Stuffed Day Quotes

Hey, all the cool kids are sleeping with stuffed animals these days.

Hugh consoled me, saying, "Don't let it get to you. There are plenty of things you're good at." When asked for some examples, he listed vacuuming and naming stuffed animals. He says he can probably come up with a few more, but he'll need some time to think.

the best part was pulling down the shades stuffing the doorbell with rags putting the phone in the refrigerator and going to bed for 3 or 4 days. and the next best part was nobody ever missed me.

people used to tell me that i had beautiful hands told me so often, in fact, that one day i started to believe them until i asked my photographer father, “hey daddy could i be a hand model” to which he said no way, i dont remember the reason he gave me and i wouldve been upset, but there were far too many stuffed animals to hold too many homework assignment to write, too many boys to wave at too many years to grow, we used to have a game, my dad and i about holding hands cus we held hands everywhere, and every time either he or i would whisper a great big number to the other, pretending that we were keeping track of how many times we had held hands that we were sure, this one had to be 8 million 2 thousand 7 hundred and fifty three. hands learn more than minds do, hands learn how to hold other hands, how to grip pencils and mold poetry, how to tickle pianos and dribble a basketball, and grip the handles of a bicycle how to hold old people, and touch babies , i love hands like i love people, they're the maps and compasses in which we navigate our way through life, some people read palms to tell your future, but i read hands to tell your past, each scar marks the story worth telling, each calloused palm, each cracked knuckle is a missed punch or years in a factory, now ive seen middle eastern hands clenched in middle eastern fists pounding against each other like war drums, each country sees theyre fists as warriors and others as enemies. even if fists alone are only hands. but this is not about politics, no hands arent about politics, this is a poem about love, and fingers. fingers interlock like a beautiful zipper of prayer. one time i grabbed my dads hands so that our fingers interlocked perfectly but he changed positions, saying no that hand hold is for your mom. kids high five, but grown ups, we learn how to shake hands, you need a firm hand shake,but dont hold on too tight, but dont let go too soon, but dont hold down for too long, but hands are not about politics, when did it become so complicated. i always thought its simple. the other day my dad looked at my hands, as if seeing them for the first time, and with laughter behind his eye lids, with all the seriousness a man of his humor could muster, he said you know you got nice hands, you could’ve been a hand model, and before the laughter can escape me, i shake my head at him, and squeeze his hand, 8 million 2 thousand 7hundred and fifty four.

But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her. There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.

I don’t like parties. Someone always tries to assassinate someone I actually like, and there are never enough of those little stuffed mushroom caps.

I snuggle closer to him in my sleep and my whimpering subsides to a contented sigh. It almost hurts to see Raffe closing his eyes and holding me the way a kid might hold a stuffed animal for comfort. I reach out my phantom hand to stroke his face. But of course, I can’t feel him. I can only feel what the sword remembers. I run my hand along the lines of his neck and the muscles of his shoulder, anyway. Imagining the smooth warmth of him. Remembering the feeling of being held in his arms.

She stuffed in more waffles, and thought if every day started off with sex and waffles, people would maybe be less inclined to kill each other.

Listen, now, you're going to die, Ray-mond K. K. K. Hessel, tonight. You might die in one second or in one hour, you decide. So lie to me. Tell me the first thing off the top of your head. Make something up. I don't give a shit. I have a gun. Finally, you were listening and coming out of the little tragedy in your head. Fill in the blank. What does Raymond Hessel want to be when he grows up? Go home, you said you just wanted to go home, please. No shit, I said. But after that, how did you want to spend your life? If you could do anything in the world. Make something up. You didn't know. Then you're dead right now, I said. I said, now turn your head. Death to commence in ten, in nine, in eight. A vet, you said. You want to be a vet, a veterinarian. You could be in school working your ass off, Raymond Hessel, or you could be dead. You choose. I stuffed your wallet into the back of your jeans. So you really wanted to be an animal doctor. I took the saltwater muzzle of the gun off one cheek and pressed it against another. Is that what you've always wanted to be, Dr. Raymond K. K. K. K. Hessel, a veterinarian?... So, I said, go back to school. If you wake up tomorrow morning, you find a way to get back into school. I have your license. I know who you are. I know where you live. I'm keeping your license, and I'm going to check on you, mister Raymond K. Hessel. In three months, and then six months, and then a year, and if you aren't back in school on your way to being a veterinarian, you will be dead... Raymond K. K. Hessel, your dinner is going to taste better than any meal you've ever eaten, and tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your life.

Nobody pours stuffing like you do, my friend.

But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little flat--the ardent, voluble chats after the day's study; the cozy dinners and fresh, light breakfasts; the interchange of ambitions--ambitions interwoven each with the other's or else inconsiderable--the mutual help and inspiration; and--overlook my artlessness--stuffed olives and cheese sandwiches at 11 p.m.

If you have a son, how will you love him? She is pacing the living room, while the Thanksgiving Day Parade plays behind her, a montage of inflated cartoon bodies, floating slow down 6th Avenue, smiles painted onto their faces. I consider not responding. I consider explaining that I can love him and not trust him. I consider saying that I won’t love him at all. Just to scare her. Instead, I say, If I am ever murdered, like, body found in a ditch, mouth stuffed with dirt, stocking around my neck, identified by my toenails, please don’t go looking for a guilty woman. ("My Grandmother Asks Why I Don't Trust Men")

And it was funny. The silence of him had a bizarre effect on her. Normally, she was the quiet one in situations, preferring to keep her own council and not share her thoughts on anything. But with John's mute presence, she felt curiously compelled to talk. "I'm stuffed," she said, lying back against the pillows. As he cocked a brow and lifted the last Danish, she shook her head. "God...no. I couldn't manage another thing." And it was only then that he began to eat. "You waited for me ?" she said, frowning. When he ducked her gaze and shrugged, she cursed softly. " You didn't have to." Another shrug. As she watched him, she murmured, "You have beautiful table manners." His blush was the color of Valentine's Day and she had to tell her heart to calm the fuck down as it started to beat fast.

Live or die, but don't poison everything... Well, death's been here for a long time -- it has a hell of a lot to do with hell and suspicion of the eye and the religious objects and how I mourned them when they were made obscene by my dwarf-heart's doodle. The chief ingredient is mutilation. And mud, day after day, mud like a ritual, and the baby on the platter, cooked but still human, cooked also with little maggots, sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother, the damn bitch! Even so, I kept right on going on, a sort of human statement, lugging myself as if I were a sawed-off body in the trunk, the steamer trunk. This became perjury of the soul. It became an outright lie and even though I dressed the body it was still naked, still killed. It was caught in the first place at birth, like a fish. But I play it, dressed it up, dressed it up like somebody's doll. Is life something you play? And all the time wanting to get rid of it? And further, everyone yelling at you to shut up. And no wonder! People don't like to be told that you're sick and then be forced to watch you come down with the hammer. Today life opened inside me like an egg and there inside after considerable digging I found the answer. What a bargain! There was the sun, her yolk moving feverishly, tumbling her prize -- and you realize she does this daily! I'd known she was a purifier but I hadn't thought she was solid, hadn't known she was an answer. God! It's a dream, lovers sprouting in the yard like celery stalks and better, a husband straight as a redwood, two daughters, two sea urchings, picking roses off my hackles. If I'm on fire they dance around it and cook marshmallows. And if I'm ice they simply skate on me in little ballet costumes. Here, all along, thinking I was a killer, anointing myself daily with my little poisons. But no. I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar. Even with the witches' gymnastics they trust my incalculable city, my corruptible bed. O dearest three, I make a soft reply. The witch comes on and you paint her pink. I come with kisses in my hood and the sun, the smart one, rolling in my arms. So I say Live and turn my shadow three times round to feed our puppies as they come, the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown, despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy! Despite the pails of water that waited, to drown them, to pull them down like stones, they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue and fumbling for the tiny tits. Just last week, eight Dalmatians, 3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood each like a birch tree. I promise to love more if they come, because in spite of cruelty and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens, I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann. The poison just didn't take. So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

. . . my obsession with gratefulness. I can't stop. Just now, I press the elevator button and am thankful that it arrives quickly. I get onto the elevator and am thankful that the elevator cable didn't snap and plummet me to the basement. I go to the fifth floor and am thankful that I didn't have to stop on the second or third or fourth floor. I get out and am thankful that Julie left the door unlocked so I don't have to rummage for my King Kong key ring. I walk in, and am thankful that Jasper is home and healthy and stuffing his face with pineapple wedges. And on and on. I'm actually muttering to myself, 'Thank you. . .thank you. . . thank you.' It's an odd way to live. But also kind of great and powerful. I've never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.

During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison. On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.

Other freshmen were already moving into their dormitory rooms when we arrived, with their parents helping haul. I saw boxes of paperbacks, stereo equipment, Dylan albums and varnished acoustic guitars, home-knitted afghans, none as brilliant as mine, Janis posters, Bowie posters, Day-Glo bedsheets, hacky sacks, stuffed bears. But as we carried my trunk up two flights of stairs terror invaded me. Although I was studying French because I dreamed of going to Paris, I actually dreaded leaving home, and in the end my parents did not want me to leave, either. But this is how children are sacrificed into their futures: I had to go, and here I was. We walked back down the stairs. I was too numb to cry, but I watched my mother and father as they stood beside the car and waved. That moment is a still image; I can call it up as if it were a photograph. My father, so thin and athletic, looked almost frail with shock, while my mother, whose beauty was still remarkable, and who was known on the reservation for her silence and reserve, had left off her characteristic gravity. Her face and my father's were naked with love. It wasn't something thatwe talked about—love. But they allowed me this one clear look at it. It blazed from them. And then they left.

Isolation, I was reminded again and again, is a danger. But what if one's real context is in books? Some days, going from one book to another, preoccupied with thoughts that were of no importance, I would feel a rare moment of serenity: all that could not be solved in my life was merely a trifle as long as I kept it at a distance. Between that suspended life and myself were these dead people and imagined characters. One could spend one's days among them as a child arranges a circle of stuffed animals when the darkness of night closes in.

I bought a big brown stuffed animal. You know, for dinner.

We know too much about people in these days; we hear too much. Our ears, our minds, our mouths, are stuffed with personalities. Don't mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

Two-Bit was the only one wearing a jacket; he had a couple of cans of beer stuffed in it. He always gets high before a rumble. Before anything else, too, come to think of it. I shook my head. I’d hate to see the day when I had to get my nerve from a can.

A fig for my opinion! If you fall in love with Mr. Osmond what will you care for that?" "Not much, probably. But meanwhile it has a certain importance. The more information one has about one's dangers the better." "I don't agree to that—it may make them dangers. We know too much about people in these days; we hear too much. Our ears, our minds, our mouths, are stuffed with personalities. Don't mind anything any one tells you about any one else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

Life has changed a lot, you know. You didn’t used to get all this food inside food inside food when I was a girl. The other day I was eating a mushroom and found it had been stuffed with prawns. I’ve got so many misgivings over this craze, Boy. It’s flying in the face of nature.

These modern analysts! They charge so much. In my day, for five marks Freud himself would treat you. For ten marks, he would treat you and press your pants. For fifteen marks, Freud would let you treat him, and that included a choice of any two vegetables. Thirty dollars an hour! Fifty dollars an hour! The Kaiser only got twelve and a quarter for being Kaiser! And he had to walk to work! And the length of treatment! Two years! Five years! If one of us couldn’t cure a patient in six months we would refund his money, take him to any musical revue and he would receive either a mahogany fruit bowl or a set of stainless steel carving knives. I remember you could always tell the patients Jung failed with, as he would give them large stuffed pandas.

Fridays! They are the worst. Days stuffed with itsy-bitsy multicoloured tasks that fill every second of the day, but like M&M´s fail to nourish in any way.

Then, Valentine’s Day came. There was a dance, and balloons and flowers and cheaply made rings and all sorts of lame teddy bears and stuffed animals, as if teenagers can be wooed with the same shit as five-year-olds. It was the Dietzes’ most hated holiday of the year, too, because it dealt with the consumerization of something sacred. Mom and Dad had agreed never to buy each other anything on the day. It was a false, Hallmark holiday. A sham. A moneymaking sideshow for insecure couples who didn’t have true love. I agreed with this, for the most part.

I can't believe it's actually happening. This is independent adulthood, this is what it feels like. Shouldn't there be some sort of ritual? In certain remote African tribes there'd be some incredible four day rites of passage ceremony involving tattooing and potent hallucinogenic drugs extracted from tree-frogs, and village elders smearing my body with monkey blood, but here,rites of passage is all about three new pairs of pants and stuffing your duvet in a bin-liner.

I might have starved to death. I would be mud-slick, stuffed to the guts with cold and hopelessness, and my body might know it was doomed and give up on its own. That would be better than idly winding wool on a snowy day, waiting for someone to kill me.

Friendship was a thing of extraordinary value, ever since it had become clear to both of them that lovers never lasted, and that families were the traps you walked into on major holidays and emerged from the next day, stuffed with carbohydrates and seething.

If someone tells you they love turkey smothered with cranberry sauce, that they love it more than anything else in the world, you might spend the day roasting that someone a turkey and smothering it with cranberry sauce. If that same someone then takes one little bite and says, 'That'll be all, thank you,' you'll likely go red in the face and hurl both these turkeys our the nearest window because clearly, this person never loved turkey smothered with cranberry sauce in the first place. Little bites are never enough when you love something. When you love something, you want it all. That's how it works. And that's how it was for Archer. Archer didn't want a little taste of adventure with a side of leftover discoveries. Archer wanted the whole turkey and he wanted it stuffed with enough salts and spices to turn his taste buds into sparklers.

Exactly one month after he was convicted, when the lights were dimmed and the detention officers made a final sweep of the catwalk, Peter reached down and tugged off his right sock. He turned on his side in the lower bunk, so that he was facing the wall. He fed the sock into his mouth, stuffing it as far back as it would go. When it got hard to breathe, he fell into a dream. He was still eighteen, but it was the first day of kindergarten. He was carrying his backpack and his Superman lunch box. The orange school bus pulled up and, with a sigh, split open its gaping jaws. Peter climbed the steps and faced the back of the bus, but this time, he was the only student on it. He walked down the aisle to the very end, near the emergency exit. He put his lunch box down beside him and glanced out the rear window. It was so bright he thought the sun itself must be chasing them down the highway. 'Almost there,' a voice said, and Peter turned around to look at the driver. But just as there had been no passengers, there was no one at the wheel. Here was the amazing thing: in his dream, Peter wasn't scared. He knew, somehow, that he was headed exactly where he'd wanted to go.

Being loved didn't mean you were alive. People loved lots of inanimate things: stuffed animals, cars, puppets. Being alive meant something else. "Because you're real, Pupkin," Louise said. "And nothing real can last forever. That's how you know you're real. Because one day you die.

Motherhood is when eating chicken soup; the kids get the chicken and you get the soup and you would still feel happily stuffed.

She’d heard my theory on funnel cake and celery stalker men before. Most men were either like funnel cake: delicious and interesting, but who at the end of the day just aren’t good for the heart or complexion. Or they were celery: a sensible, healthy choice that didn’t really bring much to the table but an occasional crunch. If you OD on celery, you end up bingeing on cake behind closed doors. Funnel cake, while warm and delicious, is difficult to make. But you go there because you long for it like the double-twist stomach-dropping roller coaster as soon as you arrive at the amusement park. Wet ribbons of batter crackle and pop until golden and crisp, yielding in the center. The steamy swirls of tender yellow dough absorb confectioners’ sugar like pores. When the luxurious fat melts on your tongue, you exhale. You’ve got sticky batter, dribbling down spouts, leaving rings on your clean countertops, splattering oil growing darker and beginning to smoke. Layers of paper towels and oil-draining weapons clutter your space. With funnel cake, you’ve got steps to follow. Procedures. Rules. No one makes rules about celery. It’s always around for the snacking. You choose it when you’re dieting or trying not to consume too many wings over football. Come to think of it, you don’t even bother eating it when you diet. Instead it’s a conduit for blue cheese. You use it to make stocks and stuffing. It becomes filler, pantry almost.

The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at your side must surely be despising you. But he is not. He is not thinking as he looks at you, 'What an overfed lout'; he is thinking, 'One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall be able to imitate that man.' He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom Socialists, have no effective trade union, and will work twelve hours a day--they work fifteen hours, seven days a week, in many cafés. They are snobs, and they find the servile nature of their work rather congenial.

Children see God every day; they just don't call it that. It's the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It's the sweet whispers of sweet gum trees and the sounds riding the tops of honeysuckle-scented breezes. Children feel God stuffed into brown fluffy dogs with stitches strong enough to withstand a good squeeze, and on the lips of round women who can't get enough sugar from Chocolate. I began to believe that God is us and nature, beauty and love, mystery and majesty, everything right and good.

Where ya goin’?” Coleen asked. “I’m taking Lena to dinner, then we’re going dancing.” Coleen threw a hand on her hip. “You don’t smell the gumbo that’s been cooking all day? It’s your favorite. I stuffed every aquatic creature I could find into that pot. Claws and legs are hanging out all over the place.” “I’ll have some tomorrow,” Jorie said as she caught one of the screws that dropped from the blade. “I made pie, damn it. Pecan, just because I know you love it. Bring that woman here for dinner and save yourself a buck or two.” “Oh, no,” Jorie said with a laugh. “I really like her. It’s too soon to expose her to an Andolini dinner.

It was not a conspiratorial wink, nor did Hornblower attempt the hopeless task of trying to pretend he stuffed hot greasy sausages into his pockets every day of his life; the wink simply dared the old gentleman to comment on or even think of the remarkable act.

It's too bad we're not all teddy bears. More stuffing would only make us cuter and cuddlier.

He knew his parents were liars. He’d known since the day he’d found his brother’s dead body stuffed inside a suitcase.

Registration Day' by Gavin Gunhold (1899— ) Toronto Review of Poetry, 1947 On registration day at taxidermy school I distinctly saw the eyes of the stuffed moose Move.

The tire left a skid mark on the road that looked like a mustache. So I shaved it off the pavement, stuffed it in my trunk, and took it home to wear to work the next day. Ah, but that’s life, no?

If you read any poetry or stories coming out these days, you know what I mean when I say that you can smell the stench of liquor coming from the words they write. And underneath their sentences lies a pile of chicken and goat bones, and the skeletons of the innocent ones. If you poke the head of the broom into contemporary literature, you'll find a hollow wall stuffed full of money — impure, dirty money.

Restoring order of my personal universe suddenly seemed imperative, as I refolded my T-shirts, stuffed the toes of my shoes with tissue paper, and arranged all the bills in my secret stash box facing the same way, instead of tossed in sloppy and wild, as if by my evil twin. All week, I kept making lists and crossing things off them, ending each day with a sense of great accomplishment eclipsed only by complete and total exhaustion.

Spiders draw just enough silk out of their bowels to catch those half-dozen flies they need to feed themselves and their loved ones; but the rich make silk and silk and silk. Nothing can stop them. Their houses are stuffed with it. Their banks are stuffed with it, and it’s not out of their bowels they make it, but out of the bowels and lungs and eyeballs of others.

All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the night, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit. Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep.

From the first day we met, I knew I needed you in my life. You took the chaos and made it calm. You lifted my heart with your smile and awed me with your brilliant mind. I kept every secret valentine, every scribbled note, your stuffed rabbit, and the answer to every math question I gave you. I hoped one day to be the kind of man you could love, a man who would hold and cherish you, a man worthy of you, and who would protect you with the sword you are going to allow him to have at our wedding.

The people of former times [...] they're dead that's the only thing they have over the living but in their own day they were just as sickening. Picturesqueness: I don't fall for that not for one minute. Stinking filthy dirty washing cabbage-stalks what a pretentious fool you have to be to go into such ecstasies over that! And it's the same thing everywhere all the time whether they're stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it's the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I'd rather stay at home reading a thriller although they've become so dreary nowadays. The telly too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way.

She straightened up the trailer, ran the vacuum cleaner over the braided rug, spread a clean tablecloth and put fresh shelf paper in the kitchen cupboards. That was a little job. In the old days she would have stuffed the dirty paper in the stove and burned it. The electric stove was clean but it couldn’t dry socks, burn paper, raise bread or provide comfort. Cost money to run it. They called it progress.

