Summer Escapes Quotes

...In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers...

The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

Karrin." She looked up at me. She looked very young somehow. "Remember what I said yesterday," I said. "You're hurt. But you'll get through it. You'll be okay." She closed her eyes tightly. "I'm scared. So scared I'm sick." "You'll get through it." "What if I don't?" I squeezed her fingers. "Then I will personally make fun of you every day for the rest of your life," I said. "I will call you a sissy girl in front of everyone you know, tie frilly aprons on your car, and lurk in the parking lot at CPD and whistle and tell you to shake it, baby. Every. Single. Day." Murphy's breath escaped in something like a hiccup. She opened her eyes, a mix of anger and wary amusement easing into them in place of fear. "You do realize I'm holding a gun, right?

Fenris lunged at my face. I cleverly escaped by falling on my butt.

It never occurred to me that I had brought him here not just to show him my little world, but to ask my little world to let him in, so that the place where I came to be alone on summer afternoons would get to know him, judge him, see if he fitted in, take him in, so that I might come back here and remember. Here I would come to escape the known world and seek another of my own invention; I was basically introducing him to my launchpad.

They're on a crash course to nowhere. But you, my lady friend, you're a black hole. You've sucked me in, and now there's no escape...

As a place to start, let us use a model to explain precisely what this ‘Great Year’ actually is. The year 2012 is the year that marked the end of a 26,000-year cycle, ending in a great galactic alignment that was calculated on the Mayan calendar and results in the calendar ending on the winter solstice (December 21st) of 2012. But what exactly is this galactic alignment?

What happens this weekend stays between us. We set the rules.

Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find. If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes. The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.

It’s the way you take over the space around you. You remind me constantly, loudly, indecently, of all the little things that make you you. It’s impossible to escape, and it makes me very angry.

Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance and her sunlight, from before human cruelty or suffering. She overwhelms man by the contrast between divine beauty and social hideousness. She spares him nothing of her loveliness, neither wing or butterfly, nor song of bird; in the midst of murder, vengeance, barbarism, he must feel himself watched by holy things; he cannot escape the immense reproach of universal nature and the implacable serenity of the sky. The deformity of human laws is forced to exhibit itself naked amidst the dazzling rays of eternal beauty. Man breaks and destroys; man lays waste; man kills; but the summer remains summer; the lily remains the lily; and the star remains the star. ... As though it said to man, 'Behold my work. and yours.

He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary?

I remembered the last thing my mom ever told me. I’d been reluctant to use the fire escape, reluctant to leave her, but she’d gripped my arms and made me look at her. Magnus, run. Hide. Don’t trust anyone. I’ll find you. Whatever you do, don’t go to Randolph for help.

No matter what you think you can be, when you’re forced to stop and look at where you actually are, it’s pretty depressing. Sometimes, there is no escaping the truth

I vaguely remember a story about a woman who looked back while fleeing a broken city. She turned into a pillar of salt. A harsh fate, but I got the point. You can’t look back when you’re escaping disaster. You can’t hope that someone will come after you, either.

As early as she could remember, she was escaping into books, falling into stories, cloaking herself from the great summer storms with silken words.

The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer -- and yet also, like many things, so very simple -- was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. (69)

It's raining in Washington tonight. Plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalks with leopard spots. Downtown, elderly ladies carry their houseplants out to set them on the fire-escapes, as if they were infirm relatives or Boy Kings. I like that.

The endless void of space stretched out before it. Millennia had passed as it roared through the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. The awesome ellipse of its original path was continually altered by intermittent proximity to myriad stars. It gave off minute bits of itself as it rocketed silently through the vacuum of space, but still, after all these millennia it was counted large as such things were measured, and the fact that it had never collided with anything else after such a tremendous interval of travel was a mute testimony to the vastness and comparative emptiness of the universe. Much as humans, on a molecular level, are comprised mostly of space not of matter, so the universe, for all its galaxies and solar systems, is comprised primarily of interconnecting emptiness. Dark, colossal, mindless, and mighty in its mass and velocity, it came on and on through space. The great alignment had set it on a new path. Now, one last nudge from the Red Giant in the previous solar system had fixed its new course, on a fateful rendezvous. Though it was oblivious to its own destination and nothing in the universe with awareness had yet detected it . . . Its path was set.

I love ports. I love the smell of tar and sea air, and the scream of the gulls. Maybe it's years of taking the ferry to France for summer holidays, but a harbor gives me a feeling of freedom in a way that an airport never does. Airports say work and security checks and delays. Ports say... I don't know. Something completely different. Escape, maybe.

Hope—cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora’s box—smiled on him gently all that summer.

For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it. In the clamor in which we live, love is impossible and justice does not suffice. This is why Europe hates daylight and is only able to set injustice up against injustice. But in order to keep justice from shriveling up like a beautiful orange fruit containing nothing but a bitter, dry pulp, I discovered once more at Tipasa that one must keep intact in oneself a freshness, a cool wellspring of joy, love the day that escapes injustice, and return to combat having won that light. Here I recaptured the former beauty, a young sky, and I measured my luck, realizing at last that in the worst years of our madness the memory of that sky had never left me. This was what in the end had kept me from despairing. I had always known that the ruins of Tipasa were younger than our new constructions or our bomb damage. There the world began over again every day in an ever new light. O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

The rest of the girls out there are just shooting stars," Simon whispered into my ear. "They're on a crash course to nowhere. But you, my lady friend, you're a black hole. You've sucked me in, and now there's no escape

Thoroughly ruffled, Rachel turned her back on the source of her annoyance and started for the door. She could feel his gaze on her, and the notion that he was watching her made her suddenly self-conscious. In her teetering heels, she could not help but sway. Just as she reached the door, he made an odd sound that caused her to glance back at him, startled. “Rachel,” he said in what was scarcely more than a husky whisper, while his eyes drilled into hers, “don’t sleep with him. Sleep with me instead.” Her breath caught for a moment as the words coiled around her like a seductive snake. Only by forcing herself to keep walking was she able to escape.

I thought of all the summer evenings I'd spent sitting in the chairs under the trees beside the trailer, reading books that helped me escape Creek View, at least for a little while. Magical kingdoms, Russian love triangles, and the March sisters couldn't have been further away from the trailer park.

The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.

Not because of me, not because of you, just that the summer, embracing both of us together, put me so close to you there could be no escape.

Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk – his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world – as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape….He recalled his and Tracy’s parting at Penn Station on the morning of Pearl Harbor, in the first-class compartment of the Broadway Limited, their show of ordinary mute male farewell, the handshake, the pat on the shoulder, carefully tailoring and modulating their behavior through there was no one at all watching, so finely attuned to the danger of what they might lose that they could not permit themselves to notice what they had

As much as people want to look on the bright side, skip straight to the future when everything will be okay, the truth is that there is this time, where you sometimes have trouble breathing, and you feel powerless. Like you’re screaming and no one hears you, and the myth of the happy future is nothing you can count on, and the only word that makes sense is escape.

I drove by all the places we used to hang out getting wasted I thought about our last kiss, how it felt the way you tasted And even though your friends tell me you're doing fine Are you somewhere feeling lonely even though he's right beside you? When he says those words that hurt you, do you read the ones I wrote you? Sometimes I start to wonder, was it just a lie? If what we had was real, how could you be fine? 'Cause I'm not fine at all I remember the day you told me you were leaving I remember the make-up running down your face And the dreams you left behind you didn't need them Like every single wish we ever made I wish that I could wake up with amnesia And forget about the stupid little things Like the way it felt to fall asleep next to you And the memories I never can escape 'Cause I'm not fine at all The pictures that you sent me they're still living in my phone I'll admit I like to see them, I'll admit I feel alone And all my friends keep asking why I'm not around It hurts to know you're happy, yeah, it hurts that you've moved on It's hard to hear your name when I haven't seen you in so long It's like we never happened, was it just a lie? If what we had was real, how could you be fine? 'Cause I'm not fine at all I remember the day you told me you were leaving I remember the make-up running down your face And the dreams you left behind you didn't need them Like every single wish we ever made I wish that I could wake up with amnesia And forget about the stupid little things Like the way it felt to fall asleep next to you And the memories I never can escape If today I woke up with you right beside me Like all of this was just some twisted dream I'd hold you closer than I ever did before And you'd never slip away And you'd never hear me say I remember the day you told me you were leaving I remember the make-up running down your face And the dreams you left behind you didn't need them Like every single wish we ever made I wish that I could wake up with amnesia And forget about the stupid little things Like the way it felt to fall asleep next to you And the memories I never can escape 'Cause I'm not fine at all No, I'm really not fine at all Tell me this is just a dream 'Cause I'm really not fine at all

From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words. ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning. ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful.

He turns toward the voice. It is as though the darkness itself has spoken. But when he looks closer he can make her out - the very pale blonde hair first, gleaming in what little light there is, then the shimmering stuff of her dress.

We used to escape together, years ago, when we were so sure we could steal time before it stole us.

We who are white men can't change who we are. But we could do worse than to follow what I took that summer as his example: to be aware of and curious about the world around you, to give what you have with neither apology nor self-congratulation. When praise comes to see you, get out on the fire escape. When it's someone else's time to talk, listen. Don't turn your house into a museum. When your work is done, get out of the way.

In all nature there seemed to be a feeling of hopelessness and pain. The earth, like a ruined woman sitting alone in a dark room and trying not to think of the past, was brooding over memories of spring and summer and apathetically waiting for the inevitable winter. Wherever one looked, on all sides, nature seemed like a dark, infinitely deep, cold pit from which neither Kirilov nor Abogin nor the red half-moon could escape....

In the past I had often tried to escape the grown-up world of sorrow through my imagination- dreaming that a handsome young lieutenant would ride to my rescue or that a great empresario would discover my musical talents and whisk me away. I had envisioned knights in shining armor and happily ever after scenes to escape from rules or boredom or pain; including a vision of my mother walking through our front door whole and well again. Now I knew that a lifetime of escape led to a life like Aunt Bertie's. My imagination was a gift, but I had to live in the real world. My eyes had been opened this summer to poverty and crime and abuse and I needed to use my imagination not to escape, but to help people like Irina and Katya, to make my own contribution as the women in the women's pavilion had done. I couldn't do it in the same way Jane Adams and my grandmother and Aunt Mat were, but I would find my own way and my own time.

It was a sunny day in early summer, and he could hear birdsong. In a nearby orchard that had so far escaped shelling, apple trees were blossoming bravely. Men were the only animals that slaughtered their own kind by the million, and turned the landscape into a waste of shell craters and barbed wire. Perhaps the human race would wipe itself out completely, and leave the world to the birds and trees, Walter thought apocalyptically. Perhaps that would be for the best.

A Faint Music by Robert Hass Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge, the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing

These are secrets hidden from those who escape the Himalaya when it is at its bleakest: the mountains do not reveal themselves to people who come here merely to escape the heat of the plains. Through the summer they veil themselves in a haze. The peaks emerge for those devoted to them through the coldest of winters, the wettest of monsoons. The mountains, Diwan Sahib said in an uncharacteristic rush of sentimentality fueled by a few drinks at his fireplace, believe that love must be tested by adversity.

Because when all is said and done the setting doesn’t matter: the space, the walls, the light. It makes no difference whether I’m under a clear blue sky or caught in the rain or swimming in the transparent sea in summer. I could be riding a train or traveling by a car or flying in a plane, among the clouds that drift and spread on all sides like a mass of jellyfish in the air. I’ve never stayed still, I’ve always been moving, that’s all I’ve ever been doing. Always waiting either to get somewhere or to come back. Or to escape. I keep packing and unpacking the small suitcase at my feet. I hold my purse in my lap, it’s got some money and a book to read. Is there any place we’re not moving through? Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. I’m related to these related terms. These words are my abode, my only foothold. On the Train There are five of them, four men and a woman, all more or less the same age.

