Spit Or Swallow Quotes

What you read will taste so bad at times, you’ll want to spit it out, but you’ll swallow these words and they will become part of you, part of your gut, and you will hurt because of them.

Peeta opens his mouth for the first bite without hesitation. He swallows, then frowns slightly. "They're very sweet." "Yes they're sugar berries. My mother makes jam from them. Haven't you've ever had them before?" I say, poking the next spoonful in his mouth. "No," he says, almost puzzled. "But they taste familiar. Sugar berries?" "Well, you can't get them in the market much, they only grow wild," I say. Another mouthful goes down. Just one more to go. "They're sweet as syrup," he says, taking the last spoonful. "Syrup." His eyes widen as he realizes the truth. I clamp my hand over his mouth and nose hard, forcing him to swallow instead of spit. He tries to make himself vomit the stuff up, but it's too late, he's already losing consciousness. Even as he fades away, I can see in his eyes what I've done is unforgiveable. I sit back on my heels and look at him with a mixture of sadness and satisfaction. A stray berry stains his chin and I wipe it away. "Who can't lie, Peeta?" I say, even though he can't hear me.

My uncle ordered popovers from the restaurant's bill of fare. And, when they were served, he regarded them with a penetrating stare. Then he spoke great words of wisdom as he sat there on that chair: "To eat these things," said my uncle, "You must exercise great care. You may swallow down what's solid, but you must spit out the air!" And as you partake of the world's bill of fare, that's darned good advice to follow. Do a lot of spitting out the hot air. And be careful what you swallow.

We're shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls right out of my mouth. You swallow my heart and flee, but I want it back now, baby. I want it back.

Good grief. Did my mother leave me any secrets? My favorite wine. Food. the key to my house. What's left?" - "Well, we still don't know if you spit or swallow.

Teccam explains there are two types of secrets. There are secrets of the mouth and secrets of the heart. Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. There secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you’re barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free. Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become. Teccam claims it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart. Any fool will spit out poison, he says, but we hoard these painful treasures. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. They they sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them.

Time for Wine Tasting 101. “So here’s how this works. When tasting a wine, as opposed to casual drinking, there are four basic steps you need to remember: sight, smell, taste, then spit or swallow.” Nick paused at that last part and cocked his head. “And your personal preference on the latter would be…?” “Only lightweights spit.” His right eye twitched.

Here is to the men we've had. Some were good, some were bad. Some will run, some will follow. But it is up to us if we spit or swallow

Or not,” I said as I ground my teeth. “I like to masticate by myself.” “And you’re so good at it,” Gary said. “The up and down motions of your… jaw. And then, upon completion, you swallow. Right, Sam? You swallow, don’t you?” “Of course I do,” I said, confused. What the hell were we talking about now? “I always swallow when I finish. What am I supposed to do? Spit it back out?

She shuddered. “What is it with slobbery kissers? Are they trying to drown us in spit? I mean, Jesus, swallow every now and then.

I took a pull of the whiskey before setting the bottle on my desk, but I didn’t swallow. I leaned into Emmy, my hand on her throat still keeping her pinned to my office door, and spit the whiskey in her mouth.

Don’t spit, swallow: there is protein and other good stuff in male semen; it’s an acquired taste and, once acquired, totally addictive.

Hard as nails Stacy Killian was one like one of those Tootsie Roll Pops - hard shell, soft, chewy center. Once a guy knew the center could be chewed, that's what they did. Chewed you up and spit you out. Or swallowed you, bite by bite. Goodbye respect. Goodbye self-esteem.

At first it's bliss. It's drunken, heady, intoxicating. It swallows the people we were - not particuarly wonderful people, but people who did our best, more or less - and spits out the monsters we are becoming. Our friends despise us. We are an epic. Everything is grand, crashing, brilliant, blinding. It's the Golden Age of Hollywood, and we are a legend in our own minds, and no one outside can fail to see that we are headed for hell, and we won't listen, we say they don't understand, we pour more wine, go to the parties, we sparkle, fly all over the country, we're on an adventure, unstoppable, we've found each other and we race through our days like Mr. Toad in his yellow motorcar, with no idea where the brakes are and to hell with it anyway, we are on fire, drunk with something we call love.

Jess couldn't stop spitting out words, because they were words like blades to hurt, and if she swallowed them, she'd be scraped hollow.

Swallow future Spit out hope Burn your face Upon the chrome

I could taste the blood in my mouth, from where I had bitten into my tongue, and I either had to spit or swallow. I swallowed. No comments, please.

I had bitten into my tongue, and I either had to spit or swallow. I swallowed. No comments, please.

Did you just spit something?” he asked, sounding curious and amused … “Never would have pegged you as a spitter, Vivian.” Eyes suddenly wide, I sat straight up, almost levitating from the bed, then rallied. “Only when it’s something not worth swallowing.” Hello line, I believe I just crossed over you. I distinctly heard Clark choke on a sip of what I assumed was his Scotch.

Well, all of us country club ex-wives need a lot of money,” she said. “Sex with the stable boys at the club isn’t cheap you know.” I almost choked. “Mom! You made me spit my beer.” My dearest mother hummed into the phone. “Maybe you wouldn’t be single, darling, if you learned to swallow properly.

If Nana thinks you're trying to scam her, she'll tell you, and if she thinks you ruined her life by discontinuing Arnold's Thin bread, she'll let you know that, too. I guess when you spend eighty-seven years swallowing other people's bullshit, there comes a time when you gotta spit some back.

When you are fed with the spoon of betrayal, you can choose to spit it out and live or swallow it and die

It was as if his whole life had suddenly lodged in his throat, a raw bite he could neither spit out nor swallow.

… I agree with two things: the steppe is wide—even though I’ve never been there, and the mountains, fuck, yes, the mountains are a thing for themselves. They eat you up, swallow you whole, digest and churn around until their loneliness spits you back out again and you think that nothing else matters. Just them, and that tiny handful of life that’s your own. Fucking insignificant. Nothing, no one, barely remembered, except perhaps for a moment of recognition in a goddamned teahouse.” He shut up, suddenly, had said too much. Vadim flashed a smile. “You’re my favourite enemy, too. Fucking messy Brit.

I had loved him since the moment he’d taken the pudding from me. When my father had announced on Dez’s eighteenth birthday that he supported a match between us, I’d never been happier than I was in that moment. I was young. And stupid. When Dez had disappeared the very next day, I experienced a heartache that I thought would swallow me whole and never spit me out. He’d been more than a crush. He had been my best friend, my confidant and my world.

I've just assumed there were certain directions my life was going to take. The safe kind. The kind everyone else was taking, and I plowed through with a vengeance. It hasn't been easy, but it hasn't been brave either. The idea of actually straying from it is either thrilling or terrifying, the two feelings swallowing each other and spitting each other back out before I can settle on one.

I lapped the blood off my knuckles. The dried flakes dissolved in my mouth, turning my spit to syrup. Even after I’d swallowed all the blood, I kept licking my hands. I tore at the skin with my teeth. I wanted more. I would always want more.

I felt expendable, throw-away, swallowed by a big biological project that I didn't initiate or choose, that produced me but would also chew me up and spit me out. I felt used.

watching fireworks backward: tinsel swallowed into the night sky instead of spitting out from it.

Trying to get today’s Republican to accept basic facts is like trying to get your dog to take a pill. You have to feed them the truth wrapped in a piece of boloney, hold their snout shut, and stroke their throats. And even then, just when you think they’ve swallowed it, the spit it out on the linoleum. If conservatives get to call universal healthcare ‘socialized medicine’ then I get to call private for-profit healthcare ‘soulless, vampire bastards making money off human pain’.

I watched Daryl swirl, sniff, sip, swish, chew, swallow, and sometimes spit his way through countless glasses of Bordeaux and all I could think was that someone who spent so much time and care on all the oral and olfactory acrobatics involved in wine tasting should really be more adept at oral sex

Having someone do certain things for you is like getting someone to chew your food for you. It might be easier to swallow but it loses all its flavor and it will be covered in spit. And you want the flavor!

I think it can be dangerous to spend too long watching the lives of others; you might run out of time to live your own. Technology is devolving the human race. Eating up our emotional intelligence, spitting out any remnants of privacy it can’t quite swallow. The world will keep on spinning and the stars will always shine, regardless of whether anyone is looking.

