia clung to me, thrust together again, drawn apart; then, in a plunge deeper than the rest, I found myself flung across her, pressing her against the rail, warding myself off her with the arms that held her prisoner on either side, and as the ship paused at the end of its drop as though gathering strength for the ascent, we stood thus embraced, in the open, cheek against cheek, her hair blowing across my eyes; the dark horizon of tumbling water, flashing now with gold, stood still above us, then came sweeping down till I was staring through Julia’s dark hair into a wide and golden sky, and she was thrown forward on my heart, held up by my hands on the rail, her face still pressed to mine. In that minute, with her lips to my ear and her breath warm in the salt wind, Julia said, though I had not spoken, “Yes, now,” and as the ship righted herself and for the moment ran into calmer waters, Julia led me below.

right now my mind is full of images, an overwhelming flood of memories and ideas—you have any idea how many memories are buried in the mind? Fishing for bluegill on Lake Argyle with my father, the hook caught in his thumb, forcing it through the other side and cutting it off with wirecutters, the severed barb flying dangerously into the air spinning its cut facet gleaming in the sun and I jerking back for fear it would plunge into my eye, squinting protectively, opening my eyes again it is mud, all mud, a universe of mud and the mortar shell has just taken flight, my fingers jammed into my ears, the smell of the explosion penetrating my sinuses making them clench up and bleed, the shell exploding in the trees, a puff of white smoke but the trees are still there and the gunfire still raining down like hailstones on the cellar door on the day that the tornado wrecked our farmhouse and we packed into my aunt’s fruit cellar and I looked up at the stacked mason jars of rhubarb and tomatoes and wondered what would happen to us when the glass shattered and flew through the air like the horizontal sleet of Soldier Field on the day that I caught five for eighty-seven yards and put such a hit on Cornelius Hayes that he took five minutes to get up. God, I can see my entire life!

Coley and I had to separate to get around a girl who was mostly eclipsed by the size of the power she was carrying some sort of project about World War II—a picture of Hitler doing his mustachioed Sieg heil, a gaunt concentration camp victim, a couple of American soldiers smoking cigarettes and scowling at the camera, the captions beneath each photo in glitter-bubble letters. If this had been the movie version of my life, I knew, somebody who did teenage stuff well, some director, would have lingered on that poster and maybe even have swelled some poignant music, out is in slow motion as the hallway continued on at regular speed around us, backlit the three of us—Coley and the poster board chick and me—and in doing so tried to make some statement about teenage frivolity and prom season as it stacked up against something authentic and horrible like war. But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.

Coley and I had to separate to get around a girl who was mostly eclipsed by the size of the poster she was carrying, some sort of project about World War Two—a picture of Hitler doing his mustachioed Sieg heil, a gaunt concentration-camp victim, a couple of American soldiers smoking cigarettes and scowling at the camera, the captions beneath each photo in glitter-bubble letters. If this had been the movie version of my life, I knew, somebody who did teenage stuff well, some director, would have lingered on that poster and maybe even have swelled some sort of poignant music, put us in slow motion as the hallway continued on at regular speed around us, backlit the three of us—Coley and the posterboard chick and me—and in doing so tried to make some statement about teenage frivolity and prom season as it stacked up against something authentic and horrible like war. But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain it as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.

Dither and I like to take the ladies out. Last night Maggie showered her blue-black guts over the barstool at the Dirty Truth while I swung the bartender into the wall-sized mirror by his ankles. Dither put his many fingers into six fraternity brothers while Winnie sucked off the beer spigots, her shattered pelvis undulating obscenely, her hair and dress alive with blood beetles. Then we burst out into the streets. I sliced off heads all down Pleasant while Dither shoved swords up through the seats at the Calvin Theater. Winnie set bassinets afire at Cooley Dickinson while Maggie squatted to piss in the lobster tank in the Stop & Shop. We pinwheeled through the Bridge Street cemetery, upending ancient caskets and sending their contents into the grey sky until it looked like smoke from a great fire. It was a beautiful night; we poured wine into our lungs like drowning sots. In the pink morning we were stacked on the benches like cordwood. The sky was a sick yellow bruise. The sun was a cold dead eye. The winds raised up and shook the houses and thrashed the trees. A great fire is coming to Leeds. Pneumonic plagues and blood from the faucets and worms exploding up into bath tubs from the drains. You’re listening to WXXT. The time is 6:16 a.m. It is not too late to rise, rise and do what needs to be done. Up next, we’ve got Burton Stallhearse and the Grappling Grannies performing their version of “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.