I thought about what time is, how we're broken every second, we're losing moments all the time, leaking them away like a stuffed animal losing its stuffing, until one day they're gone an we lose everything. Forever. And then, at the same time, we're gaining seconds, moment after moment. Every one is a gift, until at the end of our lives we're sitting on a rich hoard of moments. Rich beyond imaging. Time was both those things at once.

An amusing story? She jabs the call button as if poking an eye. She doesn’t want an amusing story, she wants change, a break, not anecdotes. Her life has been stuffed with anecdotes, an endless string of the bastards, now she wants something to right for once. She wants success, or at least the hope of it.

As a teenager Valentine’s Day was a stressful time. Either I didn’t have a “girlfriend” and was forced to endure a day of hearts, cards and stuffed animals parading through my loneliness or even worse I had a “girlfriend” and felt pressure to provide just the right combination of cards, candy and stuffed animals to show the appropriate level of affection. Are flowers and a card enough? Should I get her balloons? Does she like balloons? If I don’t get her candy will she think I think she’s fat? Why did I want a girlfriend again? Valentine’s Day was a report card on how you were, or were not in some sad cases, perceived as “boyfriend” material.

THERE WILL COME A DAY . . . There will come a day when she no longer wants to hold my hand. So I will hold it while I still can. There will come a day when she no longer tells me what’s on her mind. So I will listen while she still wants to talk to me. There will come a day when she no longer says, “Watch me, Mama!” So I will observe and encourage while I still can. There will come a day when she no longer invites me to eat school lunch with her. So I will join her while I still can. There will come a day when she no longer needs my help to bake cookies or hit the tennis ball in the sweet spot. So I will stand beside her gently guiding and instructing while I still can. There will come a day when she no longer wants my opinion about clothes, friendship, death, and heaven. So I will share my views while she still wants to hear them. There will come a day when she no longer allows me to hear her prayers and her dreams. So I will fold my hands and absorb every word while I still can. There will come a day when she no longer sleeps with her beloved stuffed animal. And that day may come sooner than I think. Because sometimes unexpected events happen, causing the days to rush by, the years to tumble ahead. Sometimes what I thought I would have time to do, Like listen to her laugh, Wipe her tears, Breathe her scent, And hold her close, Will no longer be available to me. What I thought I had all the time in the world to do, May no longer be an option. The little pink dog that my child must now learn to sleep without after eight precious years reminds me that tomorrow may not allow for all the things I planned to do. So instead of being too busy, Too tired, Or too distracted when she seeks my love and attention, I will be ready and waiting To make her a well-loved child While I still can.

I see things in windows and I say to myself that I want them. I want them because I want to belong. I want to be liked by more people, I want to be held in higher regard than others. I want to feel valued, so I say to myself to watch certain shows. I watch certain shows on the television so I can participate in dialogues and conversations and debates with people who want the same things I want. I want to dress a certain way so certain groups of people are forced to be attracted to me. I want to do my hair a certain way with certain styling products and particular combs and methods so that I can fit in with the In-Crowd. I want to spend hours upon hours at the gym, stuffing my body with what scientists are calling 'superfoods', so that I can be loved and envied by everyone around me. I want to become an icon on someone's mantle. I want to work meaningless jobs so that I can fill my wallet and parentally-advised bank accounts with monetary potential. I want to believe what's on the news so that I can feel normal along with the rest of forever. I want to listen to the Top Ten on Q102, and roll my windows down so others can hear it and see that I am listening to it, and enjoying it. I want to go to church every Sunday, and pray every other day. I want to believe that what I do is for the promise of a peaceful afterlife. I want rewards for my 'good' deeds. I want acknowledgment and praise. And I want people to know that I put out that fire. I want people to know that I support the war effort. I want people to know that I volunteer to save lives. I want to be seen and heard and pointed at with love. I want to read my name in the history books during a future full of clones exactly like me. The mirror, I've noticed, is almost always positioned above the sink. Though the sink offers more depth than a mirror, and mirror is only able to reflect, the sink is held in lower regard. Lower still is the toilet, and thought it offers even more depth than the sink, we piss and shit in it. I want these kind of architectural details to be paralleled in my every day life. I want to care more about my reflection, and less about my cleanliness. I want to be seen as someone who lives externally, and never internally, unless I am able to lock the door behind me. I want these things, because if I didn't, I would be dead in the mirrors of those around me. I would be nothing. I would be an example. Sunken, and easily washed away.

Pop said life was like learning to drive. You were bound to fuck up, make mistakes, maybe even cause an accident, but if you practice and follow the rules, people didn’t have to get hurt—and one day you’d just get better at it. Just don’t . . . give it up, he said.

And he came to understand that the burial of the broken wasn't eccentric — this was what people did every day, stuffing their brokenness down, pushing it down, smoothing the surface over, making the surface look like nothing was broken underneath. Because, if people see that you are broken, they will not want to stand with you. They will migrate away from you the way groups of people walking down the street will move aside when a shambling ranting man approaches. They will look at the ground and look away so that such a person becomes invisible. So if you are such a person or just an everyday person with some broken places, some places really broken, you will pull them back from view so you can mingle with others without being seen as broken. Because if you have the look of a broken thing, if you are pushed aside and turned from, you will never find your footing again in the world.

Tristán, the pill pusher who had stuffed Karina Junco full of chemical substances. This was a great exaggeration. For one, back in those days, Tristán didn’t do any hard drugs.

The only other white people we saw during the three days we stayed there were a German couple intent on taking pictures of their stuffed sheep in a variety of locations around the world.

He translates one book of the Iliad, two of the Odyssey, plus an admirable slice of Plato’s Republic. Five lines on an average day, ten on a good one, scribbled onto yellow legal pads in his crimped pencil-writing and stuffed into boxes beneath the dining table. Sometimes he believes his translations are adequate. Usually he decides they’re terrible. He shows them to no one.

Loving your work doesn’t mean finding a job you can tolerate for eight hours a day, but rather a job that gets you flying out of bed in the morning like a Jack Russell who just had a firecracker stuffed up his ass.

Three, four, ten, thirty multi-coloured little beings with backpacks ran down the stairs, Pieces of humanity, a mass to direct and discipline. Four hundred of them were stuffed into this building six hours a day, four hundred were let out again when those six hours were up. Material. But zoom in on one single child and there you had an upholder of the world. A child with a mother and father, grandparents, relatives and friends. A child whose existence is necessary for the proper functioning of many lives. Children are fragile, and carry so many lives on their frail shoulders. Fragile is their world, controlled by adults. Everything is fragile.

What was it like to spend your whole day in rooms stuffed with thirty elementary school students and then have to come home, make dinner, and judge your kid’s fake diving competition? She’d been on her feet all day and now was crouched on the cold tile floor, I’m sure desperate for a comfy seat, warm food, and a cold beer, none of which were going to magically appear before her. These are important moments to remember. They aren’t small.

I mean to say, millions of people, no doubt, are so constituted that they scream with joy and excitement at the spectacle of a stuffed porcupine-fish or a glass jar of seeds from Western Australia - but not Bertram. No; if you will take the word of one who would not deceive you, not Bertram. By the time we had tottered out of the Gold Coast village and were working towards the Palace of Machinery, everything pointed to my shortly executing a quiet sneak in the direction of that rather jolly Planters' Bar in the West Indian section. ... There are certain moments in life when words are not needed. I looked at Biffy, Biffy looked at me. A perfect understanding linked our two souls. "?" "!" Three minutes later we had joined the Planters. I have never been in the West Indies, but I am in a position to state that in certain of the fundamentals of life they are streets ahead of our European civilisation. The man behind the counter, as kindly a bloke as I ever wish to meet, seemed to guess our requirements the moment we hove in view. Scarcely had our elbows touched the wood before he was leaping to and fro, bringing down a new bottle with each leap. A planter, apparently, does not consider he has had a drink unless it contains at least seven ingredients, and I'm not saying, mind you, that he isn't right. The man behind the bar told us the things were called Green Swizzles; and, if ever I marry and have a son, Green Swizzle Wooster is the name that will go down on the register, in memory of the day his father's life was saved at Wembley.

Horror. Horrible. The things people do these days to disrespect the dead are just awful. So we’re going to respect my dead friend properly.” “By stuffing the chimney full of fireworks.” “By stuffing the chimney full of fireworks!” She agrees.

Aaaand we have a winnerrrrr!" a man shouts into the mic in a singsong carnival voice as I lick the last of Patrick's ice cream from my fingers. "Pick out a prize for the beautiful girl." "For you," Patrick says, kneeling in front of me with a moose in his outstretched hands. I pull the stuffed animal to my chest. "Thank you. I shall love him always. I shall call him Holden Caulfield." "From the book?" "Yes, from the book. You were reading it when I saw you my first day here." "You remember that?" "It's one of my favorite books," I say. "You were totally checking me out." "Patrick! Not in front of Holden Caulfield!" I cover the moose's floppy ears with my hands, hoping neither he nor Patrick sees the red flooding my cheeks.

The illusion of speed is the belief that it saves time. It looks simple at first sight: finish something in two hours instead of three, gain an hour. It’s an abstract calculation, though, done as if each hour of the day were like an hour on the clock, absolutely equal. But haste and speed accelerate time, which passes more quickly, and two hours of hurry shorten a day. Every minute is torn apart by being segmented, stuffed to bursting. You can pile a mountain of things into an hour.

I imagine the gods saying, We will make it up to you. We will give you three wishes, they say. Let me see the squirrels again, I tell them. Let me eat some of the great hog stuffed and roasted on its giant spit and put out, steaming, into the winter of my neighborhood when I was usually too broke to afford even the hundred grams I ate so happily walking up the cobbles, past the Street of the Moon and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers, the Street of Silence and the Street of the Little Pissing. We can give you wisdom, they say in their rich voices. Let me go at last to Hugette, I say, the Algerian student with her huge eyes who timidly invited me to her room when I was too young and bewildered that first year in Paris. Let me at least fail at my life. Think, they say patiently, we could make you famous again. Let me fall in love one last time, I beg them. Teach me mortality, frighten me into the present. Help me to find the heft of these days. That the nights will be full enough and my heart feral.

I decided to give myself a Christmas present this year. I decided to spend the day only speaking to animals (real and stuffed), select humans as necessary so long as they weren’t my parents or Langston, and a Snarl in a red Moleskine notebook—if he returned it to me.

The giant stuffed animals all found homes quickly. A few days later, I learned that one of the animals had been taken by a Carnegie Mellon who, like me, has cancer. After the lecture, she walked up and selected the giant elephant. I love the symbolism of that. She got the elephant in the room.

Anticipating their calamity and fright when deportation day came (August 6, 1942) he [Henryk Goldszmit, pen name: Janusz Korczak] joined them aboard the train bound for Treblinka, because, he said, he knew his presence would calm them—“You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this.” A photograph taken at the Umschlagplatz (Transshipment Square) shows him marching, hatless, in military boots, hand in hand with several children, while 192 other children and ten staff members follow, four abreast, escorted by German soldiers. Korczak and the children boarded red boxcars not much larger than chicken coops, usually stuffed with seventy-five vertical adults, though all the children easily fit. In Joshua Perle’s eyewitness account in The Destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, he describes the scene: “A miracle occurred, two hundred pure souls, condemned to death, did not weep. Not one of them ran away. None tried to hide. Like stricken swallows they clung to their teacher and mentor, to their father and brother, Janusz Korczak.” In 1971, the Russians named a newly discovered asteroid after him, 2163 Korczak, but maybe they should have named it Ro, the planet he dreamed of. The Poles claim Korczak as a martyr, and the Israelis revere him as one of the Thirty-Six Just Men, whose pure souls make possible the world’s salvation. According to Jewish legend, these few, through their good hearts and good deeds, keep the too-wicked world from being destroyed. For their sake alone, all of humanity is spared. The legend tells that they are ordinary people, not flawless or magical, and that most of them remain unrecognized throughout their lives, while they choose to perpetuate goodness, even in the midst of inferno.

Erika was a stout sprinter from Brooklyn who complained about Los Angeles endlessly, the smoggy air, the traffic, the lack of trains. Her grievances only made Jude realize how grateful she felt. Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack, so she tried to hide it. On move-in day, Erika had glanced at Jude’s two suitcases and asked, “Where’s the rest of your stuff?” Her own desk was cluttered with records, photographs of friends taped to the walls, her closet stuffed with shimmery blouses. Jude, quietly unpacking everything she owned, said that her other things were still in storage.

I enjoy a torture session on the rowing machine and I also enjoy my mom’s homemade peach cobbler. I enjoy flopping like that dead fish with hips that can’t lie in dance class, and I also enjoy ordering pizza with my kid, renting a movie, and downing popcorn while we share some special time together. I enjoy seeing how much I can lift at the gym and I also enjoy stuffing a fresh chewy chocolate chip cookie into my face when I’m having a hard day.

Cheeseburger-Stuffed Twice-Baked Potatoes • MAKES 8 SERVINGS • THIS RECIPE IS THE LUSCIOUS love-child of a stuffed potato skin and a cheeseburger, where Russet potatoes are scooped out and twice-baked to make crispy carriers for a generous helping of beefy filling that’s smothered in melted cheddar cheese. It tastes as decadent as it sounds, but it is actually quite healthy, because hollowing out the potatoes keeps carbs in check (and gives you the makings of mashed potatoes for the next day) and amping up lean beef with chopped mushrooms, broccoli, and tomatoes gives you a big portion with a sensible amount of meat.

The mythic American character is made up of the virtues of fairness, self-reliance, toughness, and honesty. Those virtues are generally stuffed into a six-foot-tall, dark-haired, can-do kind of guy who is at once a family man, attractive to strange women, carefree, stable, realistic, and whimsical. in the lore of America, that man lives on the Great Plains. he's from Texas, Dodge City, Cheyenne, the Dakotas, or somewhere in Montana. In fact, the seedbed of this American character, from the days of de Tocqueville through Andrew Jackson, Wyattt Earp, Pony Express riders, pioneers, and cowboys to modern caricatures played by actors such as Tom Mix, Gary Cooper, and John Wayne has aways been the frontier. It's a place with plenty of room to roam, great sunsets, clear lines between right and wrong, and lots of horses. It's also a place that does not exist and never has. The truth is that there has never been much fairness out here.

She didn’t dream, but when she awoke, she couldn’t believe her eyes. Small white flowers lay at the foot of her cot, and many infant-sized footprints led in and out of the tent. Before someone could enter and notice, Celaena swept a foot over the tracks, destroying any trace, and stuffed the flowers into a nearby satchel. Though no one mentioned another word about faeries, as they traveled onward, Celaena continually scanned the soldiers’ faces for any indication that they’d seen something strange. She spent a good portion of the following day with sweaty palms and a racing heartbeat, and kept one eye fixed on the passing woods.

I hope I shall never marry. Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at the end of a Journey or a Walk; though the Carpet were of Silk, the Curtains of the morning Clouds; the chairs and Sofa stuffed with Cygnet's down; the food Manna, the Wine beyond Claret, the Window opening on Winander mere, I should not feel - or rather my Happiness would not be so fine, as my Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have described, there is a sublimity to welcome me home - The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window pane are my Children. The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness - an amiable wife and sweet Children I contemplate as a part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds

Virgil reached into the wool cap that contained his dreads, stuffed so full as to give him the appearance, Ted thought, of the Great Kazoo on the latter years of The Flintstones or a Jiffy Pop container expanded to its max. (Ted made a mental note that these are not bad similes and hoped he could find them on a rainy day.)

Eating a huge home cooked Christmas dinner was his personal favorite. Evan would look around after each Christmas Day was done. There were empty dishes, and torn up wrapping paper on the ground. Monty was passed out on the couch stuffed with food. Evan would close his eyes and hear the day. He could feel the memories that were just made.

Something was in her mouth. Sami's tongue slid along the edges of something plastic. Flat, low ridges, holes-an adjustable strap. A baseball cap? Another taste. Hair spray. Gross. Someone had stuffed her baseball cap in her mouth, and from the feel of it they had taped it in place. Her arms were tied behind her and she lay face down on the floor-of what? Her car. The carpeting scraped her cheek every time they hit a bump. Panic flooded Sami's senses. She came instantly awake. Inhaling deeply through her nose, she willed herself to calm down. Her working motto flashed through her brain, panic never accomplished anything. Of course she had never been kidnapped and tied up before. In the dim light of passing cars, she glimpsed things-paper gum wrappers, an old straw, one whopper wrapper, a CD cover. That's where Sting went. Been looking for that for days. Man did she need to vacuum this car out. A metallic scent hit her nose. She'd recognize that smell until the day she died. Blood. And by the odor, someone had lost a great deal of it.

Shouldn't you be eating chocolate?" I asked. "Guaranteed cure-all." I motioned at Chloe. "Give her some." "She didn't want it," Chloe said. "And you can't have it." She stuffed the rest into her mouth, nearly choking. Hunter chuckled. "I swear she's going to choke to death on chocolate one day," she said. "I feel sorry for whoever has to write her epitaph.

Selfish children these days,” she muttered around a beakful of cottony stuffing. “Won’t even share a few delicious tidbits with the messenger. I blame television.” Micah

Alice walked into the kitchen one day and found Tom carefully stuffing his nose with frozen peas. I wanted to see if the peas would come out of my eyeballs, he told the doctor.

on the exhausted old rose-pink armchair with tufts of stuffing protruding along its seams, as if the chair itself were about to abandon the effort required to remain a chair at all.

We thought about Thanksgiving, planned for Thanksgiving and talked of Thanksgiving for weeks beforehand, but the evening before the actual day was the best time of all. Then the house seethed with children and dogs, with friends and cooks, and with delightful smells of baking pie, turkey stuffing and coffee. Every time the doorbell rang we put on another pot of coffee and washed the cups and by the time we went to bed we were so nervous and flighty that when accidentally bumped or brushed against, we buzzed and lit up like pin-ball machines.

I made tourtes of veal, of capons, and of artichokes and cardoon hearts. I slaved over pork belly tortellini and eggs stuffed with their own yolks and raisins, pepper, cinnamon, orange juice, and butter. I made sure the pastry chef was working hard on the pastry twists made with rosewater and currants. Soups of cauliflower, mushrooms, and leeks simmered for the better part of the day.

A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman’s warbler. Always rare, it was said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in 1939, two birders, operating independently in different places, coincidentally saw a Bachman’s warbler within two days of each other. Both shot the birds (nice work, boys!), and that, it appears, was that for the Bachman’s warbler. But there are almost certainly others that disappeared before anyone much noticed. John James Audubon painted three species of bird—the small-headed flycatcher, the carbonated warbler, and the Blue Mountain warbler—that have not been seen by anyone since. The same is true of Townsend’s bunting, of which there is one stuffed specimen in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Who’s teasing? I’m telling him the truth. He ain’t going to have it. Neither one of ‘em going to have it. And I’ll tell you something else you not going to have. You not going to have no private coach with four red velvet chairs that swivel around in one place whenever you want ‘em to. No. and you not going to have your own special toilet and your own special-made eight-foot bed either. And a valet and a cook and a secretary to travel with you and do everything you say. Everything: get the right temperature in your hot-water bottle and make sure the smoking tobacco in the silver humidor is fresh each and every day. There’s something else you not going to have. You ever have five thousand dollars of cold cash money in your pocket and walk into a bank and tell the bank man you want such and such a house on such and such a street and he sell it to you right then? Well, you won’t ever have it. And you not going to have a governor’s mansion, or eight thousand acres of timber to sell. And you not going to have no ship under your command to sail on, no train to run, and you can join the 332nd if you want to and shoot down a thousand German planes all by yourself and land in Hitler’s backyard and whip him with your own hands, but you never going to have four stars on your shirt front, or even three. And you not going to have no breakfast tray brought in to you early in the morning with a red rose on it and two warm croissants and a cup of hot chocolate. Nope. Never. And no pheasant buried in coconut leaves for twenty days and stuffed with wild rice and cooked over a wood fire so tender and delicate it make you cry. And no Rothschild ’29 or even Beaujolais to go with it.” A few men passing by stopped to listen to Tommy’s lecture. “What’s going on?” they asked Hospital Tommy. “Feather refused them a beer,” said. The men laughed. “And no baked Alaska!” Railroad Tommy went on. “None! You never going to have that.” “No baked Alaska?” Guitar opened his eyes wide with horror and grabbed his throat.” You breaking my heart!” “Well, now. That’s something you will have—a broken heart.” Railroad Tommy’s eyes softened, but the merriment in them died suddenly. “And folly. A whole lot of folly. You can count on it.” “Mr. Tommy, suh,” Guitar sang in mock humility, “we just wanted a bottle of beer is all.” “Yeah,” said Tommy. “Yeah, well, welcome aboard.