The Midgard Serpent opened its mouth and swallowed the ox head. The hook dug into the gums of its mouth, and when the serpent felt this, he snapped back so hard that both of Thor’s fists slammed against the gunwale. Thor now became angry and, taking on his divine strength, he strained so hard that both his feet pushed through the bottom of the boat. Using the sea floor to brace himself, he began pulling the serpent up on board. It can be said that no one has seen a more terrifying sight than this: Thor, narrowing his eyes at the serpent, while the serpent spits out poison and stares straight back from below. It is told that the giant Hymir changed colour. He grew pale and feared for his life when he saw the serpent and also the sea rushing in and out of the boat.

You said that if the truth hurts, deception feels good. For a brief moment in my youth I touched the truth of what you said. You said the spiritual leaders had once endeavored to suck the poison from the snakebites of the soul and spit it out. But a new era began when the spiritual ones swallowed the poison instead and became deceived.

I wished I had been there when the bombs fell, to have opened my mouth and swallowed their ordinance. Then spit it all back at them.

It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved too inassimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.

Miles swallowed icy spit. Those who do not know their history, his thought careened, are doomed to keep stepping in it. Alas, so were those who did, it seemed.

He released her arm and crossed his own over his chest. "I'm trying not to jump to conclusions. Spit it out." "I'm more of a swallowing kind of a girl." Holy hell.

I had chewed a big steak two hours before, swallowing the juice and spitting out the meat, and I could smell animal blood in my sweat.

I hated feeling like so much in my life come down to Dacia. She was like a hair stuck in my mouth, always had been. I couldn’t swallow her down, couldn’t spit her out.

She swallows knives, then gets angry when you make her spit them out and don’t name her magic.

I was born with a scream inside me lodged between my heart and throat. Can’t swallow it; can’t choke it down. Can’t spit that motherfucker out. It’s stuck like me...

Either spit it out or swallow it don't chew on it all night

I took in another mouthful of iron-tasting water and was so dazed I had to remind myself to spit it out, not swallow it.

He pulled the gun from his waist, running it along my cheek and back down to my lips. I blinked back the tears at sick game. He finally stopped the gun at my temple, my pulse fighting against the pressure of the cold metal of the gun. “Do you think you are a good person, Kendall?” “No, not at all,” I said, swallowing down the misery of my honest answer. “Really?” he asked, one eyebrow lifting in confusion. “Are you afraid to die?” I wished I could spit in his face for making everything so hard. I wished he would just pull the trigger and end it already. But a small part of me was begging and pleading internally that he wouldn’t shoot me. “No, I’m not afraid to die,” I admitted, I closed my eyes and the tears fell quickly. “I’m not afraid of much in life. I’ve seen too much to be scared.” He let out a sigh. I opened my eyes. He pulled the gun away from me. “Well, damn. How the hell am I supposed to kill someone so miserable?” I looked away. Even in death I was pitiful.

Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. These secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you're barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free. Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become. Teccam claims it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart. Any fool will spit out poison, he says, but we hoard these painful treasures. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. There they sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them.

In the meantime, a massive and frightening bleakness inside me kept expanding and rattling. Sometimes I wrote about it in my diary, sensing that if I didn’t somehow fill the hollowness, it would swallow my heart and spit out my core. Other times I wished for the emptiness to scrape me off, a permanent erasure. I was terrified that I was supposed to be living and I wasn’t, that I must have some prospect and I didn’t.

Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the world is intelligible. The stones are wet and mossy and in the crevices are black toads. A big door bars the entrance to the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung. The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but there is an enameled sign on it, in perfect condition, which says: “Be sure to close the door.” Why close the door? I can’t make it out. I look again at the sign but it is removed; in it’s place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstead and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absent mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to the huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography. I lean out the window and the Eiffle Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The sewers are gurgling furiously. There are nothing but roofs everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning.

I turned to look at my quiet, bookish mother, a woman I had honestly never seen swat a fly. “I’m sorry, but there is no way you grew up here. It’s not even possible.” There was a whirring sound, and I felt something pass by my face. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mom’s hand go up, and suddenly she was holding the hilt of a knife-a knife that had apparently just been hurled at her head. The whole thing had happened in less than a second. I swallowed. “Never mind.” Mom didn’t say anything, but kept her gaze focused on Aislinn, who, I noticed, still had one hand slightly raised. She was smiling. “Grace was always the quickest of all of us,” she said, and I realized she was talking to me. Smiling at me. “Okay,” I finally said. “Well, I didn’t get that from her, in case you’re wondering. I can’t even catch a football.” Aislinn chuckled, even as Finley’s scowl deepened. “So you’re the demon spawn,” Finley spit out. “Finn!” Aislinn snapped. Huh. So at least one of the Brannicks hated me. Weirdly, that made me feel better. That was normal. And if there was one thing I knew how to deal with, it was Mean Girls. “I actually go by Sophie.

Like all animal species (including humans), plants must spread their offspring to areas where they can thrive and pass on their parents’ genes. Young animals disperse by walking or flying, but plants don’t have that option, so they must somehow hitchhike. While some plant species have seeds adapted for being carried by the wind or for floating on water, many others trick an animal into carrying their seeds, by wrapping the seed in a tasty fruit and advertising the fruit’s ripeness by its color or smell. The hungry animal plucks and swallows the fruit, walks or flies off, and then spits out or defecates the seed somewhere far from its parent tree. Seeds can in this manner be carried for thousands of miles. It may come as a surprise to learn that plant seeds can resist digestion by your gut and nonetheless germinate out of your feces. But any adventurous readers who are not too squeamish can make the test and prove it for themselves. The seeds of many wild plant species actually must pass through an animal’s gut before they can germinate. For instance, one African melon species is so well adapted to being eaten by a hyena-like animal called the aardvark that most melons of that species grow on the latrine sites of aardvarks.

The faces around me were flushed from the wine. When jaw muscles relax, the atmosphere becomes relaxed as well. People’s mouths fell open like trash bags, and garbage spilled out. I had to chew the garbage, swallow it, and spit it back out in different words. Some of the words stank of nicotine. Some smelled like hair tonic. The conversation became animated. Everyone began to talk, using my mouth. Their words bolted into my stomach and then back out again, footsteps resounding up to my brain.

He lay in bed open-eyed in the dark. There were intestinal moans from his left side, where gas makes a hairpin turn at the splenic flexure. He felt a mass of phlegm wobbling in his throat but he didn’t want to get out of bed to expel it, so he swallowed the whole nasty business, a slick syrupy glop. This was the texture of his life. If someone ever writes his true biography, it will be a chronicle of gas pains and skipped heartbeats, grinding teeth and dizzy spells and smothered breath, with detailed descriptions of Bill leaving his desk to walk to the bathroom and spit up mucus, and we see photographs of ellipsoid clots of cells, water, organic slimes, mineral salts and spotty nicotine. Or descriptions just as long and detailed of Bill staying where he is and swallowing.

SUMMER FRUIT I spent springs and summers as a child eating the fruit from a watermelon. Grainy sugar bites and juice slick up my cheeks like a Chelsea smile. My mother used to warn me if I swallowed a seed it would get stuck in my belly and grow a watermelon plant. My stomach would expand till I’d combust. I always spit them out in horror. I spent a spring and summer eating the fruit from the flesh of your lips. The bounty of two round mounds, hard like pink sugar. Your grip on my cheeks with a firm hand holding my mouth open.

The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.

He lifted his pint and took a long gulp and I watched his face grimace a little as he tried to swallow. His eyes closed briefly as he fought the urge to spit it back up. 'Christ, that tastes good,' he said with all the credibility of a Parisian complimenting a meal in Central London. 'I needed that.

I caught her one day eating a bee. When she realized I was watching, she spit it out, saying the bee had flown into her mouth. But I knew that she ate bees. She would choose the ones that had drunk the most wisteria juice and keep them alive in her mouth for a moment, let them play a little before swallowing.

For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved to in assimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.

For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved too inassimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.

They’re sweet as syrup,” he says, taking the last spoonful. “Syrup.” His eyes widen as he realizes the truth. I clamp my hand over his mouth and nose hard, forcing him to swallow instead of spit. He tries to make himself vomit the stuff up, but it’s too late, he’s already losing consciousness. Even as he fades away, I can see in his eyes what I’ve done is unforgivable.

The biggest thing the white man takes from us ain’t our bodies. He takes our voices, too. He swallows up our yes’s and no’s like biscuits. But one day our yes’s and no’s will be so loud and strong they will lodge in his throat. He will have to spit them out to keep from choking. He will starve. There won’t be nothing left of him except the shadows he casts on the deadest night.