NINA Your life is beautiful. TRIGORIN I see nothing especially lovely about it. [He looks at his watch] Excuse me, I must go at once, and begin writing again. I am in a hurry. [He laughs] You have stepped on my pet corn, as they say, and I am getting excited, and a little cross. Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though. [After a few moments' thought] Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth--I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can't help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it is a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I do not forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano; I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope; I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the colour worn by widows; I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening. I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball. I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more. And so it goes for everlasting. I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot. Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum. The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing. A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. I did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with cold indifference. Oh, how terrible it was! What agony!

Imagination is the first step to escapism....

The worst thing about adultery was that it made you see your life for what it was: something that was nearly impossible to escape.

Our summer made her light escape into the beautiful.

Having escaped restraint, they were, like some people we know of, afraid of their freedom, did not know what to do with it, and seemed glad to get back into the old familiar bondage.

I wish that I could wake up with amnesia And forget about the stupid little things Like the way it felt to fall asleep next to you And the memories I never can escape 'Cause I'm not fine at all No, I'm really not fine at all Tell me this is just a dream 'Cause I'm really not fine at all

A scream so loud it shattered and splintered into a dreadful chorus that rattled and shook my brain and bones and cells and soul. I grabbed the telegram from Mama’s hand, threw it on the fire, ran out of the room into the hallway, and then outside into the square, and I continued running, zigzagging down streets, through mews, and on and on, as though I could escape from that moment; escape my brother’s death and run back through time.

Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we are going to haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.

Good. Now I'm going to tell you something, and I really need you to hear it,' she said. 'You can cut me off, cut Justin off, be so small no one can ever find you. Go ahead. Run like the wind, I won't chase you. But you can't escape yourself.' I just stared at her. 'You are not what happened to you. You are what you do next.' Something in her words finally got through, and I suddenly wanted to cry. A pinch of emotion in a dark, deep nothing.

The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay.

Now the city is at its loveliest. The crowds of summer and autumn have gone, the air has a new freshness, the light has that pale-gold quality unique to this time of year. There have been several weeks of this weather now, without a drop of rain.

Misery was a creeping thing, like the dew settling on grass or the cold fingers of frost meeting me in my bed at night and crackling the insides of my windows. I had longed to be left alone, to escape the lie of my family, only to discover this was different kind of poison. Slow acting, but lethal. At first it numbed me, pleasure leaching from my days like a summer leaf draining of sap to greet the autumn. Then loneliness came, a creeping oily stain that stopped me from enjoying it at all.

Lizzie and I arrived in the polluted heat of a London summer. We stood frozen at street corners as a blur of pedestrians burst out of the subways and spilled like ants down the pavements. The crowed bars, the expensive shops, the fashionable clothes - to me it all seemed a population rushing about to no avail...I stared at a huge poster of a woman in her underwear staring down at her own breasts. HELLO BOYS, she said. At the movies we witnessed sickening violence, except that this time we held tubs of popcorn between our legs and the gunfire and screams were broadcast in digital Dolby. We had escaped a skull on a battlefield, only to arrive in London, where office workers led lines of such tedium and plenty that they had to entertain themselves with all the f****** and killing on the big screen. So here then was the prosperous, democratic and civilized Western world. A place of washing machines, reality TV, Armani, frequent-flier miles, mortgages. And this is what the Africans are supposed to hope for, if they're lucky.

Like prison, I'm never getting out of trouble. The only thing I can do is make my trouble your joy - because here's the thing about reading my memoir: it will make you feel good about yourself. You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy moral business, and feel like you are a better person.

The men will fight for their thrones and their power and their legacies, but to them we are nothing more than crickets and ants, insignificant, expendable. We will continue to worry over the rice and soy sauce and oil, three meals a day, how to escape the cold in the winter and the heat in the high summer, the holes in the roof and the bedding and the taxes. What does it matter who wears the crown, if they will not change any of this for us?

The instant I saw Lori’s dad and Frances across the hot asphalt road, I spun around, hoping Lori was still hidden by the trees. She stood right behind me, in full view. And if my expression matched hers, we couldn’t have looked more guilty. I turned back around. Her dad’s face was even worse. Glaring at me, he worked his jaw like he was going to say something, but he wanted to make sure he’d thought of the worst possible insult first. He turned redder and seemed to swell, like all his holes were plugged up and the pressure had nowhere to escape. He opened his mouth. “It was my fault,” I said quickly. “I know!” he roared. At the same time, Lori stepped in front of me and muttered, “Wrong thing to say, Adam.” “Right.” I put my hand on Lori’s shoulder and pushed her an arm’s length away so it wouldn’t look like I was hiding behind her. “It’s nobody’s fault, because we didn’t do anything wrong.

Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation’s literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.

The diorama was even more enthralling than Annabelle had hoped it would be. However, she wasn’t able to lose herself in the unfolding spectacle—she was too acutely aware of the man standing beside her. It hardly helped that he occasionally bent down to murmur some inappropriate comment in her ear, mockingly reproving her for displaying such unseemly interest in the sight of gentlemen dressed in pillow-cases. No matter how sternly Annabelle tried to hold back her amusement, a few reluctant giggles escaped, earning disapproving glances from people around them. And then, naturally, Hunt chided her for laughing during such an important lecture, which made her want to giggle all the more.

A careful man I must always be; A little fellow follows me. I know I dare not go astray For fear he’ll go the self-same way. I cannot once escape his eyes; Whate’er he sees me do, he tries, Like me, he says, he’s going to be, This little chap who follows me. He thinks that I am good and fine; Believes in every word of mine. The base in me he must not see, This little chap who follows me. I must be careful as I go Through summer’s sun and winter’s snow, Because I am building for the years to be This little chap who follows me.3

I think there are plenty of people out there, men and women both, who have pined over someone who is unattainable — only to have their heart broken time and again.

If there’s anyone who can break a curse, it’s her. If there’s anyone who can escape their fate, a treacherous voice whispers, it’s her.

The day is hot, the Capulets abroad. And if we meet we shall not escape a brawl. For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.

I couldn’t escape the hell I was in; the push pull between hot & cold. Neither was better, just two extremes of the same pain.

I always dream of some great unexpected infidelity. But I have not yet been able to escape my bigamous state. Milan Kundera, The Paris Review, summer 1984 no. 92

Summer ended. Hot golden days gave way to washed-out skies and falling rain. Isabelle was so focused on the escape route that she hardly noticed the change in weather. On

We’re all broken. So what? None of us get through this life without bumps, bruises, and a few shattered dreams. What matters is what we do with the unshattered ones.

people are shaped by love, hatred, choices, strengths, and insecurities, and capturing their essence is a beautiful thing.

Next time I fuck you, I want to be sure you’re not going to pull away from me afterward.” “And I can’t escape on a boat?” “That might have crossed my mind.

Boris was famous for his bibliotherapy. He knew which books would mend a broken heart, what to read on a summer day, and which novel to choose for an adventurous escape.

The work lifts his spirits, when spirits can be lifted, but darkness still catches him now and then. That’s the nature of darkness. It comes at the end of every day, predictable as the striking of a clock’s chime, even in the heart of summer, when the light is full and lingering. You can never quite escape the night. Perhaps that’s as God wills; this must be His design. How are we to know when our lives are good and when we are blessed, if we have no sorrow, no deprivation for comparison’s sake? There is, he believes, a purpose to all the Creator’s ways.

Don't the overwhelming majority believe that mankind is the crowning achievement of Creation, that man is better than everything, even things we haven't yet investigated? And don't those people who aren't able to escape the bonds of their own ego think that the entire Universe, even the countless worlds of outer space, is just a backdrop for this ego? And yet it might be quite different.

I’m so in love with you,” he said when we pulled apart, his breaths escaping in cold puffs of air. “Swear on it?” I whispered, and he smiled and kissed the inside of my wrist over the top of my bracelet.

Books have always been her escape. When she couldn’t leave the house, when no one would answer her questions, when she felt so very alone in the world. They have given her a way out before—maybe they can do it again.

Death and his scythe do not come. No sweeping black capes or ethereal escapes. There’s no pearly gate, no prisms of colors as his soul slips away. The stillness is cold steel. The silence is empty with no memory to mend it.

Secrets construct a bulwark within me. I am closet bins and dark rooms and currents dragging me down and down. I want to escape myself. If I could speak truth without consequences, I’d invite everyone into my silence and beg them to rescue me.

...(in the past I would listen to a record three, five, ten times running, waiting for something that never happened). A book offers more deliverance, more escape, more fulfilment of desire. In songs one remains locked in desire. (The lyrics are not that important, only the melody matters; so I understood nothing of what the Platters or the Beatles were saying.) There are no places, no scenes, no characters, only oneself and one’s longing. Yet the very starkness and paucity of music allow me to recall a whole episode of my life and the girl I used to be when I listen to I’m Just a Dancing Partner thirty years later. Whereas the beauty and fullness of The Beautiful Summer and In Search of Lost Time, which I have reread two or three times, can never give me back my life.

The travelers emerged into a spacious square. In the middle of this square were several dozen people on a wooden bandstand like in a public park. They were the members of a band, each of them as different from one another as their instruments. Some of them looked round at the approaching column. Then a grey-haired man in a colorful cloak called out and they reached for their instruments. There was a burst of something like cheeky, timid bird-song and the air – air that had been torn apart by the barbed wire and the howl of sirens, that stank of oily fumes and garbage – was filled with music. It was like a warm summer cloud-burst ignited by the sun, flashing as it crashed down to earth. People in camps, people in prisons, people who have escaped from prison, people going to their death, know the extraordinary power of music. No one else can experience music in quite the same way. What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought, but simply the blind, heart-breaking miracle of life itself. A sob passed down the column. Everything seemed transformed, everything had come together; everything scattered and fragmented -home, peace, the journey, the rumble of wheels, thirst, terror, the city rising out of the mist, the wan red dawn – fused together, not into a memory or a picture but into the blind, fierce ache of life itself. Here, in the glow of the gas ovens, people knew that life was more than happiness – it was also grief. And freedom was both painful and difficult; it was life itself. Music had the power to express the last turmoil of a soul in whose blind depths every experience, every moment of joy and grief, had fused with this misty morning, this glow hanging over their heads. Or perhaps it wasn't like that at all. Perhaps music was just the key to a man's feelings, not what filled him at this terrible moment, but the key that unlocked his innermost core. In the same way, a child's song can appear to make an old man cry. But it isn't the song itself he cries over; the song is simply a key to something in his soul.

She slid her free hand over his shoulder, soft breasts crushing against his chest. All his blood rushed down to his groin, taking with it the last vestiges of his rational thought. He locked his arms around her, pulling her so close he could feel each gentle breath as an exquisite stroke on his cock. Raw desire coursed through his veins as his hands skimmed over the sweet softness of her curves. "Someone is watching us through the window," she murmured, her breath warm on his cheek. "All the more reason to put on a good show." With one hand on her nape, he tipped back her head and covered her mouth with his own. A moan escaped her lips, filling his head with thoughts of tangled sheets, banging headboards, sweat-slicked skin, and the realization of a fantasy that had consumed him night after sleepless night since she'd turned sixteen and he'd realized she wasn't a little girl anymore. He parted her lips with the gentle slide of his tongue, touching, tasting, savoring, pausing between heady sips to let her essence dance over his taste buds. With every breath he inhaled the fresh scent of wildflowers in a rain-soaked meadow, the grassy lawn where they'd played catch in the summer sun. He'd known she was smart and fun and beautiful. But this kiss. These feelings. The throbbing heat of desire. It was all completely new.

That was the kind of tree in Francie's yard. Its umbrellas curled over, around and under her third-floor fire-escape. An eleven-year-old girl sitting on this fire-escape could imagine that she was living in a tree. That's what Francie imagined every Saturday afternoon in summer.