Arobynn Hamel, the King of the Assassins. Chaol gritted his teeth as he finished stuffing the last of the white sheets into the hallway closet. He’d been thinking a good deal about Celaena’s old master in the past few days. Arobynn was smart enough to have put things together when he found a washed-up orphan right after the Princess of Terrasen went missing, her body vanished into the half-frozen Florine River.

Behold now, let the Dead and Living meet! Across the gulf of Time they still are one. Time hath no power against Identity, though sleep the merciful hath blotted out the tablets of our mind, and with oblivion sealed the sorrows that else would hound us from life to life, stuffing the brain with gathered griefs till it burst in the madness of uttermost despair. Still are they one, for the wrappings of our sleep shall roll away as thunder-clouds before the wind; the frozen voice of the past shall melt in music like mountain snows beneath the sun; and the weeping and the laughter of the lost hours shall be heard once more most sweetly echoing up the cliffs of immeasurable time. Ay, the sleep shall roll away, and the voices shall be heard, when down the completed chain, whereof our each existence is a link, the lightning of the Spirit hath passed to work out the purpose of our being; quickening and fusing those separated days of life, and shaping them to a staff whereon we may safely lean as we wend to our appointed fate. - Ayesha

She straightened up the trailer, ran the vacuum cleaner over the braided rug, spread a clean tablecloth and put fresh shelf paper in the kitchen cupboards. That was a little job. In the old days she would have stuffed the dirty paper in the stove and burned it. The electric stove was clean but it couldn’t dry socks, burn paper, raise bread or provide comfort. Cost money to run it. They called it progress. By nine there was nothing

American Indians share a magnificent history — rich in its astounding diversity, its integrity, its spirituality, its ongoing unique culture and dynamic tradition. It's also rich, I'm saddened to say, in tragedy, deceit, and genocide. Our sovereignty, our nationhood, our very identity — along with our sacred lands — have been stolen from us in one of the great thefts of human history. And I am referring not just to the thefts of previous centuries but to the great thefts that are still being perpetrated upon us today, at this very moment. Our human rights as indigenous peoples are being violated every day of our lives — and by the very same people who loudly and sanctimoniously proclaim to other nations the moral necessity of such rights. Over the centuries our sacred lands have been repeatedly and routinely stolen from us by the governments and peoples of the United States and Canada. They callously pushed us onto remote reservations on what they thought was worthless wasteland, trying to sweep us under the rug of history. But today, that so-called wasteland has surprisingly become enormously valuable as the relentless technology of white society continues its determined assault on Mother Earth. White society would now like to terminate us as peoples and push us off our reservations so they can steal our remaining mineral and oil resources. It's nothing new for them to steal from nonwhite peoples. When the oppressors succeed with their illegal thefts and depredations, it's called colonialism. When their efforts to colonize indigenous peoples are met with resistance or anything but abject surrender, it's called war. When the colonized peoples attempt to resist their oppression and defend themselves, we're called criminals. I write this book to bring about a greater understanding of what being an Indian means, of who we are as human beings. We're not quaint curiosities or stereotypical figures in a movie, but ordinary — and, yes, at times, extraordinary — human beings. Just like you. We feel. We bleed. We are born. We die. We aren't stuffed dummies in front of a souvenir shop; we aren't sports mascots for teams like the Redskins or the Indians or the Braves or a thousand others who steal and distort and ridicule our likeness. Imagine if they called their teams the Washington Whiteskins or the Washington Blackskins! Then you'd see a protest! With all else that's been taken from us, we ask that you leave us our name, our self-respect, our sense of belonging to the great human family of which we are all part. Our voice, our collective voice, our eagle's cry, is just beginning to be heard. We call out to all of humanity. Hear us!

Our pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting. They begin to subside the instant they arise, only to be replaced by fresh desires or feelings of discomfort. You can’t get enough of your favorite meal until, in the next moment, you find you are so stuffed as to nearly require the attention of a surgeon—and yet, by some quirk of physics, you still have room for dessert. The pleasure of dessert lasts a few seconds, and then the lingering taste in your mouth must be banished by a drink of water. The warmth of the sun feels wonderful on your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a good thing. A move to the shade brings immediate relief, but after a minute or two, the breeze is just a little too cold. Do you have a sweater in the car? Let’s take a look. Yes, there it is. You’re warm now, but you notice that your sweater has seen better days. Does it make you look carefree or disheveled? Perhaps it is time to go shopping for something new. And so it goes. We seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not wanting. Thus, the question naturally arises: Is there more to life than this? Might it be possible to feel much better (in every sense of better) than one tends to feel? Is it possible to find lasting fulfillment despite the inevitability of change? Spiritual life begins with

only children know God. Children see God every day; they just don’t call it that. It’s the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It’s the sweet whispers of sweet gum trees and the sounds riding the tops of honeysuckle-scented breezes. Children feel God stuffed into brown fluffy dogs with stitches strong enough to withstand a good squeeze, and on the lips of round women who can’t get enough sugar from Chocolate.

It wasn’t until Clay felt the sand under his talons and heard the roaring of the dragons in the stands that he realized he hadn’t quite thought this plan through. He had no idea what his fighting skills would be like against an unknown dragon. His mind went blank as the SkyWing guards dropped a hissing IceWing onto the ground opposite him. Did he know anything about IceWings? The sun was high in the sky, and it was much warmer in the arena than up on their prison spires. Clay could see beads of silvery liquid dripping through the IceWing’s glacier-blue scales. Above them, Queen Scarlet smirked from her balcony, with Glory sleeping serenely beside her. The same SkyWing announcer from the day before strutted to the center of the arena and bellowed at the crowd. “After last month’s battle with Blaze’s army, our queen’s dungeons were stuffed with IceWing prisoners of war. Only nine have survived. After two wins, I give you — Fjord of the IceWings!” Fjord lashed his tail and snarled at Clay. “And in this corner, an unusual case — a MudWing, but not one of our allies. No, this dragonet was found hiding under our mountains, protected by the Talons of Peace. Is he one of the dragonets of destiny? Not if he loses this battle!” A murmur of laughter rippled around the seats, but in the closest faces Clay could see expressions of uneasiness and, he thought, concern. He spotted a large MudWing in one of the balconies, frowning down at him. Try to stop this, Clay thought at him, praying hard. Do something! I’m one of you! But the MudWing shifted his gaze away, as if he didn’t want to watch but couldn’t afford to leave. The SkyWing announcer went on. “If these prophesied dragonets are as wonderful and legendary as they’re supposed to be, this should be a showdown to remember. I hope you’re prepared to impress us, dragon of the mud. I present to you … Clay of the MudWings! Claws up, teeth ready! Fight!” Clay

To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and the novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage. To make our meaning plain — Orlando could come home from one of these routs at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a Christmas tree and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room a score of times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again. Often the sun would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could persuade herself to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching and tossing, laughing and sighing for an hour or longer before she slept at last. And what was all this stir about? Society. And what had society said or done to throw a reasonable lady into such an excitement? In plain language, nothing. Rack her memory as she would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word to magnify into the name something. Lord O. had been gallant. Lord A. polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr M. amusing. But when she tried to recollect in what their gallantry, politeness, charm, or wit had consisted, she was bound to suppose her memory at fault, for she could not name a thing. It was the same always. Nothing remained over the next day, yet the excitement of the moment was intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that society is one of those brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about Christmas time, whose flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of a dozen different ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid. Take away Lord O., Lord A., Lord C., or Mr M. and separately each is nothing. Stir them all together and they combine to give off the most intoxicating of flavours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can deal with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are content to leave it.

Children" Years back here we were children and at the stage of running in gangs about the meadows-- here to this one, there to that one. Where we picked up violets on lucky days, you can now see cattle gadding about. I still remember hunching ankle deep in violets, squabbling over which bunches were fairest. Our childishness was obvious-- we ran dancing rounds, we wore new green wreaths. So time passes. Here we ran swilling strawberries from oak to pine through hedges, through turnstiles-- as long as day was burning down. Once a gardener rushed from an arbor: "O.K. now, children, run home." We came out in spots those yesterdays, when we stuffed on strawberries; it was just a childish game to us. Often we heard the herdsman hooing and warning us: "Children, the woods are alive with snakes." And one of the children breaking through the sharp grass, grew white and shouted, "Children, a snake ran in there. He got our pony. She'll never get well. I wish that snake would go to hell!" "Well then, get out of the woods! If you don't hurry away quickly, I'll tell you what will happen-- if you don't leave the forest behind you by daylight, you'll lose yourselves; your pleasure will end in bawling." Do you know how five virgins dawdled in the meadow, till the king slammed his dining-room door? Their shouting and shame were outrageous: their jailor tore everything off them, down to their skins they stood like milk cows without any clothes.

Lazily...possessively he ran a hand down her back. "Mmm, again," Shelby murmured. With a quiet laugh, Alan stroked up and down until she was ready to purr. "Shelby..." She gave another sigh as an answer and snuggled closer. "Shelby,there's something warm and fluffy under my feet." "Mmm-hmm." "If it's your cat, he's not breathing." "MacGregor." He kissed the top of her head. "What?" She gave a muffled laugh against his shoulder. "MacGregor," she repeated. "My pig." There was silence for a moment while he tried to digest this. "I beg your pardon?" The dry serious tone had more laughter bubbling up. Would she ever be able to face a day without hearing it? "Oh, say that again.I love it." Because she had to see his face, Shelby found the energy to lean across him and grope for the matches on the nightstand. Skin rubbed distractedly against skin while she struck one and lit a candle. "MacGregor," she said, giving Alan a quick kiss before she gestured to the foot of the bed. Alan studied the smiling porcine face. "You named a stuffed purple pig after me?" "Alan, is that any way to talk about our child?" His eyes shifted to hers in an expression so masculine and ironic, she collapsed on his chest in a fit of giggles. "I put him there because he was supposed to be the only MacGregor who charmed his way into my bed." "Really." Alan tugged on her hair until she lifted her face, full of amusement and fun,to his. "Is that what I dd?" "You knew damn well I wouldn't be able to resist balloons and rainbows foever.

Once my father told me: When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end. Darkness fell. Rain fell. I never asked: What question? And now it's too late. Because I lost you, Tateh. One day, in the spring of 1938, on a rainy day that gave way to a break in the clouds, I lost you. You'd gone out to collect specimens for a theory you were hatching about rainfall, instinct, and butterflies. And then you were gone. We found you lying under a tree, your face splashed with mud. We knew you were free then, unbound by disappointing results. And we buried you in the cemetery where your father was buried, and his father, under the shade of the chestnut tree. Three years later, I lost Mameh. The last time I saw her she was wearing her yellow apron. She was stuffing things in a suitcase, the house was a wreck. She told me to go into the woods. She'd packed me food, and told me to wear my coat, even though it was July. "Go," she said. I was too old to listen, but like a child I listened. She told me she'd follow the next day. We chose a spot we both knew in the woods. The giant walnut tree you used to like, Tateh, because you said it had human qualities. I didn't bother to say goodbye. I chose to believe what was easier. I waited. But. She never came. Since then I've lived with the guilt of understanding too late that she thought she would have been a burden to me. I lost Fitzy. He was studying in Vilna, Tateh—someone who knew someone told me he'd last been seen on a train. I lost Sari and Hanna to the dogs. I lost Herschel to the rain. I lost Josef to a crack in time. I lost the sound of laughter. I lost a pair of shoes, I'd taken them off to sleep, the shoes Herschel gave me, and when I woke they were gone, I walked barefoot for days and then I broke down and stole someone else's. I lost the only woman I ever wanted to love. I lost years. I lost books. I lost the house where I was born. And I lost Isaac. So who is to say that somewhere along the way, without my knowing it, I didn't also lose my mind?

And in the depths of the city, beyond an old zone of ruined buildings that looked like broken hearts, there lived a happy young fellow by the name of Haroun, the only child of the storyteller Rashid Khalifa, whose cheerfulness was famous throughout that unhappy metropolis, and whose never-ending stream of tall, short and winding tales had earned him not one but two nicknames. To his admirers he was Rashid the Ocean of Notions, as stuffed with cheery stories as the sea was full of glumfish; but to his jealous rivals he was the Shah of Blah. To his wife, Soraya, Rashid was for many years as loving a husband as anyone could wish for, and during these years Haroun grew up in a home in which, instead of misery and frowns, he had his father’s ready laughter and his mother’s sweet voice raised in song. Then something went wrong. (Maybe the sadness of the city finally crept in through their windows.) The day Soraya stopped singing, in the middle of a line, as if someone had thrown a switch, Haroun guessed there was trouble brewing. But he never suspected how much.

Don Juan had said that any habit was, in essence, a “doing,” and that a doing needed all its parts in order to function. If some parts were missing, a doing was disassembled. By doing, he meant any coherent and meaningful series of actions. In other words, a habit needed all its component actions in order to be a live activity. La Gorda then described how she had stalked her own weakness of eating excessively. She said that the Nagual had suggested she first tackle the biggest part of that habit, which was connected with her laundry work; she ate whatever her customers fed her as she went from house to house delivering her wash. She expected the Nagual to tell her what to do, but he only laughed and made fun of her, saying that as soon as he would mention something for her to do, she would fight not to do it. He said that that was the way human beings are; they love to be told what to do, but they love even more to fight and not do what they are told, and thus they get entangled in hating the one who told them in the first place. For many years she could not think of anything to do to stalk her weakness. One day, however, she got so sick and tired of being fat that she refused to eat for twenty-three days. That was the initial action that broke her fixation. She then had the idea of stuffing her mouth with a sponge to make her customers believe that she had an infected tooth and could not eat. The subterfuge worked not only with her customers, who stopped giving her food, but with her as well, as she had the feeling of eating as she chewed on the sponge. La Gorda laughed when she told me how she had walked around with a sponge stuffed in her mouth for years until her habit of eating excessively had been broken. “Was that all you needed to stop your habit?” I asked. “No. I also had to learn how to eat like a warrior.” “And how does a warrior eat?” “A warrior eats quietly, and slowly, and very little at a time. I used to talk while I ate, and I ate very fast, and I ate lots and lots of food at one sitting. The Nagual told me that a warrior eats four mouthfuls of food at one time. A while later he eats another four mouthfuls and so on.

I spend the next few days watching Maï die. I can't stand that voice, that protest. Katzenelenbogen shows up and explains in that rational, no-nonsense, doctoral tone that no one has the right to make such a fuss over a cat, while the whole world. . . . . I kick them out, both him and the world. Maï is no longer a cat. She is a human being in agony. Every living thing that suffers is a human being. She is cuddled in my arms, a small ball of lackluster fur, which gives her a horrible stuffed air already smacking of taxidermists. Every now and then she raises her head, looks at me inquiringly and miaows a question I understand, but am unable to answer. Our vocal cords are totally inadequate there. What goings-on about a mere cat, huh? I hate your guts, you antisentimental, antiemotional, hardheaded rationalists. You are the ones who have raised the going rate of sensitivity. You have put all your emphasis on ideas, and ideas without "emotions" and without "sentimentalism," that's the world you have built, your work. All the pseudo-people who have the Nazi arrogance to be reading this book make my hands ache for a grenade.

A falcon. I can see that. I thought you said nothing lived here?” Sand’s face went blank. “There was nothing alive, except for me, until Merlin. And then you.” Perrotte bit back her exasperation, and said simply, “Go on.” He twined his blunt-tipped fingers together, staring down at them. “I, erm. I found the falcon in the mews.” “So, it’s not true that there was nothing alive in the castle?” “The truth is . . . Well, the truth is the truth, and thus worth telling, but sometimes truths are so complicated that it’s exhausting to get them out in the right order.” He glanced up at her. That sounded like an evasion if ever she’d heard one. She raised an eyebrow. “The falcon was dead!” Sand blurted out. “Stuffed and mounted, and then also damaged in the sundering. I mended him, and put him on the mantel, so I’d have something to talk to. But a couple days before you—you came upstairs—” He gestured helplessly at the bird, who stopped stripping water from its feathers just long enough to glare at the humans. Perrotte stared. “The bird came to life,” she whispered. “After you put it to rights, this falcon came to life. Just like me.” “Well . . .

wicked ecclesiastics who show the worst example to the people,” and, above all, nobles who empty the purses of the poor by their extravagance, and disdain them for “lowness of blod or foulenesse of body,” for deformed shape of body or limb, for dullness of wit and uncunning of craft, and deign not to speak to them, and who are themselves stuffed with pride—of ancestry, fortune, gentility, possessions, power, comeliness, strength, children, treasure—“prowde in lokynge, prowde in spekyng,… prowde in goinge, standynge and sytting.” All would be drawn by fiends to Hell on the Day of Judgment.

float before I could swim. Ellis never believed it was called Dead-Man’s Float, thought I’d made it up. I told him it was a survival position after a long exhausting journey. How apt. All I see below is blue light. Peaceful and eternal. I’m holding my breath until my body throbs as one pulse. I roll over and suck in a deep lungful of warm air. I look up at the starry starry night. The sound of water in and out of my ears, and beyond this human shell, the sound of cicadas fills the night. I dreamt of my mother. It was an image, that’s all, and a fleeting one, at that. She was faded with age, like a discarded offcut on the studio floor. In this dream, she didn’t speak, just stepped out of the shadows, a reminder that we are the same, her and me, cut from the same bruised cloth. I understand how she got up one day and left, how instinctively she trusted the compulsion to flee. The rightness of that action. We are the same, her and me. She walked out when I was eight. Never came back. I remember being collected from school by our neighbour Mrs Deakin, who bought me sweets on the way home and let me play with a dog for as long as I wanted. Inside the house, my father was sitting at the table, drinking. He was holding a sheet of blue writing paper covered in black words, and he said, Your mother’s gone. She said she’s sorry. A sheet of writing paper covered in words and just two for me. How was that possible? Her remnant life was put in bags and stored in the spare room at the earliest opportunity. Stuffed in, not folded – clothes brushes, cosmetics all thrown in together, awaiting collection from the Church. My mother had taken only what she could carry. One rainy afternoon, when my father had gone next door to fix a pipe, I emptied the bags on to the floor and saw my mother in every jumper and blouse and skirt I held up. I used to watch her dress and she let me. Sometimes, she asked my opinion about colours or what suited her more, this blouse or that blouse? And she’d follow my advice and tell me how right I was. I took off my clothes and put on a skirt first, then a blouse, a cardigan, and slowly I became her in miniature. She’d taken her good shoes, so I slipped on a pair of mid-height heels many sizes too big, of course, and placed a handbag on my arm. I stood in front of the mirror, and saw the infinite possibilities of play. I strutted, I

Stuffed whole suckling pig is a feast-day specialty everywhere in Italy, although each region cooks it slightly differently. In Rome the piglet would be stuffed with its own fried organs; in Sardinia, with a mixture of lemons and minced meat. Here, evidently, the stuffing was made with bread crumbs and herbs. He could make out each individual component of the mixture: finocchio selvatico---wild fennel---garlic, rosemary, and olives, mingling with the smell of burning pork fat from the fire, which spit green flame briefly wherever the juices from the little pig, running down its trotters, dropped into it.