She needs to think you're still a couple. And you'll need to be convincing about it, too. Lots of kissing and stuff in case your mother tries to spy on you." Emma stops chewing. Galen drops his fork. "Uh, I don't think we need to take it that far-" Emma starts. "Oh, no? Teenagers don't kiss their sweethearts anymore?" Rachel crosses her arms, wagging the spatula to the beat of her tapping foot. "They do, but-" "No buts. Come on, sweetie. You think your mom's going to believe you keep your hands off Galen?" "Probably not, but-" "I said no buts. Look at you two. You're not even sitting next to each other! You need some practice, I'd say. Galen, go sit beside her. Hold her hand." "Rachel," he says, shaking his head, "this can wait-" "Fine," Emma grinds out. They both turn to her. Still frowning, she nods. "We'll make it a point to kiss and hold hands when she's around." Galen almost drops his fork again. No way. Kissing Emma is the last thing I need to do. Especially when her lips turn that red. "Emma, we don't have to kiss. She already knows I want to sleep with you." He cringes as soon as he says it. He doesn't have to look up to know the sizzling sound in the kitchen is from Rachel spitting her pineapple juice into the hot skillet. "What I mean is, I already told her I want to sleep with you. I mean, I told her I wanted to sleep with you because she already thinks I do. Want to, I mean-" If a Syrena could drown, this is what it would feel like. Emma holds up her hand. "I get it, Galen. It's fine. I told her the same thing." Rachel plops down beside Emma, wiping the juice spittle from her face with a napkin. "So you're telling me your mom thinks you two want to sleep with each other, but you don't think she'll be expecting you to kiss." Emma shakes her head and shovels a forkful of omelet into her mouth, then chases it with some juice. She says, "You're right, Rachel. We'll let her catch us making out or something." Rachel nods. "That should work." "What does that mean? Making out?" Galen says between bites. Emma puts her fork down. "It means, Galen, that you'll need to force yourself to kiss me. Like you mean it. For a long time. Think you can do that? Do Syrena kiss?" He tries to swallow the bite he forgot to chew. Force myself? I'll be lucky if I can stop myself. It had never occurred to him to kiss anyone-before he met Emma. These days, it's all he can think about, her lips on his. He decides it was better for both of them when Emma kept rejecting him. Now she's ordering him to kiss her-for a long time. Great. "Yes, they kiss. I mean, we kiss. I mean, I can force myself, if I have to." He doesn't meet Rachel's eyes as she plunks more fish onto his plate, but he can almost feel her smirking down at him. "We'll just have to plan it, that's all. Give you time to prepare," Emma tells him. "Prepare for what?" Rachel scoffs. "Kissing isn't supposed to be planned. That's why it's so fun." "Yeah, but this isn't for fun, remember?" Emma says. "This is just for show." "You don't think kissing Galen would be fun?" Emma sighs, putting her hands on her cheeks. "You know, I appreciate that you're trying to help us, Rachel. But I can't talk about this anymore. Seriously, I'm going to break out into hives. We'll make it work when the time comes." Rachel laughs and removes Emma's plate after she declines a second helping. "If you say so. But I still think you should practice.

For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or it you proved too inassimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum. I’d left here of my own will, and yet it seemed the city had banished in much the same way I’d banished it. Seeing it now after so long, seeing the marsh grass pitching wildly around the edges of the city, the rooftops hunkered together with their ship watches and widow walks, and behind them, the steeples of St Philip’s and St Michael’s lifted like dark fingers, I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.

I've learned to accept that it's not my fault when bad things happen to me or to the people I love. It's just the way life is. It's not fair. If you're one of the unlucky ones, then fight. Be stronger. Be stronger because you have no choice. Be stronger than you are right now because if you're not, life will swallow you up and spit you right out. And then you'll die with a broken heart.

He couldn't have eaten that horrid soup!" "He did,and he even pretended to like it." "Pretended?" "No one could have liked that meal." She wrinkled her nose. "Mary was mortified." "Mary can be mortified all she wishes; we can't have MacLean da-" Sophia slipped the spoon into his mouth and dumped the contents. Red choked, his face contorting, and he looked around wildly. "Do not spit that out." He glared at her, and after what appeared and sounded like a heroic effort, he swallowed the laudanum. "Blech! There! I hope ye're happy!" He grabbed up a hand cloth and began rubbing his tongue vigorously. She calmly replaced the spoon and recorked the bottle. "As I was saying, MacLean swore that he liked every dish at dinner, even the turnips. They were so hard it almost broke my knife to cut one." "Hm.That's very odd,it is.

Margot shrugged nonchalantly and took a sip of her water. Quinn took a sip of his water, still looking at her over the end of the bottle. She was holding a Nook in her lap, and he looked down at what she was reading. As he started reading a paragraph, he almost choked on his water, slapping a hand over his mouth before he spit it all over the place. Margot looked at him, startled. “Are you alright?” she asked, concerned. Quinn nodded. “Fine,” he wheezed. “What the hell are you reading?” Margot grinned. “It is a romance novel,” she said, completely unashamed. “A romance novel has graphic sex in it?” he asked, bewildered. Margot laughed. “Some of them do.” She shrugged. He frowned. “Why are you reading that?” “It is a good book.” She grinned and wagged her eyebrows at him. Quinn’s lips twitched. Dammit. He didn’t want to laugh, but she was seriously cute when she wagged her eyebrows at him. “Would you like me to read some to you?” she asked in a low sultry voice, while giving him a suggestive little wink. Quinn swallowed hard. “No. That’s okay,” he croaked. If she read that book to him in her sexy French accent, he would be sporting a tent, and he doubted the rest of the people on the plane would appreciate that. “No? The woman in it is very sexy,” Margot purred, giving him a naughty smirk. Quinn narrowed his eyes at her. Was she trying to get him worked up? Well, two could play that game. He leaned in closer to her so that his lips brushed the shell of her ear when he spoke. “Unless you want to take care of the hard-on that I will soon be sporting, I suggest you stop talking about your naughty little book,” he whispered huskily.

Say you're bored. Or you can't sleep. Maybe your mom is yelling at you, or the boy/ girl you like doesn't like you back in the same way, or you're too fat to even consider going to prom. Or the closet person to you since you were babies in the cradle together has killed herself. The usual stuff. Dread not. Don't be depressed. Be a junkie! You can't count on people to nurture you through the trauma that is existence. But you already knew that. Start by drawing the shades in your bedroom. Welcome the darkness. Lift the pill from your nightstand, clutch the water glass in your hand. Offer your divine thanks in advance. Be greedy-swallow the pill whole rather than spit it in half to spread the wealth for a later date. Dilution is wasteful. Savor the wholesome wholeness. Now lay down in bed. Close your eyes. Wait. Just a little longer.

The plane banked, and he pressed his face against the cold window. The ocean tilted up to meet him, its dark surface studded with points of light that looked like constellations, fallen stars. The tourist sitting next to him asked him what they were. Nathan explained that the bright lights marked the boundaries of the ocean cemeteries. The lights that were fainter were memory buoys. They were the equivalent of tombstones on land: they marked the actual graves. While he was talking he noticed scratch-marks on the water, hundreds of white gashes, and suddenly the captain's voice, crackling over the intercom, interrupted him. The ships they could see on the right side of the aircraft were returning from a rehearsal for the service of remembrance that was held on the ocean every year. Towards the end of the week, in case they hadn't realised, a unique festival was due to take place in Moon Beach. It was known as the Day of the Dead... ...When he was young, it had been one of the days he most looked forward to. Yvonne would come and stay, and she'd always bring a fish with her, a huge fish freshly caught on the ocean, and she'd gut it on the kitchen table. Fish should be eaten, she'd said, because fish were the guardians of the soul, and she was so powerful in her belief that nobody dared to disagree. He remembered how the fish lay gaping on its bed of newspaper, the flesh dark-red and subtly ribbed where it was split in half, and Yvonne with her sleeves rolled back and her wrists dipped in blood that smelt of tin. It was a day that abounded in peculiar traditions. Pass any candy store in the city and there'd be marzipan skulls and sugar fish and little white chocolate bones for 5 cents each. Pass any bakery and you'd see cakes slathered in blue icing, cakes sprinkled with sea-salt.If you made a Day of the Dead cake at home you always hid a coin in it, and the person who found it was supposed to live forever. Once, when she was four, Georgia had swallowed the coin and almost choked. It was still one of her favourite stories about herself. In the afternoon, there'd be costume parties. You dressed up as Lazarus or Frankenstein, or you went as one of your dead relations. Or, if you couldn't think of anything else, you just wore something blue because that was the colour you went when you were buried at the bottom of the ocean. And everywhere there were bowls of candy and slices of special home-made Day of the Dead cake. Nobody's mother ever got it right. You always had to spit it out and shove it down the back of some chair. Later, when it grew dark, a fleet of ships would set sail for the ocean cemeteries, and the remembrance service would be held. Lying awake in his room, he'd imagine the boats rocking the the priest's voice pushed and pulled by the wind. And then, later still, after the boats had gone, the dead would rise from the ocean bed and walk on the water. They gathered the flowers that had been left as offerings, they blew the floating candles out. Smoke that smelt of churches poured from the wicks, drifted over the slowly heaving ocean, hid their feet. It was a night of strange occurrences. It was the night that everyone was Jesus... ...Thousands drove in for the celebrations. All Friday night the streets would be packed with people dressed head to toe in blue. Sometimes they painted their hands and faces too. Sometimes they dyed their hair. That was what you did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then, sooner or later, you turned blue forever.