Sky's The Limit" [Intro] Good evening ladies and gentlemen How's everybody doing tonight I'd like to welcome to the stage, the lyrically acclaimed I like this young man because when he came out He came out with the phrase, he went from ashy to classy I like that So everybody in the house, give a warm round of applause For the Notorious B.I.G The Notorious B.I.G., ladies and gentlemen give it up for him y'all [Verse 1] A nigga never been as broke as me - I like that When I was young I had two pair of Lees, besides that The pin stripes and the gray The one I wore on Mondays and Wednesdays While niggas flirt I'm sewing tigers on my shirts, and alligators You want to see the inside, I see you later Here comes the drama, oh, that's that nigga with the fake, blaow Why you punch me in my face, stay in your place Play your position, here come my intuition Go in this nigga pocket, rob him while his friends watching And hoes clocking, here comes respect His crew's your crew or they might be next Look at they man eye, big man, they never try So we rolled with them, stole with them I mean loyalty, niggas bought me milks at lunch The milks was chocolate, the cookies, butter crunch 88 Oshkosh and blue and white dunks, pass the blunts [Hook: 112] Sky is the limit and you know that you keep on Just keep on pressing on Sky is the limit and you know that you can have What you want, be what you want Sky is the limit and you know that you keep on Just keep on pressing on Sky is the limit and you know that you can have What you want, be what you want, have what you want, be what you want [Verse 2] I was a shame, my crew was lame I had enough heart for most of them Long as I got stuff from most of them It's on, even when I was wrong I got my point across They depicted me the boss, of course My orange box-cutter make the world go round Plus I'm fucking bitches ain't my homegirls now Start stacking, dabbled in crack, gun packing Nickname Medina make the seniors tote my Niñas From gym class, to English pass off a global The only nigga with a mobile can't you see like Total Getting larger in waists and tastes Ain't no telling where this felon is heading, just in case Keep a shell at the tip of your melon, clear the space Your brain was a terrible thing to waste 88 on gates, snatch initial name plates Smoking spliffs with niggas, real-life beginner killers Praying God forgive us for being sinners, help us out [Hook] [Verse 3] After realizing, to master enterprising I ain't have to be in school by ten, I then Began to encounter with my counterparts On how to burn the block apart, break it down into sections Drugs by the selections Some use pipes, others use injections Syringe sold separately Frank the Deputy Quick to grab my Smith & Wesson like my dick was missing To protect my position, my corner, my lair While we out here, say the Hustlers Prayer If the game shakes me or breaks me I hope it makes me a better man Take a better stand Put money in my mom's hand Get my daughter this college grant so she don't need no man Stay far from timid Only make moves when your heart's in it And live the phrase sky's the limit Motherfuckers See you chumps on top [Hook]

Danny flicks an ashless cigarette and bounces in place on the couch, occasionally checking the door leading to the kitchen. Crates are stacked along the wall, magazines piled on the floor. I smell fish and char. “You baking?” He frowns. “Nah.” I’m undermining him if I check, but the smell of burning thickens. We enter the kitchen, where hundreds, maybe thousands of reminders blink in the occasional ocean breeze. I never escape the sensation I’m being surveilled, except instead of a penetrating gaze they are commands, observations. DON’T FORGET RICE. PETER IS THE COUSIN WHO STEALS. AN HOUR IS SIXTY MINUTES. CLOVER HATES LILIES. TAKE SHOWER. Some are so old the paper has become cloth soft. Danny plucks one from the wall. SALMON IN THE OVEN. “Damn.” He opens the oven door, releasing smoke. “Oven mitt,” I warn when he is about to barehand the rack.

a stack of chocolate chip pancakes

This realization was the mental equivalent of a slow-motion clip played in reverse: A great mess lifts itself off the floor and flies upward to arrange itself on a tabletop. Tea unpuddles and siphons itself into cups midair to land neatly on a tray. Books leap from a jumble, flapping their covers like wings, and rise to roost in a stack. Sense out of madness.