Some bears are sold for amazing sums at auction. An example is a very old stuffed individual named Mabel that had belonged to Elvis Presley (as a child or an adult?) and had been sold at auction several times after the King's death; it was made in the Steiff workshop in 1909. Its end was exceedingly sinister. Lent by its owner for an exhibition of stuffed bears in Wells, England, in which it was to be the star attraction, it provoked a hatred or jealousy of a young Doberman accompanying the night watchman after the first day of the exhibition. The dog seized the precious relic and furiously bit and clawed it to pieces. (252)

Bill knows about my writing. He knows about the pages of poetry stuffed into my car’s glove box; he knows about the many nextstory.doc files on my hard drive; he knows how I like to sift through the thesaurus for hours; he knows that nothing feels better to me than finding exactly the right word that stabs cleanly at the heart of what you are trying to say. He knows that I read most books twice or more and write long letters to their authors, and that sometimes I even get an answer. He knows how much I need to write. But he had never given me permission to write about us until that day. I nodded and inwardly vowed to do my best. I

The rainy winter days passed quickly. Thanksgiving came and not long afterward Christmas vacation. Ramona missed Daisy, who went with her family to visit her grandparents. When she returned, the girls spent an afternoon dressing up Roberta in the clothes she had received for Christmas. Roberta was agreeable to having a dress pulled over her head, her arms stuffed into a sweater, her head shoved into caps. She enjoyed the girls’ admiration. She was not so happy about a pair of crocheted slippers with ears and tails that looked like rabbits, a gift from Howie’s grandmother, who enjoyed crocheting. Roberta did not care for the slippers.

It's weird not being in our subculture of two any more. There was Jen's culture, her little habits and ways of doing things; the collection of stuff she'd already learnt she loved before we met me. Chorizo and Jonathan Franken and long walks and the Eagles (her dad). Seeing the Christmas lights. Taylor Swift, frying pans in the dishwasher, the works absolutely, arsewipe, heaven. Tracy Chapman and prawn jalfrezi and Muriel Spark and HP sauce in bacon sandwiches. And then there was my culture. Steve Martin and Aston Villa and New York and E.T. Chicken bhuna, strange-looking cats and always having squash or cans of soft drinks in the house. The Cure. Pink Floyd. Kanye West, friend eggs, ten hours' sleep, ketchup in bacon sandwiches. Never missing dental check-ups. Sister Sledge (my mum). Watching TV even if the weather is nice. Cadbury's Caramel. John and Paul and George and Ringo. And then we met and fell in love and we introduced each other to all of it, like children showing each other their favourite toys. The instinct never goes - look at my fire engine, look at my vinyl collection. Look at all these things I've chosen to represent who I am. It was fun to find out about each other's self-made cultures and make our own hybrid in the years of eating, watching, reading, listening, sleeping and living together. Our culture was tea drink from very large mugs. And looking forward to the Glastonbury ticket day and the new season of Game of Thrones and taking the piss out of ourselves for being just like everyone else. Our culture was over-tipping in restaurants because we both used to work in the service industry, salty popcorn at the cinema and afternoon naps. Side-by-side morning sex. Home-made Manhattans. Barmade Manhattans (much better). Otis Redding's "Cigarettes and Coffee" (our song). Discovering a new song we both loved and listening to it over and over again until we couldn't listen to it any more. Period dramas on a Sunday night. That one perfect vibrator that finished her off in seconds when we were in a rush. Gravy. David Hockney. Truffle crisps. Can you believe it? I still can't believe it. A smell indisputably reminiscent of bums. On a crisp. And yet we couldn't get enough of them together - stuffing them in our gobs, her hand on my chest, me trying not to get crumbs in her hair as we watched Sense and Sensibility (1995). But I'm not a member of that club anymore. No one is. It's been disbanded, dissolved, the domain is no longer valid. So what do I do with all its stuff? Where so I put it all? Where do I take all my new discoveries now I'm no longer a tribe of two? And if I start a new sub-genre of love with someone else, am I allowed to bring in all the things I loved from the last one? Or would that be weird? Why do I find this so hard?

It was as if, in the midst of a film concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, something had, first, gone wrong with the sound apparatus, thus muffling and finally cutting off all noise, all of the blasts and repercussions and thunders, and then, second, ripped the film from the projector and inserted in its place a beautiful tropical slide which did not move or tremor. The world ground to a standstill. The silence was so immense and unbelievable that you felt your ears had been stuffed or you had lost your hearing altogether. The children put their hands to their ears. They stood apart. The door slid back and the smell of the silent, waiting world came in to them. The sun came out.

More than even loving your family, there is no more important ambition than finding a job that you love. If you don’t, you’ll reek of self-loathing like a porn star who can’t get the box cover, and your family will hate you for it. Loving your work doesn’t mean finding a job you can tolerate for eight hours a day, but rather a job that gets you flying out of bed in the morning like a Jack Russell who just had a firecracker stuffed up his ass. Was I ever addicted to my job? Damn right I was. You’re fucked if you aren’t. You better scratch and claw like a Chilean miner to find a gig worthy of gettin’ hooked on. Unlike your hobbies or your spouse, you gotta do your job every day regardless of whether or not it gets you revved up.

That peculiar feeling—it was only a feeling, you couldn’t describe it as an activity—that we used to call “Church.” The sweet corpsy smell, the rustle of Sunday dresses, the wheeze of the organ and the roaring voices, the spot of light from the hole in the window creeping slowly up the nave. In some way the grown-ups could put it across that this extraordinary performance was necessary. You took it for granted, just as you took the Bible, which you got in big doses in those days. There were texts on every wall and you knew whole chapters of the O.T. by heart. Even now my head’s stuffed full of bits out of the Bible. And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord. And Asher abode in his breaches. Followed them from Dan until thou come unto Beersheba. Smote him under the fifth rib, so that he died. You never understood it, you didn’t try to or want to, it was just a kind of medicine, a queer-tasting stuff that you had to swallow and knew to be in some way necessary. An extraordinary rigmarole about people with names like Shimei and Nebuchadnezzar and Ahithophel and Hash-badada; people with long stiff garments and Assyrian beards, riding up and down on camels among temples and cedar trees and doing extraordinary things. Sacrificing burnt offerings, walking about in fiery furnaces, getting nailed on crosses, getting swallowed by whales. And all mixed up with the sweet graveyard smell and the serge dresses and the wheeze of the organ.

When they are away, you will often look for the baby doll, but it is not always there, where it is supposed to be, where you left it. Sometimes The Baby moves it, or she takes it with her, and you have to settle for some other toy. You bring it into the living room and set it between your paws as you sleep. It helps you believe that one day you might be a real mother.

That Thanksgiving has evolved over hundreds of years into a national holiday of eating is rather ironic given the quality of Thanksgiving food. Stuffing and roasting a twenty-pound turkey is, without a doubt, the worst possible way to enjoy a game bird. The whole notion of eating a game bird is to savor those subtleties of flavor that elude the domesticated hen. Partridge, pheasant, quail are all birds that can be prepared in various ways to delight the senses; but a corn-fed turkey that’s big enough to serve a gathering of ten or more is virtually impossible to cook with finesse. The breasts will inevitably become as dry as sawdust by the time the rest of the bird has finished cooking. Stuffing only exacerbates this problem by insulating the inner meat from the effects of heat, thus prolonging the damage. The intrinsic challenge of roasting a turkey has led to all manner of culinary abominations. Cooking the bird upside down, a preparation in which the skin becomes a pale, soggy mess. Spatchcocking, in which the bird is drawn and quartered like a heretic. Deep frying! (Heaven help us.) Give me an unstuffed four-pound chicken any day. Toss a slice of lemon, a sprig of rosemary, and a clove of garlic into the empty cavity, roast it at 425° for sixty minutes or until golden brown, and you will have a perfect dinner time and again. The limitations of choosing a twenty-pound turkey as the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving meal have only been compounded by the inexplicable tradition of having every member of the family contribute a dish. Relatives who should never be allowed to set foot in a kitchen are suddenly walking through your door with some sort of vegetable casserole in which the “secret ingredient” is mayonnaise. And when cousin Betsy arrives with such a mishap in hand, one can take no comfort from thoughts of the future, for once a single person politely compliments the dish, its presence at Thanksgiving will be deemed sacrosanct. Then not even the death of cousin Betsy can save you from it, because as soon as she’s in the grave, her daughter will proudly pick up the baton. Served at an inconvenient hour, prepared by such an army of chefs that half the dishes are overcooked, half are undercooked,

I reach out and squeeze her hand, and remember everything we’ve lived through together. The normal things we endured as we grew from girls to women. The days in school where boys would line us up in order of our fuckability. The parties where it was normal to lie on top of a semi-conscious girl, do things to her, then call her a slut afterwards. A Christmas number-one song about a pregnant woman being stuffed into the boot of a car and driven off a bridge. Laughing when your male friends made rape jokes. Opening a newspaper and seeing the breasts of a girl who had only just turned legal, dressed in school uniform to make her look underage. Of the childhood films we grew up on, and loved, and knew all the words to, where, at the end, a girl would always get chosen for looking the prettiest compared to all the others. Reading magazines that told you to mirror men’s body language, and hum on their dick when you went down on them, that turned into books about how to get them to commit by not being yourself. Of size zero, and Atkins, and Five-Two, and cabbage soup, and juice cleanses and eat clean. Of pole-dancing lessons as a great way to get fit, and actually, if you want to be really cool, come to the actual strip club too. Of being sexually assaulted when you kissed someone on a dance floor and not thinking about it properly until you are twenty-seven and read a book about how maybe it was wrong. Of being jealous of your friend who got assaulted on the dance floor because why didn’t he pick you to assault? Boys not wanting to be with you unless you fuck them quickly. Boys not wanting to be with you because you fucked them too quickly. Being terrified to walk anywhere in the dark in case the worst thing happens to you, and so your male friend walks you home to keep you safe, and then comes into your bedroom and does the worst thing to you, and now, when you look him up online, he’s engaged to a woman who wears a feminist T-shirt and isn’t going to change her name when they get married. Of learning to have no pubic hair, and how liberating it is to pay thirty-five pounds a month to rip this from your body and lurch up in agony. Rings around famous women’s bodies saying ‘look at this cellulite’, oh, by the way, here is a twenty-quid cream so you don’t get

They were striking the set of a play, humble, one-handed domestic drama, without permission from the cast. They started in what she called her sewing room—his old room. She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby’s half-finished yellow shawl, to give them all away to strangers was to banish her from the living. They worked quickly, almost in a frenzy. She’s not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked. Objects became junk as soon as they were separated from their owner and their pasts—without her, her old tea cosy was repellent, with its faded farmhouse motif and pale brown stains on cheap fabric, and stuffing that was pathetically thin. As the shelves and drawers emptied, and the boxes and bags filled, he saw that no one owned anything really. It’s all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we’ll desert them in the end. They worked all day, and put out twenty-three bags for the dustmen.

Shopping has really changed for me over the years. Or maybe I’ve changed. The days when I was a single girl, living in Fulham with Suze and going round the shops every day, seem ages ago now. Yes, I used to spend too much. I’ll freely admit it. I’ve made mistakes. Like Frank Sinatra, I did it my way. (Except “my way” involved stuffing Visa bills under the bed, which I bet Frank never did.)

Angels have wings,” said Emmeline dreamily. “And,” pursued Dick, “I told cook, and she said to Jane, daddy was always stuffing children up with—something or ’nother. And I asked daddy to let me see him stuffing up a child—and daddy said cook’d have to go away for saying that, and she went away next day.” “She had three big trunks and a box for her bonnet,” said Emmeline, with a far-away look as she recalled the incident.

Livia could have made a sugo blindfold- she had been making it almost every day for years. The only difficulty was, there were as many different kinds of sugo as there were days in a month. There was the everyday version, which might be no more than a handful of ripe tomatoes squashed with the tip of a knife to release the juices, then quickly fried in oil. There was the classic version, in which the tomatoes were simmered along with some garlic and onions until they had reduced to a thick, pulpy stew. Then there was a richer version, in which pieces of meat were cooked for several hours to extract all the flavor, and so on all the way up to ragù del guardaporte, the gatekeeper's sauce, so called because it required someone to sit by it all day, adding little splashes of water to stop the rolls of meat stuffed with parsley, garlic and cheese from drying out.

Perhaps I should stay. We all know the princess rarely serves as a proper chaperone.” “I don’t need to,” Ro said, adjusting her metal breastplate as she sat up straighter. “Gigantor does enough fun-killing for everybody. Plus, our girl’s still rocking the ‘adorably oblivious’ thing—which, I gotta say, gets less adorable by the day.” Her eyes narrowed at Sophie. “I’d be happy to spell it all out for you if you want. We could make a pros and cons list together!” “Pros and cons of what?” Sophie asked. Ro sighed dramatically, glancing at Keefe as she said, “See what I mean?” Keefe threw Mrs. Stinkbottom at her head, but Ro swatted the stuffed green gulon right back at him—and when he ducked, it knocked into one of the lanterns lining Keefe’s bedside table, sending it crashing to the floor. Sandor rubbed the center of his forehead. “It’s going to be a long afternoon.

Tadpoles. Crickets. Toads. Centipedes. Mice. Rats and scorpions. We eat anything. As we till the earth, we look upon bugs as buried treasure. Our eyes scan the soil, tucking any edible treat in a waistband, a pocket, tied into a scarf. Later the prize is retrieved, skewered on a stick, and stuffed into the fire. Those who haven’t caught anything watch, their begging eyes following each move. We must ignore them, and also ignore what we eat. There is no revulsion. Food is food. Anything, everything tastes good—even the smell of roasting crickets makes stomachs rumble with desire. Yet even the smallest creatures, the rodents, the insects, are becoming scarce. Some days, our meals for the entire day consist of boiled leaves. Our lives are reduced to a tight circle. Each day revolves around what we can find to eat for the following day. And until it comes, we think about food. All day. All night. Hunger owns us.

the illusion of speed is the belief that it saves time. it looks simple at first sight: finish something in two hours instead of three, gain an hour. it’s an abstract calculation, though, done as if each hour of the day were like an hour on the clock, absolutely equal. but haste and speed accelerate time, which passes more quickly, and two hours of hurry shorten a day. every minute is torn apart by being segmented, stuffed to bursting. you can pile a mountain of things into an hour. days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints. hurrying means doing several things at once, and quickly: this; then that; and then something else. when you hurry, time is filled to bursting, like a badly-arranged drawer in which you have stuffed different things without any attempt at order.

I usually enjoy setting up a new kitchen, but this has become a joyless and highly charged task. My mother and I each have our own set of kitchen boxes, which means that if there are two cheese graters between us, only one will make it into a cupboard. The other will be put back in a box or given to Goodwill. Each such little decision has the weight of a Middle East negotiation. While her kitchenware is serviceable, I’m a sucker for the high end: All-Clad saucepans and Emile Henry pie dishes. Before long, I’m shaking my head at pretty much everything my mother removes from her San Diego boxes. She takes each rejected item as a personal slight – which in fact it is. I begrudge her even her lightweight bowls, which she can lift easily with her injured hand. Here she is, a fragile old woman barely able to bend down as she peers into a low cupboard, looking for a place where she can share life with her grown daughter. At such a sight my heart should be big, but it’s small, so small that when I see her start stuffing her serving spoons into the same drawer as my own sturdy pieces, lovingly accumulated over the years, it makes me crazy. Suddenly I’m acting out decades of unvoiced anger about my mother’s parenting, which seems to be materializing in the form of her makeshift collection of kitchenware being unpacked into my drawers. When I became a mother myself, I developed a self-righteous sense of superiority to my mother: I was better than my mother, for having successfully picked myself up and dusted myself off, for never having lain in bed for days on end, too blotto to get my child off to school or even to know if it was a school day. By sheer force of will and strength of character, I believed, I had risen above all that she succumbed to and skirted all that I might have inherited. This, of course, is too obnoxiously smug to say in words. So I say it with flatware.

Here’s an intervention that’s aimed at shame detection and reduction: “Hmm . . . it’s hard to find your ‘I’m sorry’ voice. I have times like that too. I’ll use it for you before you find it again.” Then you, the parent, go to your other child and say, “I’m sorry I took your lovie. I know that was upsetting. Is there anything I can do to make it better?” And then—and this is key—no dart eyes, no lecture, no “See, that was easy!” Just trust—yes, TRUST—that this sank in and move on. Maybe later in the day, when you see that shame is no longer present (you’ll notice because your child is back to her playful self), you can say something like, “Apologizing is hard. It’s even hard for me and I’m an adult!” Or you can use stuffed animals to act out a situation that didn’t feel good to one of the animals and model a struggle around apologizing. Then pause and see what your daughter says. But note that none of this reflection or learning or growth is possible when shame is present.

The real loser in the eastern forests has been the songbird. One of the most striking losses was the Carolina parakeet, a lovely, innocuous bird whose numbers in the wild were possibly exceeded only by the unbelievably numerous passenger pigeon. (When the first pilgrims came to America there were an estimated nine billion passenger pigeons—more than twice the number of all birds found in America today.) Both were hunted out of existence—the passenger pigeon for pig feed and the simple joy of blasting volumes of birds from the sky with blind ease, the Carolina parakeet because it ate farmers’ fruit and had a striking plumage that made a lovely ladies’ hat. In 1914, the last surviving members of each species died within weeks of each other in captivity. A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman’s warbler. Always rare, it was said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in 1939, two birders, operating independently in different places, coincidentally saw a Bachman’s warbler within two days of each other. Both shot the birds (nice work, boys!), and that, it appears, was that for the Bachman’s warbler. But there are almost certainly others that disappeared before anyone much noticed. John James Audubon painted three species of bird—the small-headed flycatcher, the carbonated warbler, and the Blue Mountain warbler—that have not been seen by anyone since. The same is true of Townsend’s bunting, of which there is one stuffed specimen in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the populations of migratory songbirds fell by 50 percent in the eastern United States (in large part because of loss of breeding sites and other vital wintering habitats in Latin America) and by some estimates are continuing to fall by 3 percent or so a year. Seventy percent of all eastern bird species have seen population declines since the 1960s. These days, the woods are a pretty quiet place.

She began spending days on end in bed. She ate too little and then too much. Her stomach hurt, her head ached, her heart fluttered inside her. She was cross and absentminded and began crying like a crocodile over the most sentimental stories--because of course she went on reading. What else was there for her to do? She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn't taste bad, but she was still unhappy.

I know you are tired. I know you are hurting. I know that even among the crowds and or with your closest loved ones, you feel terribly alone in the world. I know that in the quietness, a thousand hell hounds are barking and snarling at your heels. They tell you, "Everything is wrong with you. You are a failure. You will never live to see your dreams and visions come to pass. You know you should just throw in the towel. No one would even miss you if you were gone. Exit from this cruel insane assylum you call home. We will even tell you how to end 'it'." But don't you dare entertain those hounds of hell, no, not even for one moment. See, you not only have the elixir of Life inside of your organs and your veins; you are the Elixir of Life of a Celestial domain. For every hell hound nipping at your ears, there are eight hundred angels rushing to you with every holy breath....you take. Every step you make fuels the fire of Love in your behalf. See, nothing is wrong with you. Every thing is right with you. You are cut from iron. You have long exchanged your velveteen fabric and cotton stuffing for blazen guts and a heart of gold. You are the head and not the tail. You are the water in the desert, the ripple in the steam, the sword AND the stone and you, glorious being, are not alone! We are one and we are many. We've known lack, but we are plenty. We are not on the cusp of a break through. We are the cusp and we are the break --- through. We are the old and we are the new. Who knew? You did. You do. And don't you ever forget that.

One day I went to the basement to do the laundry and found one of his socks was stuffed with bloody handkerchiefs. Seven of them. I laid them out one by one and used the tricks he taught me. I waited by the washer for its full cycle, hoping it would work. All seven came out clean, but my throat stayed tight, my stomach ached. I folded them, one by one, in little squares. I carried them upstairs on the top of the pile. Gramps was in the dining room when I got there, pouring himself a glass of whiskey. He eyed the folded laundry. “How’ve you been feeling, Gramps?” He cleared his throat. “So-so,” he said. “Have you been to the doctor?” He snorted—my suggestion was ridiculous—and I remembered a time in junior high when I came home from health class and talked to him about the dangers of smoking. “This conversation is very American,” he’d said. “We live in America.” “That we do, Sailor. That we do. But wherever in the world we live, something’s gonna get us in the end. Something gets us every time.” I hadn’t known then how to argue his point. I should have tried harder.

Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will triumph—not merely in the end but in every moment. Our pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting. They begin to subside the instant they arise, only to be replaced by fresh desires or feelings of discomfort. You can’t get enough of your favorite meal until, in the next moment, you find you are so stuffed as to nearly require the attention of a surgeon—and yet, by some quirk of physics, you still have room for dessert. The pleasure of dessert lasts a few seconds, and then the lingering taste in your mouth must be banished by a drink of water. The warmth of the sun feels wonderful on your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a good thing. A move to the shade brings immediate relief, but after a minute or two, the breeze is just a little too cold. Do you have a sweater in the car? Let’s take a look. Yes, there it is. You’re warm now, but you notice that your sweater has seen better days. Does it make you look carefree or disheveled? Perhaps it is time to go shopping for something new. And so it goes.