This time of year, the purple blooms were busy with life- not just the bees, but butterflies and ladybugs, skippers and emerald-toned beetles, flitting hummingbirds and sapphire dragonflies. The sun-warmed sweet haze of the blossoms filled the air. "When I was a kid," said Isabel, "I used to capture butterflies, but I was afraid of the bees. I'm getting over that, though." The bees softly rose and hovered over the flowers, their steady hum oddly soothing. The quiet buzzing was the soundtrack of her girlhood summers. Even now, she could close her eyes and remember her walks with Bubbie, and how they would net a monarch or swallowtail butterfly, studying the creature in a big clear jar before setting it free again. They always set them free. As she watched the activity in the hedge, a memory floated up from the past- Bubbie, gently explaining to Isabel why they needed to open the jar. "No creature should ever be trapped against its will," she used to say. "It will ruin itself, just trying to escape." As a survivor of a concentration camp, Bubbie only ever spoke of the experience in the most oblique of terms.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away -an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains." -Memories, Dreams, Reflections -Carl Gustav Jung

It is mandatory from elementary school to attend public executions. Often classes would be cancelled so students could go. Factories would send their workers, to ensure a large crowd. I always tried to avoid attending, but on one occasion that summer I made an exception, because I knew one of the men being killed. Many people in Hyesan knew him. You might think the execution of an acquaintance is the last thing you’d want to see. In fact, people made excuses not to go if they didn’t know the victim. But if they knew the victim, they felt obliged to go, as they would to a funeral.

What are you afraid of? For real.” ‘For real? Spiders. People leaving me. Not being good enough. Rejection. Too much responsibility. Being buried alive by an escaped psychopath. Losing out on a chance to date the coolest girl I knew. Turning out like my dad. The list was endless. But mostly I was afraid of a future so terrifying in its unformed vastness that it pressed in on me with its bullying fists until I was afraid to take a real breath. I was afraid of being left behind while Dan and Dave spun toward that future. But admitting my fear only felt like giving it more power over me.

Grief he had always thought of as an emotion, a mood, something that possessed you but that you eventually escaped. Now he knew it was different. Grief was a country, a place you entered hesitantly, or were thrown into without warning. But once you were there, amidst the roiling formless blackness and stench of despair, you could not leave. Even if you wanted to: you could only walk and walk and walk, traveling on through the black reaches with the sound of screaming in your ears, and hope that someday you might glimpse far off another country, another place where you might someday rest.

At the end of the vacation, I took a steamer alone from Wuhan back up through the Yangtze Gorges. The journey took three days. One morning, as I was leaning over the side, a gust of wind blew my hair loose and my hairpin fell into the river. A passenger with whom I had been chatting pointed to a tributary which joined the Yangtze just where we were passing, and told me a story.In 33 B.C., the emperor of China, in an attempt to appease the country's powerful northern neighbors, the Huns, decided to send a woman to marry the barbarian king. He made his selection from the portraits of the 3,000 concubines in his court, many of whom he had never seen. As she was for a barbarian, he selected the ugliest portrait, but on the day of her departure he discovered that the woman was in fact extremely beautiful. Her portrait was ugly because she had refused to bribe the court painter. The emperor ordered the artist to be executed, while the lady wept, sitting by a river, at having to leave her country to live among the barbarians. The wind carried away her hairpin and dropped it into the river as though it wanted to keep something of hers in her homeland. Later on, she killed herself. Legend had it that where her hairpin dropped, the river turned crystal clear, and became known as the Crystal River. My fellow passenger told me this was the tributary we were passing. With a grin, he declared: "Ah, bad omen! You might end up living in a foreign land and marrying a barbarian!" I smiled faintly at the traditional Chinese obsession about other races being 'barbarians," and wondered whether this lady of antiquity might not actually have been better off marrying the 'barbarian' king. She would at least be in daily contact with the grassland, the horses, and nature. With the Chinese emperor, she was living in a luxurious prison, without even a proper tree, which might enable the concubines to climb a wall and escape. I thought how we were like the frogs at the bottom of the well in the Chinese legend, who claimed that the sky was only as big as the round opening at the top of their well. I felt an intense and urgent desire to see the world. At the time I had never spoken with a foreigner, even though I was twenty-three, and had been an English language student for nearly two years. The only foreigners I had ever even set eyes on had been in Peking in 1972. A foreigner, one of the few 'friends of China," had come to my university once. It was a hot summer day and I was having a nap when a fellow student burst into our room and woke us all by shrieking: "A foreigner is here! Let's go and look at the foreigner!" Some of the others went, but I decided to stay and continue my snooze. I found the whole idea of gazing, zombie like rather ridiculous. Anyway, what was the point of staring if we were forbidden to open our mouths to him, even though he was a 'friend of China'? I had never even heard a foreigner speaking, except on one single Linguaphone record. When I started learning the language, I had borrowed the record and a phonograph, and listened to it at home in Meteorite Street. Some neighbors gathered in the courtyard, and said with their eyes wide open and their heads shaking, "What funny sounds!" They asked me to play the record over and over again.

No, for some unknown reason, I feel more at home in the Italian Alps than I do in the brutal heat of Puglia. I like brisk autumns, snowy winters, rainy springs, and temperate summers. The change of seasons allows for a change in one’s wardrobe (I’m sartorially obsessed) and, most important, one’s diet. A boeuf carbonnade tastes a thousand times better in the last days of autumn than when it’s eighty degrees and the sun is shining. An Armagnac is the perfect complement to a snowy night by the fire but not to an August beach outing, just as a crisp Orvieto served with spaghetti con vongole is ideal “al fresco” on a sunny summer afternoon but not nearly as satisfying when eaten indoors on a cold winter’s night. One thing feeds the other. (Pun intended.) So a visit to Iceland to escape the gloom of what is known in London as “winter” was an exciting prospect. However, my greatest concern, as you can probably guess, if you’re still reading this, was the food.

Blue said, ‘Ronan could dream a bridge for us.’ Ronan made a noise of glorious disdain. ‘Don’t just snort at me! Tell me why not. You’re a magical creature. Why can’t you do magic?’ With acidic precision, Ronan replied, ‘For starters, I’d have to sleep right there by the pit, since I’d have to be touching something to pull it out of a dream. And I’d have to know what was on the other side to even know what kind of bridge to make. And then, even if I pulled all that off, if I took something that big out of my dream, it would drain the ley line, possible making Cabeswater disappear again, this time with us in it, sending us all to some never-never land of time-space fuckery that we might never escape from. I figured after the events of this summer, all this was self-evident, which was why I summed it up before like so—’ Ronan repeated the noise of glorious disdain. ’Thanks for the super helpful alternative suggestions, Ronan Lynch. Your contribution at the end of the world will be tallied up accordingly,’ Blue said.

I thought to myself then that it didn't matter where I ended up; I'd always be living that summer in that town, wishing that I;d done things differently, tormented by the fact that I hadn't. I'd never go far enough to be able to escape it. Maybe you're happy about that. OR maybe you're not. Maybe you're carrying your own regrets, and you understand how easy it is to let your life get away from you. I wish I could be the hero of this story, but I'm not. I'm just the one to tell it, at least my part in it- the story of Katie Mackey and the people who failed her. It's an old one, this tale of selfish desires and the lament that follows, as ancient as the story of Adam and Eve turned away forever from paradise.

Once as a child, Phoebe had been caught outside in a summer storm, and had seen a butterfly knocked from the air by raindrops. It had fluttered and fallen to the ground, bombarded from every direction. The only choice had been to fold its wings, take shelter and wait. This man was the storm and the shelter, pulling her into a deep, encompassing darkness where there was too much to feel- hot soft firm sweet hungry rough silken tugging. She strained helplessly in his arms, although she didn't know whether she was trying to escape or press closer. She had craved this, the hardness and heat of his body against hers, the sensation familiar and yet not at all familiar. She had feared this, a man with a will and power that matched her own, a man who would desire and possess every last part of her without mercy.

Course they wouldn't have all the details, like whether or not they played in squares of sunlight on their walls, if they wore spiders on their hats, if they ate hamburger every other day, if they had ever made love in a yellow canola field tenderly or passionately or awkwardly. If they preferred dresses or pants, if they shaved their legs or didn't, or if they preferred red peppers to green. Stuff was happening. Even in Half-a-Life. Little things, but it all added up to something big. To our lives. It was happening all along. These were our lives. This was it. My mom was hanging on to the lives, the recorded lives, of these women. We might escape, but what if we didn't? What if we lived in Half-a-Life all our lives, poor, lonely, proud, happy? If we did, we did. These were our lives. If we couldn't escape them, we'd have to live them.

If you would wait and’ve won my heart Still we know the end is yet to come there’s no hiding we cant escape the darkness and end of Love,darkness will chase us and theywill always win. everything comes to an end .ones you taste the goodness,tails the end So goodbye LOVER It sfunny that We both know how it will end but we still kept fighting I’ll wait for you…Im sorry but Im not strong There’ s no point loverboy. Let me give you some fact No matter what you do ,where you hide it will always haunt you…sorrow my dear Im talking ‘bout Just like the others.Idont wan t to become a memory cause Im telling you Im different If you promise to wait I promise to you that I will always be yours and I will never hurt you Remember you told me nothing is impossible when you love someone Don’t tell me you love me,dear,love is one of the most unpredictable thing in the world. Why so careless? Im sorry,believed me I tried..thank you cause I felt the warmth of your love and it felt so good at the same time I felt so weak ,your love is like the summer that melts my cold heart but Im still in the battle field and soldiers cant be weak at the time of battle they have to be tough! Your words says you can fix me and I thought hey why don’t we give him a chance and I realized no one can fix me it is only me who can fix myself because this is my life.

Stuff was happening. Even in Half-a-Life. Little things, but it all added up to something big. To our lives. It was happening all along. These were our lives. This was it. My mom was hanging onto the lives, the recorded lives, of these women. We might escape, but what if we didn't? What if we lived in Half-a-Life all our lives, poor, lonely, proud, happy? If we did, we did. These were our lives. If we couldn't escape them, we'd have to live them.

Our room swallowed light whole. Even in summer when sunlight glared through the windows, it was somehow dim inside. Now it was only Easter morning, and the muted sky of early spring offered scant relief to our tenebrous room. On our side of the house a gnarled and ancient oak tree spread its reach across the back facade of the house as if to shade and protect us. One of the massive branches of its principal fork reached invitingly right up to our window to offer to take us wherever we wanted to go. This great limb, with circumference grander than both of us together, was our stairway to heaven and our secret exit to the ground; it was our biplane in the Great War of our imaginations and a magic carpet to Araby; it was our lookout post and the clubhouse of our most secret fraternal order; it was our secret passageway through the imaginary castle we made of our house. It was our escape from the darkness into the light.

I’ll be needing a closer look tomorrow.” “It’s nothing special,” she hedged. “Just an average English village. Hardly worth your time. Cottages, a church, a few shops.” “Surely there’s an inn,” Lord Payne said. “There is a rooming house,” Susanna said, leading them back from the edge of the bluff. “The Queen’s Ruby. But I’m afraid it is completely occupied at this time of year. Summer visitors, you understand, come to enjoy the sea.” And to escape men like you.

