Stuffing My Face Quotes

I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.

Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me--a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for.

Stuffing my face with fun-size Kit Kats. Which, for the record, are way less fun than full-size Kit Kats.

You went to all that trouble just for my body?" I said, amazed and so grateful. Reyn looked up, irritation on his face. "Yeah. We were going to have you stuffed, as an example to future students." I grinned, "You could put me on wheels, move me from room to room.

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.

Why me?" I blurted out, and then closed my eyes briefly. "Okay. Don't answer that." The food arrived just then一thank God一and the conversation was deterred...for about two minutes. "I'm going to answer that question," Cam said, peering at me through his lashes. I wanted to face-plant my stuffed chicken. "You don't have to." "No, I think I do.

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.

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.

. . . 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.

Emma hears me come up the stairs and asks me to watch a movie with her. I stick Band-Aids on my weeping cuts, put on pink pajamas so we match, and snuggle with her under her rainbow comforter. She arranges all of her stuffed animals around us in a circle, everyone facing the TV, then presses play...Ghosts dare not enter here.

I remember hearing you scream, Cat, and seeing your face. But I don’t remember dying. And how can I go on if I’m dead?” Tat answered fiercely, “Dead is stuffed inside that box, not what you are now. You’re my friend. Always will be. No matter what the fuck you eat. I didn’t believe that pale prick when he said he could wake you up, but you’re here. And don’t you dare think about covering yourself back up with dirt. I need you, buddy. It’s been hell without you.” “I missed you, amigo,” Juan said in almost incoherently accented English. “You can’t leave me again! Tat’s boring, and Copper only wants to train. You stay!” Dave stared at us.

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")

Gypsy On Wednesday morning, clear and calm, I went to Astor Place. And had a Gypsy read my palm or maybe just my face. She said my heart was heavy and my head was stuffed with lies. But things like that weren't on my hands, they hid behind my eyes. The room is dull and dank and cold but at least I have a hand to hold.

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.

Liam glances at me every few seconds, as though me stuffing my face is either something he likes to look at, or something totally hideous—who’s to say?

As we drove I remembered how I had told myself I would make Simon happy. I didn't feel the same person. For I now knew that I had been stuffing myself up with a silly fairy tale, that I could never mean to him what Rose had meant. I think I knew it first as I watched his face while he listened to her singing, and then more and more, as he talked about the whole wretched business - not angrily or bitterly, but quietly and without ever saying a word against Rose. But most of all I knew it because a change in myself. Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you more than suffering yourself can. Long before we got back to the castle, with all my heart and for my own heart's ease as well as his, I would have given her back to him if I could.

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.

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.

You can tell she’s old because her face looks like newspaper stuffed into wet shoes,

Lowe Moreland has drawn my face, and then stuffed it at the bottom of his bottom drawer.

Unsure how to respond, I did the next logical thing and stuffed my face with noodles.

My mother, a woman who, amid abuse, stuffed hope and a way out into the slit of a mattress, is the very face of fortitude. I am an heir to her remarkable grit. However, beneath that tough exterior, I’ve also inherited my mother’s tender femininity, that part of her spirit susceptible to bruising and bleeding, the doleful Dosha who sat by the window shelling peanuts, pondering how to carry on. The myth of the Strong Black Woman bears a kernel of truth, but it is only a half-seed. The other half is delicate and ailing, all the more so because it has been denied sunlight.

Granny is seventy-seven years old, going on seventy-eight. She’s not very good at it either. You can tell she’s old because her face looks like newspaper stuffed into wet shoes, but no one ever accuses Granny of being grown-up for her age. “Perky,” people sometimes say to Elsa’s mum, looking either fairly worried or fairly angry as Mum sighs and asks how much she owes for the damages.

I’m thinking about this—about him—way too hard. I shut the sketch pad too forcefully and place it back where I found it. It causes something that was at the very end of the notebook to slip out. A portrait. My heart halts as I scramble to lift it up, expecting—no, sure— that I’ll find Serena’s smiling face on it. The pouty lips, upturned eyes, narrow nose, and pointed chin; they’re all so familiar to me that I think it must be her, because who else’s face would I know so well? It can only be Serena’s, or . . . Mine. Lowe Moreland has drawn my face, and then stuffed it at the bottom of his bottom drawer. I’m not sure when he observed it long enough to pluck this level of detail out of me, the serious, detached air, the tight-lipped expression, the wispy hair curling around the cusp of an ear. Here’s what I do know: there is something sharp about the drawing. Something searing and intense and expansive that’s simply not there in the other sketches. Force, and power, and lots of feelings were involved in the making of this portrait. Lots.

The gremlin mob turned on Root, and when they saw the triple-barreled blaster on his hip, they kept right on turning. Root grabbed the microphone from behind the desk, and hauled it out to the extent of its cable. “Now hear this,” he growled, his gravelly tones echoing around the terminal. “This is Commander Root of the LEP. We have a serious situation above ground, and I would appreciate cooperation from all you civilians. First, I would like you all to stop your yapping so I can hear myself think!” Root paused to make certain his wishes were being respected. They were. “Secondly, I would like every single one of you, including those squawling infants, to sit down on the courtesy benches until I have gone on my way. Then you can get back to griping or stuffing your faces. Or whatever else it is civilians do.” No one had ever accused Root of political correctness. No one was ever likely to either.

You've got to cram it into your thick heads: the sickos that sent us to this place are so stuffed with hate they've got to spew it out on someone, it almost doesn't matter who. If it's not one race, face or religion it'd be another. Right now it's us they vomit on. Next war it'll be some other poor beggars, then some others, then -' 'I want to go home!' the poor woman gasped, in between shakes and sobs. 'And I want to murder every last beast in this hellhole with my bare hands,' Girder raged. She had hands as big as dinner plates. 'The best we can do instead is live. Are you listening? The only way to beat them is by not dying. So shut up and survive, you miserable cow. And let the rest of us sleep.

So why don’t you eat meat, Cam?” Jeremiah asked, stuffing half his burger into his mouth. Cam swallowed his water and said, “I’m morally opposed to eating animals.” Jeremiah nodded seriously. “But Belly eats meat. You let her kiss you with those lips?” Then he cracked up. Susannah and my mother exchanged a knowing kind of smile. I could feel my face getting hot, and I could feel how tense Cam was beside me. “Shut up, Jeremiah.” Cam glanced at my mother and laughed uneasily. “I don’t judge people who choose to eat meat. It’s a personal choice.” Jeremiah continued, “So you don’t mind when her lips touch dead animal and then touch your, um, lips?” Susannah chuckled lightly and said, “Jere, give the guy a break.” “Yeah, Jere, give the guy a break,” I said, glaring at him. I kicked him under the table, hard. Hard enough to make him flinch. “No, it’s fine,” Cam said. “I don’t mind at all. In fact-“ Then he pulled me to him and kissed me quickly, right in front of everyone. It was only a peck, but it was embarrassing. “Please don’t kiss Belly at the dinner table,” said Jeremiah, gagging a little for effect. “You’re making me nauseous.” My mother shook her head at him and said, “Belly’s allowed to kiss.” Then she pointed her fork at Cam. “But that’s it.” She burst out laughing like it was the funniest thing she’d ever said, and Susannah tried not to smile and told her to hush. I wanted to kill my mother and then myself. “Mom, please. You’re so not funny,” I said. “No more wine for Mom.” I refused to look anywhere near Jeremiah’s direction, or Cam’s, for that matter.

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?

His eyes darkened. "You're in pain, aren't you?" He touched her temple, and she leaned her head against his hand. "Yes." The inside of her head felt stuffed full like an iron band slowly tightened around her brain. "Still having bad dreams?" "Nightmares." She put her palms flat to his chest and spoke to the buttons on his coat. "Always the same. A face looming over me. I can't breathe. I feel helpless. And frightened." "Hush, my heart." His fingertips nudged her chin up so that she looked into his face. "Hush." She leaned against him. "Why can't I remember?" "It isn't time, yet." His hands landed on her shoulders.

An older boy pointed. “Look,” he told his friend. “It’s Violet Beauregarde!” That was the bratty girl in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory who turned blue and ballooned into a huge ball. I was puffy because they’d pumped me up with steroids to get me ready for surgery. I ran to Mom, who was sitting on the edge. I stuffed my face in her breasts. “What is it, Bee?” “They called me it,” I squeaked. “It?” Mom’s eyes were across from mine. “Violet Beauregarde,” I managed to say, then burst into fresh tears. The mean boys huddled nearby, looking over, hoping my mom wouldn’t rat them out to their moms. Mom called to them, “That’s really original, I wish I’d thought of that.” I can pinpoint that as the single happiest moment of my life, because I realized then that Mom would always have my back. It made me feel giant. I raced back down the concrete ramp, faster than I ever had before, so fast I should have fallen, but I didn’t fall, because Mom was in the world.

So, you admit you’re an animal killer.” She gaped. Did he just say that? Did he actually . . . “Go for it, Addie!” Tay yelled. She glanced up. There was the ball plummeting at a fierce velocity, triggering a burst of adrenaline. And there was Kris, the words still on his lips. Her fingers rolled into a fist. She threw her arm back and made contact, executing a follow-through to ensure that the sucker landed—smack!—square in the face. “Whoa!” Ed yelled as Kris went backward, hands over his nose, from which streamed a line of bright-red blood. “Awesome!” Tay slapped her on the back. “You knocked him out cold. We won!” Addie lifted the net and went over to where Kris was sitting in the mud, blood on his shirt. “Is that enough closure for you?” he asked, wiping blood off his chin. She breathed heavily, trying to think what she thought, and was delighted to realize that, actually, it had helped to knock the stuffing out of him. “Yeah. That’ll work. See you tomorrow, at noon.” She turned and marched off. “I’m going back to the lab.

Beau Eaton, don’t you dare pick something huge.” I turn to face her now. She shakes her head at me as I walk backward, straight into the waiting arms of . . . a giant stuffed raccoon. The biggest toy they’ve got. “Why not, future Mrs. Eaton?” I call back, grinning so hard my cheeks hurt. “You love that massive rock I put on your finger, don’t you?