Rachel Mina was single. She didn’t indicate whether she was divorced, widowed, or never married. A hospital administrator on leave from Chicago. She was thirty-seven and weighed 115 pounds. In Cody’s experience, that meant he should add a few years and at least ten pounds, so he scratched in “40” and “125” on the page. Mina indicated she was a vegetarian (fish was okay) and intermediate rider. She wrote: “Discovery tour.” He wondered what “on leave” meant. His first thought was she seemed to be the only one of the clients thus far who might have had the free time—and means—to visit homes in four states and leave bodies and ashes behind. But a woman, and a single one at that? Discovery tour, Cody mouthed, squinting through smoke at the page. It sounded phony and new-agey, he thought. Or facetious. And an interaction between a hospital administrator and Hank Winters seemed possible. He placed her application aside from the others into what he thought of as the hot stack.

At first, the smoke in the Fiction stacks was as pale as onionskin. Then it deepened to dove gray. Then it turned black. It wound around Fiction A through L, curling in lazy ringlets. It gathered into soft puffs that bobbed and banked against the shelves like bumper cars. Suddenly, sharp fingers of flame shot through the smoke and jabbed upward. More flames erupted. The heat built. The temperature reached 451 degrees and the books began smoldering. Their covers burst like popcorn. Pages flared and blackened and then sprang away from their bindings, a ream of sooty scraps soaring on the updraft. The fire flashed through Fiction, consuming as it traveled. It reached for the cookbooks. The cookbooks roasted. The fire scrambled to the sixth tier and then to the seventh. Every book in its path bloomed with flame. At the seventh tier, the fire banged into the concrete ceiling, doubled back, and mushroomed down again to the sixth tier. It poked around, looking for more air and fuel. Pages and book jackets and microfilm and magazines crumbled and vanished. On the sixth tier, flames crowded against the walls of the stacks, then decided to move laterally. The fire burned through sixth-tier shelves and then nosed around until it found the catwalk that connected the northeast stacks to the northwest stacks. It erupted into the catwalk and hurried along until it reached the patent collection stored in the northwest stacks. It gripped the blocky patent gazettes. They were so thick that they resisted, but the heat gathered until at last the gazettes smoked, flared, crackled, and dematerialized. Wind gusts filled the vacuum made by the fire. Hot air saturated the walls. The floor began to fracture. A spiderweb of hot cracks appeared. Ceiling beams spalled, sending chips of concrete shooting in every direction. The temperature reached 900 degrees, and the stacks' steel shelves brightened from gray to white, as if illuminated from within. Soon, glistening and nearly molten, they glowed cherry red. Then they twisted and slumped, pitching their books into the fire.

The hot bright afternoon and the gleaning birds and the mowing men and this beautiful boy, paused in front of his sketch, rolling a cigarette, his charcoal-covered fingertips blackening the paper, and he licked across the edge of the cigarette paper with his bright tongue and put the cigarette between what Bridget noticed with a slight rush of breath were his full lips and took a kitchen match from the back pocket of his pants and struck it against the little wooden box he kept his charcoal sticks in and touched it to the end of the cigarette and deeply inhaled smoke into his lungs and held it and crossed his arms and stood back from the drawing and contemplated it and let the smoke from his lungs in a sustained relaxed torrent that made a matted blue cloud in the sunlight and smelled sweet and made her want to smoke. This boy before her, smoking his cigarette and looking at the sketch deciding it was done, seemed like a ghost, not because he was otherworldly or like a hallucination but because Bridget knew that she would remember this moment for however long she lived in its perfect entirety—the grass, the sunlight, the blue cloud of smoke, the tedder and the windrows and the mowing men, this boy she found more and more beautiful—and she could already feel what it was going to be like to look back on it and remember the young girl she’d once been and the young boy who’d stood right in front of her and whisked a stick of charcoal around and nearly miraculously rendered the grass, the light, the mowers, the windrows, the huge, heavy, volumed, shadowed, sunny, swarming, monolithic stacks of hay— everything she saw and anticipated remembering—onto a white pane of paper exactly as it looked to her own eyes.