She sat and watched the dockhand when it was sunny and she sat and watched him when it rained. Or when it was foggy, which is what it was nearly every morning at eight o’clock. This morning was none of the above. This morning was cold. The pier smelled of fresh water and of fish. The seagulls screeched overhead, a man’s voice shouted. Where is my brother to help me, my sister, my mother? Pasha, help me, hide in the woods where I know I can find you. Dasha, look what’s happened. Do you even see? Mama, Mama. I want my mother. Where is my family to ask things of me, to weigh on me, to intrude on me, to never let me be silent or alone, where are they to help me through this? Deda, what do I do? I don’t know what to do. This morning the dockhand did not go over to see his friend at the next pier for a smoke and a coffee. Instead, he walked across the road and sat next to her on the bench. This surprised her. But she said nothing, she just wrapped her white nurse’s coat tighter around herself, and fixed the kerchief covering her hair. In Swedish he said to her, “My name is Sven. What’s your name?” After a longish pause, she replied. “Tatiana. I don’t speak Swedish.” In English he said to her, “Do you want a cigarette?” “No,” she replied, also in English. She thought of telling him she spoke little English. She was sure he didn’t speak Russian. He asked her if he could get her a coffee, or something warm to throw over her shoulders. No and no. She did not look at him. Sven was silent a moment. “You want to get on my barge, don’t you?” he asked. “Come. I will take you.” He took her by her arm. Tatiana didn’t move. “I can see you have left something behind,” he said, pulling on her gently. “Go and retrieve it.” Tatiana did not move. “Take my cigarette, take my coffee, or get on my barge. I won’t even turn away. You don’t have to sneak past me. I would have let you on the first time you came. All you had to do was ask. You want to go to Helsinki? Fine. I know you’re not Finnish.” Sven paused. “But you are very pregnant. Two months ago it would have been easier for you. But you need to go back or go forward. How long do you plan to sit here and watch my back?” Tatiana stared into the Baltic Sea. “If I knew, would I be sitting here?” “Don’t sit here anymore. Come,” said the longshoreman. She shook her head. “Where is your husband? Where is the father of your baby?” “Dead in the Soviet Union,” Tatiana breathed out. “Ah, you’re from the Soviet Union.” He nodded. “You’ve escaped somehow? Well, you’re here, so stay. Stay in Sweden. Go to the consulate, get yourself refugee protection. We have hundreds of people getting through from Denmark. Go to the consulate.” Tatiana shook her head. “You’re going to have that baby soon,” Sven said. “Go back, or move forward.” Tatiana’s hands went around her belly. Her eyes glazed over. The dockhand patted her gently and stood up. “What will it be? You want to go back to the Soviet Union? Why?” Tatiana did not reply. How to tell him her soul had been left there? “If you go back, what happens to you?” “I die most likely,” she barely whispered. “If you go forward, what happens to you?” “I live most likely.” He clapped his hands. “What kind of a choice is that? You must go forward.” “Yes,” said Tatiana, “but how do I live like this? Look at me. You think, if I could, I wouldn’t?” “So you’re here in the Stockholm purgatory, watching me move my paper day in and day out, watching me smoke, watching me. What are you going to do? Sit with your baby on the bench? Is that what you want?” Tatiana was silent. The first time she laid eyes on him she was sitting on a bench, eating ice cream. “Go forward.” “I don’t have it in me.” He nodded. “You have it. It’s just covered up. For you it’s winter.” He smiled. “Don’t worry. Summer’s here. The ice will melt.” Tatiana struggled up from the bench. Walking away, she said in Russian, “It’s not the ice anymore, my seagoing philosopher. It’s the pyre.

He walked steadily, feeling them behind him. His stride did not falter; he pretended they weren’t there. He pretended that all was well—that those hideous things knew nothing about what he had done earlier in the night. But each pumpkin he passed nearly leapt off its porch or railing or wooden chair, expanded and morphed and throbbed as if in a funhouse mirror, and joined the procession behind him. The wind picked up, suddenly and fiercely, and construction paper decorations adorning the houses that surrounded him flapped helplessly against their doors and windows. The man ducked against the cold wind, and from the pursuing army of the jack-o’-lanterns behind him. Cardboard skeletons with fastener joints and witches with shredded yarn hair and ghosts with cotton ball sheets and black crayon eyes escaped their thumbtacks and scotch tape and newspaper twine and they flashed and danced in his face. He brushed at them desperately with his hands, attempting to tear a hole through them and escape.

During the Second World War 70,000 Jews were murdered in Latvia, 30,000 of them by summer 1941. In Lithuania, almost all of the country’s 200,000 Jews were killed. (In Estonia there were only 5,000 Jews to start with, and most of them were able to escape to the Soviet Union.) In his official report, one German officer characterised the farmers’ hatred of the Jews as ‘monstrous’. They had, as he wrote on 16 August, 1941, ‘already done a great deal of the dirty work’ before the Germans could intervene.

It never occurred to me that I had brought him here not just to show him my little world, but to ask my little world to let him in, so that the place where I came to be alone on summer afternoons would get to know him, judge him, see if he fitted in, take him in, so that I might come back here and remember. Here I would come to escape the known world and seek another of my own invention; I was basically introducing him to my launchpad. All I had to do was list the works I'd read here and he'd know all the places I'd traveled to.

At the end of the same summer, Aristeus the Corinthian, the Lacedaemonian ambassadors Aneristus, Nicolaus, and Stratodemus, Timagoras of Tegea, and Pollis of Argos who had no public mission, were on their way to Asia in the hope of persuading the King to give them money and join in the war. […] On the very day of their arrival the Athenians, fearing that Aristeus, whom they considered to be the cause of all their troubles at Potidaea and in Chalcidicè, would do them still further mischief if he escaped, put them all to death without trial and without hearing what they wanted to say; they then threw their bodies down precipices. They considered that they had a right to retaliate on the Lacedaemonians, who had begun by treating in the same way the traders of the Athenians and their allies when they caught their vessels off the coast of Peloponnesus. For at the commencement of the war, all whom the Lacedaemonians captured at sea were treated by them as enemies and indiscriminately slaughtered, whether they were allies of the Athenians or neutrals. (Book 2 Chapter 67)

The symbol of the Finnish summer is a cosy cottage perched on a blue lake, with a little rowboat, a fishing pier and perhaps its own swimming beach. The simplest rustic cabins have outside loos and water drawn from a well, while the most modern designer bungalows have every creature comfort. Whether you’re looking for a wilderness escape – picturesque Karelia offers some of Finland's most deeply forested corners – or somewhere for a big family party, you’re bound to find the perfect place from the thousands of rental cottages on offer.

The work lifts his spirits, when spirits can be lifted, but darkness still catches him now and then. That’s the nature of darkness. It comes at the end of every day, predictable as the striking of a clock’s chime, even in the heart of summer, when the light is full and lingering. You can never quite escape the night. Perhaps that’s as God wills; this must be His design. How are we to know when our lives are good and when we are blessed, if we have no sorrow, no deprivation for comparison’s sake? There is, he believes, a purpose to all the Creator’s ways. But the mind and heart of God are beyond the understanding of Man. You can know your suffering serves a purpose—that the suffering of others plays some inscrutable part in the grand drama of Creation. But knowing brings you little comfort. When night drops its heavy curtain across the world, darkness is cruel and unforgiving. The way all your happiness can snuff itself in an instant, like the flame of a candle pinched between a licked finger and thumb—it can shake your faith, or strip faith away entirely, if you let it.

My father had once told me the story of how, when he was in the work camp, a truckload of giant logs was brought in to be chopped. He was on ax duty with a gang of twelve. It was a dreadfully hot summer and each swing of the blade was torture. He hacked at a log and there was the unmistakable sound of metal hitting metal. He bent down and found a mushroom-shaped chunk of lead embedded in the trunk. A bullet. He counted the rings from the perimeter to the bullet and found they matched his age exactly. We never escape ourselves, he said to me years later.

Where I sat looking out the window one summer night from the fifth floor of our building, and the air was warm and sweet like it is now, and there were the low voices of young couples, their Converses and Air Force Ones tapping against each other on the fire escapes as they worked to make the body speak its other tongues, the sound of matches, or flames sparked from lighters the shape and shine of 9mms or Colt .45s, which was how we turned death into a joke, how we reduced fire to the size of cartoon raindrops, then sucked them through cigarillo tips, like myths.

Since 1980, the planet has experienced a fiftyfold increase in the number of dangerous heat waves; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and eventually, the IPCC warns, simply working outdoors at that time of year will be unhealthy for parts of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will annually encounter deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015, when heat killed thousands in India and Pakistan. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. Then, it was one of the worst weather events in Continental history, killing 35,000 Europeans, including 14,000 French; perversely, the infirm fared relatively well, William Langewiesche has written, most of them watched over in the nursing homes and hospitals of those well-off countries, and it was the comparatively healthy elderly who accounted for most of the dead, many left behind by vacationing families escaping the heat, with some corpses rotting for weeks before the families returned.

Do not think you can go off and meditate all day every day and find your purpose. You must go into the world and have it brought out of you. The world represents a relationship in which your purpose is initiated, fostered and realized. That is why seeking escape from the world or a permanent retreat from the world is counterproductive. The very tribulations in the world that you find so difficult and so unpleasant are the very things that will call out of you the greatness that you have come to give. Do not, then, condemn the world when in fact it creates the right conditions for your redemption.

To cement their perceived dominance, the Daughters had erected hundreds of Civil War monuments across the South as the Red Summer waned. Most of them were made of low-grade bronze or limestone, mass-produced and erected as fast and inexpensively as possible. These effigies served two purposes. To create a false narrative of honor and sacrifice that Confederate sympathizers could embrace in place of the shameful pall of treason that was their actual birthright. And to remind Black Southerners that to some of their white neighbors they were just escaped cattle meant to be sacrificed on the altar of the Lost Cause.

Just as summer-killed meat draws flies, so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who remain there as long as their purses and their wits will maintain them, in the hope (at first) of an appointment from the Autarch and (later) of obtaining a tutorial position in some exalted family. At sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often are, to their lectures on theogony, thodicy, and the like, and I recall one particularly in which a phoebad put forward as an ultimate truth the ancient sophistry of the existence of three Adonai, that of the city (or of the people), that of the poets, and that of the philosophers. Her reasoning was that since the beginning of human consciousness (if such a beginning ever was) there have been vast numbers of persons in the three categories who have endeavored to pierce the secret of the divine. If it does not exist, they should have discovered that long before; if it does, it is not possible that Truth itself should mislead them. Yet the beliefs of the populace, the insights of the rhapsodists, and the theories of the metaphysicians have so far diverged that few of them can so much as comprehend what the others say, and someone who knew nothing of any of their ideas might well believe there was no connection at all between them. May it not be, she asked (and even now I am not certain I can answer), that instead of traveling, as has always been supposed, down three roads to the same destination, they are actually traveling toward three quite different ones? After all, when in common life we behold three roads issuing from the same crossing, we do not assume they all proceed toward the same goal. I found (and find) this suggestion as rational as it is repellent, and it represents for me all that monomaniacal fabric of argument, so tightly woven that not even the tiniest objection or spark of light can escape its net, in which human minds become enmeshed whenever the subject is one in which no appeal to fact is possible. As a fact the Claw was thus an incommensurable. No quantity of money, no piling up of archipelagoes or empires could approach it in value any more than the indefinite multiplication of horizontal distance could be made to equal vertical distance. If it was, as I believed, a thing from outside the universe, then its light, which I had seen shine faintly so often, and a few times brightly, was in some sense the only light we had. If it were destroyed, we were left fumbling in the dark.

Was that your first kiss?" he asked. I stammered at the sudden change of topic. Kissing was not something we had discussed before. "The other day. Charlie?" he prodded. I looked over my shoulder for an escape route out of this conversation, "Technically," I murmured, still looking at the water behind me. "Technically?" I sighed and faced him again, cringing. "Do we have to talk about this? I know fourteen is old for a first kiss, but.. "Charlie is such a dick," he interrupted with unusual sharpness. "It's not a big deal," I said quickly. "It's just a kiss. It's not like it matters or anything," I lied. "Your first kiss is a big deal, Percy.