He was fiddling with the harness on the lead horse when she approached him, and asked, "Do you have proof that our aunt sent you to escort us?" He glanced sideways at her,but then put his attention back on the horse. "I mentioned your aunt,you didn't," he pointed out,his tone indifferent. "Well,yes,you did,but everyone in this town knows that we recently lost our father and are traveling to live with our aunt." That got his eyes on her again with a narrowed frown. "I've never set foot in this town before." "So you say,but-" "Are you accusing me of sneaking into town in the last day or so,hearing your tale that 'everyone' knows about, and cooking up a plan to abscond with you and your sister?" Put that way,it sounded really horrible. He'd have to be the worst sort of person to cook up such a plan. She winced mentally. She should nod in agreement. She couldn't bring herself to do it.She didn't need to.He was already furious with her. He reached inside his vest to pull out a letter he had stuffed in a pocket there. He literally shoved the letter in Marian's face. "This is how I knew where to find you, Miss Laton,and having not found you where you were supposed to be,I've spent every day since tracking you down.

He insisted on clearing the table, and again devoted himself to his game of patience: piecing together the map of Paris, the bits of which he’d stuffed into the pocket of his raincoat, folded up any old how. I helped him. Then he asked me, straight out, ‘What would you say was the true centre of Paris?’ I was taken aback, wrong-footed. I thought this knowledge was part of a whole body of very rarefied and secret lore. Playing for time, I said, ‘The starting point of France’s roads . . . the brass plate on the parvis of Notre-Dame.’ He gave me a withering look. ‘Do you take for me a sap?’ The centre of Paris, a spiral with four centres, each completely self-contained, independent of the other three. But you don’t reveal this to just anybody. I suppose - I hope - it was in complete good faith that Alexandre Arnoux mentioned the lamp behind the apse of St-Germain-l’Auxerrois. I wouldn’t have created that precedent. My turn now to let the children play with the lock. ‘The centre, as you must be thinking of it, is the well of St-Julien-le-Pauvre. The “Well of Truth” as it’s been known since the eleventh century.’ He was delighted. I’d delivered. He said, ‘You know, you and I could do great things together. It’s a pity I’m already “beyond redemption”, even at this very moment.’ His unhibited display of brotherly affection was of childlike spontaneity. But he was still pursuing his line of thought: he dashed out to the nearby stationery shop and came back with a little basic pair of compasses made of tin. ‘Look. The Vieux-Chene, the Well. The Well, the Arbre-a-Liege On either side of the Seine, adhering closely to the line he’d drawn, the age-old tavern signs were at pretty much the same distance from the magic well. ‘Well, now, you see, it’s always been the case that whenever something bad happens at the Vieux-Chene, a month later — a lunar month, that is, just twenty-eight days — the same thing happens at old La Frite’s place, but less serious. A kind of repeat performance. An echo Then he listed, and pointed out on the map, the most notable of those key sites whose power he or his friends had experienced. In conclusion he said, ‘I’m the biggest swindler there is, I’m prepared to be swindled myself, that’s fair enough. But not just anywhere. There are places where, if you lie, or think ill, it’s Paris you disrespect. And that upsets me. That’s when I lose my cool: I hit back. It’s as if that’s what I was there for.

The frosting shirt from your cake fight weeks earlier – just like the one you have in your closet. It was hanging inside his closet door, blue and crusty. It’s probably still in there.” I smile, picturing Matt hanging his frosted shirt behind the door that night at the same time I was stuffing mine into its plastic bag in my room next door, totally freaked out about what had just happened. “I didn’t think you recognized it,” I say. “That day we went through my closet before the trip. You wanted me to throw it out.” “I didn’t recognize it that day. But once I saw the picture in your journal, it started to come together.

the walls came alive with brightly hued paintings of ibis-headed men and lion-headed women. We moved along a dazzling corridor covered with Gods, Goddesses, solar disks, and all-seeing eyes. There were boats, birds, chariots, harps, plows, and rainbow wings—thousands of glyphs. I had the sensation of floating through a storied world. When we arrived in the first hall, I could barely take in the sprawling room with its cubicles reaching toward the ceiling, each one labeled and stuffed with scrolls and leather-bound codices. Enheduanna’s exaltation to Inanna was likely in here, as well as at least a few works by female Greek philosophers. It seemed absurd to think my own writings might be housed here one day, too, but I stood there and let myself imagine it. As we moved from hall to hall, I became aware of young men in short white tunics dashing about, some carrying armloads of papyri, others on ladders arranging scrolls in cubicles or dusting them with tufts of feathers. I noticed that Lavi watched them intently. “You are very quiet,” Yaltha said, sidling next to me. “Is the library all you hoped?” “It’s a holy of holies,” I said. And it was, but I could feel the tiny lump of anger tucked beneath my awe. A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world.

So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. Isaiah 41: 10 NIV Nadin Khoury was thirteen years old, five foot two, and weighed, soaking wet, probably a hundred pounds. His attackers were larger and outnumbered him seven to one. For thirty minutes they hit, kicked, and beat him. He never stood a chance. They dragged him through the snow, stuffed him into a tree, and suspended him on a seven-foot wrought-iron fence. Khoury survived the attack and would have likely faced a few more except for the folly of one of the bullies. He filmed the pile-on and posted it on YouTube. The troublemakers landed in jail, and the story reached the papers. A staffer at the nationwide morning show The View read the account and invited Khoury to appear on the broadcast. As the video of the assault played, his lower lip quivered. As the video ended, the curtain opened, and three huge men walked out, members of the Philadelphia Eagles football team. Khoury, a rabid fan, turned and smiled. One was All-Pro receiver DeSean Jackson. Jackson took a seat close to the boy and promised him, “Anytime you need us, I got two linemen right here.” Then, in full view of every bully in America, he gave the boy his cell phone number. 16 Who wouldn’t want that type of protection? You’ve got it . . . from the Son of God himself.

Moses threw the spent cigarette butt to the ground. It bounced once then lay still. A lazy wisp of smoke drifted towards the reaching shadows. He pushed himself to his feet and brushed flakes of grit from the seat of his jeans. Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he moved away from the pipe and began to negotiate a route down the alley. A rivulet of cans, wrappers and remnants of kebabs dotted the ground like flotsam; the waste of nights past, discarded by the nameless, faceless masses marking their territories with futile gestures. Oh, sure, the trash was still emptied these days – there were still garbage men around, but it just delayed the inevitable, prolonging the agony of a tired and dying world.

Strong, good smells clash with each other, garlic against cinnamon, savory against sweet. Two dressings, Ma's traditional corn bread version as well as the stuffing she made last year for a change of pace, a buttery version with cherries and sausage and hazelnuts. The herb-brined turkey, probably larger than we need, and a challenge to manhandle into and out of the refrigerator. A deep dish of creamy, smooth mashed potatoes, riced and dried to make them thirsty, then plumped back up with warmed cream and butter. For dessert, a mocha cake I came up with one day. In the batter is barely sweetened chocolate and dark, strong coffee. The layers are sealed together with more chocolate, warmed up with a hint of ancho powder.

She imagines its walls white. She imagines everything in it painted white. Even the holes in the floor, through the white broken boards, are painted white inside. The house’s windows look out on to high privet hedge. Elisabeth goes outside to paint that high hedge white too. Inside, sitting on a white-painted old couch, the stuffing coming out of it also stiff with white emulsion, Daniel laughs at what she’s doing. He laughs silently but like a child with his feet in his hands as she paints one tiny green leaf white after another. He catches her eye. He winks. That does it. They’re both standing in pure clean white space. Yes, she says. Now we can sell this space for a fortune. Only the very rich can afford to be this minimalist these days.

These days, the Lowe brothers knew better than to tempt the town’s wrath, but that didn’t stop them from sneaking over the fence in the throes of night, relishing the taste of some reckless thrill. “Do you hear that?” The older one, Hendry Lowe, stood up, brushed the forest floor off his gray T-shirt, and cracked each of his knuckles, one by one. “That’s the sound of rules breaking.” Hendry Lowe was too pretty to worry about rules. His nose was freckled from afternoons napping in sunshine. His dark curls kissed his ears and cheekbones, overgrown from months between haircuts. His clothes smelled sweet from morning pastries often stuffed in his pockets. Hendry Lowe was also too charming to play a villain. The younger brother, Alistair, leapt from the fence and crashed gracelessly to the ground. He didn’t like forgoing the use of magick, because without it he was never very good at anything—even an action as simple as landing. But tonight he had no magick to waste. “Do you hear that?” Alistair echoed, smirking as he rose to his feet. “That’s the sound of bones breaking.” Although the two brothers looked alike, Alistair wore the Lowe features far differently than Hendry. Pale skin from a lifetime spent indoors, eyes the color of cigarette ashes, a widow’s peak as sharp as a blade. He wore a wool sweater in September because he was perpetually cold. He carried the Sunday crossword in his pocket because he was perpetually bored. He was one year younger than Hendry, a good deal more powerful, and a great deal more wicked. Alistair Lowe played the perfect villain. Not because he was instinctively cruel or openly proud, but because, sometimes, he liked to.

The multiplication of desires. This is what our culture has given us. It gives us things and the desire for those things. And the more attached we are to things—whether those things are physical objects, or sins, or pets, or people—the less we hunger for the real bread of eternal life (see John 6:55). We are like a man dying of malnutrition despite having a pantry full of food. He stuffed himself with soda and chips and chocolate, but it wasn’t enough. It couldn’t sustain him. And he never felt the hunger pains because he had filled his stomach with junk. Every petty and meaningless desire of ours is filled. We have so much that we even invent new desires and fulfill them, too. Every day you hear about some new fetish, some new perverse interest that has taken hold of some segment of society. And with these new fetishes always come new “rights.” We plunge into ourselves and bring to the surface every dark and depraved and strange desire we can find, and then we fight for the right to satisfy it. We not only indulge ourselves, we even feel heroic in our indulgence. We have made selfishness into a cause; a banner under which we march and sing songs of victory. All of it is empty, none of it has any substance, but we drown our souls in it, in this sea of nothingness, and God is pushed ever further to the periphery. As Jeremiah said, we have gone after empty idols and become empty ourselves; we have exchanged our glory for useless things (Jeremiah 2:5, 2:11). Our lives have become consumed by so much noise, so much commotion, so much food, so much media, so many advertisements, so many lights and sounds, and all it does is keep us focused on a million things besides the one thing that matters. We run from God into the haze of modern culture, and we lose Him somewhere in the chaos, in the noise.

The cuisine of Northern Iran, overlooked and underrated, is unlike most Persian food in that it's unfussy and lighthearted as the people from that region. The fertile seaside villages of Mazandaran and Rasht, where Soli grew up before moving to the congested capital, were lush with orchards and rice fields. His father had cultivated citrus trees and the family was raised on the fruits and grains they harvested. Alone in the kitchen, without Zod's supervision, he found himself turning to the wholesome food of his childhood, not only for the comfort the simple compositions offered, but because it was what he knew so well as he set about preparing a homecoming feast for Zod's only son. He pulled two kilos of fava beans from the freezer. Gathered last May, shucked and peeled on a quiet afternoon, they defrosted in a colander for a layered frittata his mother used to make with fistfuls of dill and sprinkled with sea salt. One flat of pale green figs and a bushel of new harvest walnuts were tied to the back of his scooter, along with two crates of pomegranates- half to squeeze for fresh morning juice and the other to split and seed for rice-and-meatball soup. Three fat chickens pecked in the yard, unaware of their destiny as he sharpened his cleaver. Tomorrow they would braise in a rich, tangy stew with sour red plums, their hearts and livers skewered and grilled, then wrapped in sheets of lavash with bouquets of tarragon and mint. Basmati rice soaked in salted water to be steamed with green garlic and mounds of finely chopped parsley and cilantro, then served with a whole roasted, eight kilo white fish stuffed with barberries, pistachios, and lime. On the farthest burner, whole bitter oranges bobbed in blossom syrup, to accompany rice pudding, next to a simmering pot of figs studded with cardamom pods for preserves.

November The month of the drowned dog. After long rain the land Was sodden as the bed of an ancient lake, Treed with iron and bridles. In the sunk lane The ditch - a seep silent all summer - Made brown foam with a big voice: that, and my boots On the lane's scrubbed stones, in the gulleyed leaves, Against the hill's hanging silence; Mist silvering the droplets on bare thorns Slower than the change of daylight. In a let of the ditch a tramp was bundled asleep; Face tucked down into beard, drawn in Under his hair like a hedgehog's. I took him for dead, But his stillness separated from the death Of the rotting grass on the ground. A wind chilled, And a fresh comfort tightened through him, Each hand stuffed deeper into the other sleeve. His ankles, bound with sacking and hairy band, Rubbed each other, resettling. The wind hardened; A puff shook a glittering from the thorns, And against the rains' dragging grey columns Smudged the farms. In a moment The fields were jumping and smoking; the thorns Quivered, riddled with the glassy verticals. I stayed on under the welding cold Watching the tramp's face glisten and the drops on his coat Flash and darken. I thought what strong trust Slept in him - as the trickling furrows slept, And the thorn-roots in their grip on darkness; And the buried stones, taking the weight of winter; The hill where the hare crouched with clenched teeth. Rain plastered the land till it was shining Like hammered lead, and I ran, and in the rushing wood Shuttered by a black oak leaned. The keeper's gibbet had owls and hawks By the neck, weasels, a gang of cats, crows: Some stiff, weightless, twirled like dry bark bits In the drilling rain. Some still had their shape, Had their pride with it; hung, chins on chests Patient to outwait these worst days that beat Their crowns bare and dripped from their feat.

The reason we were with Mama that day was because it was a snow day. School was canceled, but we were too little to stay alone in our apartment while Mama went to work—which she did, through snow and sleet and probably also earthquakes and Armageddon. She muttered, stuffing us into our snowsuits and boots, that it didn’t matter if she had to cross a blizzard to do it, but God forbid Ms. Mina had to spread the peanut butter on her own sandwich bread. In fact the only time I remember Mama taking time off work was twenty-five years later, when she had a double hip replacement, generously paid for by the Hallowells. She stayed home for a week, and even after that, when it didn’t quite heal right and she insisted on returning to work, Mina found her tasks to do that kept her off her feet. But when I was little, during school vacations and bouts of fever and snow days like this one, Mama would take us with her on the B train downtown. Mr.

Live to start. Start to live. Don’t Wait. Start Stuff. People are innately passionate about certain unique aspects of life. You are innately passionate about certain unique aspects of life. And people are blessed with bouts of clear and concise intuition that drive them toward distinct goals and aspirations within their jobs and their lives as a whole.(You are not excluded from this group.) But people disregard these inspired thoughts, these high-potential opportunities, as “just another stupid idea.” Why? Perhaps they are concerned about a lack of support (perceived or otherwise) from others, or maybe they are afraid of what others will think of them if they fail. Whatever the reason, they convince themselves: “This would be a great idea for someone who has more free time.” “This would be a great idea for someone with a higher level of education.” “This would be a great idea for someone who has more money.” “Everybody thinks this idea is crazy. They must be right.” No matter the justification, the response is the same. These inspired thoughts, these high-potential ideas, are stuffed deep into the drawer labeled “stupid,” and they’re never heard from again . . . or the waiting game begins. People wait. They wait for that elusive day when they’ll finally have enough time (guess what? — you never will), enough education (there is always more to know), enough money (no matter how much you make, someone will always have more). They wait until the children are grown (news flash: just because they’re grown, it doesn’t mean you’re rid of them) or until things settle down at work (they never will). People wait until . . . until . . . until . . . They wait, and they wait, and they wait, until that fateful day when they wake up and realize that while they were sitting around, paying dues, earning their keep, waiting for that elusive “perfect time,” their entire life has passed them by.

Say I decide that it would be a good thing to insert pictures here demonstrating cultural relativism, displaying an act that is commonsensical in one culture but deeply distressing in another. I know, I think, I'll get some pictures of a Southeast Asian dog meat market. Like me, most readers will likely resonate with dogs. Good plan! On to Google Images and the result is that I spend hours transfixed, unable to stop, torturing myself with picture after picture of dogs being carted off to market. Dogs being butchered, cooked and sold. Pictures of humans going about their day's work in a market indifferent to a crate stuffed to the top with suffering dogs. I imagine the fear those dogs feel. How they are hot, thirsty, in pain. I think, what if these dogs had come to trust humans? I think of their fear and confusion. I think, what if one of the dogs whom I've loved had to experience that? What if this happened to a dog my children loved? And with my heart racing, I realize that I hate these people. Hate! Every last one of them and despise their culture. And it takes a locomotive's worth of effort for me to admit that I can't justify that hatred and contempt. That mine is a mere moral intuition. That there are things that I do that would evoke the same response in some distant person whose morality and humanity are certainly no less than mine. And that but for the randomness of where I happen to have been born, I could have readily had their views instead. The thing that makes the tragedy of commonsense morality so tragic, is the intensity with which you just know that They are deeply wrong. In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions, religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit, bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds, facing a potential tragedy of the commons. They make us less selfish in Me versus Us situations, but they send us hurtling toward our worst behaviors when confronting Thems and their different moralities.

Write your routine, Ronan. Now. While I watch. I want to see it." 7:45 A.M.: The most important meal of the day. 8:00 A.M.: Feed animals. 9:30 A.M.: Repair barns or house. 12:00 P.M.: Lunch @ that weird gas station. 1:30 P.M.: Ronan Lynch's marvelous dream emporium. "What does this one mean, Ronan?" It meant practice makes perfect. It meant ten thousand hours to mastery, if at first you don't succeed, there is no try only do. Ronan had spent hours over the last year dreaming ever more complex and precise objects into being, culminating in an intricate security system that rendered the Barns largely impossible to find unless you knew exactly where you were going. After Cambridge, though, it felt like all the fun had run out of the game. "I don't ask what you do at work, Declan." 6:00 P.M.: Drive around. 7:15 P.M.: Nuke some dinner, yo. 7:30 P.M.: Movie time. 11:00 P.M.: Text Parrish. Adam's most recent text had said simply: $4200. It was the amount Ronan had to send to cover the dorm room repairs. *11:30 P.M.: Go to bed. *Saturday/Sunday: Church/DC *Monday: Laundry & Grocery *Tuesday: Text or call Gansey These last items were in Declan's handwriting, his addendums subtly suggesting all the components of a fulfilling grown-up life Ronan had missed when crafting it. They only served to depress Ronan more. Look how you can predict the next forty-eight hours, seventy-two hours, ninety-six hours, look how you can predict the rest of your life. The entire word routine depressed Ronan. The sameness. Fuck everything. Gansey texted: Declan told me to tell you to get out of bed. Ronan texted back: why He watched the morning light move over the varied black-gray shapes in his bedroom. Shelves of model cars; an open Uilleann pipes case; an old scuffed desk with a stuffed whale on it; a metal tree with wondrously intricate branches; heaps of laundry curled around beet-read wood shavings. Gansey texted back: don't make me get on a plane I'm currently chained to one of the largest black walnut trees in Oregon

Missy and her crew left, I was alone. Like really alone, like pre-Shay alone. It felt glorious. Well, maybe not. I didn’t feel right about Shay, but I’d see him in a day. We could sort out whatever happened on his street. Till then, I studied to my heart’s content. I made trips to my dorm’s computer lab, and I even got naughty. I stole some of the computer’s printing papers, stuffing them down the front of my shirt. My inner dork was coming out full-force. It was like I’d been around “cool” people too much for my system. It was rebelling. It needed an outlet, and I indulged. All of the colored highlighters came out. Not just the primary colors, all of them. I used pink for one textbook, and added purple on the next. All caution was thrown to the wind. It was only eight, but I went to the library. I really let my freak out. An energy drink. Coffee from the cart. My own Twizzlers this time. Even a bag of chocolate candies. I was going nuts on the caffeine and sugar, and then I found an empty study room on the top and most isolated floor in the library. I stayed until midnight. It was some of the best studying I’ve had. Ever. Mind-blowing.

