Streak Broken Quotes

Nesta gazed at her friends. And saw pain and sorrow in their tear-streaked faces, but also the openness of letting each other see the broken places deep inside. The understanding that they would not turn away.

I didn’t say anything; I could find no words that would express the swirled chaos of emotions inside me. So I just watched him go right out the door.

Royce understood then why she had come: she had come to finish the task her relatives had begun; to do to him what he had done to her brother. Unmoving, he watched her, noting that tears were pouring down her beautiful face as she slowly bent down. But instead of reaching for his lance or her dagger, she took his hand between both of hers and pressed her lips to it. Through his daze of pain and confusion, Royce finally understood that she was kneeling to him, and a groan tore from his chest: "Darling," he said brokenly, tightening his hand, trying to make her stand, "don't do this…" But his wife wouldn't listen. In front of seven thousand onlookers, Jennifer Merrick Westmoreland, countess of Rockbourn, knelt before her husband in a public act of humble obeisance, her face pressed to his hand, her shoulders wrenched with violent sobs. By the time she finally arose, there could not have been many among the spectators who had not seen what she had done. Standing up, she stepped back, lifted her tear-streaked face to his, and squared her shoulders. Pride exploded in Royce's battered being—because, somehow, she was managing to stand as proudly—as defiantly—as if she had just been knighted by a king.

Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars. Then the breeze died too and there was no noise save the drip and tickle of water that ran out of clefts and spilled down, leaf by leaf, to the brown earth of the island. The air was cool, moist, and clear; and presently even the sound of the water was still. The beast lay huddled on the pale beach and the stains spread, inch by inch. The edge of the lagoon became a streak of phosphorescence which advanced minutely, as the great wave of the tide flowed. The clear water mirrored the clear sky and the angular bright constellations. The line of phosphorescence bulged about the sand grains and little pebbles; it held them each in a dimple of tension, then suddenly accepted them with an inaudible syllable and moved on. Along the shoreward edge of the shallows the advancing clearness was full of strange, moonbeam-bodied creatures with fiery eyes. Here and there a larger pebble clung to its own air and was covered with a coat of pearls. The tide swelled in over the rain-pitted sand and smoothed everything with a layer of silver. Now it touched the first of the stains that seeped from the broken body and the creatures made a moving patch of light as they gathered at the edge. The water rose further and dressed Simon's coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble. The strange, attendant creatures, with their fiery eyes and trailing vapours busied themselves round his head. The body lifted a fraction of an inch from the sand and a bubble of air escaped from the mouth with a wet plop. Then it turned gently in the water. Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling; and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved further along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon's dead body moved out towards the open sea.

Don’t fool yourself: we all have a cruel streak. We keep it under lock and key either because we’re afraid of getting punished or because we believe this will somehow make a difference, make the world a better place.

An incomplete list: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

Patience is not the indiscriminate acceptance of any sort of evil: "It is not the one who does not flee from evil who is patient but rather the one who does not let himself thereby be drawn into disordered sadness." To be patient means not to allow the serenity and discernmet of one's soul to be taken away. Patience, then, is not the tear-streaked mirror of a "broken" life (as one might almost think, to judge from what is frequently shown and praised under this term) but rather is the radiant essence of final freedom from harm. Patience is, as Hildegard of Bingen states, "the pillar that is weakened by nothing.

I should have kept my eyes on him, should have remembered where I got my mean streak.

They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword.

Brush snapped. The stag shambled forth from the outer darkness. It loomed above Scobie, its fur rank and steaming. Black blood oozed from gashes along its flanks. Beneath a great jagged crown of antlers its eyes were black, its teeth yellow and broken. Scobie fell to his knees, palms raised in supplication. The stag nuzzled his matted hair and its long tongue lapped at the muddy tears and the streaks of drying blood upon the man’s upturned face. Its muzzle unhinged. The teeth closed and there was a sound like a ripe cabbage cracking apart.

I suddenly felt the way Cinderella might have felt if she hadn’t had that convenient midnight curfew: my feet were hurting, my hair was slipping free from its pins, and my makeup was getting all smudged from sweat. I was unbelievably tired, undeniably depressed, and I just wanted charming.

I stand at a window, looking out at a dark world streaked with light. And I see what you see, my eyes filled with a constant threat of tears, at all the desolate beauty in the world.

Um, you don’t have to join me, but if you’re looking for a table, there are a couple good seats over there.” He nodded toward the far end.

Her mascara ran in streaks down her face lipstick smeared across her alabaster cheeks like a porcelain doll that had been flung around before the paint had dried. ... barely blinking eyes like content little suns poking through dark mascara clouds she is broken yet whole at the same time and she belongs to him (excerpt from "Content" in Make Me Take It From You by HL37)

It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china, the dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become. ("The Destructors")

But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself (many—most—would be dead by now), the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises, sunsets, the different hands of waitresses who had placed before her cups of coffee— All of it gone, or about to go.

Josey?” She heard her mother’s voice in the hall, then the thud of her cane as she came closer. “Please don’t tell her I’m here,” the woman in the closet said, with a strange sort of desperation. Despite the cold outside, she was wearing a cropped white shirt and tight dark blue jeans that sat low, revealing a tattoo of a broken heart on her hip. Her hair was bleached white-blond with about an inch of silver-sprinkled dark roots showing. Her mascara had run and there were black streaks on her cheeks. She looked drip-dried, like she’d been walking in the rain, though there hadn’t...

So she sees if she can drive him off. The MacCarrolls have that little perverse streak in them. She’d rather break her own heart than have it broken. There’s an Irish logic to it.

Twice a day I change the time on my broken clock, my contrarian streak forcing me to ensure that it's never right.