DEATH’S DIARY: THE PARISIANS Summer came. For the book thief, everything was going nicely. For me, the sky was the color of Jews. When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, their spirits came toward me, into my arms, and we climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof and up, into eternity’s certain breadth. They just kept feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower after shower. I’ll never forget the first day in Auschwitz, the first time in Mauthausen. At that second place, as time wore on, I also picked them up from the bottom of the great cliff, when their escapes fell awfully awry. There were broken bodies and dead, sweet hearts. Still, it was better than the gas. Some of them I caught when they were only halfway down. Saved you, I’d think, holding their souls in midair as the rest of their being—their physical shells—plummeted to the earth. All of them were light, like the cases of empty walnuts. Smoky sky in those places. The smell like a stove, but still so cold. I shiver when I remember—as I try to de-realize it. I blow warm air into my hands, to heat them up. But it’s hard to keep them warm when the souls still shiver. God. I always say that name when I think of it. God. Twice, I speak it. I say His name in a futile attempt to understand. “But it’s not your job to understand.” That’s me who answers. God never says anything. You think you’re the only one he never answers? “Your job is to …” And I stop listening to me, because to put it bluntly, I tire me. When I start thinking like that, I become so exhausted, and I don’t have the luxury of indulging fatigue. I’m compelled to continue on, because although it’s not true for every person on earth, it’s true for the vast majority—that death waits for no man—and if he does, he doesn’t usually wait very long. On June 23, 1942, there was a group of French Jews in a German prison, on Polish soil. The first person I took was close to the door, his mind racing, then reduced to pacing, then slowing down, slowing down …. Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear. I took them all away, and if ever there was a time I needed distraction, this was it. In complete desolation, I looked at the world above. I watched the sky as it turned from silver to gray to the color of rain. Even the clouds were trying to get away. Sometimes I imagined how everything looked above those clouds, knowing without question that the sun was blond, and the endless atmosphere was a giant blue eye. They were French, they were Jews, and they were you.

Okay, I’m going to tell you what I think. It’s like this,” he said grimly. “Quit or don’t quit. Take the promotion or not take it. But, if you take the graveyard shift, mark my words, we will eventually—I don’t know how, and I don’t know when—live to regret it.” Without saying another word he walked inside. In bed Alexander let her kiss his hands. He was on his back, and Tatiana sidled up to him naked, kneeling by his side. Taking his hands, she kissed them slowly, digit by digit, knuckle by knuckle, pressing them to her trembling breasts, but when she opened her mouth to speak, Alexander took his hands away. “I know what you’re about to do,” he said. “I’ve been there a thousand times. Go ahead. Touch me. Caress me. Whisper to me. Tell me first you don’t see my scars anymore, then make it all right. You always do, you always manage to convince me that whatever crazy plan you have is really the best for you and me,” he said. “Returning to blockaded Leningrad, escaping to Sweden, Finland, running to Berlin, the graveyard shift. I know what’s coming. Go ahead, I’ll be good to you right back. You’re going to try to make me all right with you staying in Leningrad when I tell you that to save your hard-headed skull you must return to Lazarevo? You want to convince me that escaping through enemy territory across Finland’s iced-over marsh while pregnant is the only way for us? Please. You want to tell me that working all Friday night and not sleeping in my bed is the best thing for our family? Try. I know eventually you’ll succeed.” He was staring at her blonde and lowered head. “Even if you don’t,” he continued, “I know eventually, you’ll do what you want anyway. I don’t want you to do it. You know you should be resigning, not working graveyard—nomenclature, by the way, that I find ironic for more reasons that I care to go into. I’m telling you here and now, the path you’re taking us on is going to lead to chaos and discord not order and accord. It’s your choice, though. This defines you—as a nurse, as a woman, as a wife—pretend servitude. But you can’t fool me. You and I both know what you’re made of underneath the velvet glove: cast iron.” When Tatiana said nothing, Alexander brought her to him and laid her on his chest. “You gave me too much leeway with Balkman,” he said, kissing her forehead. “You kept your mouth shut too long, but I’ve learned from your mistake. I’m not keeping mine shut—I’m telling you right from the start: you’re choosing unwisely. You are not seeing the future. But you do what you want.” Kneeling next to him, she cupped him below the groin into one palm, kneading him gently, and caressed him back and forth with the other. “Yes,” he said, putting his arms under his head and closing his eyes. “You know I love that, your healing stroke. I’m in your hands.” She kissed him and whispered to him, and told him she didn’t see his scars anymore, and made it if not all right then at least forgotten for the next few hours of darkness.

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.

We use winter as a blank slate, the place where everything is scrubbed away. From the most mystical vision to the most obvious folk use, winter is the climate of imagination. Winter displaces us from the normal cycles of nature so comes our escape into the mind… Another sense of memory and winter is the memory of winter when it is over. The snows of winter become the tangible sands of the memory clock. Summer supplies the illusion of same time over and over. Winter and cold places supply a sense of past time, and an urge to think about time passing. Though our setting for all these essays has been winter, our true subject has been time. We share a sense of timeless winter, of eternal winter as the place where time stands still, the poles as places permanently outside of our dailiness, the snow as nature’s secret…we could lose the polar icecaps but would not stop hearing winter music.

To escape the throngs, we decided to see the new Neil Degrasse Tyson planetarium show, Dark Universe. It costs more than two movie tickets and is less than thirty minutes long, but still I want to go back and see it again, preferably as soon as possible. It was more visually stunning than any Hollywood special effect I’d ever seen, making our smallness as individuals both staggering and - strangely - rather comforting. Only five percent of the universe consists of ordinary matter, Neil tells us. That includes all matter - you, and me, and the body of Michael Brown, and Mork’s rainbow suspenders, and the letters I wrote all summer, and the air conditioner I put out on the curb on Christmas Day because I was tired of looking at it and being reminded of the person who had installed it, and my sad dying computer that sounds like a swarm of bees when it gets too hot, and the fields of Point Reyes, and this year’s blossoms which are dust now, and the drafts of my book, and Israeli tanks, and the untaxed cigarettes that Eric Garner sold, and my father’s ill-fitting leg brace that did not accomplish what he’d hoped for in terms of restoring mobility, and the Denver airport, and haunting sperm whales that sleep vertically, and the water they sleep in, and Mars and Jupiter and all of the stars we see and all of the ones we don’t. That’s all regular matter, just five percent. A quarter is “dark matter,” which is invisible and detectable only by gravitational pull, and a whopping 70 percent of the universe is made up of “dark energy,” described as a cosmic antigravity, as yet totally unknowable. It’s basically all mystery out there - all of it, with just this one sliver of knowable, livable, finite light and life. And did I mention the effects were really cool? After seeing something like that it’s hard to stay mad at anyone, even yourself.

History generally records that Michael Vaughan quit the England captaincy in tearful circumstances following the Test-series defeat to South Africa in 2008. But the Top Spin can reveal this version of events is little more than a smokescreen. For it appears that what actually tipped Vaughan over the edge was a phonecall from a stricken team-mate - a call so harrowing Vaughan decided he could cope no longer. The ex-skipper was enjoying a barbecue at home with friends two summers ago when he took a rare call from Monty Panesar. 'Hello, Monty.' 'Hello Vaughany. I've got some bad news for you.' 'Oh?' 'Yes, you know I was telling you about my parrot Gary last week?' 'Er...' 'Well, he's gone missing. Just thought you'd like to know.' 'Sorry to hear that Monty.' 'Bye.' 'Bye.' So aghast was Vaughan that captaincy duty now extended to fielding calls from team-mates about escaped pets that he knew his time was up. Sure, the tears at the farewell press conference left an impression on us all. But it was Monty's ex-parrot that sealed the deal.

Hannah tells me you’re an archeologist,” she said. “Drew’s father has followed in your footsteps. He spent the whole summer in France, excavating a Roman ruin.” A spark of mischief flared in Andrew’s eyes. “Why, it could be the other way around,” he said. “Perhaps I got the idea from him.” Hannah gave Andrew a sharp poke with her cane. Luckily, Aunt Blythe didn’t notice that either. “You have the oddest sense of humor,” she said to Andrew. “It’s a pity you spent most of your life overseas. I’m sure I would have enjoyed knowing you.” To escape his sister’s reach, Andrew shifted his position. “It’s strange,” he said to my aunt, “but I feel like I do know you.” “Isn’t that funny?” Aunt Blythe stared at him. “Even though I’ve never set eyes on you before, I feel the same way.” With a little guidance from Hannah, the conversation changed to Andrew’s years in South America. For at least an hour he entertained us with his adventures, which Hannah claimed were highly exaggerated. “He never tells a story the same way twice,” she told me. “You wouldn’t believe how much more exciting they’ve gotten since the first time I heard them.

Behind her, Annabelle heard Daisy say to Lillian accusingly, “I thought you said that no one ever comes to this meadow!” “That’s what I was told,” Lillian replied, her voice muffled as she stepped into the circle of her gown and bent to jerk it upward. The earl, who had been mute until that point, spoke with his gaze trained studiously on the distant scenery. “Your information was correct, Miss Bowman,” he said in a controlled manner. “This field is usually unfrequented.” “Well, then, why are you here?” Lillian demanded accusingly, as if she, and not Westcliff, was the owner of the estate. The question caused the earl’s head to whip around. He gave the American girl an incredulous glance before he dragged his gaze away once more. “Our presence here is purely coincidental,” he said coldly. “I wished to have a look at the northwest section of my estate today.” He gave the word my a subtle but distinct emphasis. “While Mr. Hunt and I were traveling along the lane, we heard your screaming. We thought it best to investigate, and came with the intention of rendering aid, if necessary. Little did I realize that you would be using this field for…for…” “Rounders-in-knickers,” Lillian supplied helpfully, sliding her arms into her sleeves. The earl seemed incapable of repeating the ridiculous phrase. He turned his horse away and spoke curtly over his shoulder. “I plan to develop a case of amnesia within the next five minutes. Before I do so, I would suggest that you refrain from any future activities involving nudity outdoors, as the next passersby who discover you may not prove to be as indifferent as Mr. Hunt and I.” Despite Annabelle’s mortification, she had to repress a skeptical snort at the earl’s claim of indifference on Hunt’s behalf, not to mention his own. Hunt had certainly managed to get quite an eyeful of her. And though Westcliff’s scrutiny had been far more subtle, it had not escaped her that he had stolen a quick but thorough glance at Lillian before he had veered his horse away. However, in light of her current state of undress, it was hardly the time to deflate Westcliff’s holier-than-thou demeanor. “Thank you, my lord,” Annabelle said with a calmness that pleased her immensely. “And now, having dispensed such excellent advice, I would ask that you allow us some privacy to restore ourselves.” “With pleasure,” Westcliff growled.

Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we're gonna have it haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.

It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either differential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marveling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never. . . . She was no dazzling executante; her runs were not at all like strings of pearls, and she struck no more right notes than was suitable for one of her age and situation. Nor was she the passionate young lady, who performs so tragically on a summer's evening with the window open . . . And she was tragical only in the sense that she was great, for she loved to play on the side of Victory. Victory of what and over what - that is more than the words of daily life can tell us. But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy decided that they should triumph.

I've spent time with a lot of very busy people: business leaders, prominent journalists, multiple presidents. Despite the unusually high demands on their schedules, something they all have in common is that they carve out time for reading, and for consuming information that may not seem to have anything to do with their jobs. When President Obama released summer reading lists or his top book recommendations for the year, a chorus of 'yeah, right' could occasionally be heard from certain corners of the internet, where skeptics who doubted he had time to read contemporary literature liked to hang out. But President Obama read all those books, and many more. Taking time after a long day to sit down and read some Chinese science fiction, a novel by Jesmyn Ward, or even one of Ron Chernow's biographies was an escape, but it also oxygenated Obama's brain. There may not have been a specific moment when he consciously connected the dots between a novel he read two years earlier and the issue at hand, but moving beyond your own experience is an important part of developing the kind of perspective that helps with decision-making. It's also how the most effective people connect. Developing broad general knowledge gives you the flexibility to adapt to your audience on the fly, as well as the ability to naturally relate to diverse groups. And besides, have you ever recommended a book to someone who ended up really loving it? It's a unique way of understanding someone better, and that kind of communication goes both ways.