From down here, it was obvious what had happened to Nettle. A huge cluster of pitcher plants was gathered right below the hill, gaping maws ready to swallow any animal that tumbled down it. Each one looked like a long green sack, tipped with stripes of dark pink around the open mouth at the top. Sundew had a collection of much smaller pitcher plants growing outside her nest to catch flies before they buzzed in and bothered her. She really didn’t like this big kind, though; it was super creepy to look at a giant pitcher plant and wonder whether there might be a dragon corpse decomposing inside it. Or, in this case, a dragon that was still very much alive and spitting mad. “GET ME OUT! GET ME OUT OF THIS THING!” Nettle shrieked. One of the plants wobbled as she slammed herself into the side. “Whoa,” Cricket said, landing beside Sundew. “She’s … in there? Why doesn’t she just fly out?” “Meeebomorp,” Bumblebee added, wide-eyed.

Here, do me a favour. To sharpen your understanding, try this: well all the spit inside your mouth—now swallow. Now do it again. Now, again—don’t waste time, just swallow whatever saliva is in there. Four, five times is kind of annoying, but regulate that to a hundred—a thousand? For days on end—weeks, months? Now can you see exactly what I mean when I say the body doesn’t need much to simultaneously turn itself into your oppressor— into the site of your oppression?

THE THEOPHANY, TECCAM writes of secrets, calling them painful treasures of the mind. He explains that what most people think of as secrets are really nothing of the sort. Mysteries, for example, are not secrets. Neither are little-known facts or forgotten truths. A secret, Teccam explains, is true knowledge actively concealed. Philosophers have quibbled over his definition for centuries. They point out the logical problems with it, the loopholes, the exceptions. But in all this time none of them has managed to come up with a better definition. That, perhaps, tells us more than all the quibbling combined. In a later chapter, less argued over and less well-known, Teccam explains that there are two types of secrets. There are secrets of the mouth and secrets of the heart. Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. These secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you’re barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free. Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become. Teccam claims it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart. Any fool will spit out poison, he says, but we hoard these painful treasures. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. There they sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them. Modern philosophers scorn Teccam, but they are vultures picking at the bones of a giant. Quibble all you like, Teccam understood the shape of the world.

Josh and Rashmi are making out-I can actually see tongue-so I turn to my bread and grapes.How biblical of me. The grapes are smaller than I'm used to, and the skin is slightly textured. Is that dirt? I dip my napkin in water and dab at the tiny purple globes. It helps, but they're still sort of rough. Hmm. St. Clair and Meredith stop talking. I glance up to find them staring at me in matching bemusement. "What?" "Nothing," he says. "Continue your grape bath." "They were dirty." "Have you tried one?" she asks. "No,they've still got these little mud flecks." I hold one up to show them. St. Clair plucks it from my fingers and pops it into his mouth.I'm hypnotized by his lips, his throat, as he swallows. I hesitate. Would I rather have clean food or his good opinion? He picks up another and smiles. "Open up." I open up. The grape brushes my lower lip as he slides it in. It explodes in my mouth, and I'm so startled by the juice that I nearly spit it out. The flavor is intense, more like grape candy than actual fruit. To say I've tasted nothing like it before is an understatement. Meredith and St. Clair laugh. "Wait until you try them as wine," she says. St. Clair twirls a forkful of pasta. "So. How was French class?" The abrupt subject change makes me shudder. "Professeur Gillet is scary. She's all frown lines." I tear off a piece of baguette. The crust crackles, and the inside is light and springy. Oh,man. I shove another hunk into my mouth.

Freaky kids like us can’t ever be normal- Tyler says smugly- Our generation is some new kind of “evolutionary development”, my shrink says- “Normal” is just “average”, not cool. My latest diagnosis is “A.P.M”, Acute Premature Melancholia”, usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senoir has had it all his life, too. You look if you might be A.P.M, too, Sky: that kind of pissed-off mopey look in your face like you swallowed something really gross and can’t spit it out.

The old man with the white beard had gone quite mad. He ripped his robes from his body and ran naked through the forest glade. He was babbling and shouting at the sky. His words were nothing but meaningless sounds — guttural grunts and lunatic ravings. His eyes were wild and his white beard and white hair were tangled with twigs and leaves. He foamed and spit and waved his oaken staff around like a club. He tried to grab squirrels and eat them raw. He rolled around in the dirt and swallowed small stones.

I’m trying to think…are you the florist?” Malcolm’s voice was slightly off, as if it were coming from someplace other than his own throat. ... She took a sip from her own drink. “Nope. I like flowers as much as the next woman, but I can’t tell a dahlia from a daisy.” “Or a lupine from a lobelia?” Hugh Parteger said. “Or a carnation from a chrysanthemum.” “You’re obviously not into floral sects,” he said. She almost spit out a mouthful of kir royale laughing. ... “Mr. Parteger, I don’t discuss what I do in my garden bed with anyone.” “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “For most women, it’s just a matter of finding the right tool.” She took another drink, enjoying herself immensely. ... “Yes, but it’s such a tedious process, finding one that fits and works really well. Better just stick to hand weeding. Fewer complications that way.” “Ah, so you’re a master gardener.” She actually giggled. How mortifying. She took a long swallow from her drink. “As Voltaire said, we must cultivate our garden.” “I believe he also said, ‘Once, a philosopher, twice, a pervert.

After the initial moments of bliss, the gravity of what I was doing began to spread over me in a feverish heat. I ran to the bathroom and spit the glob of food into the toilet, my eyes filling with tears. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Gladys had given me pamphlets on every eventuality: Dieting After the Death of a Loved One and The Dangers of Carnivals, Circuses, and Fairs. I had piles of these pamphlets, but they hadn’t been powerful enough to restrain me against the siren song of pasta and melted cheese. In the face of that, I decided I’d done well. I hadn’t even swallowed.

SOOOOOOOO… THESE ARE DISAPPOINTING.” Keefe took a second bite from a round Digestive biscuit and crinkled his nose. “Are they supposed to suck up all the spit in your mouth and turn it into a paste? Is that, like, something humans find delicious?” “Maybe you’re supposed to dunk them in milk?” Sophie suggested, trying not to spray crumbs as she struggled to swallow the bite she’d taken. They really did win the prize for Driest. Cookies. Ever. “Actually, I think you’re supposed to eat them with tea.” “You think?” Keefe asked, shaking his head and stuffing the rest of the Digestive into his mouth. “You’re failing me with your human knowledge, Foster.” “For the thousandth time, I grew up in the U.S., not the U.K.!” she reminded him. “We had Chips Ahoy! and Oreos and E.L. Fudges!” “Hm. Those do sound more fun than a Digestive,” Keefe conceded. “I’m sure you’d especially enjoy the E.L. Fudges,” Sophie told him. “They’re shaped like tiny elves.” Keefe dropped the package of Jaffa Cakes he’d been in the process of opening and scanned the beach in front of them. “Okay, where’s the nearest cliff? You need to teleport me somewhere to get some of those immediately.

Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become. Teccam claims it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart. Any fool will spit out poison, he says, but we hoard these painful treasures. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. There they sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them.