Eat either three regular-size meals a day or four or five smaller meals. Do not skip meals or go more than six waking hours without eating. 2. Eat liberally of combinations of fat and protein in the form of poultry, fish, shellfish, eggs and red meat, as well as of pure, natural fat in the form of butter, mayonnaise, olive oil, safflower, sunflower and other vegetable oils (preferably expeller-pressed or cold-pressed). 3. Eat no more than 20 grams a day of carbohydrate, most of which must come in the form of salad greens and other vegetables. You can eat approximately three cups-loosely packed-of salad, or two cups of salad plus one cup of other vegetables (see the list of acceptable vegetables on page 110). 4. Eat absolutely no fruit, bread, pasta, grains, starchy vegetables or dairy products other than cheese, cream or butter. Do not eat nuts or seeds in the first two weeks. Foods that combine protein and carbohydrates, such as chickpeas, kidney beans and other legumes, are not permitted at this time. 5. Eat nothing that is not on the acceptable foods list. And that means absolutely nothing! Your "just this one taste won't hurt" rationalization is the kiss of failure during this phase of Atkins. 6. Adjust the quantity you eat to suit your appetite, especially as it decreases. When hungry, eat the amount that makes you feel satisfied but not stuffed. When not hungry, eat a small controlled carbohydrate snack to accompany your nutritional supplements. 7. Don't assume any food is low in carbohydrate-instead read labels! Check the carb count (it's on every package) or use the carbohydrate gram counter in this book. 8. Eat out as often as you wish but be on guard for hidden carbs in gravies, sauces and dressings. Gravy is often made with flour or cornstarch, and sugar is sometimes an ingredient in salad dressing. 9. Avoid foods or drinks sweetened with aspartame. Instead, use sucralose or saccharin. Be sure to count each packet of any of these as 1 gram of carbs. 10. Avoid coffee, tea and soft drinks that contain caffeine. Excessive caffeine has been shown to cause low blood sugar, which can make you crave sugar. 11. Drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water each day to hydrate your body, avoid constipation and flush out the by-products of burning fat. 12. If you are constipated, mix a tablespoon or more of psyllium husks in a cup or more of water and drink daily. Or mix ground flaxseed into a shake or sprinkle wheat bran on a salad or vegetables.

With the importance of resetting the entropy each time a steam engine goes through a cycle, you might wonder what would happen if the entropy reset were to fail. That’s tantamount to the steam engine not expelling adequate waste heat, and so with each cycle the engine would get hotter until it would overheat and break down. If a steam engine were to suffer such a fate it might prove inconvenient but, assuming there were no injuries, would likely not drive anyone into an existential crisis. Yet the very same physics is central to whether life and mind can persist indefinitely far into the future. The reason is that what holds for the steam engine holds for you. It is likely that you don’t consider yourself to be a steam engine or perhaps even a physical contraption. I, too, only rarely use those terms to describe myself. But think about it: your life involves processes no less cyclical than those of the steam engine. Day after day, your body burns the food you eat and the air you breathe to provide energy for your internal workings and your external activities. Even the very act of thinking—molecular motion taking place in your brain—is powered by these energy-conversion processes. And so, much like the steam engine, you could not survive without resetting your entropy by purging excess waste heat to the environment. Indeed, that’s what you do. That’s what we all do. All the time. It’s why, for example, the military’s infrared goggles designed to “see” the heat we all continually expel do a good job of helping soldiers spot enemy combatants at night. We can now appreciate more fully Russell’s mind-set when imagining the far future. We are all waging a relentless battle to resist the persistent accumulation of waste, the unstoppable rise of entropy. For us to survive, the environment must absorb and carry away all the waste, all the entropy, we generate. Which raises the question, Does the environment—by which we now mean the observable universe—provide a bottomless pit for absorbing such waste? Can life dance the entropic two-step indefinitely? Or might there come a time when the universe is, in effect, stuffed and so is unable to absorb the waste heat generated by the very activities that define us, bringing an end to life and mind? In the lachrymose phrasing of Russell, is it true that “all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins”?

She started to head out, but she passed her room. It was the same as she'd left it: a pile of cushions by her bed for Little Brother to sleep on, a stack of poetry and famous literature on her desk that she was supposed to study to become a "model bride," and the lavender shawl and silk robes she'd worn the day before she left home. The jade comb Mulan had left in exchange for the conscription notice caught her eye; it now rested in front of her mirror. Mulan's gaze lingered on the comb, on its green teeth and the pearl-colored flower nestled on its shoulder. She wanted to hold it, to put it in her hair and show her family- to show everyone- she was worthy. After all, her surname, Fa, meant flower. She needed to show them that she had bloomed to be worthy of her family name. But no one was here, and she didn't want to face her reflection. Who knew what it would show, especially in Diyu? She isn't a boy, her mother had told her father once. She shouldn't be riding horses and letting her hair loose. The neighbors will talk. She won't find a good husband- Let her, Fa Zhou had consoled his wife. When she leaves this household as a bride, she'll no longer be able to do these things. Mulan hadn't understood what he meant then. She hadn't understood the significance of what it meant for her to be the only girl in the village who skipped learning ribbon dances to ride Khan through the village rice fields, who chased after chickens and helped herd the cows instead of learning the zither or practicing her painting, who was allowed to have opinions- at all. She'd taken the freedom of her childhood for granted. When she turned fourteen, everything changed. I know this will be a hard change to make, Fa Li had told her, but it's for your own good. Men want a girl who is quiet and demure, polite and poised- not someone who speaks out of turn and runs wild about the garden. A girl who can't make a good match won't bring honor to the family. And worse yet, she'll have nothing: not respect, or money of her own, or a home. She'd touched Mulan's cheek with a resigned sigh. I don't want that fate for you, Mulan. Every morning for a year, her mother tied a rod of bamboo to Mulan's spine to remind her to stand straight, stuffed her mouth with persimmon seeds to remind her to speak softly, and helped Mulan practice wearing heeled shoes by tying ribbons to her feet and guiding her along the garden. Oh, how she'd wanted to please her mother, and especially her father. She hadn't wanted to let them down. But maybe she hadn't tried enough. For despite Fa Li's careful preparation, she had failed the Matchmaker's exam. The look of hopefulness on her father's face that day- the thought that she'd disappointed him still haunted her. Then fate had taken its turn, and Mulan had thrown everything away to become a soldier. To learn how to punch and kick and hold a sword and shield, to shoot arrows and run and yell. To save her country, and bring honor home to her family. How much she had wanted them to be proud of her.

STUFFIN’ MUFFINS Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. 4 ounces salted butter (1 stick, 8 Tablespoons, ¼ pound) ½ cup finely chopped onion (you can buy this chopped or chop it yourself) ½ cup finely chopped celery ½ cup chopped apple (core, but do not peel before chopping) 1 teaspoon powdered sage 1 teaspoon powdered thyme 1 teaspoon ground oregano 8 cups herb stuffing (the kind in cubes that you buy in the grocery store—you can also use plain bread cubes and add a quarter-teaspoon more of ground sage, thyme, and oregano) 3 eggs, beaten (just whip them up in a glass with a fork) 1 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon black pepper (freshly ground is best) 2 ounces (½ stick, 4 Tablespoons, pound) melted butter ¼ to ½ cup chicken broth (I used Swanson’s) Hannah’s 1st Note: I used a Fuji apple this time. I’ve also used Granny Smith apples, or Gala apples. Before you start, find a 12-cup muffin pan. Spray the inside of the cups with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray OR line them with cupcake papers. Get out a 10-inch or larger frying pan. Cut the stick of butter in 4 to 8 pieces and drop them inside. Put the pan over MEDIUM heat on the stovetop to melt the butter. Once the butter has melted, add the chopped onions. Give them a stir. Add the chopped celery. Stir it in. Add the chopped apple and stir that in. Sprinkle in the ground sage, thyme, and oregano. Sauté this mixture for 5 minutes. Then pull the frying pan off the heat and onto a cold burner. In a large mixing bowl, combine the 8 cups of herb stuffing. (If the boxed stuffing you bought has a separate herb packet, just sprinkle it over the top of the mixture in your frying pan. That way you’ll be sure to put it in!) Pour the beaten eggs over the top of the herb stuffing and mix them in. Sprinkle on the salt and the pepper. Mix them in. Pour the melted butter over the top and mix it in. Add the mixture from your frying pan on top of that. Stir it all up together. Measure out ¼ cup of chicken broth. Wash your hands. (Mixing the stuffing is going to be a lot easier if you use your impeccably clean hands to mix it.) Pour the ¼ cup of chicken broth over the top of your bowl. Mix everything with your hands. Feel the resulting mixture. It should be softened, but not wet. If you think it’s so dry that your muffins might fall apart after you bake them, mix in another ¼ cup of chicken broth. Once your Stuffin’ Muffin mixture is thoroughly combined, move the bowl close to the muffin pan you’ve prepared, and go wash your hands again. Use an ice cream scoop to fill your muffin cups. If you don’t have an ice cream scoop, use a large spoon. Mound the tops of the muffins by hand. (Your hands are still impeccably clean, aren’t they?) Bake the Stuffin’ Muffins at 350 degrees F. for 25 minutes. Yield: One dozen standard-sized muffins that can be served hot, warm, or at room temperature. Hannah’s 2nd Note: These muffins are a great accompaniment to pork, ham, chicken, turkey, duck, beef, or . . . well . . . practically anything! If there are any left over, you can reheat them in the microwave to serve the next day. Hannah’s 3rd Note: I’m beginning to think that Andrea can actually make Stuffin’ Muffins. It’s only April now, so she’s got seven months to practice.

Sophie!” Val spotted her first and abandoned all ceremony to wrap his arms around her. “Sophie Windham, I have missed you and missed you.” He held her tightly, so tightly Sophie could hide her face against his shoulder and swallow back the lump abruptly forming in her throat. “I have a new étude for you to listen to. It’s based on parallel sixths and contrary motion—it’s quite good fun.” He stepped back, his smile so dear Sophie wanted to hug him all over again, but St. Just elbowed Val aside. “Long lost sister, where have you been?” His hug was gentler but no less welcome. “I’ve traveled half the length of England to see you, you know.” He kissed her cheek, and Sophie felt a blush creeping up her neck. “You did not. You’ve come south because Emmie said you must, and you want to check on your ladies out in Surrey.” Westhaven waited until St. Just had released her. “I wanted to check on you.” His hug was the gentlest of all. “But you were not where you were supposed to be, Sophie. You have some explaining to do if we’re to get the story straight before we face Her Grace.” The simple fact of his support undid her. Sophie pressed her face to his shoulder and felt a tear leak from her eye. “I have missed you so, missed all of you so much.” Westhaven patted her back while Valentine stuffed a cold, wrinkled handkerchief into her hand. “We’ve made her cry.” St. Just did not sound happy. “I’m just…” Sophie stepped away from Westhaven and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m a little fatigued is all. I’ve been doing some baking, and the holidays are never without some challenges, and then there’s the baby—” “What baby?” All three men spoke—shouted, more nearly—as one. “Keep your voices down, please,” Sophie hissed. “Kit isn’t used to strangers, and if he’s overset, I’ll be all night dealing with him.” “And behold, a virgin shall conceive,” Val muttered as Sophie passed him back his handkerchief. St. Just shoved him on the shoulder. “That isn’t helping.” Westhaven went to the stove and took the kettle from the hob. “What baby, Sophie? And perhaps you might share some of this baking you’ve been doing. The day was long and cold, and our brothers grow testy if denied their victuals too long.” He sent her a smile, an it-will-be-all-right smile that had comforted her on many an occasion. Westhaven was sensible. It was his surpassing gift to be sensible, but Sophie found no solace from it now. She had not been sensible, and worse yet, she did not regret the lapse. She would, however, regret very much if the lapse did not remain private. “The tweenie was anticipating an interesting event, wasn’t she?” Westhaven asked as he assembled a tea tray. While Sophie took a seat at the table, St. Just hiked himself onto a counter, and Val took the other bench. “Joleen,” Sophie said. “Her interesting event is six months old, a thriving healthy child named… Westhaven, what are you doing?” “He’s making sure he gets something to eat under the guise of looking after his siblings,” St. Just said, pushing off the counter. “Next, he’ll fetch the cream from the window box while I make us some sandwiches. Valentine find us a cloth for the table.” “At once, Colonel.” Val snapped a salute and sauntered off in the direction of the butler’s pantry, while Westhaven headed for the colder reaches of the back hallway. “You

Chicken Francese, or lamb chops, or plump spinach gnocchi that she'd roll out by hand and drop into boiling salt water. When her brothers came home for the holidays, she'd spend days in the kitchen, preparing airy latkes and sweet and sour brisket; roast turkey with chestnut stuffing; elaborately iced layer cakes. She'd stay in the kitchen for hours, cooking dish after dish, hoping that all the food would somehow conceal their father's absence; hoping that the meals would take the taste of grief out of their mouths. "After my father died, I think cooking saved me. It was the only thing that made me happy. Everything else felt so out of control. But if I followed a recipe, if I used the right amounts of the right ingredients and did everything I was supposed to do..." She tried to explain it- how repetitive motions of peeling and chopping felt like a meditation, the comfort of knowing that flour and yeast, oil and salt, combined in the correct proportions, would always yield a loaf of bread; the way that making a shopping list could refocus her mind, and how much she enjoyed the smells of fresh rosemary, of roasting chicken or baking cookies, the velvety feel of a ball of dough at the precise moment when it reached its proper elasticity and could be put into an oiled bowl, under a clean cloth, to rise in a warm spot in the kitchen, the same step that her mother's mother's mother would have followed to make the same kind of bread. She liked to watch popovers rising to lofty heights in the oven's heat, blooming out of their tins. She liked the sound of a hearty soup or grain-thickened stew, simmering gently on a low flame, the look of a beautifully set table, with place cards and candles and fine china. All of it pleased her.

Robert Askins Brings ‘Hand to God’ to Broadway Chad Batka for The New York Times Robert Askins at the Booth Theater, where his play “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday. By MICHAEL PAULSON The conceit is zany: In a church basement, a group of adolescents gathers (mostly at the insistence of their parents) to make puppets that will spread the Christian message, but one of the puppets turns out to be more demonic than divine. The result — a dark comedy with the can-puppets-really-do-that raunchiness of “Avenue Q” and can-people-really-say-that outrageousness of “The Book of Mormon” — is “Hand to God,” a new play that is among the more improbable entrants in the packed competition for Broadway audiences over the next few weeks. Given the irreverence of some of the material — at one point stuffed animals are mutilated in ways that replicate the torments of Catholic martyrs — it is perhaps not a surprise to discover that the play’s author, Robert Askins, was nicknamed “Dirty Rob” as an undergraduate at Baylor, a Baptist-affiliated university where the sexual explicitness and violence of his early scripts raised eyebrows. But Mr. Askins had also been a lone male soloist in the children’s choir at St. John Lutheran of Cypress, Tex. — a child who discovered early that singing was a way to make the stern church ladies smile. His earliest performances were in a deeply religious world, and his writings since then have been a complex reaction to that upbringing. “It’s kind of frustrating in life to be like, ‘I’m a playwright,’ and watch people’s face fall, because they associate plays with phenomenally dull, didactic, poetic grad-schoolery, where everything takes too long and tediously explores the beauty in ourselves,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not church, even though it feels like church a lot when we go these days.” The journey to Broadway, where “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday at the Booth Theater, still seems unlikely to Mr. Askins, 34, who works as a bartender in Brooklyn and says he can’t afford to see Broadway shows, despite his newfound prominence. He seems simultaneously enthralled by and contemptuous of contemporary theater, the world in which he has chosen to make his life; during a walk from the Cobble Hill coffee shop where he sometimes writes to the Park Slope restaurant where he tends bar, he quoted Nietzsche and Derrida, described himself as “deeply weird,” and swore like, well, a satanic sock-puppet. “If there were no laughs in the show, I’d think there was something wrong with him,” said the actor Steven Boyer, who won raves in earlier “Hand to God” productions as Jason, a grief-stricken adolescent with a meek demeanor and an angry-puppet pal. “But anybody who is able to write about such serious stuff and be as hilarious as it is, I’m not worried about their mental health.” Mr. Askins’s interest in the performing arts began when he was a boy attending rural Texas churches affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod denomination; he recalls the worshipers as “deeply conservative, old farm folks, stone-faced, pride and suffering, and the only time anybody ever really livened up was when the children’s choir would perform.” “My grandmother had a cross-stitch that said, ‘God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing,’ and so I got into that,” he said. “For somebody who enjoys performance, that was the way in.” The church also had a puppet ministry — an effort to teach children about the Bible by use of puppets — and when Mr. Askins’s mother, a nurse, began running the program, he enlisted to help. He would perform shows for other children at preschools and vacation Bible camps. “The shows are wacky, but it was fun,” he said. “They’re badly written attempts to bring children to Jesus.” Not all of his formative encounters with puppets were positive. Particularly scarring: D

The ten rules of ikigai We’ll conclude this journey with ten rules we’ve distilled from the wisdom of the long-living residents of Ogimi: Stay active; don’t retire. Those who give up the things they love doing and do well lose their purpose in life. That’s why it’s so important to keep doing things of value, making progress, bringing beauty or utility to others, helping out, and shaping the world around you, even after your “official” professional activity has ended. Take it slow. Being in a hurry is inversely proportional to quality of life. As the old saying goes, “Walk slowly and you’ll go far.” When we leave urgency behind, life and time take on new meaning. Don’t fill your stomach. Less is more when it comes to eating for long life, too. According to the 80 percent rule, in order to stay healthier longer, we should eat a little less than our hunger demands instead of stuffing ourselves. Surround yourself with good friends. Friends are the best medicine, there for confiding worries over a good chat, sharing stories that brighten your day, getting advice, having fun, dreaming . . . in other words, living. Get in shape for your next birthday. Water moves; it is at its best when it flows fresh and doesn’t stagnate. The body you move through life in needs a bit of daily maintenance to keep it running for a long time. Plus, exercise releases hormones that make us feel happy. Smile. A cheerful attitude is not only relaxing—it also helps make friends. It’s good to recognize the things that aren’t so great, but we should never forget what a privilege it is to be in the here and now in a world so full of possibilities. Reconnect with nature. Though most people live in cities these days, human beings are made to be part of the natural world. We should return to it often to recharge our batteries. Give thanks. To your ancestors, to nature, which provides you with the air you breathe and the food you eat, to your friends and family, to everything that brightens your days and makes you feel lucky to be alive. Spend a moment every day giving thanks, and you’ll watch your stockpile of happiness grow. Live in the moment. Stop regretting the past and fearing the future. Today is all you have. Make the most of it. Make it worth remembering. Follow your ikigai. There is a passion inside you, a unique talent that gives meaning to your days and drives you to share the best of yourself until the very end. If you don’t know what your ikigai is yet, as Viktor Frankl says, your mission is to discover it.

We stop, together as if on signal, and stand and look at the bodies. It doesn't matter if we look. We're supposed to look: this is what they are there for, hanging on the Wall. Sometimes they'll be there for days, until there's a new batch, so as many people as possible will have the chance to see them. What they are hanging from is hooks. The hooks have been set into the brickwork of the Wall, for this purpose. Not all of them are occupied. The hooks look like appliances for the armless. Or steel question marks, upside-down and sideways. It's the bags over the heads that are the worst, worse than the faces themselves would be. It makes the men like dolls on which the faces have not yet been painted; like scarecrows, which in a way is what they are, since they are meant to scare. Or as if their heads are sacks, stuffed with some undifferentiated material, like flour or dough. It's the obvious heaviness of the heads, their vacancy, the way gravity pulls them down and there's no life anymore to hold them up. The heads are zeros. Though if you look and look, as we are doing, you can see the outlines of the features under the white cloth, like gray shadows. The heads are the heads of snowmen, with the coal eyes and the carrot noses fallen out. The heads are melting. But on one bag there's blood, which has seeped through the white cloth, where the mouth must have been. It makes another mouth, a small red one, like the mouths painted with thick brushes by kindergarten children. A child's idea of a smile. This smile of blood is what fixes the attention, finally. These are not snowmen after all.