Punishment cells were set up in the two-story cathedral ... Poles the thickness of an arm were set from wall to wall and prisoners were ordered to sit on these poles all day ... one's feet could not reach the ground. And it was not so easy to keep balance ... the prisoner spent the entire day just trying to maintain his perch. If he fell, the jailers jumped in and beat him ... Every little island and every little hillock of the Archipelago had to be encircled by a hostile, stormy Soviet seascape ... Escapes multiplied ... For half a year the sea was frozen over, but not solidly, and in places there was open water, and the snowstorms raged, and the frost bit hard, and things were enveloped in mists and darkness. And in the spring ... there were the long white nights with clear visibility over long distances for the patrolling cutters ... it was only when the nights began to lengthen, in the late summer and the autumn, that the time was right ... for those who were out in work parties, where a prisoner might have freedom of movement and time to build a boat or a raft near the shore ... and to cast off at night ... and strike out at random, hoping above all to encounter a foreign ship ... The whole long history of the Archipelago, about which it has fallen to me to write this home-grown, homemade book, has, in the course of half a century, found in the Soviet Union almost no expression whatever in the printed word. In this a role was played by that same unfortunate happenstance by which camp watchtowers never got into scenes in films nor into landscapes painted by our artists ...

Sitting in the dark window he seems to see them Now they are gathering, entering the door. They are nearly all there now And then he begins to say, ‘Now. Now,’ leaning a little forward; and then, as though it had waited for his signal, the music begins. The organ strains come rich and resonant through the summer night, blended, sonorous, with that quality of abjectness and sublimation, as if the freed voices themselves were assuming the shapes and attitudes of crucifixions, ecstatic, solemn, and profound in gathering volume. Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music. It was as though they who accepted it and raised voices to praise it within praise, having been made what they were by that which the music praised and symbolised, they took revenge upon that which made them so by means of the praise itself. Listening, he seems to hear within it the apotheosis of his own history, his own land, his own environed blood: that people from which he sprang and among whom he lives who can never take either pleasure or catastrophe or escape from either, without brawling over it. Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying; catastrophe too, the violence identical and apparently inescapable And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks.

It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle. It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush, from the inside. On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed. Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create. . .draw. ..” In order to escape his destiny in time. The house resembles a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue. It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real. A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them. Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them. Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity. In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them. Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.

It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system. In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell functioning of the caregivers was significantly suppressed, even in those whose spouses had died as long as three years previously. The caregivers who reported lower levels of social support also showed the greatest depression in immune activity — just as the loneliest medical students had the most impaired immune systems under the stress of examinations. Another study of caregivers assessed the efficacy of immunization against influenza. In this study 80 per cent among the non-stressed control group developed immunity against the virus, but only 20 per cent of the Alzheimer caregivers were able to do so. The stress of unremitting caregiving inhibited the immune system and left people susceptible to influenza. Research has also shown stress-related delays in tissue repair. The wounds of Alzheimer caregivers took an average of nine days longer to heal than those of controls. Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing. Dental students had a wound deliberately inflicted on their hard palates while they were facing immunology exams and again during vacation. In all of them the wound healed more quickly in the summer. Under stress, their white blood cells produced less of a substance essential to healing. The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however, the flight-fight reaction is triggered in situations where it is neither necessary nor helpful, since we no longer face the same mortal threats to existence. The body’s physiological stress mechanisms are often triggered inappropriately, leading to disease. There is another way to look at it. The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all.

WHOEVER YOU ARE, WHEREVER YOU ARE..I'M STARTING TO THINK WE'RE A LOT ALIKE. HUMAN BEINGS SPINNING ON BLACKNESS. ALL WANTING TO BE SEEN, TOUCHED, HEARD, PAID ATTENTION TO. MY LOVED ONES ARE EVERYTHING TO ME HERE. IN THE LAST YEAR OR 3 I'VE SCREAMED AT MY CREATOR. SCREAMED AT CLOUDS IN THE SKY. FOR SOME EXPLANATION. MERCY MAYBE. FOR PEACE OF MIND TO RAIN LIKE MANNA SOMEHOW. 4 SUMMERS AGO, I MET SOMEBODY. I WAS 19 YEARS OLD. HE WAS TOO. WE SPENT THAT SUMMER, AND THE SUMMER AFTER, TOGETHER. EVERYDAY ALMOST. AND ON THE DAYS WE WERE TOGETHER, TIME WOULD GLIDE. MOST OF THE DAY I'D SEE HIM, AND HIS SMILE. I'D HEAR HIS CONVERSATION AND HIS SILENCE..UNTIL IT WAS TIME TO SLEEP. SLEEP I WOULD OFTEN SHARE WITH HIM. BY THE TIME I REALIZED I WAS IN LOVE, IT WAS MALIGNANT. IT WAS HOPELESS. THERE WAS NO ESCAPING, NO NEGOTIATING WITH THE FEELING. NO CHOICE. IT WAS MY FIRST LOVE, IT CHANGED MY LIFE. BACK THEN, MY MIND WOULD WANDER TO THE WOMEN I HAD BEEN WITH, THE ONES I CARED FOR AND THOUGHT I WAS IN LOVE WITH. I REMINISCED ABOUT THE SENTIMENTAL SONGS I ENJOYED WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER.. THE ONES I PLAYED WHEN I EXPERIENCED A GIRLFRIEND FOR THE FIRST TIME. I REALIZED THEY WERE WRITTEN IN A LANGUAGE I DID NOT YET SPEAK. I REALIZED TOO MUCH, TOO QUICKLY. IMAGINE BEING THROWN FROM A PLANE. I WASN'T IN A PLANE THOUGH. I WAS IN A NISSAN MAXIMA, THE SAME CAR I PACKED UP WITH BAGS AND DROVE TO LOS ANGELES IN. I SAT THERE AND TOLD MY FRIEND HOW I FELT. I WEPT AS THE WORDS LEFT MY MOUTH. I GRIEVED FOR THEM, KNOWING I COULD NEVER TAKE THEM BACK FOR MYSELF. HE PATTED MY BACK. HE SAID KIND THINGS. HE DID HIS BEST, BUT HE WOULDN'T ADMIT THE SAME. HE HAD TO GO BACK INSIDE SOON, IT WAS LATE AND HIS GIRLFRIEND WAS WAITING FOR HIM UPSTAIRS. HE WOULDN'T TELL ME THE TRUTH ABOUT HIS FEELINGS FOR ME FOR ANOTHER 3 YEARS. I FELT LIKE I'D ONLY IMAGINED RECIPROCITY FOR YEARS. NOW IMAGINE BEING THROWN FROM A CLIFF. NO, I WASN'T ON A CLIFF, I WAS STILL IN MY CAR TELLING MYSELF IT WAS GONNA BE FINE AND TO TAKE DEEP BREATHS. I TOOK THE BREATHS AND CARRIED ON. I KEPT UP A PECULIAR FRIENDSHIP WITH HIM BECAUSE I COULDN'T IMAGINE KEEPING UP MY LIFE WITHOUT HIM. I STRUGGLED TO MASTER MYSELF AND MY EMOTIONS. I WASN'T ALWAYS SUCCESSFUL. THE DANCE WENT ON.. I KEPT THE RHYTHM FOR SEVERAL SUMMERS AFTER. IT'S WINTER NOW. I'M TYPING THIS ON A PLANE BACK TO LOS ANGELES FROM NEW ORLEANS. I FLEW HOME FOR ANOTHER MARRED CHRISTMAS. I HAVE A WINDOWSEAT. IT'S DECEMBER 27, 2011. BY NOW I'VE WRITTEN TWO ALBUMS, THIS BEING THE SECOND. I WROTE TO KEEP MYSELF BUSY AND SANE. I WANTED TO CREATE WORLDS THAT WERE ROSIER THAN MINE. I TRIED TO CHANNEL OVERWHELMING EMOTIONS. I'M SURPRISED AT HOW FAR ALL OF IT HAS TAKEN ME. BEFORE WRITING THIS I'D TOLD SOME PEOPLE MY STORY. I'M SURE THESE PEOPLE KEPT ME ALIVE, KEPT ME SAFE.. SINCERELY. THESE ARE THE FOLKS I WANNA THANK FROM THE FLOOR OF MY HEART. EVERYONE OF YOU KNOWS WHO YOU ARE.. GREAT HUMANS, PROBABLY ANGELS. I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NOW, AND THAT'S ALRITE. I DON'T HAVE ANY SECRETS I NEED KEPT ANYMORE. THERE'S PROBABLY SOME SMALL SHIT STILL, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. I WAS NEVER ALONE, AS MUCH AS I FELT LIKE IT. AS MUCH AS I STILL DO SOMETIMES. I NEVER WAS. I DON'T THINK I EVER COULD BE. THANKS. TO MY FIRST LOVE, I'M GRATEFUL FOR YOU. GRATEFUL THAT EVEN THOUGH IT WASN'T WHAT I HOPED FOR AND EVEN THOUGH IT WAS NEVER ENOUGH, IT WAS. SOME THINGS NEVER ARE.. AND WE WERE. I WON'T FORGET YOU. I WON'T FORGET THE SUMMER. I'LL REMEMBER WHO I WAS WHEN I MET YOU. I'LL REMEMBER WHO YOU WERE AND HOW WE'VE BOTH CHANGED AND STAYED THE SAME. I'VE NEVER HAD MORE RESPECT FOR LIFE AND LIVING THAN I HAVE RIGHT NOW. MAYBE IT TAKES A NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE TO FEEL ALIVE. THANKS. TO MY MOTHER, YOU RAISED ME STRONG. I KNOW I'M ONLY BRAVE BECAUSE YOU WERE FIRST.. SO THANK YOU. ALL OF YOU. FOR EVERYTHING GOOD. I FEEL LIKE A FREE MAN. IF I LISTEN CLOSELY.. I CAN HEAR THE SKY FALLING TOO. - FRANK

I hung up the phone after saying good night to Marlboro Man, this isolated cowboy who hadn’t had the slightest probably picking up the phone to say “I miss you.” I shuddered at the thought of how long I’d gone without it. And judging from the electrical charges searing through every cell of my body, I realized just how fundamental a human need it really is. It was as fundamental a human need, I would learn, as having a sense of direction in the dark. I suddenly realized I was lost on the long dirt road, more lost than I’d ever been before. The more twists and turns I took in my attempt to find my bearings, the worse my situation became. It was almost midnight, and it was cold, and each intersection looked like the same one repeating over and over. I found myself struck with an illogical and indescribable panic--the kind that causes you to truly believe you’ll never, ever escape from where you are, even though you almost always will. As I drove, I remembered every horror movie I’d ever watched that had taken place in a rural setting. Children of the Corn. The children of the corn were lurking out there in the tall grass, I just knew it. Friday the 13th. Sure, it had taken place at a summer camp, but the same thing could happen on a cattle ranch. And The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Oh no. I was dead. Leatherface was coming--or even worse, his freaky, emaciated, misanthropic brother. I kept driving for a while, then stopped on the side of the road. Shining my brights on the road in front of me, I watched out for Leatherface while dialing Marlboro Man on my car phone. My pulse was rapid out of sheer terror and embarrassment; my face was hot. Lost and helpless on a county road the same night I’d emotionally decompensated in his kitchen--this was not exactly the image I was dying to project to this new man in my life. But I had no other option, short of continuing to drive aimlessly down one generic road after another or parking on the side of the road and going to sleep, which really wasn’t an option at all, considering Norman Bates was likely wandering around the area. With Ted Bundy. And Charles Manson. And Grendel.