It wasn't tuna ventresca that drew diners to this community over others, nor was it heritage beef. It was the final bottle of a 1985 Cannonau, salt-crusted from its time on the Sardinian coast. Each diner had barely a swallow. My employer bid us not to swallow, not yet, but hold the wine at the back of the throat till it stung and warmed to the temperature of blood and spit, till we wrung from it the terroir of fields cracked by quake and shadowed by smog; only then, swallowing, choking, grateful, did we appreciate the fullness of its flavor. His face was ferocious and sublime in this moment, cracked open; I saw it briefly behind the mask. He was a man who knew the gradations of pleasure because he knew, like me, the calculus of its loss. To me that wine was fig and plum; volcanic soil; wheat fields shading to salt stone; sun; leather, well-baked; and finally, most lingering, strawberry. Psychosomatic, I'm sure, but what flavor isn't? I raised my glass to the memory of my drunk in the British market. I imagined him sat across the table, calmed at last, sane among the sane. He would have tasted in that wine the starch of a laundered sheet, perhaps, or the clean smooth shot of his dignity. My employer decanted these deepest longings, mysterious to each diner until it flooded the palate: a lost child's yeasty scalp, the morning breath of a lover, huckleberries, onion soup, the spice of a redwood forest gone up in smoke. It is easy, all these years later, to dismiss that country's purpose as decadent, gluttonous. Selfish. It was those things. But it was, also, this connoisseurship of loss.

We should probably set some ground rules." I continued. He slumped back against the chair, crossing his arms over his chest. "You want to make rules for tutoring?" I nodded. "And if you don't follow them, I'll quit." He studied me for long moments. It made me squirm in my seat. Romeo had a very intense and level stare. "Okay, Rimmel," he drawled. "Let's hear these rules." I swallowed. Every time he said my name, the spit in my mouth seemed to thicken. "Okay." I agreed. My shoulders straightened and I held up my hand to count the rules as I went. "One: do not be late. It's rude. If you're late again, I won't wait." His lips twitched, which brought me to the next rule. "Two: Don't bother trying to charm me into doing your work for you. I won't." He pressed a hand to his chest like he was offended. "You think so low of me." He gasped. I rolled my eyes. "Three: No girls during tutoring. No disappearing." "But you're a girl," he said, sitting forward swiftly and tucking a bunch of hair behind my ear. The back of my neck broke out in goose bumps and they scattered down my spine, and my toes curled in the Converse I was wearing. "Rule four," I said, ignoring the funny way he made me feel. "No charm at all." "I can't help it, Rimmie." His intensely azure eyes roamed over my face like he was looking at me for the first time. "It's so easy to make you blush." I hit away his hand. "Rule five: Do not call me Rimmie." Ugh, he was irritating! He chuckled and sat back. "Fine. Now, can we get to work?" he asked, pointing at his paper. "No," I snapped. "Tutoring is over for today." "But what about this assignment?" he whined. "Here's a thought," I said as I snatched my bag and stood. "Sit here and do it." I started to stalk away, nearly tripping over my half-untied shoelace. He laughed beneath his breath, and I thought about kicking him. - Rimmel & Romeo

But it is doubtful whether it is permissible to say that the electron 'occupies space' at all. Atoms have the capacity of swallowing energy and of spitting out energy - in the form of light rays, for instance. When a hydrogen atom, the simplest of all, with a single electron-planet, swallows energy, the planet jumps from its orbit to a larger orbit - say, from the orbit of Earth to the orbit of Mars; when it emits energy, it jumps back into the smaller orbit. But these jumps are performed by the planet without it passing through the space that separates the two orbits. It somehow de-materializes in orbit A and re-materializes in orbit B. Moreover, since the amount of 'action' performed by the hydrogen electron while going once round its orbit is the indivisibly smallest quantum of action (Planck's basic constant 'h'), it is meaningless to ask at what precise point of its orbit the electron is at a given moment of time. It is equally everywhere.

Tina woke to a thin beam of afternoon sun. She lay still for a moment, revisiting, reliving, trying to get comfortable with the events of the night before. The sound of rustling paper got her up and the smell assaulted her again. Lockie was eating a burger, trying for slow, but failing.He had his back to her as he perched in a corner, secretively stuffing his mouth. ‘Hey, Lockie,’ said Tina. Lockie turned, wild-eyed and fearful. He stopped mid-chew and pushed his tongue through his teeth to spit the gooey mess out. ‘Gross, kid, just swallow for fuck’s sake.’ ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry for touching, sorry for eating, sorry for being a bad boy.’ ‘You’re not being a bad boy,’ Tina said. She hated how pathetic the kid sounded. ‘The food is for you, do you understand? It’s all for you.’ Lockie stared. He was still and silent, as if waiting for what would happen next. Tina hated the idea that he was afraid of her, that he would have to be afraid of everyone he ever met from now on. ‘Say it, kid. Say, “It’s all for me.” Go on, say it.’ Lockie stared. ‘Say it, Lockie.’ ‘It’s all . . .’ He faltered. “It’s all for me.” 'Say it, I mean it.’ ‘It’s all for me.’ ‘Say it again, Lockie.’ ‘It’s all for me. All for me, all for me.’ ‘Okay, kid, you can shut up now. Get back to your breakfast. I might have a cigarette.’ ‘The food is all for me,’ said Lockie. His voice was determined. He was telling her, but mostly he was telling himself. ‘That’s right, kid, it’s all for you.’ ‘But you can share it with me,’ he said, and he gave Tina a small smile.Someone had taught Lockie all the right rules. Someone who didn’t even know if he was alive right now. ‘I bet you’ve got the best mum and dad somewhere.' Lockie nodded and chewed. ‘I bet I do.’ He didn’t talk anymore after that. The memory of his parents had obviously been put somewhere far away so thoughts of them wouldn’t hurt. He wasn’t ready to take them out again.

There are secrets of the mouth and secrets of the heart. Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. These secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you’re barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free. Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become. Teccam claims it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart. Any fool will spit out poison, he says, but we hoard these painful treasures. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. There they sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them. Modern

Teccam explains that there are two types of secrets. There are secrets of the mouth and secrets of the heart. Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. These secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you’re barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free. Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become. Teccam claims it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart. Any fool will spit out poison, he says, but we hoard these painful treasures. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. There they sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them.

The tornadic bundle of legs and arms and feet and hands push farther into the kitchen until only the occasional flailing limb is visible from the living room, where I can’t believe I’m still standing. A spectator in my own life, I watch the supernova of my two worlds colliding: Mom and Galen. Human and Syrena. Poseidon and Triton. But what can I do? Who should I help? Mom, who lied to me for eighteen years, then tried to shank my boyfriend? Galen, who forgot this little thing called “tact” when he accused my mom of being a runaway fish-princess? Toraf, who…what the heck is Toraf doing, anyway? And did he really just sack my mom like an opposing quarterback? The urgency level for a quick decision elevates to right-freaking-now. I decide that screaming is still best for everyone-it’s nonviolent, distracting, and one of the things I’m very, very good at. I open my mouth, but Rayna beats me to it-only, her scream is much more valuable than mine would have been, because she includes words with it. “Stop it right now, or I’ll kill you all!” She pushed past me with a decrepit, rusty harpoon from God-knows-what century, probably pillaged from one of her shipwreck excursions. She waves it at the three of them like a crazed fisherman in a Jaws movie. I hope they don’t notice she’s got it pointed backward and that if she fires it, she’ll skewer our couch and Grandma’s first attempt at quilting. It works. The bare feet and tennis shoes stop scuffling-out of fear or shock, I’m not sure-and Toraf’s head appears at the top of the counter. “Princess,” he says, breathless. “I told you to stay outside.” “Emma, run!” Mom yells. Toraf disappears again, followed by a symphony of scraping and knocking and thumping and cussing. Rayna rolls her eyes at me, grumbling to herself as she stomps into the kitchen. She adjusts the harpoon to a more deadly position, scraping the popcorn ceiling and sending rust and Sheetrock and tetanus flaking onto the floor like dirty snow. Aiming it at the mound of struggling limbs, she says, “One of you is about to die, and right now I don’t really care who it is.” Thank God for Rayna. People like Rayna get things done. People like me watch people like Rayna get things done. Then people like me round the corner of the counter as if they helped, as if they didn’t stand there and let everyone they love beat the shizzle out of one another. I peer down at the three of them all tangled up. Crossing my arms, I try to mimic Rayna’s impressive rage, but I’m pretty sure my face is only capable of what-the-crap-was-that. Mom looks up at me, nostrils flaring like moth wings. “Emma, I told you to run,” she grinds out before elbowing Toraf in the mouth so hard I think he might swallow a tooth. Then she kicks Galen in the ribs. He groans, but catches her foot before she can re-up. Toraf spits blood on the linoleum beside him and grabs Mom’s arms. She writhes and wriggles, bristling like a trapped badger and cussing like sailor on crack. Mom has never been girlie. Finally she stops, her arms and legs slumping to the floor in defeat. Tears puddle in her eyes. “Let her go,” she sobs. “She’s got nothing to do with this. She doesn’t even know about us. Take me and leave her out of this. I’ll do anything.” Which reinforces, right here and now, that my mom is Nalia. Nalia is my mom. Also, holy crap.