When you move beyond your 40th birthday, there are a number of lifestyle factors that should underpin your fitness lifestyle. Consider the following 7 factors and think about how you stack up in regard to them. Do you: Get regular (at least 6 monthly) medical checkups? Not smoke? Get regular exercise? Eat sensibly and in moderation? Strive to maintain a balanced weight? Know how to relax? Drink alcohol in moderation?

it occurred to me that it was all futile, the fantasy of Korean unity, the five thousand years of Korean identity, because the unified nation was broken, irreparably, in 1945 when a group of politicians drew a random line across the map, separating families who would die without ever meeting again, with all their sorrow and anger and regret unrequited, their bodies turning to earth, becoming part of this land. On that evening, as a sun the color of mournful pomegranate fell behind the Forever Tower, behind the smoke stack, behind this city, this school, behind the children of the elite who were now my children for a brief time, these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here.

All that is human melted into the sky and faded into the mountains. Is that a paradox? That a man could never need or have better companionship than himself? As for the solitary confinement of the mind, that solipsism, like the other absurdities of the professional philosopher, is the product of too much time wasted in library stacks between the covers of a book and smoke-hilled coffeehouses, bad for the brains, and conversation-clogged seminars. To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist, all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head. If he ducks, he’s a liar. His logic may be airtight, but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic.

Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke.

Dusty beer bottles on both sides of the squishy steps vibrated and danced every time anyone descended down them. There were bottles on various ledges and within cases that were stacked like totem poles. The kids used a large wooden spool as a table and sat on seats torn from junk cars. They told jokes that everyone knew by heart, or stories that they could recite verbatim. The top of the spool was littered with ashtrays, full of snuffed butts, as well as empty beer bottles, or “dead soldiers.” At the bottom of the bottles, engorged cigarette butts resembled leeches, having been drowned in a lethal cocktail of backwash and saliva. Half the cigarettes inside the ashtrays had white filters, lovingly imprinted with Gail’s pink lipstick that she’d rubbed out in the ashtray. Of late, I was smoking more, sucking on the cigarettes that I bummed off the girls. Sucking in their essence.

seemed like a ghost, not because he was otherworldly or like a hallucination but because Bridget knew that she would remember this moment for however long she lived in its perfect entirety—the grass, the sunlight, the blue cloud of smoke, the tedder and the windrows and the mowing men, this boy she found more and more beautiful—and she could already feel what it was going to be like to look back on it and remember the young girl she’d once been and the young boy who’d stood right in front of her and whisked a stick of charcoal around and nearly miraculously rendered the grass, the light, the mowers, the windrows, the huge, heavy, volumed, shadowed, sunny, swarming, monolithic stacks of hay— everything she saw and anticipated remembering—onto a white pane of paper exactly as it looked to her own eyes.

When Hahn and Strassman conducted their experiment, they launched a neutron into an atom of uranium, a metal that was made up of the largest and heaviest atoms known at the time. Because a neutron has no electrical charge, it can slip through the powerful wall of electrons that surrounds every atom. This extra neutron is absorbed into the already bloated uranium nucleus, upsetting the careful balance of forces that holds the atom together. And in a flash the whole atom fractures. Its protons and electrons and neutrons rearrange themselves into different elements. The reaction also releases stray neutrons, which fly off on their own. But the most significant by-product of this collision is energy. Lots of it… Just how much energy comes from a nuclear reaction? About seventy million times more energy than from a chemical reaction. So if, for example, you fissioned one kilogram of uranium, it would make the same size explosion as 20,000 tons of TNT. One little chunk of uranium has more potential explosive energy than a pile of TNT stacked ten stories high. If fission could work on a large enough scale (instead of just one atom at a time), mankind stood to gain more than merely the ability to make explosions. In fact, fission promised to reveal some of the deepest mysteries of the universe. The secret behind fission’s awesome power lies in the type of reaction that is taking place. For practically all of human history, the most energetic reactions that humans were aware of were chemical reactions. Fire is a good example. If you ignite a lump of coal and make sure there is enough oxygen around, the result is fire (energy) and smoke. On a molecular level, the heat from the flame disrupts the electrons in the coal, causing each carbon atom to bond with two atoms of oxygen. The result is a new molecule made from the old atoms: CO2. We put in carbon and oxygen, and we get out carbon and oxygen, though in slightly different arrangements. But in a nuclear reaction, such as fission, the original atom of uranium disappears. It actually becomes two new atoms. Instead of changing merely the arrangement of the atoms, fission changes their very identity. In fission, scientists had finally discovered the philosopher’s stone that had captivated the minds of medieval alchemists. With fission, we could finally turn lead into gold.