She climbed down the cliffs after tying her sweater loosely around her waist. Down below she could see nothing but jagged rocks and waves. She was creful, but I watched her feet more than the view she saw- I worried about her slipping. My mother's desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of- the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end? She was thinking reach the waves, the waves, the waves, and I was watching her navigate the rocks, and when we heard her we did so together- looking up in shock. It was a baby on the beach. In among the rocks was a sandy cove, my mother now saw, and crawling across the sand on a blanket was a baby in knitted pink cap and singlet and boots. She was alone on the blanket with a stuffed white toy- my mother thought a lamb. With their backs to my mother as she descended were a group of adults-very official and frantic-looking- wearing black and navy with cool slants to their hats and boots. Then my wildlife photographer's eye saw the tripods and silver circles rimmed by wire, which, when a young man moved them left or right, bounced light off or on the baby on her blanket. My mother started laughing, but only one assistant turned to notice her up among the rocks; everyone else was too busy. This was an ad for something. I imagined, but what? New fresh infant girls to replace your own? As my mother laughed and I watched her face light up, I also saw it fall into strange lines. She saw the waves behind the girl child and how both beautiful and intoxicating they were- they could sweep up so softly and remove this gril from the beach. All the stylish people could chase after her, but she would drown in a moment- no one, not even a mother who had every nerve attuned to anticipate disaster, could have saved her if the waves leapt up, if life went on as usual and freak accidents peppered a calm shore.

what I had to live with, the rest of the world must never see, for it separated me from them, as it had just done with my former best friends and with my one long love, Berry. There was rage and rage and rage, coating all like crude oil coating gulls. They had hurt me, bad. For now, I had no faith in the others of the world. And the delivery of medical care? Farce. BUFF ’n’ TURF. Revolving door. I wasn’t sitting at the end of the ambulance ride, no. There was no glamour in this. My first patient of the New Year was a five-year-old found in a clothes dryer, face bloodied. She had been hit by her pregnant mother, hit over and over with a bludgeon of pantyhose stuffed with shards of broken glass. How could I survive?

The hell of it is that my son, my only child, has to turn out to be,” he added with a return of his old spirit, black eyes flashing, “the one man in Washington, D.C. who hates my guts!” “You weren’t too fond of him, either, if you recall,” she pointed out. He glared at her. “He’s hot-tempered and arrogant and stubborn!” “Look who he gets it from,” she said with a grin. He unlinked his hands as he considered that. “Those can be desirable traits,” he agreed with a faint smile. “Anyway, it’s nice to know I won’t die childless,” he said after a minute. He lifted his eyes to her face. “Leta can’t know any of this. When and if the time comes, I’ll tell her.” “Who’s going to tell him?” she ventured. “You?” he suggested. “In your dreams,” she said with a sweet smile. He stuffed his hands back into his pockets. “We’ll cross that bridge when the river comes over it. You’ll be careful, do you hear me? I’ve invested a lot of time and energy into hijacking you for my museum. Don’t take the slightest risk. If you think you’ve been discovered, get out and take Leta with you.” “She’s afraid to fly,” she pointed out. “She won’t get in an airplane unless it’s an emergency.” “Then I’ll come out and stuff her into a car and drive her to the airport and put her on a plane,” he said firmly. She pursed her lips. He was very like Tate. “I guess you would, at that.

I took a step toward her, but she turned from me and stomped back to her car. I watched her drive off. After a moment, I walked up the limestone steps and through the phantom oak-and-glass front doors of the house where I grew up. I paced the hall, entered the long rectangle of dining room, rested a hand on the carved cherrywood mantel, then passed into the kitchen. The house was so real around me that I could smell the musty linen in the cedar closet, the gas from the leaky burner on the stove, the sharp tang of geraniums that I had planted in clay pots. I lay down on the exact place where the living room couch had been pushed tight under the leaded-glass windows. I closed my eyes and it was all around me again. The stuffed bookshelves, the paneling, the soft slap of my mother's cards on the table. I could see from the house of my dark mind the alley, from the alley the street leading to the end of town, its farthest boundary the lucid silence of the dead. Between the graves my path, and along that path her back door, her face, her timeless bed, and the lost architecture of her bones. I turned over and made myself comfortable in the crush of wild burdock. A bee or two hummed in the drowsy air. The swarm had left the rubble and built their houses beneath the earth. They were busy in the graveyard right now, filling the skulls with white combs and the coffins with sweet black honey.

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.

I must have roamed dementedly about for a time in the streets. When I at last got back to my own place, Faustine was again there ahead of me, coiled torpid in the bed like a loathsome boa-constrictor. She was already in the never-never land where ghouls like her belonged. I covered her face with one of the pillows, pressed down upon it with the weight of my whole body, held it there until she should have been dead ten times over. Yet when I removed the pillow to look, the black of strangulation was missing from her face. She was still in that state of suspended animation that defied me, a taunting smile visible about her lips. I had a gun in my valise, from years before when I'd been on an engineering job in the jungles of Ecuador. I got it out, looked it over. It was still in good working order, although it only had one bullet left in it. That one would be enough. She wasn't going to escape me! I pressed the muzzle to her smooth white forehead, mid-center. "Die, damn you!" I growled, and pulled the trigger back. It exploded with a crash. A film of smoke hid her face from me for a minute. When it had cleared again, I looked. There was no bullet-hole in her skull! A black powder-smudge marked the point of contact. The gun dropped to the floor with a thud. That ineradicable smile still glimmered up at me, as if to say: "You see? You can't." I rubbed my finger over the black; the skin was unbroken underneath. A blank cartridge, that must have been it. I raised her head; there was a rent in the sheet under it. I probed through it with two fingers. I could feel the bullet lying imbedded down in the stuffing of the mattress. ("Vampire's Honeymoon)

It was slow at first, dead things slowly mouldering away. The flies in the corners, the dried flowers in their clay pots. The stuffed bird Alfie bought, only because he was both fascinated and disgusted by it in equal measures, was molting on it's perch. It's feathers falling like leaves then laying, parched and cracking dry. The sea shells I kept on my windowsill turned slowly back into sand and the wind filtering through the curtains blew the pieces into the creases of my bedsheets. When I pulled them over my head at night they felt like waves crashing against my ears. It made my thoughts sodden and heavy like impalpable clay, they dredged through my mind like half-forgotten things. Wave: a face, a feeling, the ghost of a name balancing on my teeth and ready to- crash: and now gone, like a dream I once tried to remember though it was already evaporating quick from my morning-shaking fingers. I started dreaming of crumbling sandcastles and the ocean lapping at my feet. I woke in waves and lay, rocking, until I got up to place my feet in the quiet carpet and watch through my down-turned, dream-filled lashes, as it exhaled dust at every step.

Have you swallowed all that war stuff?" "No, of course I--" I was so committed to refuting him that I had half-denied the charge before I understood it; now my eyes swung back to his face. "All what war stuff?" "All that stuff about there being a war." "I don't think I get what you mean." "Do you really think that the United States of America is in a state of war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?" "Do I really think..." My voice trailed off. He stood up, his weight on the good leg, the other resting lightly on the floor in front of him. "Don't be a sap," he gazed with cool self-possession at me, "there isn't any war." "I know why you're talking like this," I said, struggling to keep up with him. "Now I understand. You're still under the influence of some medicinal drug." "No, you are. Everybody is." He pivoted so that he was facing directly at me. "That's what this whole war story is. A medicinal drug. Listen, did you ever hear of the 'Roaring Twenties'?" I nodded very slowly and cautiously. "When they all drank bathtub gin and everybody who was young did just was they wanted?" "Yes." "Well, what happened was that they didn't like that, the preachers and the old ladies and all the stuffed shirts. So then they tried Prohibition and everybody just got drunker, so then they really got desperate and arranged the Depression. That kept the people who were young in the thirties in their places. But they couldn't use that trick forever, so for us in the forties they've cooked up this war fake." "Who are 'they' anyway?" "The fat old men who don't want us crowding them out of their jobs. They've made it all up. There isn't any real food shortage, for instance. The men have all the best steaks delivered to their clubs now. You've noticed how they've been getting fatter lately, haven't you?

He asked you not to like me, So why did you, Neera? Even now, I perform breaststrokes in caterpillar-stuffed north eastern clouds He didn’t ask me for any poems for 50 years, So why are you asking now, Neera? Even now, standing in 10-foot-deep water, I wield icy rods He wrote an editorial on my sub-judice case, Turning an editor, why are you asking for my writing, Neera? Even now, I love flatbreads stuffed with smoked penguin fat He did not confess to being my anthology’s publisher Why did you confess, Neera? Even now, I have family-pack yawns in the face of families, He didn’t like pronouncing my name So why are you telling it to youths, Neera? Even now, in bloody waters, I join the Bollywood chorus of tiger sharks He had said I have nothing of a true writer So why do you think I do, Neera? At Imlitala, I knew rat roasts don’t taste too good without charcoal smoke He said I have nothing creative in me So why do you think I do, Neera? Having burnt bank notes worth Rs 5,000 crore, I smelt death He said I’ll never write poetry So why do you think I have, Neera? On the banks of Amsterdam’s canals I have heard doddering old men sing limericks He transcended from sorrow to anger and anger to hate Why are you so generous Neera? Please don’t tell my grandmother.

His features, shaping into something resembling dumbfounded astonishment, were cast in a warm glow from a shaded nearby lamp. He looked earnestly surprised and a little boyish. Smash, smash, smash. His mesmerizing eyes narrowed as they looked over my now completely covered form, the only skin showing was that of my face and hands. If I’d been thinking clearly and sober I might have felt ridiculous; instead, as I was most definitely not thinking clearly and was most definitely not sober, I was cursing myself for leaving my gloves in Chicago and I was looking for my glasses. He shifted on his feet, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and studied me with open and growing amusement; “Are you going somewhere?

Approaching the trail, he broke through the thicket a short distance ahead of the Empath. Causing the Empaths horse to startle as the surprised rider jerked on the reins. Cap was equally surprised to find a young girl before him instead of an older, experienced male Empath. Cap brought his horse to a quick halt. The young girl pulled a small knife from her boot and cautioned him. "I don't know where you came from, but I'm not easy prey.” Her voice shook slightly with fear as she raised the knife. Not sure how to proceed, they stared silently at each other. Cap had always believed that Empaths didn't carry weapons. This pretty, chestnut haired girl couldn't be more than 18 years old. Her long straight tresses covered the spot on her jacket where the Empathic Emblem was usually worn, causing Cap to doubt she was the one he sought. Not wanting to frighten her any more than he already had, Cap tried to explain. "I'm Commander Caplin Taylor. I’m looking for an Empath that is headed for the Western Hunting Lodge.” "My name is Kendra; I am the Empath you seek.” She answered cautiously, still holding the blade. A noise from the brush drew her attention as a small rodent pounced out, trying to evade an unseen predator. Cap was just close enough to lurch forward and snatch the dirk from her hand. Her head jerked back in alarm. "Bosen May has been mauled by a Sraeb, his shoulder is a mass of pulp." Cap spoke quickly not wanting to hesitate any longer. That was all Kendra needed to hear. She pushed her horse past him and headed quickly down the trail. "Wait!" Cap called after her, turning his horse around. Reining in the horse, she turned back to face him annoyed by the delay. "Are you a good horseman?" Cap asked, as he stuffed her dirk in his jacket. "I've been in the saddle since I was a child." She answered, abruptly. "Okay so just a few years then?" Cap's rebuke angered her. Jerking the horse back toward the trail, she ignored him. "Wait, I'm sorry!" Cap called after her. "It's just that I know a quicker way, if you can handle some rough terrain." "Let’s go then." Kendra replied, gruffly, turning back to face him. Without another word, Cap dove back into the brush and the girl followed.