Normally men don't really listen all that well. You can mention that you like apricots, or The Cure, or kittens, and it just goes out of their heads the minute it's out of your mouth. I personally seize on these clues about people. For example, I know that Sasha loves the smell of violets, and that Rose enjoys novels of a bodice-ripping nature and walks for exercise and has a Siamese cat called Dr. Oodles, but if I'd asked Dan what his best friend had studied at college- where they were roommates- he would have no idea. Anyway, Edward was apparently different, because he'd sent me a gorgeous bouquet of roses that filled the room with an intense, sweetly lemony, rosy smell that was mind-blowing. The roses themselves were a rich cream and stuffed with petals that made them look like roses in paintings. Sasha was looking at me. "Well, you must have done something pretty amazing last night. I've been sketching these since I got in. They're the most gorgeous Madame Hardys I've seen in a long time." I could see she had also been getting her shit together; there were open cartons on her desk, and she'd brought her portfolio to the office. "Aren't they roses?" I was bending down, sniffing deeply. I looked for a card. Sasha laughed. "The name of the rose is Madame Hardy. It's a damask rose, and one of the most famous old roses available these days. Someone knows their flowers.

Because when the Judgment Day came and everyone's sins were laid bare, she knew that no nails would be left clutched in anyone's hands or stuffed in anyone's pockets. Including her own. That everyone would have driven their very last nail into the hands and feet of Jesus. So yes, even as she struggled to move forward and seek understanding of all that had happened, she would leave Hood and this entire horrible war at the cross of Christ.

Les Oeufs Jeannette (EGGS JEANNETTE) YIELD: 4 SERVINGS WHEN WE WERE KIDS, eggs were a staple on our table. Meat or poultry showed up there once a week at the most, and more often than not, our “meat” dinners consisted of a delicious ragout of potatoes or cabbage containing bits of salt pork or leftover roast. Eggs were always a welcome main dish, especially in a gratin with béchamel sauce and cheese, and we loved them in omelets with herbs and potatoes that Maman would serve hot or cold with a garlicky salad. Our favorite egg recipe, however, was my mother’s creation of stuffed eggs, which I baptized “eggs Jeannette.” To this day, I have never seen a recipe similar to hers, and we still enjoy it often at our house. Serve with crusty bread as a first course or as a main course for lunch. 6 jumbo eggs (preferably organic) 1 teaspoon chopped garlic 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley 2 to 3 tablespoons whole milk ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 2 tablespoons vegetable oil (preferably peanut oil) DRESSING 2 to 3 tablespoons leftover egg stuffing (from above) 4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard 2 to 3 tablespoons water Dash of salt and freshly ground black pepper FOR THE HARD-COOKED EGGS: Put the eggs in a small saucepan, and cover with boiling water. Bring to a very gentle boil, and let boil for 9 to 10 minutes. Drain off the water, and shake the eggs in the saucepan to crack the shells. (This will help in their removal later on.) Fill the saucepan with cold water and ice, and let the eggs cool for 15 minutes. Shell the eggs under cold running water, and split them lengthwise. Remove the yolks carefully, put them in a bowl, and add the garlic, parsley, milk, salt, and pepper. Crush with a fork to create a coarse paste. Spoon the mixture back into the hollows of the egg whites, reserving 2 to 3 tablespoons of the filling to use in the dressing. Heat the vegetable oil in a nonstick skillet, and place the eggs, stuffed side down, in the skillet. Cook over medium heat for 2 to 3 minutes, until the eggs are beautifully browned on the stuffed side. Remove and arrange, stuffed side up, on a platter. FOR THE DRESSING: Mix all of the dressing ingredients in a small bowl with a whisk or a spoon until well combined. Coat the warm eggs with the dressing, and serve lukewarm.

Many articles speculate about Tom’s retreat from public life. He’s an organization helmed by committee, a criminal, a group of women. Much has been written about why he won’t permit interpretation of Parakeet. That he believes in time-capsule art, that he is a misogynist maestro. They’re all wrong. Baffled companies who want to produce this odd, violent heart of a play are not being held to the specifications of a playwright, but of a little girl. We were hypersensitive, sickly kids, constantly made fun of in school. Every day my classmates reminded me I was different though there was little chance I’d forget. They’d mark my out-loud face as if doing me a favor: Your eyebrows are joined, they’d say. Your calves are not shaped the way mine are. Your mother looks like an Arab spy. My mother demanded silence, but when we were together Tom and I were feral. One night, frustrated by our noise, she booted the door down and hurled handfuls of my stuffed animals into trash bags. Tom stood between her and them and widened his stance so he could not be moved. My mother backhanded him against the corner of a bureau.

That’s how good the money is.” He paused and stuffed the catalog back into his pocket, then added, “Women’s clothes are wonderful, don’t you think? Only the other day I met a man who said he traveled in ladies’ lingerie. . . .” “Are you sure he was all right?” Martin asked Mr. Slack a bit dubiously. He had heard talk of one very remote camp where the tough, strong lumberjacks apparently chose to dress in women’s clothing as they sang songs about their big choppers, but he hadn’t believed it. Until now, anyway.

...even if ballots are not stuffed by the ruling party on the day of the election, a vote can be undemocratic if the opposition can never make its case properly and journalists are prevented from reporting a government’s failures.

In the consumption of tea as a source of calories, exploited urban workers in London mirrored nothing so much as the slaves at the other end of the food system in the Caribbean, who chewed sugar cane for energy enough to get through the working day.

Top 10 ideas from No More Meltdowns: 1. Each day for several months, have your child imagine the sensations of anger and rehearse the calming strategy, such as: holding a squeeze ball, counting to 10, taking deep breaths, taking a walk and swinging on the swing set. He will be able to do the calming strategy without too much conscious effort (42) 2. Create a schedule of routines that involves visual reminders of their schedule to provide comfort in understanding what to expect next (40) 3. Praise their effort when they are working on a project or attempting a new activity. Those concentrating on their ability get frustrated more easily. In contrast, those attending their level of effort respond to frustration with more motivation and positive feelings. Praise their continued efforts rather than simply praise their current ability (28) 4. Avoid meltdowns by anticipating and preparing for triggering events. Use the Prevention Plan Form (20, 147) 5. Self-calming strategies: Getting a hug, swinging on the swing set, taking a walk, taking deep breaths, counting to 10, holding a favorite toy (a pup) and a squeeze ball. (42) When using humor, ask “Is it okay if I try to make you laugh to get your mind off of this?”(39) 6. Creating rules and consequences is an important starting point. Without rules and consequences, our lives would be chaotic (5) 7. Gradually expose your child to new foods by asking him first to just look at the foods. Next, ask him to smell them, taste them and eventually eat a small piece. Begin with sweet items (even candy) to allow your child to be open to trying new things. Exercise just prior to trying a new food can increase appetite (77, 78, 80) 8. A child’s passion can be the most effective distraction. Suggestions: Getting hugs, stuffed animals, favorite toys, books and looking out the window (38) 9. Give your child a sticker for each night he sleeps in his own bed. Most importantly, praise him so that he can take pride in his independence (143) 10. Set a time to do homework soon after school, before he gets too tired, and right after as snack, so he’s not hungry. Break down the homework into small steps and ask him to do one tiny part of it. Once started, he will likely be willing to do other parts as well (70) When children feel accepted and appreciated by us, they are more likely to listen to us (9)

A traveling magician sold it to me when I was sixteen. He swore to me that a single cut was enough to end a life." She says it flatly, matter-of-factly, but her eyes have gone hollow and her face is waxy again and suddenly I don't feel jokey at all. Suddenly I wonder why a princess would sleep with a poison blade beneath her bed, why she would purchase it in the first place. I picture myself at sixteen, a scarecrow of a girl stuffed with hormones and hunger instead of straw, so sick of dying I would do anything to live. I ran very different calculations in those days, comparing the Greyhound bus schedule to the number of hours before my parents would report me missing, multiplying hoarded pills by the number of days I would have on the run. I figured I could make it to Chicago before the cops were even looking for me, and from there I could go—anywhere. Do anything.

A Tidy and Organized Home… Makes you feel calm. You can relax and unwind in a tidy home. There is space to do things, and you know where everything is. When you walk into a hotel room, you immediately feel a sense of peace because the environment is tidy and organized. Makes you feel healthy. Dust and mold accumulate in messes. Are you always coughing and sneezing? Do you suffer from allergies? It’s probably because you are breathing in all the dirt in your home. Give your home a spring clean and your health issues will improve. Makes you feel in control. How does it feel when you know where everything is? Clutter prevents positive energy from flowing through your home. Remember, energy attaches itself to objects, and negative energy is attracted to mess, which creates exhaustion, stagnation, and exasperation. What does it feel like when negative energy is stuck in your body? You want to lie in bed and shut the world away because everything becomes more difficult and you can’t explain why. Here is how decluttering your house will unlock blocked streams of positive energy: You will become more vibrant. Once you create harmony and order in your home, you will feel more radiant and present. Like acupuncture, which removes imbalances and blockages from the body to create more wellness and dynamism, clearing clutter removes imbalances and blockages from your personal space. When you venture through spaces that have been set ablaze with fresh energy, you are captured by inspiration, and the most attractive parts of your personality come to life. You will get rid of bad habits and introduce good ones. All bad habits have triggers. Do you lie on your bed to watch TV instead of sitting on the couch because you can’t be bothered to fold the laundry that has piled up over the past six months? Or because the bed represents sleep, and when you come home from work and get into bed, you are going to fall asleep instead of doing those important tasks on your to-do list. Once you tidy the couch, coming home from work will allow you to sit on it to watch your favorite TV program but get up once it’s finished and do what you need to do. You will improve your problem-solving skills. When your home has been opened up with a clear space, it’s easier to focus, which provides you with a fresh perspective on your problems. You will sleep better. Are you always tired no matter how much sleep you get? That’s because negative energy is stuck under your bed amongst all that junk you’ve stuffed under there. Once you tidy up your bedroom, you will find that positive energy can flow freely around your room making it easier for you to have a deep and restful sleep. You will have more time. Mess delays you. An untidy house means you are always losing things. You can’t find a shoe, a sock, or your keys, so you waste time searching for them, which makes you late for work or social gatherings. When you declutter your home, you could save about an hour a day because you will no longer need to dig through a stack of items to find things. Your intuition will be stronger. A clear space creates a sense of certainty and clarity. You know where everything is, so you have peace of mind. When you have peace of mind, you can focus on being in the present moment. When you need to make important decisions, you will find it easier to do so. It might take some time to give your home a deep clean, but you won’t be sorry for it once it’s done. Chapter 5: How To Become an Assertive Empath The word assertive means “having or showing a confident and forceful personality.

I'd strutted past his ground-floor grotto a gazillion times, but one day, my nosy nature nudged me to take a peek. Holy hoarders. The place was stuffed to the rafters with ancient artifacts and dust-bunny colonies, all carefully curated over eons. A skinny pathway, barely lit, snaked through the clutter, kind of like Dorothy's obstacle course to Oz. Except here, not even a desperate Dorothy would be clicking her ruby slippers, chanting, "There's no place like home." -Kim Lee ‘The Big Apple Took a Bite Off Me’ Now on Amazon Books and Kindle

Maybe that’s what makes a marriage last, he thinks. Memories made of electricity and rock music and hot sand between the toes and dance parties and beach days and moments that cannot be stuffed into words.

The world has become a planetary Nozick Experience Machine, mediated by the ubiquitous smartphone. Everyone is plugged in, desperate for their pleasure fix, for their likes, their approvals. They have become addicted to hyperreality, yet hyperreality is soulless. It can’t satisfy exactly because it lacks, well, reality. You have been told you can have it all, you can have the perfect life. You can’t. However, you can be presented with images and experiences as if you had achieved it all. But you haven’t. You have to buy into the fantasy, but deep down there’s something missing. What is missing is you. You yourself have become hyperreal, which means you have lost the real you, and nothing can make up for the loss of yourself. You have become fixed to your persona, your mask, and now there is nothing beneath the mask. When you take the mask off at the end of an exhausting day of faking it, there’s no real face underneath, just a faked face, or a blank space. We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. Mistah Kurtz, he dead.

However, when a group of psychology PhD candidates at Case Western—including one named Mark Muraven—discovered those studies in the mid-nineties, they started asking questions the previous research didn’t seem to answer. To Muraven, this model of willpower-as-skill wasn’t a satisfying explanation. A skill, after all, is something that remains constant from day to day. If you have the skill to make an omelet on Wednesday, you’ll still know how to make it on Friday. In Muraven’s experience, though, it felt like he forgot how to exert willpower all the time. Some evenings he would come home from work and have no problem going for a jog. Other days, he couldn’t do anything besides lie on the couch and watch television. It was as if his brain—or, at least, that part of his brain responsible for making him exercise—had forgotten how to summon the willpower to push him out the door. Some days, he ate healthily. Other days, when he was tired, he raided the vending machines and stuffed himself with candy and chips. If willpower is a skill, Muraven wondered, then why doesn’t it remain constant from day to day?

I tried about everything iI could think of to get Megan to be the one to break up with me so as to spare her feelings. I acted batshit crazy; she liked it. I ignored her phone calls for days; she kept calling. I stopped paying for things; she paid for everything. I stuffed her socks in her mouth; she had an orgasm. Nothing worked.

On a warm June day in 2005, Steve Jobs went to his first college graduation—as the commencement speaker. The billionaire founder and leader of Apple Computer wasn’t just another stuffed-shirt businessman. Though only fifty years old, the college dropout was a technology rock star, a living legend to millions of people around the world. In his early twenties, Jobs almost single-handedly introduced the world to the first computer that could sit on your desk and actually do something all by itself. He revolutionized music and the ears of a generation with a spiffy little music player called the iPod and a wide selection of songs at the iTunes store. He funded and nurtured a company called Pixar that

INGREDIENTS: 1 clean jam jar with airtight lid 2 cups rose petals, red or pink, washed, dried and shredded (be careful to use only rose petals that have not been sprayed with insecticides) 1 cup white sugar (or rock sugar) ½ teaspoon cardamom seeds, crushed (optional) DIRECTIONS: Layer the bottom of the jar with some shredded dried petals. Add a layer of sugar. Repeat the process until you’ve used up all the petals and sugar. At this point, you can add the crushed cardamom seeds if desired. Close the jar tightly with a lid. Place the jar in sunlight for 7 to 10 days. Every day, use a clean spoon to stir the contents, which will start to become moist. On the last day, stir and store the jar in the refrigerator. It should last up to a year. Enjoy on toast, ice cream, in milk or even just out of the jar! Some folks add it to paan, a popular Indian snack and breath freshener made with betel leaves and stuffed with areca nuts, lime paste, cardamom, coconut, fennel and other spices. A PERFUME PRIMER Perfume.

Someday I knew a woman who found a field of “some days” And as she picked the “some days” She put them in her pocket For some day She thought Someday I will heal Some day I will live my purpose Someday I will get to be me Someday Some day Some day Then one some day Under a Monet sunset She passed With her hand clutching a “someday” for some one Stuffed deep inside her pockets everything she saved And planned to use Were all those “some days” And in the moments before when she lost her fear with her final words she shared “Don’t die with all the days You plan to use for Someone someday

The two grandmas did all the cooking—all day long, it seemed to me—moving slowly around each other in the narrow kitchen and producing pierogies or wedding soup or Irish soda bread, stuffed cabbage, roasts, meatballs, cookies, iced layer cakes. Like chefs in some commercial kitchen, they cooked constantly, in no particular order and with no particular meal in mind. Just the endless turning out of something good to eat.

Tristan. Vanderbilt. I mean, she may as well date Dracula. Not a modern-day urban fantasy Dracula, but like the original guy who gets his head cut off and his mouth stuffed with garlic.” “That was Lucy, not Dracula,” Church corrects because—shocker—he’s the only one who’s actually read the original 1897 novel.

Callum could hardly believe that she was here. In his arms. In his bed. He buried his nose in her hair and smelled deeply. The salt. The earthiness. The heather. For nearly a thousand years, he’d sifted through rosewater baths and heavy perfumes and those goddamn azaleas that surrounded his club to find this, the smell of her. If he closed his eyes, he could take them back to that heather-stuffed mattress in the little cottage by the sea, with nothing but the sound of her sleeping breath and a crackling fire, the delicate seashells clinking together in the rafters as the wind shook the house. He squeezed her tighter against his chest and let himself live in that memory, his eyes closed, at home in his mind with her in his arms. Callum didn’t know how long they lay there. Hours, at least. It was hard for him to grasp time. When a person was immortal, the difference between minutes and hours felt rather insignificant. He wondered, briefly, if it was the same for her. She seemed perfectly content to lie there. Let the night pass into day. Let the sun rise. Let the world crumble to dust around them. He would lie here with her in his arms until the very sun burned out. And then he’d hold her in the dark.

Other days, when he was tired, he raided the vending machines and stuffed himself with candy and chips.

In 2017, researchers reconstructed the diets of Neanderthals, cousins of modern humans who went extinct approximately 50,000 years ago. They found that an individual with a dental abscess had been eating a type of fungus – a penicillin-producing mould – implying knowledge of its antibiotic properties. There are other less ancient examples, including the Iceman, an exquisitely well-preserved Neolithic corpse found in glacial ice, dating from around 5,000 years ago. On the day he died, the Iceman was carrying a pouch stuffed with wads of the tinder fungus (Fomes fomentarius) that he almost certainly used to make fire, and carefully prepared fragments of the birch polypore mushroom (Fomitopsis betulina) most probably used as a medicine. The indigenous peoples of Australia treated wounds with moulds harvested from the shaded side of eucalyptus trees. Ancient Egyptian papyruses from 1500 BCE refer to the curative properties of mould, and in 1640, the King’s herbalist in London, John Parkinson, described the use of moulds to treat wounds.

Lizzy truly was a sly one. It was said that some people kept their cards close to their chests. Lizzy kept hers stuffed tightly down the front of her stays, never to see the light of day.

near the doorway that led to the courtyard, suddenly reminding me of when he and I departed down that eastern road so many days ago... I turned and smiled. “Goodbye for now,” I said to the Minecraftians. “Bye, Skeleton Steve,” Xenocide99 said. “You want some more arrows?” “Sure,” I said, and I took what he gave me and stuffed the ammo into my pack. “Goodbye, Skeleton Steve!” LuckyMist said with a smile and wet eyes. She rushed me and gave me a fierce hug! My bones clunked. “We’ll visit soon, okay??” “You’ll be on a huge, weird mountain north of a zombie-infested village to the east, huh?” WolfBroJake asked, clapping me on the shoulder with an armored hand. “Yeah, basically,” I replied. “There’s also a really big, blue lake. And the tower is on the smaller of the two huge peaks.” “Take care, bro,” the warrior said. “See you soon.” “Bye, Slinger!!” LuckyMist exclaimed. “Take care of Skeleton Steve!” Slinger clicked his fangs together and smiled. “I will. Goodbye for now, Minecraftians!” The female Minecraftian then ran up to Elias and gave the Enderman a huge hug as well. “Goodbye again, Elias! Visit us soon, okay??” “I will, LuckyMist...” the Enderman ninja replied, returning the hug and cupping her cheek with a large, black hand. “Goodbye, my friends; Xenocide99, WolfBroJake...” “Bye, Elias,” the warrior replied. “Goodbye for now,” I said again to all of them. With that, I hopped onto Slinger’s back in the courtyard colored by the late afternoon sun, and we—along with Elias, Eridar, and Eirzon—departed to the east...

What else did she tell you about—” Thom began, then cut off with a frown. “What ails you, Mat? You look about to sick up.” What ailed him was his memory, and not the other men’s memories for once. Those had been stuffed into him to fill holes in his own memories, which they did and more, or so it seemed. He certainly remembered many more days than he had lived. But whole stretches of his own life were lost to him, and others were like moth-riddled blankets or shadowy and dim. He had only spotty memories of fleeing Shadar Logoth, and very vague recollections of escaping on Domon’s rivership, but one thing seen on that voyage stood out. A tower shining like burnished steel. Sick up? His stomach wanted to empty itself. “I think I know where that tower is, Thom. Rather, Domon knows. But I can’t go with you. The Eelfinn will know I’m coming, maybe the Aelfinn, too. Burn me, they might already know about this letter, because I read it. They might know every word we’ve said. You can’t trust them. They’ll take advantage if they can, and if they know you’re coming, they’ll be planning to do just that. They’ll skin you and make harnesses for themselves from your hide.” His memories of them were all his own, but they were more than enough to support the judgment.