Questions of Travel There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams hurry too rapidly down to the sea, and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. —For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains, aren't waterfalls yet, in a quick age or so, as ages go here, they probably will be. But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, slime-hung and barnacled. Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around? The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, inexplicable and impenetrable, at any view, instantly seen and always, always delightful? Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too? And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm? But surely it would have been a pity not to have seen the trees along this road, really exaggerated in their beauty, not to have seen them gesturing like noble pantomimists, robed in pink. —Not to have had to stop for gas and heard the sad, two-noted, wooden tune of disparate wooden clogs carelessly clacking over a grease-stained filling-station floor. (In another country the clogs would all be tested. Each pair there would have identical pitch.) —A pity not to have heard the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird who sings above the broken gasoline pump in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque: three towers, five silver crosses. —Yes, a pity not to have pondered, blurredly and inconclusively, on what connection can exist for centuries between the crudest wooden footwear and, careful and finicky, the whittled fantasies of wooden cages. —Never to have studied history in the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages. —And never to have had to listen to rain so much like politicians' speeches: two hour of unrelenting oratory and then a sudden golden silence in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes: "Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home? Or could Pascal have been entirely right about just sitting quietly in one's room? Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free. And here, or there...No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?

Champion Ven knelt in the ruins of the village. Sifting through the rubble, he lifted out a broken doll, its pink dress streaked with dirt and its pottery face cracked. There was always a broken doll. Why did there always have to be a damn doll?

The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword.

Well.” The bird seemed to think about this for a moment. “You don’t know how to heal a broken wing, do you?” He flapped his bad wing. He’d looked just sort of gray-brown at first, but up close she could see brilliant red and yellow streaks along his wings, with a milk-white belly and a dark, slightly barbed beak.

Dear Bill, I came to this black wall again, to see and touch your name. William R. Stocks. And as I do, I wonder if anyone ever stops to realize that next to your name, on this black wall, is your mother's heart. A heart broken fifteen years ago today, when you lost your life in Vietnam. And as I look at your name, I think of how many, many times I used to wonder how scared and homesick you must have been, in that strange country called Vietnam. And if and how it might have changed you, for you were the most happy-go-lucky kid in the world, hardly ever sad or unhappy. And until the day I die, I will see you as you laughed at me, even when I was very mad at you. And the next thing I knew, we were laughing together. But on this past New Year's Day, I talked by phone to a friend of yours from Michigan, who spent your last Christmas and the last four months of your life with you. Jim told me how you died, for he was there and saw the helicopter crash. He told me how your jobs were like sitting ducks; they would send you men out to draw the enemy into the open, and then, they would send in the big guns and planes to take over. He told me how after a while over there, instead of a yellow streak, the men got a mean streak down their backs. Each day the streak got bigger, and the men became meaner. Everyone but you, Bill. He said how you stayed the same happy-go-lucky guy that you were when you arrived in Vietnam. And he said how you, of all people, should never have been the one to die. How lucky you were to have him for a friend. And how lucky he was to have had you. They tell me the letters I write to you and leave here at this memorial are waking others up to the fact that there is still much pain left from the Vietnam War. But this I know; I would rather to have had you for twenty-one years and all the pain that goes with losing you, than never to have had you at all. -Mom

One by one the dragons came to ground, and the wolves slid down from them. Anders transformed as soon as his paws hit the earth, and once human, silently pulled off Rayna’s harness so she could do the same. Nearby, Lisabet was seeing to Ellukka. Both the harnesses were charred in places, and he wasn’t sure Rayna’s would hold if they used it again. One by one the dragons transformed, until the eleven children stood in a circle. Some leaned over to rest their hands on their knees, exhausted, others hugged themselves, staring at their companions in the moonlight. The tableau was broken when Kess suddenly streaked across the circle, leaping down from Lisabet’s arms to run straight for Anders, scaling his body and perching on his shoulders. He was so exhaustedly happy to see her, he didn’t even mind the places where she sank her claws in. As if the cat’s movement had woken her up, Viktoria spoke in a whisper. “What have we done?” “The same thing as us,” Ellukka replied. “You can’t go home. Neither can we.” “We had to,” Lisabet said, sounding just as tired as the others. “If we hadn’t brought the Sun Scepter, the wolves would have weakened the dragons until they killed them. If we hadn’t kept it from the dragons, they’d have used it against the wolves until they could attack instead. We’re the only reason they’re not at war right now.” “All we did was destroy half of Holbard instead,” said Theo, looking sick.

Goldfish in a glass bowl are harmless to the human mind, maybe even helpful to minds casting about for something, anything, to think about. But goldfish let loose, propagating themselves, worst of all surviving in what has to be a sessile eddy of the East River, somehow threaten us all. We do not like to think that life is possible under some conditions, especially the conditions of a Manhattan pond. There are four abandoned ties, any number of broken beer bottles, fourteen shoes and a single sneaker, and a visible layer, all over the surface, of that grayish-green film that settles on all New York surfaces. The mud at the banks of the pond is not proper country mud but reconstituted Manhattan landfill, ancient garbage, fossilized coffee grounds and grapefruit rind, the defecation of a city. For goldfish to be swimming in such water, streaking back and forth mysteriously in small schools, feeding, obviously feeding, looking as healthy and well-off as goldfish in the costliest kind of window-box aquarium, means something is wrong with our standards. It is, in some deep sense beyond words, insulting.

Gorge after gorge, turning, turning. Caverns of sunset, falling, falling away—just a single vast gold air breathed out by beings—they must have been marvelous beings, those gold-breathers. Down. Purple-and-green islands. Cleft and groined and gigantically pocked like something left behind after all the oceans vanished one huge night: the mountains. Their hills fold and fold again, fold away, down. Folded into the dens and rocks of the hills are ghost towns. Broken streets end in them, like a sound, nowhere. Shadow is inside. We walk (oh quietly) even so—breaking lines of force, someone’s. Houses stand in their stones. Each house an empty socket. Some streaked with red inside. Words once went on in there—no. I don’t believe that. Words never went on in there.

A scratching of melody comes from the radio, chords rising open as the land that carries us, rhythm mimicking our passage down the road, harmony making this life seem it should be only that. We sing along to what songs have always been about- beginning, going on, breaking up, forgiving, We sing in missed words and broken phrases as glints of tiger moths fly at us like snow, streaking the windshield over.