They stuffed the air between my clothes and me with ice-cubes from my neck to my ankles, and whenever the ice melted, they put in new, hard ice cubes. Moreover, every once in a while, one of the guards smashed me, most of the time in the face. The ice served both for the pain and for wiping out the bruises I had from that afternoon. Everything seemed to be perfectly prepared. People from cold regions might not understand the extent of the pain when ice-cubes get stuck on your body. Historically, kings during medieval and pre-medieval times used this method to let the victim slowly die. The other method, of hitting the victim while blindfolded in inconsistent intervals, was used by the Nazis during World War II. There is nothing more terrorizing than making somebody expect a smash every single heartbeat.

How was I ever going to explain to him, or to myself, why I couldn’t go to his home and meet his family, though every part of me was dying to? Oliver wife. Oliver sons. Oliver pets. Oliver study, desk, books, world, life. What had I expected? A hug, a handshake, a perfunctory hail-fellow-well-met, and then the unavoidable Later! ? The very possibility of meeting his family suddenly alarmed me—too real, too sudden, too in-my-face, not rehearsed enough. Over the years I’d lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I’d dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn’t just how distant were the paths we’d taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me—a loss I didn’t mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we’ve stopped thinking of things we’ve lost and may never have cared for. Or was it that I was jealous of his family, of the life he’d made for himself, of the things I never shared and couldn’t possibly have known about? Things he had longed for, loved, and lost, and whose loss had crushed him, but whose presence in his life, when he had them, I wasn’t there to witness and wouldn’t know the first thing about. I wasn’t there when he’d acquired them, wasn’t there when he’d given them up. Or was it much, much simpler? I had come to see if I felt something, if something was still alive. The trouble was I didn’t want anything to be alive either.

The dogs skittered across the wet blacktop as silently as cockroaches, each so small it amazes me that they hadn’t been squashed underfoot. Easy to love. Easy to kill. I thought again of Ping Xi’s stuffed dogs, the preposterous myth of his industrial dog-killing freezer. A tight sheet of wind slapped me in the face. I pulled the collar of my fur coat up around my throat, and I pictured myself as a white fox curling up in the corner of Ping Xi’s freezer, the room whirling with smoky air, swinging sides of cow creaking through the the hum of cold, my mind slowing down until single syllables of thought abstracted from their meanings and I heard them stretched out as long-held notes, like foghorns or sirens for a blackout curfew or an air raid. “This has been a test.” I felt my teeth chatter but my face was numb. Soon. The freezer sounded really good.

Cordelia – “Why so rough?” Aral – “It’s very poor. It was the town center during the time Isolation. And it hasn’t been touched by renovation, minimal water, no electricity choked with refuse.” “Mostly human,” added Peoter tartly. “Poor?” Asked Cordelia bewildered. “No electricity? How can it be on the comm network?” “It’s not of course,” answered Vorkosigan. “Then how can anyone get their schooling?” Cordelia “They don’t.” Cordelia stared. “I don’t understand, how do they get their jobs?” “A few escape to the service, the rest prey on each other mostly.” Vorkosigan regarded her face uneasily. “Have you no poverty on Beta colony?” “Poverty? Well some people have more money than others, but no comm consuls…?” Vorkosigan was diverted from his interrogation. “Is not owning a comm consul the lowest standard of living you can imagine?” He said in wonder. “It’s the first article in the constitution! ‘Access to information shall not be abridged.’” “Cordelia, these people barely have access to food, clothing and shelter. They have a few rags and cooking pots and squat in buildings that aren’t economical to repair or tear down yet with the wind whistling through the walls.” “No air conditioning?” “No heat in the winter is a bigger problem here.” “I suppose so. You people don’t really have summer. How do they call for help when they are sick or hurt?” “What help?” Vorkosigan was growing grim. “If they’re sick they either get well or die.” “Die if we’re lucking” muttered Veoter. “You’re not joking.” She stared back and forth between the pair of them. “Why, think of all the geniuses you must missing!” “I doubt we must be missing very many from the Caravanceri.” Said Peoter dryly. “Why not? They have the same genetic compliment as you.” Cordelia pointed out the – to her -obvious. The Count went rigid. “My dear girl, they most certainly do not. My family has been Vor for nine generations.” Cordelia raised her eyebrows. “How do you know if you didn’t have the gene-typing until 80 years ago?” Both the guard commander and the footman were acquiring peculiar stuffed expressions. The footman bit his lip. “Besides,” she pointed out reasonably, “If you Vor got around half as much as those histories I’ve been reading imply. 90% of the people on this planet must have Vor blood by now. Who knows who your relatives are on your father’s side. Vorkosigan bit his napkin absently. His eyes gone crinkly with much the same expression as the footman and muttered, “Cordelia, you really can’t sit at the breakfast table and imply my ancestors were bastards. It’s a mortal insult here.” “Where should I sit? Oh I’ll never understand.

Remove this quote from your collection “The dogs skittered across the wet blacktop as silently as cockroaches, each so small it amazes me that they hadn’t been squashed underfoot. Easy to love. Easy to kill. I thought again of Ping Xi’s stuffed dogs, the preposterous myth of his industrial dog-killing freezer. A tight sheet of wind slapped me in the face. I pulled the collar of my fur coat up around my throat, and I pictured myself as a white fox curling up in the corner of Ping Xi’s freezer, the room whirling with smoky air, swinging sides of cow creaking through the the hum of cold, my mind slowing down until single syllables of thought abstracted from their meanings and I heard them stretched out as long-held notes, like foghorns or sirens for a blackout curfew or an air raid. “This has been a test.” I felt my teeth chatter but my face was numb. Soon. The freezer sounded really good.

I attempt to chew the popcorn gag Dean just stuffed into my mouth, but a kernel gets sucked into the back of my throat. I hack over the bar--my hands splayed wide as I brace myself for impending death. Dean absentmindedly pat mys back because let's face it, I'm coughing so I'm breathing, but his swats are not helping. I beat my chest to try to prevent myself from asphyxiating as I grapple for my drink, which is woefully empty. I grab Dean's draft beer, but as soon as the golden liquid hits my tongue, I dry heave from the horrid taste. Holy shit! Kate's right, IPA beer tastes like poison! My face screws up in disgust as I force the liquid down my throat and suck in a big breath of cleansing air. With a pathetic whimper, I wave my hands in front of my face and search for a cocktail napkin. Mr. Mustache bartender is still balls deep in the blonde, so I'm forced to use the back of my hand to wipe the dribble off my chin. When I finally regain some semblance of composure I turn around to glower at Dean. "Your beer tastes like a skunk's ass.

Amy tossed in her bed, then froze as she heard Northcliff’s voice in her head. Do you know that when you rise in the morning, I hear your footsteps over my head? I imagine you slipping out of a worn nightgown, your body gleaming pale and sweet, and donning one of your ghastly gowns. At night, the floorboards creak as you ready yourself for bed, and I imagine you undressing. And all night long, every time you turn over in your virgin bed, I hear you. You have me imprisoned, but I am watching you. A shiver ran up her spine at the memory of Northcliff’s words, but it wasn’t fear. It was desire. She wanted to rise from her bed and go to him. She wanted to see him. Not just his face or the expanse of his chest, but all of him. Because while he said he had been imagining her, she had also been imagining him. In a motion so slow and cautious her ancient straw-stuffed mattress made no noise, Amy sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. Northcliff was awake below. She knew it; she could feel his unswerving attention, the waves of his will beckoning her to him.

Will you never forgive me for what I did so long ago, Jane?” The soft question caught her off guard. “Would you do it again if you had the chance?” She could hardly breathe, awaiting his answer. With a low oath, he glanced away. Then his features hardened into those of the rigid and arrogant Dom he had become. “Yes. I did the only thing I could to keep you happy.” Her breath turned to ice in her throat. “That’s the problem. You still really believe that.” His gaze swung to her again, but before he could say anything more, noises in the hall arrested them both. “It’s gone very quiet in there.” It was the duke’s voice, remarkably clear, sounding as if it came from right outside the door. “Perhaps we should knock first.” Oh no! As Jane frantically set her gown to rights, she heard Lisette say, “Don’t you dare bother them, Max. I’m sure everything’s fine. Let’s come back later.” With panic growing in her belly, Jane glanced around for her tucker. Wordlessly, Dom plucked it from the back of a chair and handed it to her. Without meeting his gaze, she pinned it into her bodice, hoping to hide the tiny holes where Dom had unwittingly ripped it free of its pins. “Besides,” drawled Tristan, “it’s not as if Dom will seduce her or anything. That’s not his vice.” Sweet Lord, were they all right outside the door? “I’m not worried about that,” Max answered. “Miss Vernon isn’t the sort to let him seduce her.” As Jane tensed, Dom hissed under his breath, “Do the blasted idiots not realize we can hear them?” “Apparently not.” Dom furtively adjusted his trousers, which seemed to be rather…oddly protruding just now. Ohhh. Right. This was one time she wished Nancy hadn’t been so forthcoming about what happened to a man’s body when he was aroused. So that, not his pistol, had been the odd bulge digging into her. Definitely not a pistol. Her cheeks positively flamed. Faith, how could she even face his family after this and not give away what she and Dom had been doing? Mortified, she hurried to the looking glass to fix her hair. While she stuffed tendrils back into place and repinned drooping curls, Dom came up behind her to meet her gaze in the mirror. “Before we let them in, I want an answer to my question about Blakeborough.” Curse the stubborn man. How could she tell Dom she was so pathetic that she hadn’t even managed to find another man to love in all the years they’d spent apart? That she’d been foolish enough to wait around for Dom all this time, when he’d happily gone on living his life without her? Her pride couldn’t endure having him know that. To her relief, Tristan said, “Well, whatever they’re up to, we have to get moving.” A knock sounded at the door. “Dom? Jane? Are you done talking?” She met Dom’s gaze with a certain defiance, and he arched one eyebrow in question. So she took matters into her own hands and strode for the door. Caught off guard, Dom swore behind her and snatched up his greatcoat just as she opened the door and said, “Please come in. We’re quite finished.” In more ways than one. Their companions trooped in, casting her and Dom wary glances. Jane looked over to see Dom holding his greatcoat looped over his arm as if to shield the front of him. That brought the blushes back to her cheeks. She caught Lisette furtively watching her, and she cursed herself for wearing her emotions on her sleeve. Better shift her attention elsewhere before Lisette guessed just how shameless she’d been.