The speaker standing on an upturned barrel at the intersection of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue was shouting monotonously: “BLACK POWER! BLACK POWER! Is you is? Or is you ain’t? We gonna march this night! March! March! March! Oh, when the saints — yeah, baby! We gonna march this night!” Spit flew from his looselipped mouth. His flabby jowls flopped up and down. His rough brown skin was greasy with sweat. His dull red eyes looked tired. “Mistah Charley been scared of BLACK POWER since the day one. That’s why Noah shuffled us off to Africa the time of the flood. And all this time we been laughing to keep from whaling.” He mopped his sweating face with a red bandanna handkerchief. He belched and swallowed. His eyes looked vacant. His mouth hung open as though searching for words. “Can’t keep this up,” he said under his breath. No one heard him. No one noticed his behavior. No one cared. He swallowed loudly and screamed. “TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT! We launch our whale boats. Iss the night of the great white whale. You dig me, baby?” He was a big man and flabby all over like his jowls. Night had fallen but the black night air was as hot as the bright day air, only there was less of it. His white short-sleeved shirt was sopping wet. A ring of sweat had formed about the waist of his black alpaca pants as though the top of his potbelly had begun to melt. “You want a good house? You got to whale! You want a good car? You got to whale! You want a good job? You got to whale! You dig me?” His conked hair was dripping sweat. For a big flabby middle-aged man who would have looked more at home in a stud poker game, he was unbelievably hysterical. He waved his arms like an erratic windmill. He cut a dance step. He shuffled like a prizefighter. He shadowed with clenched fists. He shouted. Spit flew. “Whale! Whale! WHALE, WHITEY! WE GOT THE POWER! WE IS BLACK! WE IS PURE!” A crowd of Harlem citizens dressed in holiday garb had assembled to listen. They crowded across the sidewalks, into the street, blocking traffic. They were clad in the chaotic colors of a South American jungle. They could have been flowers growing on the banks of the Amazon, wild orchids of all colors. Except for their voices. “What’s he talking ’bout?” a high-yellow chick with bright red hair wearing a bright green dress that came down just below her buttocks asked the tall slim black man with smooth carved features and etched hair. “Hush yo’ mouth an’ lissen,” he replied harshly, giving her a furious look from the corners of muddy, almond-shaped eyes. “He tellin’ us what black power mean!

Describe for me, if you can, the nature of this wisdom.’ Anomander snorted impatiently. ‘Wisdom is surrender.’ ‘To what?’ ‘Complexity.’ ‘To what end?’ ‘Swallow it down, spit it out in small measures, to make palatable what many may not otherwise comprehend.’ ‘An arrogant pose, First Son.’ ‘I do not claim it, Azathanai, just as I refuse for myself the notion of rule. And, in the name of worship, I am lost in doubt, if not outright disbelief.’ ‘And why is that?’ ‘Power does not confer wisdom, nor rightful authority, nor faith in either of the two. If it offers a caress, so too can it by force make one kneel. The former is by nature suspect, while the latter — well, it can at least be said that it does not disguise its truth.’ ‘You learn for liberty.’ ‘If I do, then I am the greater fool, because liberty is not in itself a virtue. It wins nothing but the false belief in one's own utterly unassailable independence. even the beasts will not plunge to that depth. No, if I yearn for anything, it is for responsibility. An end to the evasions, the lies spoken in the mind and the lies spoken to others, the endless game of deeds without blame, and all the causes of seeming justice behind which hide venal desires. I yearn for the coward's confession, and understand me well here, Caladan: we are all cowards.

Anyway, if my lips were rose petals they’d taste too bitter. If my cheeks were apples they’d crawl with apple worms. If my eyes were stars they’d be dead by the time you saw them. If I moved you like the moon I’d disappear once a month. If my teeth were Chiclets you’d want to chew on them and spit them out. If my hands were birds you couldn’t hold them; they’d peck you bloody. Is my skin alabaster? Then it’s cold and hard and one day someone will skin me, make me into a cold hard box tinged with pink or yellow, to hold unguents, then how will you love me? If my vagina is a cool, dark forest you’ll certainly be lost, you have no sense of direction. If my vagina is a cave-watch out! It’s prone to seismic shifts and avalanche. If my vagina is a river of honey: orange, lavender, fine herbs, hazelnut, all too sweet. If my ears are shells I can’t hear you, only the ocean anyway. And if my voice is music, it is unintelligible. Don’t say anything. I am not a flower, but a body with rules and predictable, cellular qualities. My eyelashes and fingernails and skin and spit are organized by proteins designed to erode at a pre-encoded date and time, no matter what you do or do not do to me- I am remarkably like an animal. More like a heifer than a sunrise, I want to bite, stroke, swallow you so stop lying there trying to think of something to say and trying to understand me. I am the body next to but unlike yours. You already know me. You already know what I’m made of.

You said to step on the brake to put us into drive, then to step on the right one to-" "Not at the same time!" "Well, you should have told me that. How was I supposed to know?" I snort. "You acted like the freaking Dalai Lama when I tried to tell you how to shift gears. I told you, one was for go and one was for stop. You can't stop and go at the same time! You have to make up your mind." From the expression on her face, she's either about to punch me or call me something really bad. She opens her mouth, but the really bad something doesn't come out; she shuts it again. Then she giggles. Now I've seen everything. "Galen tells me that all the time," she chortles. "That I can never make up my mind." Then she bursts out laughing so hard she spits all over the steering wheel. She keeps laughing until I'm convinced an unknown force is tickling her senseless. What? As far as I can tell, her indecisiveness almost got us killed. Killed isn't funny. "You should have seen your face," she says, between gulps of breaths. "You were all, like-" And she makes the face of a drunk clown. "I bet you wet yourself, didn't you?" She cracks herself up so much she clutches her side as if she's holding in her own guts. I feel my lips fracture into a smile before I can stop them. "You were more scared than me. You swallowed like ten flies while you were screaming." She spits all over the steering wheel again. And I spew laughter onto the dash. It takes a good five minutes for us to sober up enough for another driving lesson. My throat is dry, and my eyes are wet when I say, "Okay, now. Let's concentrate. The sun is going down. These woods probably get pretty creepy at night." She clears her throat, still giggling a little. "Okay. Concentrate. Right." "So, this time, when you take your foot off the brake, the car will go on its own. There, see?" We slink along the road at an idle two miles per hour. She huffs up at her bangs. "This is boring. I want to go faster." I start to say, "Not too fast," but she squashes the gas under her foot, and my words are snatched away by the wind. She gives a startled shout, which I find hypocritical because after all, I'm the one helpless in the passenger seat, and she's the one screaming like a teapot, turning the wheel back and forth like the road isn't straight as a pencil. "Brake, brake, brake!" I shout, hoping repetition will somehow penetrate the small part of her brain that actually thinks. Everything happens fast. We stop. There's a crunching sound. My face slams into the dash. No wait, the dash becomes an airbag. Rayna's scream is cut off by her airbag. I open my eyes. A tree. A freaking tree. The metal frame groans, and something under the hood lets out a mechanical hiss. Smoke billows up from the front, the universal symbol for "you're screwed." I turn to the rustling sound beside me. Rayna is wrestling with the airbag like it has attacked her instead of saved her life. "What is this thing?" she wails, pushing it out of her way and opening the door. One Mississippi...two Mississippi... "Well, are you just going to sit there? We have a long walk home. You're not hurt are you? Because I can't carry you." Three Mississippi...four Mississippi... "What are those flashing blue lights down there?