How many times, she reflected ruefully, she had sought to understand a wounded wild creature. But it was another matter entirely to penetrate the mystery of a human being. Reaching Christopher’s door, she knocked softly. When there came no response, she let herself inside. To her surprise, the room brimmed with daylight, the late August sun illuminating tiny floating dust motes by the window. The air smelled like liquor and smoke and bath soap. A portable bath occupied one corner of the room, sodden footprints tracking across the carpet. Christopher reclined on the unmade bed, half propped on a haphazard stack of pillows, a bottle of brandy clasped negligently in his fingers. His incurious gaze moved to Beatri and held, his eyes becoming alert. He was clad in a pair of fawn-colored trousers, only partially fastened, and…nothing more. His body was a long golden arc on the bed, lean and complexly muscled. Scars marred the sun-browned skin in places…there was a ragged triangular shape where a bayonet had pierced his shoulder, a liberal scattering of marks from shrapnel, a small circular depression on his side that must have been caused by a bullet. Slowly Christopher levered himself upward and placed the bottle on the bedside table. Half leaning on the edge of the mattress, his bare feet braced on the floor, he regarded Beatrix without expression. The locks of his hair were still damp, darkened to antique gold. How broad his shoulders were, their sturdy slopes flowing into the powerful lines of his arms. “Why are you here?” His voice sounded rusty from disuse. Somehow Beatrix managed to drag her mesmerized gaze away from the glinting fleece on his chest. “I came to return Albert,” she said. “He appeared at Ramsay House today. He says you’ve been neglecting him. And that you haven’t taken him on any walks lately.” “Has he? I had no idea he was so loose-tongued.

an instant, a simple swatch of light, then movement: the blond-haired executioner. She stood in a doorway just beyond the street corner, hiding, waiting, arms raised and weapon trained. The reflection in the car window saved Dewey from what would have been, in five feet or so, a warm bullet in the back of the head. Dewey stopped just before the corner, feet away from where the blond assassin lurked. He looked behind him, down the block he’d just run down, and saw a Laundromat. He dropped back and entered the Laundromat. He ran through the store, pushing his way past piles of laundry and women folding articles, to the back room, where a man sat, smoking a cigarette in front of a pile of papers. “Lo siento,” murmured Dewey as he charged through the office toward an alley entrance, gun in hand. The sirens became louder, multiple vehicles joining in the distance. Out the door and across the alley and through a dented steel door. Inside, stacks of bread loaves, other boxes of food, the smell of meat. He moved through the storage room and entered the back of a bodega. Colt .45 cocked in front of him, he passed a middle-aged woman who fainted as she saw the weapon in his hand. Catching the eye of the man at the cash register, Dewey held a finger to his lips. There, at the side of the entrance, her back to the store, stood the blond assassin. Suddenly another customer, an elderly woman, screamed as she saw Dewey with gun. The blonde turned abruptly, leveling what he now saw was an HK UMP compact machine gun with a six-inch suppressor on the end. A full auto hail of bullets crashed through the windows as she swept the weapon east-west. The elderly woman’s screams ended abruptly as a bullet ripped through her head and killed her. The assassin’s bullets shattered the storefront’s glass, but Dewey was already down and partially hidden by a chest freezer, which shielded him from the slugs. As soon as the blonde’s gun swept past him, Dewey had a clear sight. He fired twice, two quick shots into the assassin’s neck and chest, flinging her backward onto the brick sidewalk in a shower of blood and glass. Dewey ran