A text comes from Wallace. An actual text too, not a message through the forum app. I gave him my number awhile back, before Halloween, but not because I wanted him to call me or anything. I wrote it on the edge of our conversation paper in homeroom and slid it over to him because sometimes I see something and think, Wallace would laugh at that, I should send him a picture of it, but the messaging app is terrible with pictures and texting is way better. So he texts me now, and it’s a picture. A regular sweet potato pie. Beneath the picture, he says, I really like sweet potato pie. I text back, Yeah, so do I. Then he sends me a picture of his face, frowning, and says, No, you don’t understand. Then another picture, closer, just his eyes. I REALLY like sweet potato pie. A series of pictures comes in several-second intervals. The first is a triangular slice of pie in Wallace’s hand. Then Wallace holding that slice up to his face—it’s soft enough to start collapsing between his fingers. The next one has him stuffing the slice into his mouth, and in the final one it’s all the way in, his cheeks are puffed out like a chipmunk’s, and he’s letting his eyes roll back like it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten. I purse my lips to keep my laugh in, but my parents are fine-tuned to the slightest hint of amusement from me, and they both look up. “What’s so funny, Eggs?” Dad says. “Nothing,” I reply. Nothing makes a joke less funny than someone wanting in on it, especially parents. Wow, I say to Wallace. You really like sweet potato pie. He sends one more picture, this one with him embracing the pie pan, gazing lovingly at it. We’re to be married in the spring. An actual laugh escapes me. I really hope Wallace is having a better Thanksgiving than I am. It seems like he is. I take a picture of myself pouting and send it to him, saying, Aw, the cutest of cute couples. ... Another picture from Wallace waits for me. In this one, an empty pie pan littered withcrumbs sits on the floor beside a large knife. Wallace kneels next to it with morecrumbs on his sweater, expression horrified. NOOOO WHAT HAVE I DONE MY LOVE OUR MARRIAGE ’TIS ALL FOR NAUGHT I text back: Oh no!! Not sweet potato bride! Another picture comes: Wallace sprawled on the floor beside the pie pan, one arm thrown over his eyes. Let me only be accused of loving her too much. Wallace is definitely having a better Thanksgiving than me.

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.

claque, aka canned laughter It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s nothing new under the sun (a heavenly body, by the way, that some Indian ascetics stare at till they go blind). I knew that some things had a history—the Constitution, rhythm and blues, Canada—but it’s the odd little things that surprise me with their storied past. This first struck me when I was reading about anesthetics and I learned that, in the early 1840s, it became fashionable to hold parties where guests would inhale nitrous oxide out of bladders. In other words, Whip-it parties! We held the exact same kind of parties in high school. We’d buy fourteen cans of Reddi-Wip and suck on them till we had successfully obliterated a couple of million neurons and face-planted on my friend Andy’s couch. And we thought we were so cutting edge. And now, I learn about claque, which is essentially a highbrow French word for canned laughter. Canned laughter was invented long before Lucille Ball stuffed chocolates in her face or Ralph Kramden threatened his wife with extreme violence. It goes back to the 4th century B.C., when Greek playwrights hired bands of helpers to laugh at their comedies in order to influence the judges. The Romans also stacked the audience, but they were apparently more interested in applause than chuckles: Nero—emperor and wannabe musician—employed a group of five thousand knights and soldiers to accompany him on his concert tours. But the golden age of canned laughter came in 19th-century France. Almost every theater in France was forced to hire a band called a claque—from claquer, “to clap.” The influential claque leaders, called the chefs de claque, got a monthly payment from the actors. And the brilliant innovation they came up with was specialization. Each claque member had his or her own important job to perform: There were the rieurs, who laughed loudly during comedies. There were the bisseurs, who shouted for encores. There were the commissaires, who would elbow their neighbors and say, “This is the good part.” And my favorite of all, the pleureuses, women who were paid good francs to weep at the sad parts of tragedies. I love this idea. I’m not sure why the networks never thought of canned crying. You’d be watching an ER episode, and a softball player would come in with a bat splinter through his forehead, and you’d hear a little whimper in the background, turning into a wave of sobs. Julie already has trouble keeping her cheeks dry, seeing as she cried during the Joe Millionaire finale. If they added canned crying, she’d be a mess.

Once I've coated the parsnips in a honey-saffron glaze, Rachel helps me plate them alongside the brisket, stuffed cabbage, and sweet potato tzimmes, and we carry the plates out to the dining room together. "Let me explain a little about tonight's dinner," I say, addressing the softly lit faces around the table, which is covered with flickering votives and tapered candles. I launch into a description of the Jewish New Year and the symbolism behind all of the food: how the honey represents the hope of a sweet new year, how the challah is round instead of braided to represent the circle of life, how my grandmother used to make stuffed cabbage on every possible occasion because it reminded her of her Hungarian mother. I tell them lots things- about food, about my bubbe, about me- and to my surprise, they actually pay attention. They hang on my every word and ask intelligent questions and make thought-provoking points of their own. And I realize, hey, these are people who get it, people who love to eat and talk about food and culture as much as I do. Most of them aren't Jewish, but that doesn't matter. Every family has its traditions. Every family has a story to share. That's the point of this dinner- to swap stories and histories and see how food can bring people together.

What did you just call him?” “Rufus is a stupid name,” she says with a shrug. I choke on air. “Excuse me?” “You heard me. What even is a Rufus anyway?” “A name,” I answer. “A manly name for a manly dog.” “He looks like vanilla ice cream with chocolate sprinkles. It had to be changed.” “You can’t just change a dog’s name. He’s eight months old. He likes his name. He knows it.” “Does he?” she asks, arching a brow. Jesus, she looks so much like her mother right now it’s almost scary. “Rufus.” I whistle. “Come here boy.” He lets out a whimper, but stays rooted in place, his eyes trained on the girl with the snacks. “Sprinkles, come.” Priss points to the floor. That traitor rises to all fours, looking more regal than Queen Elizabeth herself as he marches to her side. Man’s best friend, my ass. “Good boy,” she says, stuffing another treat into his mouth. “Sprinkles, sit.” He sits. “Shake,” she says, holding out her hand for his paw. “You taught him all of that in less than two hours?” “Uh-huh. Wasn’t hard. I watched some dog training videos.” “Let me guess, YouTube?” She grins. “Well, it worked.” “I see that.” “So…Sprinkles?” She steeples her hands in front of her face, poking out her lip for added drama. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of how my beast of a dog became a pansy.

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.

Madison turns to me. “Do you wanna play?” “Of course,” I say, following her to her bedroom, figuring it best to give her mother some space, lest I push her too far and she punch me in the face. I’m secure in my manhood. I have no qualms playing with dolls. So when Madison shoves a Barbie at me, I don’t even balk. I’ll give her the best goddamn Barbie performance she ever saw, if that’s what she wants. I stare at the Barbie, though, as Madison digs through a toy box. It looks different than the ones my sister played with growing up. This Barbie looks more like a scientist than a stripper, fully clothed, her hair still intact. “Found it!” Madison says, holding up another doll. I freeze when I look at it, seeing the familiar white and blue suit and the head of blond hair. You’ve gotta be kidding me. They made me into a doll. Or him, rather. Breezeo. Not an action figure, no—a straight up collector’s edition Barbie doll. “I’ll be Breezeo and Barbie can be Maryanne for you,” she says, sitting down on the floor and patting the wood beside her. “Wait, shouldn’t I be Breezeo?” “You’re him all the time, so it’s my turn now.” Well, can’t argue with that logic. “Barbie’s got the wrong color hair,” I say. “Don’t you have a Maryanne doll?” “No, ‘cuz it costs too many dollars, but you can pretend, right?” “Right,” I say, although she suddenly looks skeptical, like she doubts my abilities. “Don’t worry, I’ve got this.” She starts things off. I don’t know what’s happening, and she doesn’t give me any direction, so I’m improvising. She switches things up on me, throwing in plot twists. We’re on the run from some bad guys before suddenly we’re in school. I graduate, we both become veterinarians to her stuffed animals, and next thing I know, I’m running for president of the world.

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.

Cam let go of Evie and approached Sebastian as the room emptied. “You fight like a gentleman, my lord,” he commented. Sebastian gave him a sardonic glance. “Why doesn’t that sound like a compliment?” Sliding his hands into his pockets, Cam observed mildly, “You do well enough against a pair of drunken sots—” “There were three to start with,” Sebastian growled. “Three drunken sots, then. But the next time you may not be so fortunate.” “The next time? If you think I’m going to make a habit of this—” “Jenner did,” Cam countered softly. “Egan did. Nearly every night there is some to-do in the alley, the stable yard, or the card rooms, after the guests have had hours of stimulation from gaming, spirits, and women. We all take turns dealing with it. And unless you care to get the stuffing knocked out of you on a weekly basis, you’ll need to learn a few tricks to put down a fight quickly. It causes less damage to you and the patrons, and keeps the police away.” “If you’re referring to the kind of tactics used in rookery brawls, and quarrels over back-alley bobtails—” “You’re not going for a half hour of light exercise at the pugilistic club,” Cam said acidly. Sebastian opened his mouth to argue, but as he saw Evie drawing closer something changed in his face. It was a response to the anxiety that she couldn’t manage to hide. For some reason her concern gently undermined his hostility, and softened him. Looking from one to the other, Cam observed the subtle interplay with astute interest. “Have you been hurt?” Evie asked, looking over him closely. To her relief, Sebastian appeared disheveled and riled, but free of significant damage. He shook his head, holding still as she reached up to push back a few damp amber locks that were nearly hanging in his eyes. “I’m fine,” he muttered. “Compared to the drubbing I received from Westcliff, this was nothing.” Cam interrupted firmly. “There are more drubbings in store, milord, if you won’t take a few pointers on how to fight.” Without waiting for Sebastian’s assent, he went to the doorway and called, “Dawson! Come back here for a minute. No, not for work. We need you to come take a few swings at St. Vincent.” He glanced back at Sebastian and remarked innocently, “Well, that got him. He’s hurrying over here.