I sit down across from her at the table and put the vial of memory serum between us. “I came to make you drink this,” I say. She looks at the vial, and I think I see tears in her eyes, but it could just be the light. “I thought it was the only way to prevent total destruction,” I say. “I know that Marcus and Johanna and their people are going to attack, and I know that you will do whatever it takes to stop them, including using that death serum you possess to its best advantage.” I tilt my head. “Am I wrong?” “No,” she says. “The factions are evil. They cannot be restored. I would sooner see us all destroyed.” Her hand squeezes the edge of the table, the knuckles pale. “The reason the factions were evil is because there was no way out of them,” I say. “They gave us the illusion of choice without actually giving us a choice. That’s the same thing you’re doing here, by abolishing them. You’re saying, go make choices. But make sure they aren’t factions or I’ll grind you to bits!” “If you thought that, why didn’t you tell me?” she says, her voice louder and her eyes avoiding mine, avoiding me. “Tell me, instead of betraying me?” “Because I’m afraid of you!” The words burst out, and I regret them but I’m also glad they’re there, glad that before I ask her to give up her identity, I can at least be honest with her. “You…you remind me of him!” “Don’t you dare.” She clenches her hands into fists and almost spits at me, “Don’t you dare.” “I don’t care if you don’t want to hear it,” I say, coming to my feet. “He was a tyrant in our house and now you’re a tyrant in this city, and you can’t even see that it’s the same!” “So that’s why you brought this,” she says, and she wraps her hand around the vial, holding it up to look at it. “Because you think this is the only way to mend things.” “I…” I am about to say that it’s the easiest way, the best way, maybe the only way that I can trust her. If I erase her memories, I can create for myself a new mother, but. But she is more than my mother. She is a person in her own right, and she does not belong to me. I do not get to choose what she becomes just because I can’t deal with who she is. “No,” I say. “No, I came to give you a choice.” I feel suddenly terrified, my hands numb, my heart beating fast-- “I thought about going to see Marcus tonight, but I didn’t.” I swallow hard. “I came to see you instead because…because I think there’s a hope of reconciliation between us. Not now, not soon, but someday. And with him there’s no hope, there’s no reconciliation possible.” She stares at me, her eyes fierce but welling up with tears. “It’s not fair for me to give you this choice,” I say. “But I have to. You can lead the factionless, you can fight the Allegiant, but you’ll have to do it without me, forever. Or you can let this crusade go, and…and you’ll have your son back.” It’s a feeble offer and I know it, which is why I’m afraid--afraid that she will refuse to choose, that she will choose power over me, that she will call me a ridiculous child, which is what I am. I am a child. I am two feet tall and asking her how much she loves me. Evelyn’s eyes, dark as wet earth, search mine for a long time. Then she reaches across the table and pulls me fiercely into her arms, which form a wire cage around me, surprisingly strong. “Let them have the city and everything in it,” she says into my hair. I can’t move, can’t speak. She chose me. She chose me.

Do you remember the time we tied a lasso to a tree limb and decided to swing across the creek like Tarzan?" Wyatt tipped up his frosty bottle and took a long pull. "Yeah." Zane was already laughing. "As usual,you two decided that I'd be the one to try it out first.That way,if it broke,I'd be the one tossed into the creek." "It stands to reason." Jesse chuckled. "You were the youngest. That's just the price you had to pay to hang out with us." "And," Wyatt added, "you were always willing to go along with whatever we decided." Zane shook his head. "Not when I used it to fly across the creek." "And not when I followed him," Wyatt said with a laugh. "But Jesse, assured that it was safe,grabbed hold and was flying through the air when the branch snapped." Amy looked over at her husband. "You landed in the creek?" "Yeah? On the day after one of our biggest storms,with the water spilling over its banks and rushing so fast it carried me downstream half a mile or more." She put a hand to her mouth to cover her shock and saw Cora do the same. Wyatt laughed. "He was lucky Zane and I had our horses tethered nearby.We chased along the banks of the creek until we could get far enough ahead to toss him a tree branch to catch. By the time we hauled him out,he looked like a drowned rat and was spitting mad." "I had a right to be.I swallowed half the creek." Zane laughed. "But think how lucky we were that it happened to you instead of me. At least you could swim." Marilee's eyes rounded. "They had you test the rope when they knew you couldn't swim?" Wyatt was laughing even harder. "We figured it was one way for him to learn." "How old were you?" They thought a minute before Wyatt answered. "I was eight,so that would make Jesse ten and Zane seven." "You could have all drowned." "Yeah.Looking back,we were lucky to have surrived so many foolish adventures. But," Wyatt added, "I wouldn't have missed a single one of them." of them

didn’t plan this,” Jack said. “But since it’s you and me—tell me about Brie.” “Tell you what, Jack?” “When she was leaving… It looked like there was something….” “Spit it out.” “You and Brie?” “What?” Jack took a breath, not happily. “Are you with my sister?” Mike had a swallow of his whiskey. “I’m taking a day off tomorrow—taking her down the Pacific Coast Highway through Mendocino to look for whales, see the galleries, maybe have a little lunch.” “Why?” “She said she’d like to do that while she’s here.” “All right, but you know what I’m getting at—” “I think you’d better tell me, so I don’t misunderstand.” “I’d like to know what your intentions are toward my sister.” “You really think you have the right to do that? To ask that question?” Mike asked him. “Just tell me what was going on between the two of you while I was gone.” “Jack, you’d better loosen your grip a little. Brie’s a grown woman. From where I stand, we’re good friends. If you want to know how she sees it, I think she’s the one you have to ask. But I don’t recommend it—she might be offended. Despite everything, she tends to think of herself as a grown-up.” “It’s no secret to you—she’s had a real bad year.” “It’s no secret,” Mike agreed. “You’re making this really tough, man…” “No, I think you are. You spent some time with her tonight. Did it look to you like anything is wrong? Like she’s upset or anything? Because I think everything is fine and you worry too much.” “I worry, yeah. I worry that maybe she’ll look to you for some comfort. For something to help her get through. And that you’ll take advantage of that.” “And…?” Mike prompted, lifting his glass but not drinking. “And maybe work a little of your Latin magic on her and walk away.” Jack drank his whiskey. “I don’t want you to do that to her.” Mike put down his glass on the bar without emptying it. “I would never hurt Brie. And it has nothing to do with whose sister she is. Good night, Jack.

There are things I can confess only after swallowing a bottle of ink. How i crushed a moth between my palms before it rushed to the fireplace. These hands that are used to killing things midflight. Like my mother tongue. Before I can roll out my rounded R and O. Because women like me are believed to practise witchcraft and blackmagic. We swallow men and spit out their bones. These hands that danced with your ghosts on the bluest 4 AMs. These hands that raised a knife to its throat. How deep was the longing to be nothing more than an empty bed, an empty room. If someone asks you tell them writing was the closest I came to witchcraft. Poetry was the closest I came to being possessed. I wanted to leave behind more than emptiness so I wrote. . They say it takes 7 seconds for the eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. I glide across the dark room like the light was never here. Your body imprint on the mattress lost to the frenzied waltz of sunray and dust. How easy was it to just grab a handful of you before you dissolved. If someone asks tell them loving you was the closest I came to seeing god. . On some nights I open the curtains and you are the moon. I am the darkness surrounding it. Which is to say I don't know how to love without being consumed. If they ask you tell them remembrance was the closest I came to being sick. . Once I met a homeless man who spoke in madness because he had forgotten his mother tongue. How long do you hide yourself from the world before you forget your beginning. Like him - I too am full of silence. My beloved - a handful of you, your body. There are things I could only tell the moths but they no longer visit. I have put off the fireplace. Which is to say they too don't know how to love something that won't kill them. . My phone always autocorrects I love you to I live you and what is love if not living the other person. One summer afternoon our bodies turned into each other's. Your breath played lye strings on my neck. If they ask you tell them that was the closest I came to being alive.

My dear Marwan, in the long summers of childhood, when I was a boy the age you are now, your uncles and I spread our mattress on the roof of your grandfathers’ farmhouse outside of Hom. We woke in the mornings to the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, to the bleating of your grandmother's goat, the clanking of her cooking pots, the air cool and the sun a pale rim of persimmon to the east. We took you there when you were a toddler. I have a sharply etched memory of your mother from that trip. I wish you hadn’t been so young. You wouldn't have forgotten the farmhouse, the soot of its stone walls, the creek where your uncles and I built a thousand boyhood dams. I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan. In its bustling Old City, a mosque for us Muslims, a church for our Christian neighbours, and a grand souk for us all to haggle over gold pendants and fresh produce and bridal dresses. I wish you remembered the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh and the evening walks we took with your mother around Clock Tower Square. But that life, that time, seems like a dream now, even to me, like some long-dissolved rumour. First came the protests. Then the siege. The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials. These are the things you know You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole. You have learned dark blood is better news than bright. You have learned that mothers and sisters and classmates can be found in narrow gaps between concrete, bricks and exposed beams, little patches of sunlit skin shining in the dark. Your mother is here tonight, Marwan, with us, on this cold and moonlit beach, among the crying babies and the women worrying in tongues we don’t speak. Afghans and Somalis and Iraqis and Eritreans and Syrians. All of us impatient for sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home. I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere. But I hear your mother's voice, over the tide, and she whispers in my ear, ‘Oh, but if they saw, my darling. Even half of what you have. If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.' In the glow of this three-quarter moon, my boy, your eyelashes like calligraphy, closed in guileless sleep. I said to you, ‘Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen.' These are only words. A father's tricks. It slays your father, your faith in him. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how powerless I am to protect you from it. Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and we are in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting, easily swallowed. Because you, you are precious cargo, Marwan, the most precious there ever was. I pray the sea knows this. Inshallah. How I pray the sea knows this.