She is a Weyward. And she carries another Weyward inside her. She gathers herself together, every cell blazing, and thinks: Now. The window breaks, a waterfall of sharp sounds. The room grows dark with feathered bodies, shooting through the broken window, the fireplace. Beaks, claws, and eyes flashing. Feathers brushing her skin. Simon yells, his hand loosening on her throat. She sucks in the air, falling to her knees, one hand cradling her stomach. Something touches her foot, and she sees a dark tide of spiders spreading across the floor. Birds continue to stream through the window. Insects, too: the azure flicker of damselflies, moths with orange eyes on their wings. Tiny, gossamer mayflies. Bees in a ferocious golden swarm. She feels something sharp on her shoulder, its claws digging into her flesh. She looks up at blue-black feathers, streaked with white. A crow. The same crow that has watched over her since she arrived. Tears fill her eyes, and she knows in that moment that she is not alone in the cottage. Altha is there, in the spiders that dance across the floor. Violet is there, in the mayflies that glisten and undulate like some great silver snake. And all the other Weyward women, from the first of the line, are there, too. They have always been with her, and always will be.

I’m not really sure why Ziggy puts up with me. I’m broken. Mostly because of the broken woman who spawned me. I swear, adults should have to get a license to make a kid. Prove they’ve got their shit together before they bring a child into the world. My mom tried, I think. She thought she could piece herself into something resembling a mother by dropping the drugs and dropping the need to feed her overblown selfish streak. But she failed.

And again it snowed, and again the sun came out. In the mornings on the way to the station Franklin counted the new snowmen that had sprung up mysteriously overnight or the old ones that had been stricken with disease and lay cracked apart--a head here, a broken body and three lumps of coal there--and one day he looked up from a piece of snow-colored rice paper and knew he was done. It was as simple as that: you bent over your work night after night, and one day you were done. Snow still lay in dirty streaks on the ground but clusters of yellow-green flowers hung from the sugar maples.

Soli looked up to the sky. Same blue as the Mexican sky. She looked through the truck's slats. This was California. The United States of America. She had arrived. And here's what she discovered. This place, this America? This new place, this streets-of-gold place? Looked a hell of lot like the old place. America streaked by her, stripped and tender with heat. She watched it all rush past through the slats of the old truck: the tin roofs, seas of broken glass, glinting and breathless like a fever dream. America was the dust in her hair, the wind in her throat, the sun that shouted against her eyelids. Between the slates of this truck, America was nothing but a high-tech, high-speed dream of trees and houses and fences, a sliver of interrupted light.

He smiled and pulled the ugly white fichu from her neck. She blinked and looked down at the simple, square neckline of her bodice as if she'd never seen it. Perhaps she hadn't. Perhaps she dressed in the dark like a nun. "What are you doing?" He sighed. "I confess, I find your naïveté perplexing. How have you arrived at the advanced age of six and twenty without having anyone attempt seduction upon yourself? I'm of two minds on the matter: One, utter astonishment at my sex and their deaf disregard for your siren call. Two, glee at the thought that your innocence might signal that you are indeed innocent. Why this should excite me so, I don't know- virginity has never before been a particular whim of mine. I think perhaps it's the setting. Who knows how many virgins were deflowered here by my lusty ancestors? Or," he said as he deftly unpinned and tossed aside her apron, "maybe it's simply you." "I don't..." Her words trailed off and then, interestingly, she blushed a deep rose. Well. That question settled, then. His little maiden was really a maiden. "What?" "I think it's you," he confided, pulling the strings tying her hideous mobcap beneath her chin. She made a wild grab for it, but he was faster, snatching the bloody thing off- finally, and with a great deal of satisfaction. She might've deprived him of a wife that it'd taken him half a year and a rather large sum of money to entangle, but by God, he'd taken off her awful cap. And underneath... "Oh, Séraphine," he breathed, enchanted, for her hair was as black as coal, as black as night, as black as his own soul, save for one white streak just over her left eye. But she'd twisted and braided and tortured the strands, binding them tight to her head, and his fingers itched to let them free. "Don't!" she said, as if she knew what he wanted, her hands flying up to cover her hair. He batted them aside, laughing, pulling a pin here, a pin there, dropping them carelessly to the carpet as she squealed like a little girl and backed away from him, trying frantically to ward off his fingers. He might've taken pity on her had he not just spent an hour on a freezing moor, wondering if he was going to find her dead, neck broken, at the bottom of a hill. Her hair came down all at once, a tumbling mass, tousled and heavy and nearly down to her waist. "Wonderful," he murmured, taking it in both hands and lifting it.

AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

He helped me into the bathtub, where I sat, letting my underwear get soaked. He searched the cabinet under the sink, scattering a straight razor, an empty bottle with a worn label, and a comb with broken teeth before he found a lump of soap, and offered it to me. He was quiet, setting his hand on me to suppress the currentshadows while I scrubbed streaks of red from my body. The worst part was probing the edges of the silverskin to wash away a few days’ worth of gore, so I did it first, biting down hard on my lip to keep from crying out. Then his thumb was pressing, working a knot from my shoulder, from my neck. Goose bumps spread up and down my arms. His fingers fluttered over my shoulders, finding places to soothe. His eyes, when they found mine, were soft and almost shy, and I wanted to kiss him until he blushed again. Later.

participated in the grueling competition, which was broken up into stages and went on for days. But in the spring of 1940, Germany invaded France, and shortly after that, the German army marched into Paris. The Tours de France had been canceled indefinitely. Now it was 1942, and the Occupation had dragged on for two long years. Who knew how long it would last or when the race would start up again? The bumpy cobblestones made the bike shake. But Marcel wouldn’t let that stop him. He knew that in 1939, the spring classic Paris-Roubaix bicycle race included fifteen or more cobbled sections as part of the grueling 200-plus kilometer course. Some were even steep hills. He had just rounded the corner of the street where Madame Trottier lived when suddenly a streak of orange flashed across the road. Zut alors! He jammed his feet on the brakes hard and