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call “seeing a person we know” is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear. No doubt, in the Swann they had formed for themselves, my family had failed out of ignorance to include a host of details from his life in the fashionable world that caused other people, when they were in his presence, to see refinements rule his face and stop at his aquiline nose as though at their natural frontier; but they had also been able to garner in this face disaffected of its prestige, vacant and spacious, in the depths of these depreciated eyes, the vague, sweet residue—half memory, half forgetfulness—of the idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, around the card table or in the garden, during our life of good country neighborliness. The corporeal envelope of our friend had been so well stuffed with all this, as well as with a few memories relating to his parents, that this particular Swann had become a complete and living being, and I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when, in my memory, I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to that first Swann—to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though one’s life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality—to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon.

I tell Jack by accident. We’re talking on the phone about unprotected sex, how it isn’t good for people with our particular temperament, our anxiety like an incorrigible weed. He asks if I’ve had any sex that was “really stressful,” and out the story comes, before I can even consider how to share it. Jack is upset. Angry, though not at me. I’m crying, even though I don’t want to. It’s not cathartic, or helping me prove my point. I still make joke after joke, but my tears are betraying me, making me appear clear about my pain when I’m not. Jack is in Belgium. It’s late there, he’s so tired, and I’d rather not be having this conversation this way. “It isn’t your fault,” he tells me, thinking it’s what I need to hear. “There’s no version of this where it’s your fault.” I feel like there are fifty ways it’s my fault. I fantasized. I took the big pill and the small pill, stuffed myself with substances to make being out in the world with people my own age a little bit easier. To lessen the space between me and everyone else. I was hungry to be seen. But I also know that at no moment did I consent to being handled that way. I never gave him permission to be rough, to stick himself inside me without a barrier between us. I never gave him permission. In my deepest self I know this, and the knowledge of it has kept me from sinking. I curl up against the wall, wishing I hadn’t told him. “I love you so much,” he says. “I’m so sorry that happened.” Then his voice changes, from pity to something sharper. “I have to tell you something, and I hope you’ll understand.” “Yes?” I squeak. “I can’t wait to fuck you. I hope you know why I’m saying that. Because nothing’s changed. I’m planning how I’m going to do it.” “You’re going to do it?” “All different ways.” I cry harder. “You better.” I have to go put on a denim vest for a promotional appearance at Levi’s Haus of Strauss. I tell Jack I have to hang up now, and he moans “No” like I’m a babysitter wrenching him from the arms of his mother who is all dressed up for a party. He’s sleepy now. I can hear it. Emotions are exhausting to have. “I love you so much,” I tell him, tearing up all over again. I hang up and go to the mirror, prepared to see eyeliner dripping down my face, tracks through my blush and foundation. I’m in LA, so bring it on, universe: I can only expect to go down Lohan style. But I’m surprised to find that my face is intact, dewy even. Makeup is all where it ought to be. I look all right. I look like myself.

You aren’t worried about tomorrow, are you?” “What do you think?” He propped himself up on his elbows and studied my face. “You told me last spring it was the easiest thing in the whole wide world. You could hardly wait to jump. Why, even when you got sick you worried you’d die without having a chance to do it.” “I must have been a raving lunatic,” I muttered. Theo scowled, but the sound of a Model T chugging up the driveway stopped him from saying more. Its headlamps lit the trees and washed across the house. “It’s John again,” Theo said. “Papa will start charging him room and board soon.” Hidden in the shadows, we watched John jump out of the car and run up the porch steps. Hannah met him at the door. From inside the house, their laughter floated toward us as silvery as moonlight, cutting into my heart like a knife. “Hannah has a beau.” Theo sounded as if he were trying out a new word, testing it for rightness. He giggled. “Do you think she lets him kiss her?” I spat in the grass, a trick I’d learned from Edward. “Don’t be silly.” “What’s silly about smooching? When I’m old enough, I plan to kiss Marie Jenkins till our lips melt.” Making loud smacking sounds with his mouth, Theo demonstrated. Pushing him away, I wrestled him to the ground and started tickling him. As he pleaded for mercy, we heard the screen door open. Thinking Mama was about to call us inside, we broke apart and lay still. It was Hannah and John. “They’re sitting in the swing,” Theo whispered. “Come on, let’s spy on them. I bet a million zillion dollars they start spooning.” Stuffing his jar of fireflies into his shirt, Theo dropped to his knees and crawled across the lawn toward the house. I followed him, sure he was wrong. Hannah wasn’t old enough for kissing. Or silly enough. We reached the bushes beside the porch without being seen. Crouched in the dirt, we were so close I could have reached up and grabbed Hannah’s ankle. To keep from giggling, Theo pressed his hands over his mouth. Sick with jealousy, I watched John put his arm around Hannah and draw her close. As his lips met hers, I felt Theo jab my side. I teetered and lost my balance. The bushes swayed, the leaves rustled, a twig snapped under my feet. “Be quiet,” Theo hissed in my ear. “Do you want to get us killed?” We backed out of the bushes, hoping to escape, but it was too late. Leaving John in the swing, Hannah strode down the porch steps, grabbed us each by an ear, and shook us like rats. “Can’t a body have a second of privacy?

Any prize off this bottom row,” the guy tells us, walking away to a waiting customer. “You did it!” I jump down off the counter and wrap my arms around his neck. “You won me a prize!” “Thank fuck.” His arms wrap around me. “I was starting to worry for a moment there. Felt like I was losing my man card.” I reach up on my tiptoes and kiss his lips. “Never. And thank you.” I tip my head back to look into his face. His hands slide down my back to my ass, and he gives it a squeeze. “Go pick your prize, Boston.” Leaving Liam, I head back to the counter and lean over, looking at the bottom row of prizes. I see all kinds of crap here, including really cheap-looking stuffed animals and dolls. I definitely do not want a doll. They freak me out. Then, I spy this sad-looking odd toy. Reaching over, I grab it. Liam comes up behind me as I right myself. His chest is pressed to my back. “Is that a…fucking knitted jellyfish?” I turn my head to look up at him. He’s squinting at the toy I’ve picked up. I look back down at it in my hands, and I think he’s right. It is a knitted jellyfish toy. “I think so.” It’s white and pink and looks like a little princess jellyfish. And the more I look at it, the cuter it becomes…in a weird knitted jellyfish way. “She looks like a jellyfish princess,” I say. “It looks like a piece of shit.” “Hey! You’ll hurt her feelings.” I jab him in the arm. Then, I hug her. “I shall call her Squishy, and she shall be mine.” I laugh, meeting Liam’s blank expression. “Finding Nemo? No?” I say. Liam slowly shakes his head, looking at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Okay, makes sense. You were probably too old to watch it when it first came out—you know, when I was still in diapers and you were out serenading teenage girls with the Backstreet Boys—hey!” I squeal when he digs me in the ribs with his fingers. “We’ll watch Nemo later, and then you’ll get the reference.” I turn to the guy. “I’ll take Squishy,” I tell him, holding the stuffed animal up. “Okay, what’s next?” I hook my arm through Liam’s, holding Squishy to my chest. “Hook a Duck.” “Hook a what?” I give him a confused look. “Duck.” “And what’s Hook a Duck?” “You don’t know what Hook a Duck is?” Liam looks appalled. “No…but I feel like I should.” “You should.” “What’s so special about it?” “Well, nothing special per se, but it’s like a rite of passage. Every kid plays Hook a Duck when they come to the fair.” “Hate to break it to you, Hunter, but we’re not kids.” “Maybe not. But it’s your first time at a fair in England, and you have to play.” Liam grabs my hand and sets off, I assume, in search of this Hook a Duck game. We find one a few minutes later, and it’s closed. All shut up with the tarpaulin covering the booth. “It’s closed. Never mind,” I say to him. I start to walk away, but Liam tugs me back by the hand he’s holding. “Like a little thing like it being closed is going to stop us from playing.” He gives me a grin and drops my hand. I watch as he unhooks the tarpaulin at the bottom and lifts it just enough so that he can sneak in underneath it. “Hunter, what are you doing?” I hiss. He ducks his head back out. “Come on,” he whispers, holding the material up for me to go under. “I’m not going in there.” “Yes you are. Now hurry the fuck up, or you’ll get me arrested for breaking into a Hook a Duck tent,” he whispers. “Ugh,” I complain.

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

Tom held up a DVD with two fingers and turned red in the face, choking a little. It was a low-budget gay porno set on a submarine.  I took it away from Tom quickly and stuffed it in my back pocket.  "Yeah.  No."  Just my luck, he'd start watching it all the time and jerk off to that instead of saving sexy times for me.  "Let's go home.  We'll play submarines if you want.  But…not that." Tom laughed shakily.  "You know," he said, "for Joey, that's…that is both incredibly crass and inappropriate, and incredibly thoughtful.  I guess I'd expect nothing less from a Joey wedding present.

There are times when a day from my childhood comes to me, swirls around me, teases me as I try to catch the memory in my hands, as I try to catch the scents, the sounds, the warmth of the sun on my young face. In bare feet, I reach for it, the memory that is. I reach for summer nights, playing chase, reach across a thousand miles to the comfort of my father’s voice, to the rush of heat when my mother opens the oven to check on the baking, reach toward the rush of laughter, toward home, toward the glory days of my youth. The only way to catch an elusive memory is to open my heart and swallow it whole. When I die, I’ll be stuffed full of memories, too many to fit into a casket.

There are times when a time from my childhood comes to me, swirls around me, teases me as I try to catch the memory in my hands, as I try to catch the scents, the sounds, the warmth of the sun on my young face. In bare feet, I reach for it, the memory that is. I reach for summer nights, playing chase, reach across a thousand miles to the comfort of my father’s voice, to the rush of heat when my mother opens the oven to check on the baking, reach toward the rush of laughter, toward home, toward the glory days of my youth. The only way to catch an elusive memory is to open my heart and swallow it whole. When I die, I’ll be stuffed full of memories, too many to fit into a casket.

I once thought of habits as things I do without thinking. Like stealing candy out of my kid’s Halloween bucket on November 1. A minute ago, I was at my computer, and now I’m standing in a different room stuffing my face with Skittles. I don’t even know how I got here. Bad habits. I have lots of those. I assumed when people talked about cleaning habits they would work the same way, but they don’t. They so don’t. I have never once found myself dusting and thought, “How in the world did I get here? I don’t even remember grabbing the duster!

I can’t believe this is what my life has become. I used to be a strong, badass Marine. Now I’m wearing tactical gear, my face is covered in camo paint, and I’m lurking in shrubbery with my insane father-in-law, hoping none of the neighbors catch us and call the cops.