He was making it sound as if I was strong and brave. He didn’t realize how frightened I was inside. How my ribbon was in my bag. How I’d found it stuffed down the back of my bed and still needed it just to get through the day. How I’d never really done anything brave in my whole entire life. His eyes never left my face. “If anyone can walk into that room, Maddie Wilkins – late, or early, or anything – it’s you.

It seemed stupid that I had stayed in the cold stone room, knowing that as soon as the new day had crested, I was no longer in the Inquisitor’s service and no longer had to follow his orders. I finished eating and opened the package, revealing the complicated sections of leather pieces that somehow made up an outfit. Some of the sections were hardened with inlaid metal, a tarnished golden colour peeking through the stitching. I finally discerned something resembling the usual bodysuits worn beneath sectorian women’s clothing, though this one was different. It was thick brown leather, a silk underlining hidden on the inside. It moulded tightly to the body, two ovals cut into the sides, exposing the hips and the sides of the stomach and back. Some sort of covering fit over the top of the bodysuit, ending a few inches above the waist. The metal-inlaid patterns curved around the front of my chest and the top of my spine, connected with brown, buckled straps along my sides. A belted skirt slid over the hips, the belt pulling along the cut of the bodysuit, above my hips, another band looping around my hips. The skirt had two short layers. Yet another section of the outfit fit over my shoulders, metallic glimpses peering out from the leather that cupped my shoulders, attaching to the upper chest armour with straps. Another set of wraps covered my wrists and forearms, and I was glad to see the Inquisitor’s mark and the Spider’s mark disappearing from view. I was able to re-wear the same footwear, as there were also knee and thigh wraps in the same boiled brown leather that complemented the knee-high boots. The outfit was clearly some kind of warrior’s uniform. The Vold—and the Sentinels in particular—often wore revealing, scant clothing to show off their impressive physiques. With Calder’s cloak still on the ground, I could see half of his bare back above the golden armour that wrapped his torso. The muscles bunched and stretched as he pulled his forearm up for investigation. He had clearly stitched and re-dressed his wound after my dismal attempt at caring for it the night before. Despite my outfit showing so much skin, it was by far the heaviest thing I had ever worn, and I started to truly appreciate how quickly and silently Calder moved, weighed down as he must have been by so much armour. I tugged my hair over my shoulders, arranging the strands so that they might hide my face better. There was a lump in my throat when I stuffed everything back into my pack and muttered, “Done.

Liam dropped down to one knee and clasped her hand. "From the day we first met, I knew I needed you in my life. You took the chaos and made it calm. You lifted my heart with your smile and awed me with your brilliant mind. I kept every secret valentine, every scribbled note, your stuffed rabbit, and the answer to every math question I gave you. I hoped one day to be the kind of man you could love, a man who would hold and cherish you, a man worthy of you, and who would protect you with the sword you are going to allow him to have at our wedding." He fumbled in his pocket. "I didn't really plan this..." Daisy laughed. "Of course not." "I did try, but it wasn't me, and if I had, I would have missed this incredible opportunity to turn the ultimate cinematic symbol of uncontrollable passion upside down and make the fantasy of a love so intense that nothing else matters into something real." Her face softened. "You remembered all that?" "I remember every moment I spend with you." He pulled out a silver ring with a Sharks logo on top. "I keep my fan gear in Hamish's warehouse. I grabbed it when I left with the bike, just in case." He slipped the ring on her finger. "Daisy Patel, my humraaz, love of my life, will you marry me?" Her happiness bubbled over and she punched her fist in the air. "Go Sharks!" "Is that a yes?" He looked up, frowning. "It's a little less romantic than I had anticipated..." "Of course it's a yes.

A spiritual existence requires constant cleansing, because the spirit by nature is less involved in day-to-day issues and more focused on the core, the universal, and the eternal. The soul should be stuffed with issues and relationships and even problems, but it needs a degree of regular thinning, a process that can be the fruit of a dark night.

She felt along the solid green marble of the day for the hairline crack that might let her out. This could not be forced. Outside, the air hung swagged and the clouds sat in piles of couch stuffing, and in the south of the sky there was a tender spot, where a rainbow wanted to happen.

Returning my attention to the bottom of the gray barrel, I saw all kinds of half-eaten nasty food, and felt sorry for the janitors at the school. People could at least empty their soda cans before tossing them out! I imagined, for a moment, the rise of the garbage cans in the future. One day, they’ll come to life and seek vengeance for all the gunk that people stuffed into them. Just remember this on the

The dog account’s popularity spread beyond her family and friends to a few thousand people. But on a Monday night in December 2012, the account started gaining fans around the world. After Toffey posted three pictures of Tuna on the Instagram blog that night, the dog’s following grew from 8,500 to 15,000 within 30 minutes. Dasher pulled to refresh the page: 16,000. By the next morning, Tuna was at 32,000 followers. Dasher’s phone started ringing with media requests from around the world. Anderson Cooper’s talk show offered to fly her to DC; she appeared via webcast, thinking it wouldn’t be feasible to take a vacation day. But as requests for appearances continued to come in, her friends warned her about what was coming before she realized it: she would have to quit her job at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles and run her dog’s account full-time. It sounded ridiculous, so she took a month off to test the theory. Sure enough, BarkBox, which made a subscription box for pet items, was willing to sponsor Dasher and her friend on an eight-city tour with Tuna. People in various cities came up to her, crying, telling her they were struggling with depression or anxiety and that Tuna was bringing them joy. “That was the first time that I realized how much weight these posts had for people,” Dasher later recalled. “And that’s also when I realized I wanted to do this full-time.” Her life became about managing Tuna’s fame. Berkley, part of Penguin Random House, signed her up to write a book titled Tuna Melts My Heart: The Underdog with the Overbite. That led to more brand deals, plus merchandising to put Tuna’s likeness on stuffed animals and mugs. In her book’s acknowledgments, she thanks Tuna most of all, but also Toffey for sharing the post that changed her life. The tastes of one Instagram employee directly affected her financial success, but also the habits of the two million people who now follow that dog—including Ariana Grande.

If the day needs saving, somewhere in the preceding days, you stuffed up,” Thelma repeated what he’d once told her. Law and order ought to be boring.

See this is what I say about America - we always gotta be assigning shit, always labeling it and stuffing it into a box. Always dictating who's allowed to own what. But end of the day, that don't have anything to do with music, you dig? The music is fire and passions and soul and however you express it is how you express it.

Shep-en-Mut The painted wooden face was known to me. She stood in the dusty museum sun, Painted eyes lengthened with kohl. Azure, terra-cotta, white, Emblazoned cartonnage. The Isis wings, spread in care and love. Curving protective Neckbet and Nepthys. Beneath, the corticated skin, Black bitumen. Eyeless, cracked and black, Dessicated viscera, wrapped apart. Leaving child and husband, moving through satin bands of shadow, Singing in the ecstatic sun. Feet hissing through the silken sand She carried the Milk Jar and a Palm frond, Worshipping and serving each day. This lady was the songstress of Amun-Re, Her songs curved upward in the great Temple of Thebes. The stone beauty of the face of the God above her frailty Gave her voice a scope of praise denied to our dessicated senses When death stooped on her, claws and beak ripped. Then feathers lay outstretched in love. Horus wings, Night Heron beak, Having slain, now standing guard in fearful phalanx. Leaving the echo between the roof trees. Her flesh must be pickled, cured with cinnamon and myrrh. The skull, frail as a blown egg, Emptied of its convolute majesty, Stuffed with delicate resinous rags. When the sucking natron has had its meal Her shell will taste the shriving sun and wind once more. Blow gently, shine kindly down, Amun-Re, on thy slave. She shall be wrapped in fine linen Layer on layer, and laced like a shoe. The last we shall see in linen and plaster and paint. May her journey be safe through the dark tunnels May her soul sing in light before her God, In soft peace. The holding wings enfold my friend. Priestess of Thebes. Singer of Amun-Re Bearer of the little Milk Jar.

Remember to stuff,” before the guards shuffled her onward with the butts of their rifles. As though she wouldn’t. When Nona was locked away in the bathroom stall stealing toilet paper, judiciously stuffing it down her shirt as Pyrrha had taught her—Pyrrha had a very Blood of Eden mindset, if you thought about it—she heard Camilla outside by the sinks, saying quietly: “Let me see her.” Crown said, as though casually surprised, “Do you really want to? It’s not a good day. She’s in and out … Moving her has been a royal bitch. We’ve had to keep shifting her between beds ever since we got her here.” “Okay. Let me see her.” “If you agitate—” Camilla said, “You know I can help her, Third. You know I want to.” It seemed like Crown was going to say a joke or something dismissive again, but then she said, “So long as Dve doesn’t tag along. Your call.” When Nona rustled her way out of the stall, Camilla looked at her chest, and her mouth quirked in something that might have been the tiniest and most beautiful smile yet. But Crown didn’t notice.

Remember to stuff,” before the guards shuffled her onward with the butts of their rifles. As though she wouldn’t. When Nona was locked away in the bathroom stall stealing toilet paper, judiciously stuffing it down her shirt as Pyrrha had taught her—Pyrrha had a very Blood of Eden mindset, if you thought about it—she heard Camilla outside by the sinks, saying quietly: “Let me see her.” Crown said, as though casually surprised, “Do you really want to? It’s not a good day. She’s in and out … Moving her has been a royal bitch. We’ve had to keep shifting her between beds ever since we got her here.” “Okay. Let me see her.” “If you agitate—” Camilla said, “You know I can help her, Third. You know I want to.” It seemed like Crown was going to say a joke or something dismissive again, but then she said, “So long as Dve doesn’t tag along. Your call.” When Nona rustled her way out of the stall, Camilla looked at her chest, and her mouth quirked in something that might have been the tiniest and most beautiful smile yet. But Crown didn’t notice.

I’m begging for a pillow to fuck me. What kind of day is this?

She stepped to her clothing trunks, the grand traveling trunks that she had packed so hopefully in the days before she left Bingtown. They had been stuffed when she began her journey, full of sensible clothes fit for a lady adventurer. Stoutly woven cotton blouses with a minimum of lace, split skirts for hiking, hats with veils to ward off insects and sun, sturdy leather boots…little but memories remained of them now. The hardships of travel had softened the fabrics. Her boots scuffed and leaked, the ties now a series of knots. Laundering clothes in the acidic waters of the river had been her only choice, but seams had weakened and hems had frayed. She drew on a set of her worn clothes with no thought as to what they would look like. No one was going to look at her anyway. She was finished forever with worrying about what she looked like or what people thought of her.

In the tin-covered porch Mr Chawla had constructed at the rear of the house she had set up her outdoor kitchen, spilling over into a grassy patch of ground. Here rows of pickle jars matured in the sun like an army balanced upon the stone wall; roots lay, tortured and contorted, upon a cot as they dried; and tiny wild fruit, scorned by all but the birds, lay cut open, displaying purple-stained hearts. Ginger was buried underground so as to keep it fresh; lemon and pumpkin dried on the roof; all manner of things fermented in tightly sealed tins; chilli peppers and curry leaves hung from the branches of a tree, and so did buffalo curd, dripping from a cloth on its way to becoming paneer. Newly strong with muscles, wiry and tough despite her slenderness, Kulfi sliced and pounded, ground and smashed, cut and chopped in a chaos of ingredients and dishes. ‘Cumin, quail, mustard seeds, pomelo rind,’ she muttered as she cooked. ‘Fennel, coriander, sour mango. Pandanus flour, lichen and perfumed kewra. Colocassia leaves, custard apple, winter melon, bitter gourd. Khas root, sandalwood, ash gourd, fenugreek greens. Snake-gourd, banana flowers, spider leaf, lotus root …’ She was producing meals so intricate, they were cooked sometimes with a hundred ingredients, balanced precariously within a complicated and delicate mesh of spices – marvellous triumphs of the complex and delicate art of seasoning. A single grain of one thing, a bud of another, a moist fingertip dipped lightly into a small vial and then into the bubbling pot; a thimble full, a matchbox full, a coconut shell full of dark crimson and deep violet, of dusty yellow spice, the entire concoction simmered sometimes for a day or two on coals that emitted only a glimmer of faint heat or that roared like a furnace as she fanned them with a palm leaf. The meats were beaten to silk, so spiced and fragrant they clouded the senses; the sauces were full of strange hints and dark undercurrents, leaving you on firm ground one moment, dragging you under the next. There were dishes with an aftertaste that exploded upon you and left you gasping a whole half-hour after you’d eaten them. Some that were delicate, with a haunting flavour that teased like the memory of something you’d once known but could no longer put your finger on. Pickled limes stuffed with cardamom and cumin, crepuscular creatures simmered upon the wood of a scented tree, small river fish baked in green coconuts, rice steamed with nasturtium flowers in the pale hollow of a bamboo stem, mushrooms red – and yellow-gilled, polka-dotted and striped. Desire filled Sampath as he waited for his meals. Spice-laden clouds billowed forth and the clashing cymbals of pots and pans declared the glory of the meal to come, scaring the birds from the trees about him.

The electronics effort faced even greater challenges. To launch that category, David Risher tapped a Dartmouth alum named Chris Payne who had previously worked on Amazon’s DVD store. Like Miller, Payne had to plead with suppliers—in this case, Asian consumer-electronics companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung. He quickly hit a wall. The Japanese electronics giants viewed Internet sellers like Amazon as sketchy discounters. They also had big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City whispering in their ears and asking them to take a pass on Amazon. There were middlemen distributors, like Ingram Electronics, but they offered a limited selection. Bezos deployed Doerr to talk to Howard Stringer at Sony America, but he got nowhere. So Payne had to turn to the secondary distributors—jobbers that exist in an unsanctioned, though not illegal, gray market. Randy Miller, a retail finance director who came to Amazon from Eddie Bauer, equates it to buying from the trunk of someone’s car in a dark alley. “It was not a sustainable inventory model, but if you are desperate to have particular products on your site or in your store, you do what you need to do,” he says. Buying through these murky middlemen got Payne and his fledgling electronics team part of the way toward stocking Amazon’s virtual shelves. But Bezos was unimpressed with the selection and grumpily compared it to shopping in a Russian supermarket during the years of Communist rule. It would take Amazon years to generate enough sales to sway the big Asian brands. For now, the electronics store was sparely furnished. Bezos had asked to see $100 million in electronics sales for the 1999 holiday season; Payne and his crew got about two-thirds of the way there. Amazon officially announced the new toy and electronics stores that summer, and in September, the company held a press event at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan to promote the new categories. Someone had the idea that the tables in the conference room at the Sheraton should have piles of merchandise representing all the new categories, to reinforce the idea of broad selection. Bezos loved it, but when he walked into the room the night before the event, he threw a tantrum: he didn’t think the piles were large enough. “Do you want to hand this business to our competitors?” he barked into his cell phone at his underlings. “This is pathetic!” Harrison Miller, Chris Payne, and their colleagues fanned out that night across Manhattan to various stores, splurging on random products and stuffing them in the trunks of taxicabs. Miller spent a thousand dollars alone at a Toys “R” Us in Herald Square. Payne maxed out his personal credit card and had to call his wife in Seattle to tell her not to use the card for a few days. The piles of products were eventually large enough to satisfy Bezos, but the episode was an early warning. To satisfy customers and their own demanding boss during the upcoming holiday, Amazon executives were going to have to substitute artifice and improvisation for truly comprehensive selection.

Mel was just here. She’s complaining about the food.” “Huh?” Jack answered. “Mel?” “Yeah. She says my food is making her fat.” Jack chuckled. “Oh, that. Yeah, she’s making noises about that. Don’t worry about it.” “She didn’t make it sound like I shouldn’t worry about it. She was pretty much loaded for bear.” “She had two babies in fourteen months, plus a hysterectomy. And—she doesn’t like to be reminded about this—she’s getting older in spite of herself. Women get a little thicker. You know.” “How do you know that?” “Four sisters,” Jack said. “It’s all women ever worry about—the size of their butts and boobs. And thighs—thighs come up a lot.” “She yelled at me,” he said, still kind of startled. Paul laughed and Jack just shook his head. “Did you tell her that?” Preacher asked. “About women getting thicker with age?” “Do I look like I have a death wish? Besides, I don’t think she’s getting fat—but my opinion about that doesn’t count for much.” “She wants salads. And fresh fruit.” “How hard is that?” Jack asked. “Not hard,” Preacher said with a shrug. “But I don’t stuff that pie down her neck every day.” A sputter of laughter escaped Paul, and Jack said, “You’re gonna want to watch that, Preach.” “She wants me to use less butter and cream, take a few calories out of my food. Jack, it isn’t going to taste as good that way. You can’t make sauces and gravies without cream, butter, fat, flour. People love that stuff, salmon in dill sauce, fettuccine Alfredo, stuffed trout, brisket and garlic mash. Stews with thick gravy. People come a long way for my food.” “Yeah, I know, Preach. You don’t have to change everything—but make Mel a little something, huh? A salad, a broiled chicken breast, fish without the cream sauce, that kind of thing. You know what to do. Right?” “Of course. You don’t think she wants everyone in this town on a diet? Because she says it’s not healthy, the way I cook.” “Nah. This is a phase, I think. But if you don’t want to hear any more about it, just give her lettuce.” He grinned. “And an apple instead of the pie.” Preacher shook his head. “See, I think no matter what she says, that’s going to make her pissy.” “She said it’s what she wants, right?” “Right.” “May the force be with you,” Jack said with a grin.

Why don’t we consider moving in together? While we head for this event?” She gulped. “What?” she asked weakly. “Let’s clear the debt, get Kid Crawford out of the picture, I’ll take on your upkeep rather than Vanni and Paul shouldering your food and board, and we’ll evolve into…” He cleared his throat. “We don’t have to explain anything. People will just say, ‘Dr. Michaels likes that nice pregnant girl.’ We’ll share a house. I’ll be your roommate. You’ll have your own room. But there will be late nights you’re worried about some belly pain or later, night crying from the babies. You don’t want to do that to Vanni and Paul and—” “I was just going to go home to Seattle. To my mom and dad’s.” “They have room for me?” he asked, lifting his fork and arching that brow. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, slamming down her fork. “You can’t mean to say you plan to just follow me and demand to live with the babies!” “Well, no,” he said. “That would be obsessive. But Jesus, Ab, I don’t want to miss out on anything. Do you know how much babies change from two to six weeks? It just kills me to think you’d take them that far away from me. I mean, they are—” “I know,” she said, frustrated. “Yours.” “Yeah, sweetheart. And they’re also yours. And I swear to God, I will never try to take them away from you. That would be cruel.” He had just aimed an arrow at her sense of justice. The shock of realization must have shown on her face, but he took another bite, had another drink of his beer, smiled. “Live together?” “Here’s how it’ll go if you stay with Vanni and Paul. Toward the end, when you’re sleepless, you’ll be up at night. You’ll be tired during the day, but there will be a toddler around, making noise and crying. And you’ll have all those late pregnancy complaints, worries. Then you’ll have a small guest room stuffed to the ceiling with paraphernalia. Then babies—and grandmothers as additional guests? Newborns, sometimes, cry for hours. They could have Vanni and Paul up all night, walking the floor with you. Nah, that wouldn’t be good. And besides, it’s not Paul’s job to help, it’s mine.” “Where do you suggest we live? Here?” “Here isn’t bad,” he said with a shrug. “But Mel and Jack offered us their cabin. It’s a nice cabin—two bedrooms and a loft, ten minutes from town. Ideally, we should hurry and look around for a place that can accommodate a man, a woman, two newborns, two grandmothers and… We don’t have to make room for the lawyers, do we?” “Very funny,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Abby, we have things to work out every single day. We have to buy cribs, car seats, swings, layette items, lots of stuff—it’s going to take more than one trip to the mall. We have to let the families know there will be babies coming—it’s only fair. We should have dinner together every day, just so we can communicate, catch up. If there’s anything you need or anything you’re worried about, I want to be close so I can help. If you think I’m going to molest you while you’re huge with my babies—” “You know, I’m getting sick of that word, huge.