Outside, the floorboards creaked from the weight of a person walking, as if complete silence were a cloak the enemy could wear and discard at will. The treading of heavy boots came closer and closer. The doorway filled, blacking out the faint light from the hall, and a tall, incredibly tall, figure stepped inside. A thin line of blood trickled from its throat, as if it had been beheaded and glued back together. A dress of green silk billowed underneath the wound. Its face was a white mask, and its eyes were monstrous streaks of red. Trembling, Kuji raised his blade. He moved so slowly it felt like he was swimming through mud. The creature watched him swing his sword, its eyes on the metal, and somehow, he knew it was fully capable of putting a stop to the action. If it cared to. The edge of the dao bit into his opponent’s shoulder. There was a snapping noise, and a sudden pain lashed his cheek. The sword had broken, the top half bouncing back in Kuji’s face. It was a spirit. It had to be. It was a spirit that could pass through walls, a ghost that could float over floors, a beast impervious to blades. Kuji dropped the handle of the useless sword. His mother had told him once that invoking the Avatar could safeguard him from evil. He’d known as a child she was making up stories. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t decide to believe them right now. Right now, he believed harder than he believed anything in his life. “The Avatar protect me,” he whispered while he could still speak. He fell on his behind and scrambled to the corner of the room, blanketed completely by the spirit’s long shadow. “Yangchen protect me!” The spirit woman followed him and lowered her red-and-white face to his. A human would have passed some kind of judgment on Kuji as he cowered like this. The cold disregard in her eyes was worse than any pity or sadistic amusement. “Yangchen isn’t here right now,” she said in a rich, commanding voice that would have been beautiful had she not held such clear indifference for his life. “I am.

ONE OF THE peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India. The earliest explorers were looking for gold, which was, after an early streak of luck in Mexico, always somewhere farther on. Conquests and foundings were incidental to this search—which did not, and could not, end until the continent was finally laid open in an orgy of goldseeking in the middle of the 19th century. Once the unknown of geography was mapped, the industrial marketplace became the new frontier, and we continued, with largely the same motives and with increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves—no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but like the refugees from a broken ant hill. In our own time we have invaded foreign lands and the moon with the high-toned patriotism of the conquistadors, and with the same mixture of fantasy and avarice.

It was Horace. He’d squeezed out of his cage again. He could make himself quite runny when he wanted to. There was a broken butter dish on the floor, but although it had been full of butter, there was none there now. There was just a greasy patch. And, from the darkness under the sink, there came a sort of high-speed grumbling noise, a kind of mnnamnamnam.... “Oh, you’re after butter now, are you, Horace?” said Tiffany, picking up the dairy broom. “That’s practically cannibalism, you know.” Still, it was better than mice, she had to admit. Finding little piles of mouse bones on the floor was a bit distressing. Even Miss Treason had not been able to work that one out. A mouse she happened to be looking through would be trying to get at the cheeses and then it would all go dark. That was because Horace was a cheese. Tiffany knew that Lancre Blue cheeses were always a bit on the lively side, and sometimes had to be nailed down, but...well, she was highly skilled at cheese making, even though she said it herself, and Horace was definitely a champion. The famous blue streaks that gave the variety its wonderful color were really pretty, although Tiffany wasn’t sure they should glow in the dark.

A BLESSING FROM MY SIXTEEN YEARS’ SON I have this son who assembled inside me during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared, in a tiny blaze. Outside, pines toppled. Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras. Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous. Look at the muscled obelisk of him now pawing through the icebox for more grapes. Sixteen years and not a bone broken, not a single stitch. By his age, I was marked more ways, and small. He’s a slouching six foot two, with implausible blue eyes, which settle on the pages of Emerson’s “Self Reliance” with profound belligerence. A girl with a navel ring could make his cell phone buzz, or an Afro’d boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell— creatures strange as dragons or eels. Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel arcane as any oracle’s. Dante claims school is harshing my mellow. Rodney longs to date a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman willing to do stuff she’ll regret. They’ve come to lead my son into his broadening spiral. Someday soon, the tether will snap. I birthed my own mom into oblivion. The night my son smashed the car fender, then rode home in the rain-streaked cop cruiser, he asked, Did you and Dad screw up so much? He’d let me tuck him in, my grandmother’s wedding quilt from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’t blame us, I said. You’re your own idiot now. At which he grinned. The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy took it hard. He’d found my son awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights, where he’d draped his own coat over her shaking shoulders. My fault, he’d confessed right off. Nice kid, said the cop.

You and Patrick looked awfully cozy,” Ryder says, setting Mama’s note back on the counter. So I was right--he had been watching us. “So?” “So, nothing.” He shrugs. “Just making an observation.” “Yeah, you never just make an observation. Oh, and you and Rosie looked pretty cozy, too. I sure hope you’re not leading her on. You know she likes you.” A muscle in his jaw works furiously as he shoves his cell phone back into his pocket. “That’s the kind of guy you think I am? Seriously, Jem?” I swallow hard, unable to reply. Because the truth is, I don’t know. “I’ll see you later,” he says, his voice cold and clipped. He turns and stalks out. For some unknown reason, I follow him--down the hall, out the front door. “Don’t walk out on me,” I holler as he rounds the Durango and opens the driver’s-side door. “If you have something to say to me, then say it.” He gets in and slams the car door shut, but I throw it open again. “C’mon,” I taunt, motioning with one hand. I’m totally losing it now--white spots dancing before my eyes, tears streaking down my cheeks. I can barely catch my breath, like I’m about to hyperventilate. This isn’t about Ryder, I realize. It’s about Nan. The sudden realization hits me hard. What if I never see her again? My knees buckle, and I start to go down. Somehow, Ryder manages to catch me just before I hit the ground. “Shit, Jemma! What’s the matter with you?” He drags me to my feet and presses me against the side of his truck. “Take a deep breath. Jesus!” I do what he says. By the third, I’ve slowed my heart rate to something nearing normal. Only, my cheeks are burning with mortification now. This is the second time I’ve broken down in front of Ryder. He must think I’ve lost my mind--that I’ve totally gone off the deep end. “Just go,” I say, my voice shaking. He rakes both hands through his hair. “Are you kidding me? I can’t leave you alone like this.” “Go,” I repeat, more forcefully this time. “Just get in your car and leave, okay?” “C’mon, Jemma. You know I can’t.” “I swear I’m okay.” I straighten my spine and lift my chin, trying my best to look calm, collected, and reasonably sane. “Seriously, Ryder. I just need to be alone right now.” “Fine,” he says, shaking his head. “If you say so.” I step away from the car, feeling queasy now as he slips inside and starts the engine. But before he pulls out, he rolls down his window and meets my gaze. His dark eyes look intense, full of conflict. For a split second, I wonder what’s going on inside his head--if he’s judging me. If he has any idea what I’m going through. If he even cares. “She’s going to be okay, Jemma,” he says, then slides his sunglasses on and drives away. I guess he does get it, after all.