sounded calm when she answered the phone. Which meant that Jody had probably left. They had begun the day with the two women arguing about whose phone the government had legal and moral authority to tap. Pearl and her daughter could discuss such subjects until they were all talked out and Quinn had long since fled to wherever it might be legal and moral to smoke a cigar. “Still reeling from the Minnie Miner show?” Pearl asked him. “Not per se,” Quinn said. “That sounds like something Winston Castle would say. He must have gotten to you with his member-of-parliament persona.” “I suppose that’s why I’m calling,” Quinn said. “There’s something familiar about Winston Castle’s act. It reminds me of a magician’s patter, designed to get you looking at one hand while he’s doing something with the other. Just when everybody’s attention is distracted, Presto! Out of the hat pops the rabbit.” “Or the right card,” “Never play poker with them,” Quinn said. “Rabbits?” “People. Like the ones in Winston Castle’s whack-job family, or whatever it is. They have their patter.” “Meaning?” “Maybe somebody has a real Michelangelo up a sleeve.” “Magicians,” Pearl said, not quite understanding. “I’ve always kind of liked them.” “Their act wouldn’t work if you didn’t.” “I still like them.” “They cut people in half, you know.” “Only beautiful girls. And it doesn’t seem to hurt.” “I wouldn’t want to see you proved wrong.” “Where are you going with this,” Pearl asked with a sigh. Jody had apparently worn her down. “We are going to stake out the Far Castle’s Garden.” “I thought we were concentrating on D.O.A.” “Maybe we are,” Quinn said. “My guess is he’s not one of the many people who think Bellazza isn’t in the garden, just because an imitation has already been found there.” “Are we among the many, Quinn?” “On one hand, yes.” “But on the other?” “Presto!” 78 The searcher came by night, as Quinn had suspected he would, and hours after the restaurant had closed. Quinn was slouching low behind the steering wheel in the black Lincoln. He’d parked where he had a catty-corner view across the intersection and the Far Castle’s outdoor dining area. Beyond the stacked and locked tables and chairs loomed the shadowed topiary forms of the garden. Beginning several feet behind the flower beds was the larger garden, wilder and less arranged than the beds, with a variety of

She always had a big pot of oatmeal going on the stove and was happy to whip up a short stack of pancakes at the drop of a hat, but she pretty much made the rest of the plates to order. After the first week she had a good handle not only on what each man liked for his morning meal, but what he needed. Mr. Cupertino still loved the occasional inspired omelet and once she had made him Eggs Meurette, poached eggs in a red wine sauce, served with a chunk of crusty French bread, which was a big hit. She balanced him out other mornings with hot cereal, and fresh fruit with yogurt or cottage cheese. Johnny mostly went for bowls of cereal washed down with an ocean of cold milk, so Angelina kept a nice variety on hand, though nothing too sugary. The Don would happily eat a soft-boiled egg with buttered toast every day for the rest of his life, but she inevitably got him to eat a little bowl of oatmeal just before or after with his coffee. Big Phil was on the receiving end of her supersize, stick-to-your-ribs special- sometimes scrambled eggs, toast, potatoes, and bacon, other times maybe a pile of French toast and a slice of ham. Angelina decided to start loading up his plate on her own when she realized he was bashful about asking for seconds. On Sundays, she put on a big spread at ten o'clock, after they had all been to church, which variously included such items as smoked salmon and bagels, sausages, broiled tomatoes with a Parmesan crust, scrapple (the only day she'd serve it), bacon, fresh, hot biscuits and fruit muffins, or a homemade fruit strudel. She made omelets to order for Jerry and Mr. Cupertino. Then they'd all reconvene at five for the Sunday roast with all the trimmings.

I'd smoked from quite a young age and the first thing I noticed when I went into the studio was a stack of Marlborough Lights on the table.

Bathed in perspiration he worked like a bull, turning over with a shovel the chalk and the clay which was to become cement. This brute strength of his came not through his intelligence but from the profundities of his strong body; it did not explode within him but flowed out of him in great waves through the thunder of the earth, across the stones and the rails, from this enormous ant-like crowd who with shouting and moaning were rising from the depths with spades and hammers, emerged from smoke-stacks and the factory buildings , from the breaches quarried from the rocks, from the smoky depths up toward the obelisks supporting the power-cables.

Perhaps it’s the devil in me—or the witch, the whore, and the girl—or maybe I’m just lazy, but even talking about this holy work ethic makes me want to don the shortest short-shorts I can find and run through the stacks of the library, shrieking. from: The Excess of the Short-Short, SmokeLongQuarterly

I had dared criticize the one place, the one environment where my soft-brained superior really felt at home: the blazing glow of the pyres and the spiraling smoke of the crematorium stacks; the air heavy with the odor of burning bodies; the walls resounding with the screams of the damned and the metallic rattle of machine guns fired pointblank; it was to this that the demented doctor came for rest and relaxation after each selection, after each display of “fireworks.” This was where he spent all his free time; here, in this man-made hell, the fiendish physician of Auschwitz made me cut open the bodies of hundreds of freshly murdered people, whose flesh was also used for the cultivation of bacteria in an electric incubator. Obsessed with the belief that he had been chosen to discover the cause of multiple births, here, within these bloodstained walls, Dr. Mengele sat hunched for hours at a time over his microscopes.