At night in the tent, he leaves the flaps open, to feel the fire outside, to hear Anthony in the trailer, to see her better. She asks him to lie on his stomach, and he does, though he can't see her, while she runs her bare breasts over his disfigured back, her nipples hardening into his scars. You feel that? she whispers. Oh, he does. He still feels it. She kisses him from the top of his head downward, from his buzz-cut scalp, his shoulder blades, his wounds. Inch by inch she cries over him and kisses her own salt away, murmuring into him, why did you have to keep running? Look what they did to you. Why didn't you just stay put? Why couldn't you feel I was coming for you? You thought I was dead, he says. You thought I had been killed and pushed through the ice in Lake Ladoga. And what really happened was, I was a Soviet man left in a Soviet prison. Wasn't I dead? He is fairly certain he is alive now, and while Tatiana lies on top of his back and cries, he remembers being caught by the dogs a kilometer from Oranienburg and held in place by the Alsatians until Karolich arived, and being flogged in Sachsenhausen's main square and then chained and tattooed publicly with the 25-point star to remind him of his time for Stalin, and now she lies on his back, kissing the scars he received when he tried to escape to make his way back to her so she could kiss him. As he drives across Texas, Alexander remembers himself in Germany lying in the bloody straw after being beaten and dreaming of her kissing him, and these dreams morph with the memories of last night, and suddenly she is kissing not the scars but the raw oozing wounds, and he is in agony for she is crying and the brine of her tears is eating away the meat of his flesh, and he is begging her to stop because he can't take it anymore. Kiss something else, he pleads. Anything else. He's had enough of himself. He's sick of himself. She is tainted not just with the Gulag. She is tainted with his whole life. Does it hurt when I touch them? He has to lie. Every kiss she plants on his wounds stirs a sense memory of how he got them. He wanted her to touch him, and this is what he gets. But if he tells her the truth, she will stop. So he lied. No, he says.

Knightmare. Breezeo’s archenemy. Where Breezeo is light, a breath of fresh air, the nice breeze on a warm summer day, Knightmare is the storm that rolls in and takes it all away. Darkness, thick and suffocating, the shadows you can’t escape in the night in back alleyways. Black leather framed with dark armor, head to toe, from the combat boots the whole way up to the oversized black hood with a metal mask covering part of the face, rendering him unrecognizable. I’ve always been envious of the costume. Beats the damn pseudo-spandex, that’s for sure. “I, uh, wow.” Kennedy stands in the doorway of her apartment with a look of awe as her eyes scan the costume. “That’s just… wow.” “Wow, huh?” I glance down. “Good or bad?” “It’s just, uh, you know…” “Wow?” I guess. She nods, fighting off a smile. “Wow.” I smirk. “It’s the original.” “Seriously?” “Straight from the second movie,” I say, touching an armored chest plate with a fingerless glove-clad hand. “Well, except for these gloves. The real ones wouldn’t fit because of the cast, so I had to improvise.” “It’s, uh…” “Wow?” “Nice,” she says, touching the costume, fingertips grazing the armor. “Kind of weird seeing you like this, but still, it’s nice.” “Thanks,” I say as she steps aside for me to come in the apartment. “I talked them into letting me borrow it. Might not give it back, though. I’m kind of enjoying it.” “You should keep it,” she says, her eyes still scanning me as she closes the door. “It’s, uh…” “Nice?” “Wow.” She smiles playfully as she walks away. “I need to finish getting ready for work. Maddie, you've got a visitor!” A moment after Kennedy disappears, Madison runs in. She skids to a stop when she spots me, eyes wide, mouth popping open. “Whoa.” I push the hood off, shoving the mask up, her expression changing when she sees it’s me, face lighting up. She runs right at me, slamming into me so hard I stumble. I laugh as she hugs me. “Hey, pretty girl.” She looks up at me. “You think I’m pretty?” “What? Of course.” I kneel next to her, grinning as I press a finger to the tip of her nose. “You look like your mom.” “You think Mommy’s pretty, too?” “I think she's the most beautiful woman in the world.” Her expression shifts rapidly when I say that before her eyes widen. “Even more beautifuler than Maryanne?” I lean closer, whispering, repeating her words. “Even more beautifuler than Maryanne.” “Whoa

After loud overtures from his daughters, Anthony finally left the house and went up the winding path to the “museum,” to the mobile home where he and his parents had lived from 1949 to 1958. It has been left untouched. The furniture, tables, the paint on the walls, the ’50s cabinets, the dressers, the closets, are all unchanged, remaining as they once were. And in her closet in the bedroom, past the nurse’s uniform, far away in the right-hand corner on the top shelf, lies the black backpack that contains Tatiana’s soul. Every once in a while when she can stand it—or when she can’t stand it—she looks through it. Alexander never looks through it. Tatiana knows what Anthony is about to see. Two cans of Spam in the pack. A bottle of vodka. The nurse’s uniform she escaped from the Soviet Union in that hangs in plastic in the museum closet, next to the PMH nurse’s uniform she nearly lost her marriage in. The Hero of the Soviet Union medal in the pack, in a hidden pocket. The letters she received from Alexander—including the last one from Kontum, which, when she heard about his injuries, she thought would be the last one. That plane ride to Saigon in December 1970 was the longest twelve hours of Tatiana’s life. Francesca and her daughter Emily took care of Tatiana’s kids. Vikki, her good and forgiven friend, came with her, to bring back the body of Tom Richter, to bring back Anthony. In the backpack lies an old yellowed book, The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems. The pages are so old, they splinter if you turn them. You cannot leaf, you can only lift. And between the fracturing pages, photographs are slotted like fragile parchment leaves. Anthony is supposed to find two of these photographs and bring them back. It should take him only a few minutes. Cracked leaves of Tania before she was Alexander’s. Here she is at a few months old, held by her mother, Tania in one arm, Pasha in the other. Here she is, a toddler in the River Luga, bobbing with Pasha. And here a few years older, lying in the hammock with Dasha. A beaming, pretty, dark-haired Dasha is about fourteen. Here is Tania, around ten, with two dangling little braids, doing a fantastic one-armed handstand on top of a tree stump. Here are Tania and Pasha in the boat together, Pasha threateningly raising the oar over her head. Here is the whole family. The parents, side by side, unsmiling, Deda holding Tania’s hand. Babushka holding Pasha’s, Dasha smiling merrily in front.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this. I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stovewood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn. It had to be blood. It had to be nails driven through tongue and ears pruned away. “Some disobedience,” wrote a Southern mistress. “Much idleness, sullenness, slovenliness…. Used the rod.” It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d… with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization. “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.*

But nothing is ever enough, have you noticed?” he said. “I can’t touch you enough. I can’t make you happy. I can’t say anything right to you. And you can’t take away from me a single thing I’ve fucked up along the way.” She became deflated. “You’re here, and you’re forgiven for everything,” she said quietly, sitting up and closing her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at his tattooed arms and his scar-ribbon chest. “Tell me the truth,” Alexander said. “Don’t you sometimes think it’s harder—this—and other stuff like the magazines quizzes—harder for the two of us? That magazine quiz just points up the absurdity of us pretending we’re like normal people. Don’t you sometimes think it would be easier with your Edward Ludlow in New York? Or a Thelma? No history. No memories. Nothing to get over, nothing to claw back from.” “Would it be easier for you?” “Well, I wouldn’t hear you cry every night,” Alexander said. “I wouldn’t feel like such a failure every minute of my life.” “Oh my God! What are you talking about?” Tatiana yanked to get off him, but now it was Alexander who held her in place. “You know what I’m talking about,” he said, his eyes blazing. “I want amnesia! I want a fucking lobotomy. Could I please never think again? Look what’s happened to us, us, Tania. Don’t you remember how we used to be? Just look what’s happened.” His long winter’s night bled into Coconut Grove through all the fields and villages in three countries Alexander plundered through to get to the Bridge to Holy Cross, over the River Vistula, to get into the mountains, to escape to Germany, to save Pasha, to make his way to Tatiana. And he failed. Twenty escape attempts—two in Catowice, one ill-fated one in Colditz Castle, and seventeen desperate ones in Sachsenhausen, and he never got to her. He had somehow made all the wrong choices. Alexander knew it. Anthony knew it. With the son asleep, the parents had hours to mindlessly meander through the fields and rivers of Europe, through the streets of Leningrad. That was not to be wished upon. “Stop it,” Tatiana whispered. “Just stop it! You didn’t fail. You’re looking at it all twisted. You stayed alive, that was all, that was everything, and you know that. Why are you doing this?” “Why?” he said. “You want it out while sitting naked on top of my stomach with your hair down? Well, here it is. You don’t want it out? Then don’t ask me. Turn the light off, keep the braid in, get your”— Alexander stopped himself—“get off me, and say nothing.” Tatiana did none of those things. She didn’t want it out, what she wanted, desperately, was him to touch her. Though the aching in her heart from his words was unabated, the aching in her loins from her desire for him was also unabated.

He watched her pace toward him. She stopped just short of his chair and looked down at him. Her loose hair slipped over her shoulder. “I remember something. I’m not sure if it happened or not. Will you tell me?” “Yes,” he whispered. “I remember lying with you on the lawn of the imperial palace’s spring garden.” He shifted. Lamplight pulsed over his face. He shook his head. “I remember finding you in your suite.” This memory was coming to her now. It had a similar flavor as the last one. “I promised to tell you my secrets. You held a book. Or kindling? You were making a fire.” “That didn’t happen.” “I kissed you.” She touched the hollow at the base of his neck. His pulse was wild. “Not then,” he said finally. “But I have before.” There was a rush of images. It was as if the melody she’d imagined while lying in the dark had been dunked in the green liquor. All the cold stops gained heat and ran together. It was easy to remember Arin, especially now. Her hand slid to his chest. The cotton of his shirt was hot. “Your kitchens. A table. Honey and flour.” His heart slammed against her palm. “Yes.” “A carriage.” “Yes.” “A balcony.” Breath escaped him like a laugh. “Almost.” “I remember falling asleep in your bed when you weren’t here.” He pulled back slightly, searched her face. “That didn’t happen.” “Yes it did.” His mouth parted, but he didn’t speak. The blacks of his eyes were bright. She wondered what it would be like to give her body what it wanted. It knew something she didn’t. Her heart sped, her blood was lush in her veins. “The first day,” she said. “Last summer. Your hair was a mess. I wanted to sweep it back and make you meet my eyes. I wanted to see you.” His chest rose and fell beneath her hand. “I don’t know. I can’t--I don’t know what you wanted.” “I never said?” “No.” She lowered her mouth to his. She tasted him: the raw burn of liquor on his tongue. She felt him swallow, heard the low, dry sound of it. He pulled her down to him, tangled his hands in her hair, sucked the breath from her lips. She became uncertain whose breath was whose. He kissed her back, fingertips fanning across her face, then gone, nowhere. Then: a light touch along the curve of her hip, just barely. A stone skipping the surface of the water. “Strange,” he murmured into her mouth. She wasn’t listening. She was rippling, the sensation spreading wide. Stone on water, dimpled pockets of pressure. The wait for the stone to finally drop down. Suddenly she knew--or thought she knew--what he found strange as he traced where a dagger should have been. To see a part of her missing. She felt her missing pieces, the stark gaps. She was arrested by the thought (it pierced her, sharp and surreal) that she had become transparent, that if he touched her again his hand would go right through her, into air, into the empty spaces of who she was now.

People who don’t read science fiction, but who have at least given it a fair shot, often say they’ve found it inhuman, elitist, and escapist. Since its characters, they say, are both conventionalized and extraordinary, all geniuses, space heroes, superhackers, androgynous aliens, it evades what ordinary people really have to deal with in life, and so fails an essential function of fiction. However remote Jane Austen’s England is, the people in it are immediately relevant and revelatory—reading about them we learn about ourselves. Has science fiction anything to offer but escape from ourselves? The cardboard-character syndrome was largely true of early science fiction, but for decades writers have been using the form to explore character and human relationships. I’m one of them. An imagined setting may be the most appropriate in which to work out certain traits and destinies. But it’s also true that a great deal of contemporary fiction isn’t a fiction of character. This end of the century isn’t an age of individuality as the Elizabethan and the Victorian ages were. Our stories, realistic or otherwise, with their unreliable narrators, dissolving points of view, multiple perceptions and perspectives, often don’t have depth of character as their central value. Science fiction, with its tremendous freedom of metaphor, has sent many writers far ahead in this exploration beyond the confines of individuality—Sherpas on the slopes of the postmodern. As for elitism, the problem may be scientism: technological edge mistaken for moral superiority. The imperialism of high technocracy equals the old racist imperialism in its arrogance; to the technophile, people who aren’t in the know/in the net, who don’t have the right artifacts, don’t count. They’re proles, masses, faceless nonentities. Whether it’s fiction or history, the story isn’t about them. The story’s about the kids with the really neat, really expensive toys. So “people” comes to be operationally defined as those who have access to an extremely elaborate fast-growth industrial technology. And “technology” itself is restricted to that type. I have heard a man say perfectly seriously that the Native Americans before the Conquest had no technology. As we know, kiln-fired pottery is a naturally occurring substance, baskets ripen in the summer, and Machu Picchu just grew there. Limiting humanity to the producer-consumers of a complex industrial growth technology is a really weird idea, on a par with defining humanity as Greeks, or Chinese, or the upper-middle-class British. It leaves out a little too much. All fiction, however, has to leave out most people. A fiction interested in complex technology may legitimately leave out the (shall we say) differently technologized, as a fiction about suburban adulteries may ignore the city poor, and a fiction centered on the male psyche may omit women. Such omission may, however, be read as a statement that advantage is superiority, or that the white middle class is the whole society, or that only men are worth writing about. Moral and political statements by omission are legitimated by the consciousness of making them, insofar as the writer’s culture permits that consciousness. It comes down to a matter of taking responsibility. A denial of authorial responsibility, a willed unconsciousness, is elitist, and it does impoverish much of our fiction in every genre, including realism.