If they are to be turned into bread, grains have to be ground. When I was a little girl, my father decided to make some flour from the wheat we had grown on the farm. He tried pounding it with a pestle and mortar but all he got was broken grains, not flour. He put it through the hand mincer screwed to the edge of the table with the same result. Finally, he attacked it with a hammer on the flagstone floor. After he gave up, defeated, my mother cleared up the mess. It was sobering to realize that if the commercial millers had vanished, we could have starved even with barns full of sacks of wheat. To turn wheat into flour, you have to shear, not pound, the hard grains, which requires a grindstone, as the people of Lake Kinneret had discovered. A friend in Mexico, where hand grinding still goes on, showed me how it works. She knelt at the upper end of a grindstone, called a metate—a saddle-shaped platform on three inverted pyramidal legs, hewn from a single piece of volcanic rock (fig. 1.7). She mounded a handful of barley, took the mano, a stone shaped like a squared-off rolling pin, in both hands with her thumbs facing back to nudge the grain into place, and, using the whole weight of her upper body, sheared the mano over the grain. After half a dozen motions, she had broken the grains, which now clustered at the bottom end of the metate. Carefully scraping them up with her fingertips, she moved them back to the top, and started shearing again, this time producing white streaks of flour. By the time she had sheared the grain from top to bottom five or six times, she had produced a handful of flour.

Even at a distance, he recognized Emma sprawled headlong in the street, and he broke into a run. The road was empty, so was the boardwalk. He knelt beside her and helped her sit up. “Emma . . . honey, are you okay?” Tears streaked her dusty cheeks. “I-I lost my Aunt Kenny, and”—she hiccupped a sob—“m-my mommy’s gone.” Her face crumpled. “Oh, little one . . . come here.” He gathered her to him, and she came without hesitation. He stood and wiped her tears, and checked for injuries. No broken bones. Nothing but a skinned knee that a little soapy water—and maybe a sugar stick—would fix right up. “Shh . . . it’s okay.” He smoothed the hair on the back of her head, and her little arms came around his neck. A lump rose in his throat. “I won’t let anything happen to you.” Her sobs came harder. “Clara fell down too, Mr. Wyatt.” She drew back and held up the doll. “She’s all dirty. And she stinks.” Wyatt tried his best not to smile. Clara was indeed filthy. And wet. Apparently she’d gone for a swim in the same mud puddle Emma had fallen in. Only it wasn’t just mud, judging from the smell. “Here . . .” He gently chucked her beneath the chin. “Let’s see if we can find your Aunt Kenny. You want to?” The little girl nodded with a hint of uncertainty. “But I got my dress all dirty. She’s gonna be mad.” Knowing there might be some truth to that, he also knew Miss Ashford would be worried sick. “Do you remember where you were with Aunt Kenny before you got lost?” Emma shook her head. “I was talkin’ to my friend, and I looked up . . .” She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “And Aunt Kenny was gone.” Wyatt knew better than to think it was McKenna Ashford who had wandered away. “We’ll find her, don’t you worry.” “Clara’s dress is dirty like mine, huh?” She held the doll right in front of his face. Wyatt paused, unable to see it clearly. Easily supporting Emma’s weight, he took Clara and did his best to wipe the dirt and mud from the doll’s dress and its once-yellow strands of hair. His efforts only made a bigger mess, but Emma’s smile said she was grateful. “She likes you.” Emma put a hand to his cheek, then frowned. “Your face is itchy.” Knowing what she meant, he laughed and rubbed his stubbled jaw. He’d bathed and shaved last night in preparation for church this morning, half hoping he might see McKenna and Emma there. But they hadn’t attended. “My face is itchy, huh?” She squeezed his cheek in response, and he made a chomping noise, pretending he was trying to bite her. She pulled her hand back, giggling. Instinctively, he hugged her close and she laid her head on his shoulder. Something deep inside gave way. This is what it would have been like if his precious little Bethany had lived. He rubbed Emma’s back, taking on fresh pain as he glimpsed a fragment of what he’d been denied by the deaths of his wife and infant daughter so many years ago. “Here, you can carry her.” Emma tried to stuff Clara into his outer vest pocket, but the doll wouldn’t fit. Wyatt tucked her inside his vest instead and positioned its scraggly yarn head to poke out over the edge, hoping it would draw a smile. Which it did.

Sweat streaked her face and darkened her red hair. Her free hand was scratched and bleeding where she had scraped it against a thorn tree. He caught that small hand in his and held it up to examine the wound. The tip of a broken thorn was embedded in her palm. He raised her hand to his lips and felt the splinter with the tip of his tongue. She gasped and pulled her hand back. “Be still,” he admonished. “Do you want me to cut it out with my knife?” A thorn could fester and turn flesh black with poison. Dead, she was of no use to him. She shook her head. Her hand trembled as she held it out to him. Her sky eyes were wary, the expression like that of a doe he had once seen crossing a frozen lake in winter. The ice had been rotten, and it creaked ominously with each step the deer took. Still she had continued on until she reached the far bank and safety. He wondered if firm earth waited for this female with the strange blue eyes. Eventual safety or . . . A shudder of revulsion rippled through him. War should be between men, he thought. And no matter how much contempt he felt for Simon Brandt and those he led to Indian country, he could not find it in his heart to despise this courageous woman, even if she was without honor. Gently, he bent and brushed his lips against her hand, then, when he found the thorn with his tongue, he closed his teeth on it and pulled it free. Blood welled up from her palm as he spat out the bit of wood. He scooped up a handful of snow and pressed it against the injury. She blinked. Moisture glistened in her round eyes and for a second he thought she might begin to cry. Then her eyes narrowed and the expression gleaming there hardened. Again, Talon reminded himself that she was his enemy’s wife, and that she wished him dead.