Y'all know that little gal Kelly Crawford that works down at Tuckers?" Tuckers Jiffy Lube was the only gas station and mechanical shop in town. Jena Lynn's face contorted in disapproval. "You referring to that scantily clad girl who runs the register?" I asked as Jena Lynn hopped up to retrieve the coffeepot. "That's the one." Betsy curled up her lip in disgust. "That girl is barely legal!" I was outraged. "I know! I'm going to tell her granny. She'll take a hickory switch to the girl when she finds out what she's been up to. She was all over Darnell." Betsy wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She was right about that. Her granny wasn't the type to spare the rod; she parented old-school style. Jena Lynn's tone rose as she stirred raw sugar into her coffee. "You caught them?" "Well, I called him after what happened with poor Mr. Ledbetter---" We shook our heads. "---told him I was going to be late 'cause I was taking that extra shift. Guess he thought late meant real late 'cause when I got home, they we're rootin' around on my couch, the one my meemaw gave me last spring when she had her house redecorated." We sat in stunned silence. "I threw his junk out last night. And when he still didn't budge from the TV"---she paused for effect---"I set it all on fire, right there in the front yard." She leaned back and crossed her arms over her expansive chest. "That's harsh." Sam stacked his empty plates. "Maybe it wasn't Darnell's fault." Jena Lynn and I gave him a disapproving glare. He appeared oblivious to his offense, and the moron had the audacity to reach into the container for a cream cheese Danish. "Sam, if you value that scrawny hand of yours, I'd pull it out real slow or you'll be drawing back a nub," Betsy warned. "Sheesh!" Sam jerked backward. It was obvious he didn't doubt her for a second. He marched toward the kitchen and dropped the plates in the bus tub with a loud thud. "He should know better. You don't touch a gal's comfort food in a time of crisis," I said, and my sister nodded in agreement. Jena Lynn patted Betsy on the arm. "Ignore him, Bets. He's a man." I stood. "And if I may be so bold as to speak for all the women of the world who have been unfortunate enough to be in your shoes, we applaud you." A satisfied smile spread across Betsy's lips. "Thank you." She took a little bow. "That's why my eyes look like they do. Smoke got to me." She leaned in closer. "I threw all his high school football trophies into the blaze while he was hollering at me. The whole neighborhood came out to watch." I chuckled. The thought of Darnell Fryer running around watching all his belongings go up in smoke was hilarious. I wished I'd been there. "Did anyone try to step in and help Darnell?" "Hell nah. He owes his buddies so much money from borrowing to pay his gambling debts, the ones that came out brought their camping chairs and watched the show while tossing back a few cold ones." She got up from the counter to scoop a glass full of ice and filled it with Diet Coke from the fountain. "Y'all, I gotta lose this weight now I'm back on the market." Betsy was one of a kind.

a cloudy cocktail called Smoke, made by mixing water and fuel alcohol. Smoke joints were tucked into the back of paint stores, drugstores, and markets, among the dry goods and the stacked cans.

Towers of Death [10w] The sooty sky was sucked into the crematorium's smoke stack.

The Factory Whistle To understand the insolubility of global warming, you must bury a cities worth of cars by their noses, their exhaust pipes pointing to the sky like sentinels of smoke stacks expunging the sun.. An asthmatic whistle semaphores it's over, but the machine operators keep working, their value measured in productivity, too close to the shift to see the shift.

He nips at my lip with his teeth, and Jesus, Mary, and One Direction, that one little nibble is going to make me come apart at my seams. My panties are so hot they’re smoking. Like my pussy’s going to need a cigarette after this, and neither I, nor my pussy, have ever smoked a day in our lives.

In the distance, smoke plumes from brick kilns where men, women and children will spend their entire lives on their knees under the sun cooling, patting, stacking, packing red bricks that are sent across the country. They will never leave that burning land, always thousands of rupees short of freeing themselves from their debts to the kiln’s owner

A lot of us have done okay, but we don’t want to lose what we’ve got, see it given away.” When I ask him what he saw as being “given away,” it was not public waters given to dumpers, or clean air given to smoke stacks. It was not health or years of life. It was not lost public sector jobs. What he felt was being given away was tax money to non-working, non-deserving people—and not just tax money, but honor too. If that tax money could come back to citizens—as a sort of “raise” in the midst of a three-decade-long national economic lull, why not?