I took a shower, threw my covers back, and slipped into bed wearing nothing but Jamie’s T-shirt. I clutched the note to my chest as I pressed the button to listen to my nightly message. I went sailing today with Chelsea, he said. I thought about your hair whipping across your face, your pink cheeks, and the huge smile you had on your face as we sailed across the bay. I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you. I can’t get you out of my mind. I’m always thinking about you. Me too. I pressed END and reached down beside the bed to where I had set the note. When I read it again, this time I cried. Katy, my angel, I had to go to Portland. My father had a heart attack and they don’t know if he’s going to make it through the night. Please don’t leave. If I can’t get back by tomorrow, I’ll send a car and get you a flight up here. Please, please don’t leave. I have something really important to tell you besides the fact that I am completely in love with you. —J In the morning, the note was crumpled up on my chest. I got up and spread it out on the counter. I underlined the last line and then wrote WHY? underneath it. I stuffed it into an envelope and mailed to it the R. J. Lawson Winery. I laughed to myself as I wrote Attn: The Owner. I spent Sunday in my apartment, not moping. I did a yoga video, edited some of Beth’s latest article, and then devoted the afternoon and evening to a marathon of MythBusters, during which I learned that Jack’s death in Titanic was totally unnecessary. Had that selfish bitch, Rose, given up her life jacket to tie under that wooden door, it would have been buoyant enough to hold them both. Damn her. I slid into bed at seven and listened to Jamie’s latest voice mail over and over.

We walk past a clown who is painting kids’ faces, and I suddenly stop, something catching my eye. “I like that unicorn,” I say, pointing to the bright pink stuffed animal hanging from the ceiling of a game booth. Travis looks from the unicorn to me. “Is that a hint?” “I didn’t think I was being subtle,” I say, batting my eyelashes at him. “How much is it?” Travis asks the man in charge of the game, reaching for his wallet. “One dart for three dollars, four for ten. You just pop a balloon with the dart and you get a prize,” he says, perking up at the prospect of a new customer. “Oh, that sounds easy!” I say, clapping my hands together. “How many times do you have to pop a balloon to get the unicorn?” Travis asks. “Five,” the man answers brightly. “I could buy you a unicorn for cheaper than that!” Travis says, turning to me. My face falls. “But that’s not the point,” I argue. Travis looks at my pout before he lifts his eyes up to the ceiling, shaking his head. “Okay, I will take five darts.” I immediately perk up again, and reach out for his arm. “You’ll do great!” I say. Travis takes the first dart from the man and throws it at the wall. It doesn’t even make it all the way and falls pitifully to the floor. “Must have been a bad dart,” I argue. He frowns, picks up the second dart and this time takes a little more aim before throwing it. This time it makes it to the wall but doesn’t manage to stick. “That’s okay, it−” Before I can finish my thought, Travis is handing me his jacket to hold so he has both hands free. He picks up the next dart, his face all business, and plants his feet, ready for action. None of the five darts pop any balloons, and before I can offer him any words of consolation he has slapped down a twenty on the ledge and rolled up his sleeves. “Travis, you don’t have to−” but I can tell he isn’t listening to a word I’m saying. He throws another dart and it actually connects to the side of a balloon, but it only serves to pin the balloon to the wall more. Is that even possible? These are like miracle balloons. “This is obviously rigged!” I argue, picking up one of the darts. I throw it at the wall, my back leg kicking up from the effort and it connects with a bright yellow balloon, popping it instantly. “We have a winner!” The operator yells. I look up at Travis who is just staring at the popped balloon. “That was just beginner’s luck,” I assure Travis, picking up another dart and trying to throw it at the wall a little higher than before, aiming for above the balloons. It quickly curves down in the air and pops a blue balloon. Honestly, I tried out for my high school’s baseball team and got laughed off the diamond. If it wasn’t so inappropriate I would have Travis take a video so I could post it on my Facebook page. That would show Shannon Winters and all her baseball friends. “Another winner!” the operator yells. “Three more, pretty lady, and you’ve got your unicorn.” I shoot my eyes to Travis, but he’s still staring at the wall in disbelief. I have no problem popping the other three balloons and I stand gleefully with my arms outstretched, waiting for my unicorn. “You have three more darts,” the operator points out. “Did you want to try and win your boyfriend something?” I clamp my lips together while Travis stands beside me, completely silent. “We’re going to try something else,” I say, holding my unicorn in one hand and grabbing Travis’s hand with the other. Travis walks away shaking his head. “I played football in university. I was on the provincial lacrosse team.” “I know,” I say, wrapping my arm around his middle as we walk away. “You were so close.” I try and hide the smile from my face. There is hardly anything I’m able to beat Travis at and now I know whenever I challenge him it should definitely include darts

Let's grab something for you from the kitchen, and then we'll go find Magnus." The "something" turned out to be a wedge of the most amazing cake he'd ever tasted. It had cream in the middle, a crust of honey and almonds on top. He crammed half a wedge into his mouth and moaned aloud. "Damn, that's good," he said around the mouthful. "Damn." "I already ordered it for my wedding breakfast," said Tess. "It's called Bienenstich- bee sting cake," said Isabel, coming into the kitchen. "Appropriate, under the circumstances." He turned to face her, his cheeks stuffed with food like a chipmunk's. Then he swallowed the bite of food. "It's delicious. Did you make it?" he asked, not taking his eyes off her. While Tess had red hair and freckles, Isabel had olive-toned skin, dark eyes and full lips, like a flamenco dancer or maybe an Italian film star swathed in veils. "I did," she said. "It's a German tradition.

I watched him as he served us both something to drink. He had a bunch of freckles that covered his face and his eyelashes seemed to fade toward the tips. He wasn’t movie-star handsome, but there was definitely something attractive about him. “What? Do I have something on my face?” he asked, handing me a cup. “Oh no. I was just thinking about something.” I’d been caught staring and I could feel my cheeks turning red. “Are you having a good time?” he asked. “Mmm-hmm.” I looked over at Susan, who’d sat down on a nearby bleacher to catch her breath. She was fanning herself with a napkin. “Seems like even Miss Dancing Queen had to take a break,” Eddie said, pointing at Susan, who was now in the process of pulling her curly brown hair into a ponytail. I looked up at Eddie. “Can I ask you a question?” “Sure.” “You give everyone nicknames, why not me?” Eddie shrugged. “Don’t know. With you it’s different.” He looked down at his feet and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “It’s hard to come up with just one word that really describes you.

BRANDON!” Jarryd’s voice echoed through the halls and felt like cymbals in Brandon’s ears.  He groaned and sat up.  “I’m in here!” “BRANDON!” Greyson gave him a half-smile and dropped to his pillow.  “Aaah.  It feels good to lie here with no obligations.  Sooo nice.” “Jerk.”  Brandon threw Liam’s pillow at him.  “Someone stole my towel!”  Jarryd screamed.  “I’m NAKED!”  Brandon’s eyes squinted and his lips curled in disgust.  “I’m not in here!  I’m not in here!” Greyson glimpsed Brandon’s panicked face then suddenly stuffed his face into Liam’s pillow to stifle his laughter.  Brandon eyed the boy and kept a cautious look at the doorway, stuck between two unique situations; finally, Greyson had broken his stubborn reserve, but he had an odd, naked boy to clothe in the hall. “W-w-w-w-w what…” he heard from the hall.  Liam had happened upon Jarryd.  Jarryd laughed hysterically, “What are you looking at?  This is my body.  God gave it to me!” Liam rushed into the room, soaking wet, a towel wrapped around his waist. “Ja-Ja-Jarryd’s naked!” Brandon got up and cautiously approached the hall.  “I’m coming out and you better have clothes on, or you’re spending free time with me tomorrow.” “Oh, geez!”  Jarryd expressed from out of view in the hall.  “Nick, throw me my boxers!  Quick!”  Brandon looked back toward Greyson and rolled his eyes.  Greyson dropped his hat over his face, his stomach still bouncing with inner laughter. “Are these my boxers?  These are yours!”  “I’m coming out in three…”  “Can I wear them?” Jarryd asked his brother.  “NO!” Nick shouted. “Two…” “I’m putting them on!”  “One!

I suddenly remember what my mom used to repeat to me on a daily basis when I was in high school: nothing good can come from staying out past 11:00 p.m. or going on Craigslist. But where else could I test this idea with real results? I could post a Facebook status about it, but all people would do is comment with an LOL or smiley face emojis. I could call up my closest friends, but I’d probably be interrupting them in the middle of clinking glasses of some fancy vintage of Merlot with their SigNif to celebrate the end of a long workweek. But Kerri thought it sounded good, and she’s my voice of reason, even if she does have a 102-degree fever. “What section, Moose?” I say. Moose sits there, stuffed and still, not trying to stop me, so I proceed. Women looking for women. That seemed like a good home for this sort of thing. I open up a new post and I begin typing.

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.

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 feet.

What did I tell you last time, Manuel? What did I say would happen if you came back?” Manuel clears his throat and desperately hopes this isn’t a rhetorical question. He tries to meet her gaze. "Ah. Something about shooting and stuffing me, I think.” Her gun twitches. “Face front.” He does. “Ditch?” The bartender coughs. “She said: ‘I’ll put a hole in your head for every one of those drinks, and turn you into a disgusting display of human taxidermy.” “Did you really say that?” Manuel forces a laugh. “He was here? I don’t remember him being here.” Ditch shakes his head, solemn. “No,” she says, “I make all my employees memorize that.

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.

I feel so apart from these people. We’re the same age, but we’re different breeds. Different species entirely. While these motherfuckers were riding ponies and screaming at magicians, demanding more impressive tricks on their eighth birthdays, I was eating out of trash cans. When they were ten, they were going on vacations to The Hamptons and stuffing their faces on Maine’s finest lobster. Meanwhile, I was kneeling in a filthy back alley, shooting Narcan up my foster-carer David’s nose so he wouldn’t fucking OD and die. Apples. Oranges. I can never be like them. Understand them. Fuck, even tolerating them is going to be a challenge.

disobeying your earthly father? I do. In fact, one of my most memorable experiences with my dad came after I had spilled a paint can all over the carpet while my parents were remodeling a room. They didn’t see it happen, so I went flying up the stairs and dived under my covers. In a few minutes I could hear the muffled voice of my father discussing how I had ruined the carpet. I tightened the sheet over my head and tried to prop up stuffed animals and pillows so he couldn’t find me. I heard him call out to me. Then I heard his feet coming up the stairs. “Hugh Thomas, where are you?” Trying not to even breathe, I remained silent. Then the door opened with a creak, and I felt his feet moving toward the side of my bed. I was terrified. I knew he had found me. I expected him to grab me by the ankle, jerk me out of the bed, hang me upside down, and whale away on my hind end with a wooden spoon. But he didn’t. I just remember him gently grabbing the corner of the sheet, slowing pulling it up, sliding his face under the covers where he could make eye contact with me, and then saying, “Son, you ruined the carpet, but I love you. Why don’t you come down and help me fix this? I’m not mad, but we have to clean it up, okay?” When God came to find Adam, He was upset, for sure.