By then dawn had broken across the sky in a spectacular bloody mess; yellow as scrambled egg and streaked the colour of blood. It cast a strange orange light along the damp Lambeth Road. Behind me I heard sparrows twittering on the vale. And finches played leapfrog along the wall. But in that peculiar dawn light, hidden beneath the fringe of the woodland, directly across the road from me in the morning shadows, stood two chilling figures. The Charweed sisters.

It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the sound I heard when I was 9 and my father slammed the front door so hard behind him I swear to god it shook the whole house. For the next 3 years I watched my mother break her teeth on vodka bottles. I think she stopped breathing when he left. I think part of her died. I think he took her heart with him when he walked out. Her chest is empty, just a shattered mess or cracked ribs and depression pills. It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s all the blood in the sink. It’s the night that I spent 12 hours in the emergency room waiting to see if my sister was going to be okay, after the boy she loved, told her he didn’t love her anymore. It’s the crying, and the fluorescent lights, and white sneakers and pale faces and shaky breaths and blood. So much blood. It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the time that I had to stay up for two days straight with my best friend while she cried and shrieked and threw up on my bedroom floor because her boyfriend fucked his ex. I swear to god she still has tear streaks stained onto her cheeks. I think when you love someone, it never really goes away. It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s the six weeks we had a substitute in English because our teacher was getting divorced and couldn’t handle getting out of bed. When she came back she was smiling. But her hands shook so hard when she held her coffee, you could see that something was broken inside. And sometimes when things break, you can’t fix them. Nothing ever goes back to how it was. I got an A in English that year. I think her head was always spinning too hard to read any essays. It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s that I do.

Nesta gritted her teeth, trying to haul Cassian up once more. A broken sound of pain ripped from him. “Go! ” he barked at her. “I can’t,” she breathed, voice breaking. “I can’t.” The same words Rhys had given him. Cassian grunted in pain, but lifted his bloodied hands—to cup her face. “I have no regrets in my life, but this.” His voice shook with every word. “That we did not have time. That I did not have time with you, Nesta.” She didn’t stop him as he leaned up and kissed her—lightly. As much as he could manage. Cassian said softly, brushing away the tear that streaked down her face, “I will find you again in the next world—the next life. And we will have that time. I promise.

They’d left behind their stone houses in Caer Luel and beautiful white fountains, their red-tile roofs and straight roads, their perfectly round red bowls with pictures of dogs hunting deer around the rim, their exact corners and glass cups. And now the marble statues had lost their paint and stood melancholy white streaked with moss; tiles had blown off in storms and been patched with reed; men built fire sands directly on the cracked and broken remnants of once-brilliant mosaics.

The wind had risen, and was wailing over the marshes, sighing among the harsh herbage, the sea-lavender, sovereign wood, and wild asparagus. Not a cloud was visible. The sky was absolutely unblurred and thick besprint with stars. Jupiter burned in the south, and cast a streak of silver over the ebbing waters. The young people stood silent by each other for a moment, and their hearts beat fast. Other matters had broken in on and troubled the pleasant current of their love; but now the thought of these was swept aside, and their hearts rose and stretched towards each other. They had known each other for many years, and the friendship of childhood had insensibly ripened in their hearts to love.

...And looking back, at least we got to state our love...before our world in Orleans ended in a symphony of broken glass. Earlier that evening, I had sat on the porch with Matthieu-Michele, as Cross and Christy watched over their Grandpa Timothy's comatose body in the back bedroom. I looked down into Timothy's face and wept. Timmy already looked dead. He was deathly pale, and his hair was heavily streaked with grey. "Don't cry, Uncle Obadiah," Matthieu-Michele said tenderly. "Just have faith, and love Him. Believe in Him, and keep preaching His Word." "And here I thought that you were a man of science, like your Daddy Matt." "I cannot be both?" he smiled gently, as he took my hand and led me out on the back porch. He lowered me into a chair, and seated himself beside me. "Look at the stars," he said softly. "However could I believe in the vastness and the great wonder of the universe itself, and not in He who created it? Science and Theology go hand-in-hand; they are not polar opposites. We must remember, the Holy Bible is only a guide. God isn't just a quick-fix solution for all of our problems. He isn't a pill that we pop to make everything go away. Instead, He is a shepherd, looking out for us...loving us from a great distance and calling out to us constantly...and sometimes, things get lost in the translation. We, for example, as men, will try to weave our own selfish desires and prejudices in with His. That is the greatest sin of all, the great sin of mankind. It frightens people away from His Word and His Grace. They believe that He hates them, that it’s the voice of God condemning them, rather than the blackened hearts of the misguided men who twist His words to suit their doctrine of anger and misunderstanding. Their words are straight from the evil core of mankind, who, in their foolishness, try to take on the guise of God." I leaned upon him heavily, the tears wet upon my cheeks. "And to think that there were times when I wondered if I did any good at all," I sighed, "But His Word lives in your heart." Matthieu-Michele embraced me in his wings. "Uncle, you are a wonder!" he smiled. "Never doubt it. My father couldn't ask for a better vessel for His Word." "I love you, Boy," I whispered. "You and Croccifixio and Christophe...we will always be family, and nothing will ever part us--" ~*~*~*~ ...And it was over, just like that. It happened so quickly. The window in the front room exploded in a rain of glass, and two soldiers seized Arik. Two came for me as well, and I surrendered. Arik struggled, and was silenced with a blow to the back of the head. Matthieu-Michele--who had been behind me--was mysteriously absent, and Cross, Christy, Morgan and Simone were nowhere in sight. Matthieu-Michele must have thrown up a psychic bubble around them, and around Timothy's body, as Arik and I were manacled and taken out into the street. A barred wagon awaited us there, and we were roughly forced into it...