Danny D.’s big brothers, Gary and Sean, would light firecrackers and toss them at us. They’d let us come to their room and listen to the Doors and watch them smoke dope. One rainy afternoon, Sean, who was big with dull brown eyes, tied me to a utility pole out back of the barn and stacked twigs at my feet. He covered them with gas from the lawn mower and tried to light me up. But the gas was mixed with oil, and his matches were damp from his pocket, and when he ran back into the house for more I wrenched my wrists from the rope and ran for home.

After a swift parting embrace, he turns and leaves me standing there with my belongings. I watch him retreat across the Lawn, his pipe smoke curling into the air above his tall umber hat. His tobacco smoke lingers in my nose- the odor of thick leather ledgers, counting-room coins, and candles burnt down to nubs during late-night transactions. The smell of a world in which men worship stacks of money more than their own families and feed the imaginations of their youth to the jaws of the fires burning in their grates.

Informing smokers of the risks had only a mild impact on smoking rates. Even after the Surgeon General’s landmark 1964 report of the dangers, U.S. tobacco sales continued to climb until 1980. In taming habits, knowledge is just not a powerful lever. Willpower also isn’t much help—not when stacked up against nicotine. The Centers for Disease Control report that 68 percent of smokers say they want to quit completely. However, each individual attempt usually fails. Only about one in ten actually stop smoking for good. Most end up relapsing, typically within a week. The conflict between habit (smoke here) and conscious awareness (it’s now illegal) should decrease over time. As people repeatedly comply with a prohibition, their habits become linked to new places, ones where they now repeatedly smoke. Thus, in Lewin’s famous equation, behavior is a function of the person and the context/environment.

Jane Grigson joined the Observer magazine in the summer of 1968. Her first column was about strawberries. She wrote a recipe for strawberry barquettes-- small pastry boats filled with fruit and lacquered with redcurrant jam so that they looked like jewels. There was another for strawberry brulée in a sweet sablé shell, and coeur à la crème-- a cream pudding set in a heart-shaped mould and encircled with fruit. 'In Venice, in the season of Alpine strawberries...' she wrote, and it didn't really matter what she said next, because you were already in. In most recipes, the introduction serves the recipes. Jane's was the other way around. She wrote about the hybridized origins of modern strawberries in French market gardens, and how they feature in the mythology of the fertility goddess Frigg. After a few lines on the demanding anatomy of strawberry plants, she devoured into Jane Austen, talking about the agro-cosplay fruit-picking of the Regency ball-gown set. She refused to be complacent, especially about the things her readers already thought they knew. 'Strawberries, sugar and cream. The combination allows no improvement, you think?' Well, you're wrong. None of this would've counted for much if the recipes weren't great, but they really were. One week she'd give you smart alternatives to traditional Christmas cake-- rounds of meringue stacked with coffee cream, or Grasmere shortcake with preserved ginger. Another week it'd be the unimpeachable precision of carrot salad, celery soup or a recipe for ice cream flavored with cooked, puréed apples. The cooking was pantheistic and it dealt with everything from kippers to apples, parsley, prunes and fennel with the same care, even love. We get smug these days about how broad our tastes are, and to an extent we're right. But a newspaper now would never run a double-page spread of recipes for tripe. The magic of Jane Grigson is that though she was a smart cook, she was really a skilled purveyor of daydreams-- even if those daydreams were granular and exactingly researched. 'I sometimes think that the charm of a country's cookery lies not so much in its classic dishes as in its quirks and fancies,' she wrote. This included the esoterica of regional pies and rare apple cultivars. Something could be worthwhile without being useful. 'Walk into the yard of Château Mouton Rothschild,' began Jane's recipe for jellied rabbit, 'and you see a scatter of small fires. Some flare into the sky, others smoke as they are fed faggots of vine prunings.' Noisettes de porc aux pruneaux de Tours, crépinettes with chestnuts, carottes à la Vichy, angel's hair charlotte. She drew from the culinary canon as far back as Gervase Markham's seventeenth-century The English Huswife.