Someone knocked. I paused, the chicken halfway to my mouth, and glared at the door. The knocking persisted. It wasn’t Derek. His knock would be careful, almost apologetic. This bastard knocked like he was doing me a favor. I looked at the chicken, glanced to the door, stuffed a whole piece into my mouth, and went to see who dared to make demands on my time. The door swung open, revealing Curran. He wore old jeans a green sweatshirt and carried a brown paper sack. He raised his face and sucked air in through his nostrils in the manner of shapechangers. “Tso’s, seafood delight, and fried rice,” he said. “You’re going to share?” I leaned against the wall. The door was open but the ward still blocked his entrance, affording me a bit of leisure. “Oh, it’s you.” I dug in the container with my fork. “I thought it was somebody important.” Curran stepped forward, brushing against the ward. A flash of carmine rippled through the magic barrier and the lord of shapechangers withdrew. “A ward,” he said. “A good one.” He put his palm against the ward and pushed. Red pulsed from his fingers, spreading through the ward like waves from a pebble tossed into a quiet pond. “I can break it,” Curran said. I raised an eyebrow at him. “Be my guest.

We trapped several smaller females, all around the nine-foot mark. That’s when Steve stepped back and let the all-girl team take over: all the women in camp, zoo workers mainly, myself, and others. We would jump on the croc, help secure the tracking device, and let her go. At one point Steve trapped a female that he could see was small and quiet. He turned to Bindi. “How would you like to jump the head?” Bindi’s eyes lit up. This was what she had been waiting for. Once Steve removed the croc from the trap and secured its jaws, the next step was for the point person to jump the croc’s head. Everybody else on the team followed immediately afterward, pinning the crocodile’s body. “Don’t worry,” I said to Bindi. “I’ll back you up.” Or maybe I was really talking to Steve. He was nervous as he slipped the croc out of its mesh trap. He hovered over the whole operation, knowing that if anything went amiss, he was right there to help. “Ready, and now!” he said. Bindi flung herself on the head of the crocodile. I came in right over her back. The rest of the girls jumped on immediately, and we had our croc secured. “Let’s take a photo with the whole family,” Professor Franklin said. Bindi sat proudly at the crocodile’s head, her hand casually draped over its eyes. Steve was in the middle, holding up the croc’s front legs. Next in line was me. Finally, Robert had the tail. This shot ended up being our 2006 family Christmas card. I look at it now and it makes me laugh out loud. The family that catches crocs together, rocks together. The Irwin family motto. Steve, Bindi, and I are all smiling. But then there is Robert’s oh-so-serious face. He has a top-jaw rope wrapped around his body, with knots throughout. He took his job seriously. He had the rope and was ready as the backup. He was on that croc’s tail. It was all about catching crocs safely, mate. No mucking around here. As we idled back in to camp, Robert said, “Can I please drive the boat?” “Crikey, mate, you are two years old,” Steve said. “I’ll let you drive the boat next year.” But then, quite suddenly and without a word, Steve scooped Robert up and sat him up next to the outboard. He put the tiller in his hand. “Here’s what you do, mate,” Steve said, and he began to explain how to drive the boat. He seemed in a hurry to impart as much wisdom to his son as possible. Robert spent the trip jumping croc tails, driving the boat, and tying knots. Steve created a croc made of sticks and set it on a sandbar. He pulled the boat up next to it, and he, Robert, and Bindi went through all the motions of jumping the stick-croc. “I’m going to say two words,” Robert shouted, imitating his father. “’Go,’ and ‘Now.’ First team off on ‘Go,’ second team off on ‘Now.’” Then he’d yell “Go, now” at the top of his lungs. He and Steve jumped up as if the stick-croc was about to swing around and tear their arms off. “Another croc successfully caught, mate,” Steve said proudly. Robert beamed with pride too. When he got back to Croc One, Robert wrangled his big plush crocodile toy. I listened, incredulous, as my not-yet-three-year-old son muttered the commands of a seasoned croc catcher. He had all the lingo down, verbatim. “Get me a twelve-millimeter rope,” Robert commanded. “I need a second one. Get that top-jaw rope under that tooth, yep, the eye tooth, get it secured. We’ll need a third top-jaw rope for this one. Who’s got a six-millimeter rope? Hand me my Leatherman. Cut that rope here. Get that satellite tracker on.” The stuffed animal thoroughly secured, Robert made as if to brush off his little hands. “Professor Franklin,” he announced in his best grown-up voice, “it’s your croc.

Everett stalked back to his desk and then pointed to a chair that was bolted to the floor opposite him. “Mr. Mulberry, you don’t believe that’s an acceptable way of asking me to take a seat, do you?” A stabbing of a finger to the chair once more was his only reply. Taking a second to fasten herself back into the cork jacket, even as an odd and somewhat inappropriate sense of amusement settled over her, Millie walked over to the indicated chair and took a seat. Placing her hands demurely in her lap, she watched as Everett lowered into his own chair. Thrusting a hand through hair that was distinctly untidy, he caught her eye. “Was there a reason behind your interrupting my reading?” “I’m sure there was, but that reason escapes me at the moment.” She sat forward. “What are you reading?” Everett’s face turned a little red as he snatched the book off the desk and stuffed it into a drawer. Millie leaned back in the chair. “Very well, since you don’t seem to want to exchange the expected pleasantries, let us move on to what I’ve suddenly recalled I wanted to speak with you about. We need to discuss the children and the part you need to play in their lives, as well as discuss how you’re going to go about telling Miss Dixon it would be a horrible idea for you to send the children away to a boarding school.” Opening the drawer, Everett yanked out the book he’d just stashed away, and pushed it Millie’s way. “I think I’d rather discuss this.” Picking up the book, she looked at the title. “You’re reading Pride and Prejudice?” “I am, but don’t tell anyone. It could ruin my reputation as a manly gentleman.” The amusement that was still bubbling through her increased. “I doubt that, but tell me, what do you think about the story so far?” “I think it’s unfortunate that Lizzy is not better connected, because she would be perfect for Mr. Darcy if she came from money.” Millie shoved the book back at him as every ounce of amusement disappeared in a flash. “You don’t believe that Mr. Darcy might be just a tad too prideful since he believes he’s superior to Lizzy?” “He’s one of the richest men in England,” Everett said, returning the book to the drawer and giving it a somewhat longing look before he caught Millie’s eye. “Of course he’s superior to Lizzy.” Fighting the impulse to tell him he was a bit of an idiot, because that was a guaranteed way of getting dismissed, Millie forced a smile. “Perhaps it would be best to continue this discussion after you finish the book. But, tell me, why in the world are you reading a romance novel?” “I needed something to keep me occupied while evading Abigail and her meddling ways, and since you spoke so highly of Jane Austen, I thought I’d give her a try.” “You’re reading it because I enjoy Jane Austen?” “Well, yes. You also mentioned you enjoy Frankenstein, but I couldn’t find a copy of that in my library, so I decided I’d read a book of Jane’s instead.” Pleasure

The first shot would have gotten me in the face if I hadn’t already been moving. I dodged behind the couch as the shot rang out. Then another and another. They were loud but not deafening. The microwave in the kitchen took the first two; the next three hit the sofa and I heard the muffled impacts as stuffing flew through the air. I was crawling my ass off, heading for the door. I dodged under the coffee table, the one Oldie had hit on his way in, rolled onto my back and put my feet and hands on the underside of the glass. I

My dad was giving me a kind of pep talk and my mom had a smile on her face, but she just looked like she wanted to cry. She’s looking at this little girl holding a stuffed animal on her way to deliver a baby. I can’t even begin to imagine.

I sob and clutch my stuffed bunny. Nick leaps up on my bed and squashes his body against mine, nuzzling my face with his muzzle until I lift it enough for him to lick away my tears. While the pixie rages downstairs, I wrap my arms around Nick’s furry body and cry into him. My shoulders quake from the effort of it. He whimpers once or twice and tries to lick my face some more, but mostly he watches the door, and eventually I stop with the pathetic sobbing stuff and just keep crying.

You’ll be remembered for decades,” Fenwick said. “Perhaps centuries. Don’t tell me that it means nothing to you.” Christopher shook his head slightly, his gaze locked on the other man’s face. “There is an ancient tradition of military honor in my family,” Fenwick said. “I knew that I would achieve the most, and be remembered the longest. No one ever thinks about the ancestors who led small lives, who were known principally as husbands and fathers, benevolent masters, loyal friends. No one cares about those nameless ciphers. But warriors are revered. They are never forgotten.” Bitterness creased his face, leaving it puckered and uneven like the skin of an overripe orange. “A medal like the Victoria Cross--that is all I’ve ever wanted.” “A half ounce of die-stamped gunmetal?” Christopher asked skeptically. “Don’t use that supercilious tone with me, you arrogant ass.” Oddly, despite the venom of the words, Fenwick was calm and controlled. “From the beginning, I knew you were nothing more than an empty-headed fop. Handsome stuffing for a uniform. But you turned out to have one useful gift--you could shoot. And then you went to the Rifles, where somehow you became a soldier. When I first read the dispatches, I thought there had to be some other Phelan. Because the Phelan of the reports was a warrior, and I knew you hadn’t the makings of one.” “I proved you wrong at Inkerman,” Christopher said quietly. The jab brought a smile to Fenwick’s face, the smile of a man standing at a distance from life and seeing unimaginable irony. “Yes. You saved me, and now you’re to get the nation’s highest honor for it.” “I don’t want it.” “That makes it even worse. I was sent home while you became the lauded hero, and took everything that should have been mine. Your name will be remembered, and you don’t even care. Had I died on the battlefield, that would have at least been something. But you took even that away.