My hands are wet from sweat. The air conditioner is broken again and it’s too hot to go outside. I run my sweaty palm along the leather arm of the couch, leaving a streak of sweat behind the path of my hand. I wonder where sweat comes from? I wonder where leather comes from? My mother told me it’s made from cows, but I know she’s a liar, so I don’t believe her. How could leather be made out of cows? I’ve touched a cow before and they’re sort of fuzzy. They don’t look like leather to me. Leather looks more like it’s made from dinosaurs than cows. I bet leather really is made out of dinosaurs. I don’t know why my mother always lies to me. She lies to Daddy, too. I know she lies to him, because she gets in trouble for it a lot. Daddy always tells me not to trust whores. I don’t know what a whore is, but I know it’s something my Daddy hates. Sometimes when he gets mad at my mom, he calls her a whore. Maybe a whore is another word for liar and that’s why he hates them so much. I wish my mother wasn’t a whore. I wish she would stop lying, so she wouldn’t get in trouble so much. I don’t like watching her get in trouble. Daddy says it’s good for me, though. He says if I want to grow up and be a man, I need to see what a woman looks like when she cries. Daddy says a woman’s tears make men weak, and the more I see their tears when I’m younger, the less I’ll believe their lies when I’m older. Sometimes when he punishes my mother for being a whore, he makes me watch her cry so that I’ll grow up knowing that all the whores cry and it shouldn’t bother me. “Don’t trust anyone, Asa,” he always tells me. “Especially the whores.

Restless Shadows [Verse] Done things I'm ashamed of regret glows in the dark Cried in the night with demons tearing me apart Hope someday you'll forgive me lord I'm a broken spark Lost my way no light no path can't even see the start [Verse 2] Battled bottles and needles scars on my weary soul Took each hit felt each sting down that endless hole Try to climb back up but it’s a hard fought road I stroll Still got faith in the dark my repentant heart a goal [Chorus] Restless shadows chasing me In the cold winds they blow Lord can you hear my plea Through the haze I go Addiction chains that bind me tight In the night I scream Help me find the way to light End this broken dream [Verse 3] Stumbling through the wreckage haunted by my past Prayed for strength to lift me make this torment the last Slept in gutters woke up in the vast fields of the damned Seeking solace in the bottle never felt so outcast [Bridge] See the gateways closed tight but glimpses of your light Tired & worn down lord just wanna make it right Help me tear down these walls fight back the endless night In your arms I'll find solace if you guide my flight [Verse 4] Dust in my veins and fire behind my eyes Walking through the ashes of my life's demise Though the crimson streaked tears blind my sight Still I whisper to you of my soul's cries

Nesta surged to her feet, staggering across the clearing, blood at her mouth from where he'd hit her, and threw herself to her knees before Cassian. 'Get up,' she sobbed, hauling at his shoulder. 'Get up.' He tried- and failed. 'You're too heavy,' she pleaded, but still tried to raise him, fingers scrabbling in his black, bloodied armour. 'I can't- he's coming-' 'Go,' Cassian groaned. Her powers had stopped hurling the king across the forest. He now stalked toward them, brushing off splinters and leaves from his jacket- taking his time. Knowing she would not leave. Savouring the awaiting slaughter. Nesta gritted her teeth, trying to haul Cassian up once more. A broken sound of pain ripped from him. 'Go!' he barked at her. 'I can't,' she breathed, voice breaking. 'I can't.' The same words Rhys had given him. Cassian grunted in pain, but lifted his bloodied hands- to cup her face. 'I have no regrets in my life, but this.' HIs voice shook with every word. 'That we did not have time. That I did not have time with you, Nesta.' She didn't stop him as he leaned up and kissed her- lightly. As much as he could manage. Cassian said softly, brushing away the tear that streaked down her face. 'I will find you again in the next world- the next life. And we will have that time. I promise.' The King of Hybern stepped into that clearing, dark power wafting from his fingertips. And even the Cauldron seemed to pause in surprise- surprise or some... feeling as Nesta looked at the king with death twining around his hands, then down at Cassian. And covered Cassian's body with her own. Cassian went still- then his hand slid over her back. Together. They'd go together.

Scott Huettel, a neuroeconomist at Duke University, has shown that the ACC reacts roughly three times more vigorously if a pattern reverses after eight repetitions than it does after a three-in-a-row pattern is broken. The stock market provides uncanny real-world proof of Huettel’s laboratory findings: The more times in a row a company has exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, the worse its stock gets whacked when it finally misses the analysts’ forecasts. While a shortfall after a run of three good earnings reports trims just 3.4% off the price of the typical growth stock, a miss after a streak of eight positive quarters hacks off 7.9%. So

The first rosy streaks of dawn had broken through the darkness and he watched them in awe as he walked, oblivious to the pant legs that were already sopping with dew. Every day begins with a miracle, he thought suddenly. The streaks were growing larger, changing colors by the second.

The house was two stories in height. It was of buff brick, with white trim about the windows and the doorway. It was not large, but it occupied an extremely advantageous position. It sat on a corner plot, so that it faced both ways at once, without obstruction. Moreover, the ground-plot itself extended beyond the house, if not lavishly at least amply, so that it touched none of its neighbors. There was room left for strips of sod in the front, and for a garden in the back. It was not, of course, strictly presentable yet. There were several small messy piles of broken, discarded bricks left out before it, the sod was not in place, and the window glass was smirched with streaks of paint. But something almost reverent came into the man’s face as he looked at it. His lips parted slightly and his eyes softened. He hadn’t known there could be such a beautiful house. It was the most beautiful house he had ever seen. It was his.