They won’t, your kind of intellectuals are the first to scream when it’s safe—and the first to shut their traps at the first sign of danger. They spend years spitting at the man who feeds them—and they lick the hand of the man who slaps their drooling faces. Didn’t they deliver every country of Europe, one after another, to committees of goons, just like this one here? Didn’t they scream their heads off to shut out every burglar alarm and to break every padlock open for the goons? Have you heard a peep out of them since? Didn’t they scream that they were the friends of labor? Do you hear them raising their voices about the chain gangs, the slave camps, the fourteen-hour workday and the mortality from scurvy in the People’s States of Europe? No, but you do hear them telling the whip-beaten wretches that starvation is prosperity, that slavery is freedom, that torture chambers are brother-love and that if the wretches don’t understand it, then it’s their own fault that they suffer, and it’s the mangled corpses in the jail cellars who’re to blame for all their troubles, not the benevolent leaders! Intellectuals? You might have to worry about any other breed of men, but not about the modern intellectuals: they’ll swallow anything. I don’t feel so safe about the lousiest wharf rat in the longshoremen’s union: he’s liable to remember suddenly that he is a man—and then I won’t be able to keep him in line. But the intellectuals? That’s the one thing they’ve forgotten long ago. I guess it’s the one thing that all their education was aimed to make them forget. Do anything you please to the intellectuals. They’ll take it.

When she was a girl, Eleanor had completely believed the tale. That Zephyr brought her back from Africa with him, a pearl that he'd swallowed, that had remained hidden deep within his jaw when he was shot, skinned, sold, and shipped, during the decades his pelt was put on proud display at the big house and through his subsequent repair to reduced circumstances at the Lake House. It was there, one day, when the tiger's head was tilted just so, that the pearl rolled out of his lifeless mouth and became lost in the long weave of the library carpet. It was trodden on, bypassed, and all but forgotten, until one dark night, while the household slept, it was found by fairies on a mission of theft. They took the pearl deep into the woods, where it was laid on a bed of leaves, studied and pondered and tentatively stroked, before being stolen by a bird, who mistook it for an egg. High in the treetops, the pearl began to grow and grow and grow, until the bird became frightened that her own eggs would be crushed and she rolled the argent orb back down the side of the tree, where it landed with a soft thud on a bed of leaf fall. There, in the light of the full moon, surrounded by curious fairy folk, the egg began to hatch and a baby emerged. The fairies gathered nectar to feed her and took turns rocking the babe to sleep, but soon no amount of nectar was enough, and even fairy magic could not keep the child content. A meeting was held and it was decided the woods were no place for a human child and she must be returned to the house, laid on the doorstep in a wrap of woven leaves. As far as Eleanor was concerned, it explained everything: why she felt such an affinity with the woods, why she'd always been able to glimpse the fairies in the meadows where other people saw only grass, why birds had gathered on the ledge outside the nursery window when she was an infant. It also explained the fierce tiger rage that welled up inside her at times, that made her spit and scream and stomp, so that Nanny Bruen hissed and told her she'd come to no good if she didn't learn to control herself. Mr. Llewellyn, on the other hand, said there were worse things in life than a temper, that it only proved one had an opinion. And a pulse, he added, the alternative to which was dire! He said a girl like Eleanor would do well to keep the coals of her impudence warm, for society would seek to cool them soon enough.

The curtain billows gently in the breeze behind him as he steps out to meet me, his hair jet-black by contrast with the translucent white fabric. I jump, gasp, and nearly swallow the grip that I’m still holding between my lips; quickly, I pull it out before it goes down my throat and chokes me. It’s wet with drool. Lovely, Violet. Really attractive. I shove it into my hair, anywhere, praying it will stay and not fall on the floor, still dripping with spit. Luca’s smiling down at me. His face is half in light, half in shade, from the spots playing across the dance floor, his blue eyes gleaming. “You like to dance,” he observes conversationally. “Yes…” Safe question, safe answer. Well, at least I didn’t babble. But he doesn’t say anything else; he’s just looking me up and down, and I feel incredibly awkward under his scrutiny. I’m sweaty, catching my breath; my eyeliner’s probably running. I desperately need to escape into the dark night beyond the dance floor, where the breeze will cool me down and the shadows will hide my shiny face. “I want to get some fresh air,” I say, and move around him, stepping off onto the stone slabs and promptly sinking with one heel into the narrow space between them. “Oops!” I say idiotically, ignoring the hand that Luca is stretching out to help me. The last thing I need right now is to touch him, for all sorts of reasons. I keep walking, pulling my heel out from between the paving stones; mercifully, it comes out without catching or ripping off. I honestly think that even if it did, I would keep going; I’d walk on a sandal without a heel all night, balance on my toes, pretend nothing had happened, and think it a fair price to pay for my flight into the comparative darkness of the chill-out area, where Luca can’t see the sweat on my face.

Grasping her chin, Hunter dug his fingertips and thumb into her cheeks. When at last her jaws parted, he held the canteen over her yawning mouth and began trickling water down her. To his surprise, she went perfectly still. By breathing carefully through her nose, she was able to let him fill her mouth without swallowing. The excess water sluiced out onto her cheeks and ran into her hair. Hunter couldn’t plug the canteen and lay it down, not without turning her loose. And if he turned her loose, she’d spit out the water. “Warrior!” he yelled. Several fires away, Warrior shot up from his bed. After looking around in befuddlement, he spied Hunter and broke into a run. Within seconds he was standing by the pallet, his sleepy brown eyes riveted on the yellow-hair. “Tah-mah, what are you trying to do, drown her?” “Yes. Squeeze her nose.” “What?” “Do it!” Warrior knelt at her head. “Hunter, are you--” “Do I have to call Swift Antelope?” Warrior pinched the girl’s nose. “If she dies, it is your doing.” “She isn’t going to die. I’m trying to make her drink.” Hunter watched the girl’s face turn red from lack of air. After a few seconds the muscles in her throat became distended. Then, at last, she swallowed part of the water and began to choke. “Turn loose. Warrior, turn loose!” Warrior, who always seemed to be one thought behind everyone else, finally released her nose and sat back on his heels. The girl gasped and sucked water the wrong way. Grimly, Hunter watched while she fought to get her breath. When at last she stopped coughing, he said, “You will drink?” Her eyes glittered up at him, so filled with hatred that a chill ran up his spine. Hunter grasped her chin again. “Her nose, Warrior. And this time, turn loose when she starts to swallow or we will drown her.” “You will drown her. I’m just helping.

We kissed as the prospect went back to swallowing Mayhem. If my man liked this then I’d have to learn to be better at it. I shifted away and hunched over. Prospect moved so I could try. I opened my mouth wide like he did and went down. I was careful as he skimmed past my teeth and I took a deep breath before gliding him into my throat. His length invaded my airway. It made my eyes tear up, but I kept going. My hands turned to fists and I curled my toes as I took more inches in my mouth. Then that panic hit and I withdrew quickly. “Fucking beautiful, Torrin.” Mayhem smiled down at me. I loved that look. I wanted more of that expression. I cleared my throat, wiped my eyes, and tried again. Open wide, deep breath, and go for it. I reached further, faster, and this time passed my previous spot. I let his dick consume my airway as I forced myself not to gag. Almost there I kept telling myself as I ate up the inches. Then my nose squished against his skin and my bottom lip grazed his balls. Fuck yeah. I pulled back fast, gasping before he came fully out. I coughed louder this time, spitting all the extra saliva onto the floor. “Amazing.” Mayhem pulled me to him. We kissed briefly as he ran his hands down my sides. “Why the fuck are you still wearing pants?” He yelled it. I

A large horsefly accidentally flies directly into her oral cavity before she can speak. Outside in the air, this creature doesn’t seem that big, but from inside her mouth it feels like that giant flying reptile Rodan she once saw in a movie on cable. Her jaws are no match for this frightening pest, who, temporarily blinded in panic, begins biting her tongue with its tiny bloodsucking mouth. But Marsha is ready for any curveball nature might throw her. At first she considers spitting out this invasive monster, but then her reflexes take over and her snapping-turtle-like tongue, hidden behind her freshly glossed lips, rips the unwanted tormentor from the roof of her mouth, and with one bite of her cavity-free teeth, the execution of this pesky intruder is complete. Yes, she swallows.