Jesus, Kash!” “What are you doing?” “What are you doing? Why are you just standing out here like a creeper?” He smirked and followed me over to my apartment. “I’m trying to figure out why you’re army-crawling all over the breezeway and shouting for a candy bar.” “I’m not shouting for a candy bar, I’m looking for a cat that isn’t there.” One of his thick eyebrows rose and he bit down on his lip ring to try to hide his smile as he held my door open for us. “Mrs. Adams . . . isn’t exactly all there. She thinks she has cats and she doesn’t. And every Thursday since we moved in, she’s come knocking at eight thirty asking for me to help her look for them.” “And you help her, knowing they aren’t there?” “Well, I didn’t know the first time until I got into her apartment. Her cats are really stuffed animals and pillows.” “But you helped her every other time knowing what you know?” He’d stopped biting on that ring and his lips kept tilting up as he tried to control his smile. “Yeah, Kash, I did. Because no one else does, and don’t laugh at me! It’s not funny, I feel really bad for her! You should see how upset she gets over this.” I turned to walk into my room, but he caught me around my waist and hauled my body back to his. “I’m not laughing at you, Rach,” he mumbled huskily, and his gray eyes roamed my face. “I think it’s adorable that you help her. You’re really just a big softy, aren’t you?” Laughing when I growled at him, he continued to piss me off even more. “You’re like Sour Patch Kids candy.” “What the hell?” “Sour . . . then sweet.” “I will castrate you if you don’t let me go right now.

Fast forward to today. Americans still have very few options when it comes to trying the lesser-known varieties of charcutería available to the Spanish people. Hope exists, however, that this may be soon rectified, as evidenced by the sweeping acquittal of many Italian cured-meat imports in April 2013.20 For now, anyway, we can travel to Spain and consume to our heart’s content. We can buy what precious little is available in our country. We can make it ourselves. Or we can make a futile attempt at stuffing contraband pork into our suitcases and pray, with the wide-eyed, guilt-laden face of a Colombian drug mule, not to get busted by the Department of Homeland Security. Just know that on this point, dear reader, I can offer a bit of personal advice: Getting caught is an epic fail of disastrous proportions, even if it’s not your fault. Case in point: After a trip to Madrid and the surrounding countryside, my Spanish “family” thought that they’d surprise me with a little package of morcilla secreted away in my suitcase. It was a gesture borne of more heart than brains, as ultimately it truly was a great surprise—especially when I found myself tagged for an agricultural check at a particularly thorough US Customs checkpoint. I simply didn’t understand. I’d filled out my Customs card and done everything right. Yet there I was, unloading my dirty unmentionables on a counter for God, curious passersby, and the TSA to look over and admire. And that’s when I caught a waft of

John laughed as he saw the scolding look on Roger’s face. “What?” The big man just shook his head, arms crossed. “You’re in for it now. What if you have two girls?” John scowled. That had occurred to him as well. Two boys would be ideal. He could deal with boys. What the hell would he do with girls? Chad punched Roger in the shoulder. “Hey, now. Girls are fine. Mercy is amazing.” He looked at John. “Don’t give in to all that stereotypical bullshit. She plays with cars and stuffed animals. Give her a Barbie doll and she turns her nose up at it. I can’t wait to take her shooting at the ranch. I found this awesome little .22 caliber rifle called a Cricket. Shorter barrel, shorter stock. Totally made for a little girl.” John looked at the picture Chad had saved on his phone of the little pink gun. Huh…okay. That was pretty cute. “Besides,” Chad continued, “I doubt Shannon will let you avoid them. Twins are a lot of work, my friend. I used to babysit my niece Grace when she was a baby, and just one kid is a handful. I can’t imagine two.” “Thanks for the pep talk, Lowell,” John growled. They

There was an incident with some boys in the woods, and suddenly, I was stuffing my face with Twinkies or ordering a pizza late at night, trying to fill this ragged, ugly thing inside me that couldn't be filled or quieted. I ignored my parents and their worry entirely. All I wanted to do was eat. My body grew, became more significant, more noticeable and more invisible at the same time. Most important, though, the bigger I made my body, the safer I felt. Bad things, I'd decided years earlier, could not happen to big bodies. I was not necessarily incorrect in my thinking. Eating was, in part, a survival instinct.

Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” —Joshua 1:9 (NIV) Tomorrow I’m going in for one of my regular cancer tests, and today I’m fighting my “What if” fears. What if my cancer comes back? I’m nearly seven years out from being diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer when I was given a two-year life expectancy. I’ve beaten all odds. But a couple of doctors told me that “stage IV ovarian cancer always comes back.” So far, I’ve proven them wrong, but every time I make an appointment for a checkup, the “What if” fears start creeping in. What if my test is not good? “Don’t go there,” a friend advises me. But I have to go there. My way of dealing with my fears is to look the worst-case possibilities square in the face. I’ve even created my own scenario for this fear-facing exercise. I imagine my fears stuffed into an imaginary room. It’s a scary but sacred place, because I know that nothing in that room surprises God—and He invites me to “go there” because Jesus is there too. He walks alongside me as I explore each fear, imagining what my life would be like if that worst possibility became a reality. What if my cancer comes back? I picture Jesus answering, “If your cancer comes back, I will still be with you. I will still give you what you need, one day at a time. I will still love you with an everlasting love. And I will still give you a future with hope.” Soon, I know that even if my worst fears become reality, Jesus’ promises are still true. That gives me courage as I go off to my cancer test once again. Lord, Your promises sustain me. Always. —Carol Kuykendall Digging Deeper: Prv 1:33; Phil 4:19; 2 Pt 1:1–11

When I talked with God about the stuff I faced, first on the list was the face I stuffed.

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.

Since God chose you…you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy…. —Colossians 3:12 (NLT) Unrelenting screams drifted down the Jetway and through the plane as I searched for my seat. Scooting next to the window, I stuffed my long legs in place and looked up to see a mother wrestling a three-year-old boy—the source of the screams—into the seat next to mine. I closed my eyes. God, this must be a mistake. In spite of the mother’s trying to comfort her son, the screams escalated when the plane lurched back from the gate and rumbled down the runway. My ears throbbed. Staring out the window, I whined, God, please shut him up. Yet in my spirit I heard, “Help him.” But, God, I don’t have anything to offer. “Show him My mercy.” I groaned. A white jet stream zigzagged across the sky. I looked at the boy. “Can you see that cloud?” Tears streamed down his face. I continued. “That’s a jet.” The boy’s brow furrowed. I asked, “Do you ever watch jets fly overhead?” He sniffled and nodded. I managed a smile. “Did you know that there are little boys watching us fly over? Let’s wave at them.” His face brightened as he peered out the window, waved, and said, “Hi, little boys.” The rest of the trip he waved while his mother and I chatted. When we deplaned his mother said, “I sure am glad that you sat next to us.” I grinned. “Me too.” Lord, thank You for showing me the answer: Your mercy. —Rebecca Ondov Digging Deeper: Ps 86:5; Heb 4:16

You should take your boots off. Stick your feet in the water.” “Why?” I don’t understand why she’s so excited to get her feet wet. She laughs. “Because it’s fun.” She taps my thigh. “Take them off.” I shake my head. She tilts her head at me like an inquisitive puppy. “Please,” she says. “Don’t make me sit here and feel funny being the only one with naked feet.” I groan and pull my foot up, then tug my boot off. Then I repeat it with the other one and set the boots on the dock behind me with my socks stuffed inside. “In the water,” she says with a fierce jab of her finger. I hesitantly stick my feet in, and she laughs at the wounded look on my face when I realize how cold it is. “Quit being such a baby,” she scolds with a laugh. I gently palm the side of her head and give it a playful push. “Did you seriously just call me a baby?” “That might have to be your nickname for the rest of our lives.

The menu: legendary deep-fried Turkeyzilla, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and green beans. The theme: dysfunction. “So,” Elysia said to Lex’s parents with her ever-friendly grin, “how are you?” “How do you think they are?” Ferbus whispered. She kicked him under the table. “I mean—um—what do you do? For a living?” Lex’s mother, who hadn’t said much, continued to stare down the table at the sea of black hoodies while picking at her potatoes. Lex’s father cleared his throat. “I’m a contractor,” he said. “And she’s a teacher.” “Omigod! I wanted to be a teacher!” Elysia turned to Mrs. Bartleby. “Do you love it?” “Hmm?” She snapped back to attention and smiled vacantly at Elysia. “Oh, yes. I do. The kids are a nice distraction.” “From what?” Pip asked. Bang smacked her forehead. Lex squeezed Driggs’s hand even tighter, causing him to choke on his stuffing. He coughed and hacked until the offending morsel flew out of his mouth, landing in Sofi’s glass of water. “Ewww!” she squealed. “Drink around it,” Pandora scolded. “So! I hear New York City is lovely this time of year.” Well, it looks nice, I guess,” Mr. Bartleby said. “But shoveling out the driveway is a pain in the neck. The girls used to help, but now . . .” Sensing the impending awkwardness, Corpp jumped in. “Well, Lex has been a wonderful addition to our community. She’s smart, friendly, a joy to be around—” “And don’t you worry about the boyfriend,” Ferbus said, pointing to Driggs. “I keep him in line.” Mrs. Bartleby’s eyes widened, looking at Lex and then Driggs. “You have a—” she sputtered. “He’s your—” Ferbus went white. “They didn’t know?” “Oops!” said Uncle Mort in a theatrical voice, getting up from the table. “Almost forgot the biscuits!” “Let me help you with those,” Lex said through clenched teeth, following him to the counter. A series of pained hugs and greetings had ensued when her parents arrived—but the rest of the guests showed up so soon thereafter that Lex hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to them, much to her relief. Still, she hadn’t stopped seething. “What were you thinking?” Uncle Mort gave her a reproachful look. “I was thinking that your parents were probably going to feel more lonely and depressed this Thanksgiving than they’ve ever felt in their lives, and that maybe we could help alleviate some of that by hosting a dinner featuring the one and only daughter they have left.” “A dinner of horrors? You know my track record with family gatherings!” He ignored her. “Here we are!” he said, turning back to the table with a giant platter. “Biscuits aplenty!” Lex grunted and took her seat. “I’m not sure how much longer I can do this,” she whispered to Driggs. “Me neither,” he replied. “I think my hand is broken in three places.” “Sorry.” “And your dad seems to be shooting me some sort of a death stare.” Lex glanced at her father. “That’s bad.” “Think he brought the shotgun?” “It’s entirely possible.” “All I’m saying,” Ferbus went on, trying to redeem himself and failing, “is that we all look out for one another here.” Mr. Bartleby looked at him. Ferbus began to sweat. “Because, you know. We all need somebody. Uh, to lean on.” “Stop talking,” Bang signed. Elysia gave Lex’s parents a sympathetic grin. “I think what my idiot partner is trying to say—through the magic of corny song lyrics, for some reason—is that you don’t need to worry about Lex. She’s like a sister to me.” She realized her poor choice of words as a pained look came to Mrs. Bartleby’s face. “Or an especially close cousin.” She shut her mouth and stared at her potatoes. “Frig.” Lex was now crushing Driggs’s hand into a fine paste. Other than the folding chairs creaking and Pip obliviously scraping the last bits of food off his plate, the table was silent. “Good beans!” Pip threw in.

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.