Still, he pulled firmly at the door, knowing how it swelled and stuck in wet weather. He might have wished to see their faces once more. The face that met him was under a fireman’s helmet, lit by a flashlight held low and expertly angled. The light caught the silver needles of rain, in the air, off the rim of the black hat. It showed him a mouth and a chin and the broad shoulders under the wet rain gear without blinding him or turning the man himself into a grotesque. “I only wanted to warn you,” the man said. He moved the flashlight across his body, to the shrubs beside the steps and then to the grass and then to the weeping willow at the edge of the yard, beside the house. The streetlights were out. Following the moving beam of white light, John Keane saw the grass of his small lawn stir like a rising wave and the roots of the tree—thin as an arm, bent here and there like an elbow—breaking through. The fireman moved the light until it caught the base of the tree where a wider swath of dirt was opening like a mouth, an unhinged jaw filled with broken roots and dirt, and then it closed up again, as if with a breath. “We were driving by and saw it,” the fireman said. “That tree’s gonna fall. It’ll probably fall straight back, but you might want to get your family downstairs. Keep them to this side of the house.” He felt the wind and the rain on his bare ankles, against the hems of his thin pajama pants. He looked beyond the young fireman. In the street, there was no sign of the fire truck or car that had brought him. No coach, either. “Yes,” he said, thinking himself foolish, in his thin pajamas. “Thank you.” “There are trees down all over,” the man added. He raised his chin and in the darkness his eyes seemed as black and wet as his coat. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or thirty. “Take care of your family,” he said, and turned, using his flashlight to get himself down the three steps that led to the door. Squinting against the rain, John Keane watched him cross the path to the sidewalk, the circle of white light leading him, first to the right and then across the street where he might have disappeared altogether, leaving only the pale beam of his flashlight and a flashing reflection of two streaks of silver on his back, and then, as he apparently rounded the opposite corner, not even that.

The sun breaks through the clouds, streaking color across a city that struggles to find reasons to meet the day.

Maybe because there are so few Icelanders in the world, we know next to nothing about them. We assume they are more or less Scandinavian—a gentle people who just want everyone to have the same amount of everything. They are not. They have a feral streak in them, like a horse that’s just pretending to be broken.

A memory unearthed itself: the way his wife had looked in the weeks following the news, the way she looked at things but never really saw them. The way she always seemed to be staring at something he couldn’t make out. The broken-down pits of her eyes, high on painkillers, opiates, staring at the wall, silent tears streaking drug-slacked cheeks. Maybe that had finished them off even before the divorce papers. Neither of them could live with what happened and neither wanted to watch the other one die so slowly.

The wave of cockroaches flew up above Hajime and the others, then, as if being pulled down by gravity, crashed into them as one solid mass. The party’s field of vision was filled with wriggling black bodies. Many of the cockroaches were squished on impact and left disgusting brown streaks as their bodies slid down the barrier. Those that survived crawled all around the barrier’s surface, seeking for a way in. “I-I can’t—” Disgusted beyond reason, Suzu fainted. Kouki rushed over to Suzu and grabbed her as she fell. “Suzu, don’t fall asleep! If you fall asleep it’s all over for us!” That was no exaggeration. If the party was swallowed up by that wave of cockroaches, they would no doubt be utterly broken mentally.

Despite the cold outside, she was wearing a cropped white shirt and tight dark blue jeans that sat low, revealing a tattoo of a broken heart on her hip. Her hair was bleached white-blond with about an inch of silver-sprinkled dark roots showing. Her mascara had run and there were black streaks on her cheeks. She looked drip-dried, like she'd been walking in the rain, though there hadn't been rain for days. She smelled like cigarette smoke and river water.

she was going straight into Hollywood Station. 9 Ballard kept all her work suits in her locker at the station and dressed for her shifts after arriving each night. She had four different suits that followed the same cut and style but differed in color and pattern. She dry-cleaned them two at a time so that she always had a suit and a backup available. After arriving nearly eight hours early for her shift, Ballard changed into the gray suit that was her favorite. She accompanied it with a white blouse. She kept four white blouses and one navy in her locker as well. It was Friday and that meant Ballard was scheduled to work solo. She and Jenkins had to cover seven shifts a week, so Ballard took Tuesday to Saturday and Jenkins covered Sunday to Thursday, giving them three overlap days. When they took vacation time, their slots usually went unfilled. If a detective in the division was needed during the early-morning hours, then someone had to be called in from home. Working solo suited Ballard because she didn’t have to run decisions by her partner. On this day, if he had known what Ballard’s plan was, Jenkins would have put the kibosh on it. But because it was Friday, they would not be working together again until the following Tuesday, and she was clear to make her own moves. After suiting up, Ballard checked herself in the mirror over the locker room sinks. She combed her sun-streaked hair with her fingers. That was all she usually had to do. Constant immersion in salt water and exposure to the sun over years had left her with broken, flyaway hair that she kept no longer than chin length out of necessity. It went well with her tan and gave off a slightly butch look that reduced advances from other officers. Olivas had been an exception. Ballard squeezed some Visine drops into her eyes, which were red from the salt water. After that she was good to go. She went into the break room to brew a double-shot espresso on the Keurig. She would be operating now and through the night on less than three hours of sleep. She needed to start stacking caffeine. She kept her eye on the wall clock because she wanted to time her arrival in the detective bureau at shortly before four p.m., when she knew the lead detective in the CAPs unit would also be watching the clock, getting ready to split for the weekend. She had at least fifteen minutes to kill, so she went upstairs to the offices of the buy-bust team next to the vice unit. Major Narcotics was located downtown but each division operated

A puppy needs an unbelievable amount of educating. It is a task to wear threadbare the teacher’s patience and to do all kinds of things to the temper. Small wonder that many humans lose patience and temper during the process and idiotically resort to the whip, to the boot toe and to bellowing—in which case the puppy is never decently educated, but emerges from the process with a cowed and broken spirit or with an incurable streak of meanness that renders him worthless. Time, patience, firmness, wisdom, temper control, gentleness—these be the six absolute essentials for training a puppy.

She doubled over until her forehead touched Arion's mane. She rocked and murmured, clutching her wrist like a baseball player who had just broken her hand and was trying to fight the pain. At last she straightened. She took a shaky breath. She dismounted, wrapped her arms around Arion's neck, and whispered something in his ear. The horse nodded. Hazel stepped back and he raced away - a streak of white heading west towards the Caldecott Tunnel. I wanted to warn Hazel there was nothing to find there, but I didn't. I understood heartache a little better now. Each person's grief has its own life span; it needs to follow its own path.