1 It was early December. The streets of Milan glistened with Christmas decorations, with people coming and going carefree, carrying elegant shopping bags. It was past eight, and several minutes earlier I had closed behind me the door of Passerella, the modelling agency I ran. I had let my assistant, Giovanni, file the photos of the new faces we had initially chosen for Dante’s summer collection. He was an up-and-coming designer. The minute I walked down Monte Napoleone, one of the city’s most commercial streets, the chilly air forced me to wrap up well in my brand new light green coat. An original piece of cashmere, the five letters embossed on its lapel making it even more precious in that cold weather. My fingers contentedly groped for the word “Prada” before I stuck my hand into its warm pocket, while clutching my favourite handbag tight. A huge red ostrich Hermes where you could find cosmetics, scarves, and accessories, which I could use throughout the day, giving a different twist to my appearance. I wanted to walk a little bit to let off steam. My job may have been pleasant as it had to do with the world’s most beautiful creatures, men and women, but it wasn’t without its tensions. Models went to and fro, trade representatives looking for new faces, endless castings, phone calls, text messages, tailors, photographers, reports from my secretary and assistants—a rowdy disorder! I had already left the building where my job was, and I was going past another two entrances of nearby premises, when my leg caught on something. I instantly thought of my brand new Manolo Blahnik shoes. I’d only put them on for the second time, and they were now falling victim to the rough surface of a cardboard box, where a homeless man slept, at the entrance of a building. My eyes sparked as I checked if my high heels were damaged. On the face of it, they were intact. But that wasn’t enough for me. I found a lighter, and tried to check their red leather in the dim light. Why should the same thing happen over and over again every time I buy new shoes? I wondered and walked on, cursing. Why had that bloke chosen that specific spot to sleep, and why had I headed for his damn cardboard box! As I held my lighter, my angry gaze fell on the man who was covered with an impermeable piece of nylon, and carried on sleeping. He looked so vulnerable out in the cold that I didn’t dare rouse him from his sleep. After all, how could I hold him responsible in this state? I quickened my gait. Bella was waiting for me to start our night out with a drink and supper at Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the imposing arcade with a dome made of glass, its ambience warm and romantic. Bella’s office was nearby, and that meeting place was convenient for both of us. That’s where we made up our minds about how to spend the night.I walked several metres down the road, but something made me stop short. I wanted to have a second look at that man. I retraced my steps. He was a young man who, despite his state, seemed so out of place. His unkempt hair and unshaven face didn’t let me see anything else but his profile, which reminded of an ancient Greek statue, with pronounced cheekbones and a chiselled nose. This second time, he must have sensed me over him. The man’s body budged, and he eyed me without making me out, dazzled by the lighter flame. As soon as I realised what I had done, I took to my heels. What had made me go back? Maybe, the sense of guilt I felt inside my warm Prada coat, maybe, the compassion I had to show as Christmas was just around the corner. All I knew was that a small bell jingled within, and I obeyed it. I walked faster, as if to escape from every thought. As I left, I stuck my hand in my bag, and got hold of my mobile. My secretary’s voice on the other end of the line sounded heavy and imposing. Giovanni wasn’t the embodiment of “macho” man, but he had all it takes to be the perfect male. Having chosen to quit modelling, he still looked gorgeous at the age of

Heddy devoured books like others did chocolate. It was her way of escaping into another place whenever hers was too much to bear.

The Mystery of the Howling Dog The Mystery of the Hidden Suitcase The Mystery of Treasure Island ~ Easter Holidays: The Mystery of Four Towers The Mystery of the Burning Plane The Mystery of the Russian Spy The Mystery of Ghost Island The Mystery of the Perfect Thief The Mystery of the Underwater Car The Mystery of the Crown Jewels ~ Summer Holidays: The Mystery of the Amphibious Jeep The Mystery of the Escaped Prisoner The Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle The Mystery of the Runaway King The Mystery of the Secret Lake

I suppose I am a glutton for punishment really, voluntarily attending a wedding to watch the love of my life marry another woman.

No one deserves to be put through such an ordeal, to feel like you have to watch the love of your life get married, just to find closure.

They pulled up to 195 Madison Street - a tall narrow six-story redbrick and limestone-trimmed tenement house indistinguishable from all the tenement houses on all the other streets of tenements. The bars and ladders of a fire escape ran up the left side of the building; sooty stone scrolls, shields, and flowers framed the second- and third-story windows. This was the place where they had to live? Two blocks from the commercial madness of East Broadway; two blocks from the filthy snout of the East River, smelling of fish, ships, and garbage; three blocks from the brain-rattling racket of the elevated train; three blocks from the playground of the Henry Street Settlement; practically in the shadow of the construction side of the twin-towered Manhattan Bridge. Every three blocks they passed more people than the entire population of Rakov. Half a million Jews packed the one and a half square miles of the Lower East Side in 1909; 702 people per acre in the densest acres. It was one of the most crowded places on earth, and all of them seemed to be swarming outdoors on the June afternoon that Gishe Sore and her family arrived. Aside from the crisscross steel girders of the Manhattan Bridge at the end of the street, it was all tenement houses as far as she could see. Tenements and bodies. In every room of every building, bodies fought for a ray of light and a sip of air. Bodies slept four to a bed and on two chairs pushed together; bodies sat hunched over sewing machines in parlors and sunless back bedrooms and at kitchen tables heaped with cloth and thread; bodies ate, slept, woke, and cleared out for the next shift of bodies to cycle through. Toilets in the hall or in courtyard outhouses; windows opening, if they opened at all, onto fetid air shafts; no privacy; no escape from the racket and smell of neighbors; no relief from summer heat or blasting winter furnaces. This was the place her American children had brought them to live?

Adults with ADHD as a group have often experienced more than their fair share of disappointments and frustrations associated with the symptoms of ADHD, in many cases not realizing the impact of ADHD has had on them. When you reflect on a history of low grades, forgetting or not keeping promises made to others, repeated exhortations from others about your unfulfilled potential and the need to work harder, you may be left with a self-view that “I’m not good enough,” “I’m lazy,” or “I cannot expect much from myself and neither can anyone else.” The end result of these repeated frustrations can be the erosion of your sense of self, what is often called low self-esteem. These deep-seated, enduring self-views, or “core beliefs” about who you are can be thought of as a lens through which you see yourself, the world, and your place in the world. Adverse developmental experiences associated with ADHD may unfairly color your lens and result in a skewed pessimistic view of yourself, at least in some situations. When facing situations in the here-and-now that activate these negative beliefs, you experience strong emotions, negative thoughts, and a propensity to fall into self-defeating behaviors, most often resignation and escape. These core beliefs might only be activated in limited, specific situations for some people with ADHD; in other cases, these beliefs color one’s perception in most situations. It should be noted that many adults with ADHD, despite feeling flummoxed by their symptoms in many situations, possess a healthy self-view, though there may be many situations that briefly shake their confidence. These core beliefs or “schema” develop over the course of time from childhood through adulthood and reflect our efforts to figure out the “rules for life” (Beck, 1976; Young & Klosko, 1994). They can be thought of as mental categories that let us impose order on the world and make sense of it. Thus, as we grow up and face different situations, people, and challenges, we make sense of our situations and relationships and learn the rubrics for how the world works. The capacity to form schemas and to organize experience in this way is very adaptive. For the most part, these processes help us figure out, adapt to, and navigate through different situations encountered in life. In some cases, people develop beliefs and strategies that help them get through unusually difficult life circumstances, what are sometimes called survival strategies. These old strategies may be left behind as people settle into new, healthier settings and adopt and rely on “healthy rules.” In other cases, however, maladaptive beliefs persist, are not adjusted by later experiences (or difficult circumstances persist), and these schema interfere with efforts to thrive in adulthood. In our work with ADHD adults, particularly for those who were undiagnosed in childhood, we have heard accounts of negative labels or hurtful attributions affixed to past problems that become internalized, toughened, and have had a lasting impact. In many cases, however, many ADHD adults report that they arrived at negative conclusions about themselves based on their experiences (e.g., “None of my friends had to go to summer school.”). Negative schema may lay dormant, akin to a hibernating bear, but are easily reactivated in adulthood when facing similar gaffes or difficulties, including when there is even a hint of possible disappointment or failure. The function of these beliefs is self-protective—shock me once, shame on you; shock me twice, shame on me. However, these maladaptive beliefs insidiously trigger self-defeating behaviors that represent an attempt to cope with situations, but that end up worsening the problem and thereby strengthening the negative belief in a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle. Returning to the invisible fences metaphor, these beliefs keep you stuck in a yard that is too confining in order to avoid possible “shocks.

The plan – mine and Andrea’s – had been to sort our lives out so we didn’t have to go back to Ibiza that summer. But one lunch break I felt this intense bleakness inside me as if a cloud had passed over my soul. I literally couldn’t stomach another hour phoning people who didn’t want to be phoned. So I left the job. Just walked out. I was a failure. A quitter. I had nothing at all on the horizon. I was sliding down, becoming vulnerable to an illness that was waiting in the wings. But I didn’t realise it. Or didn’t care. I was just thinking of escape.

You in my eyes! You wake up in my eyes like the morning Sun, You surround my life like the day and its busy schedules, You are there when I am sitting idle or pursuing errands undone, Because thinking of you is the default part of all my schedules, Then when the day tires me, You sleep in my eyes, There in my dreams with me to be, While I wish I never opened my eyes, And in the darkness of the night that spreads everywhere, I hold my eyelids tight, To not let your dreams escape from the crevices in my eyes somewhere, And throughout the night I hold you in this dreamy delight tight, Then as the morning bird taps its beak on the glass window, I let the night cease for me as I let your beauty leave the territory of my eyes, And percolate into the morning light that flashes over the willow, Then begins the magic of recreating you in the light of the day with my open eyes, And then my darling Irma, you spread like the sunshine in every corner of my world, And wherever I go I carry my universe with me, In my eyes, your dreams your views and my entire world, And that is how I like it to be, at least for now this is me, But there are moments when dreams in closed or open eyes, Are awakened by your memories, And how I wish I could vanish into the skies, Because on Earth I miss you and our realities, How you feel I do not know, maybe you feel the same, But then a Summer without flowers is not a true Summer, And in a flowerless Summer nothing feels the same, You too could have evolved the feeling to tell me, “my darling let me be your flowery Summer!” Nevertheless, for now let me close my eyes and dream again of you, The Summer, the flowers and us together, To feel once more how I once felt with you, And maybe this time when I vanish into the skies we shall be together!

We expect ourselves to be in a perpetual late summer/early autumn. We ask for the harvest year-round. Our bodies ask us to take a break, and we feel guilty. We beat ourselves up for rest. We feel terrified to tell our families and communities when we don’t know what’s next in our careers or our lives because God forbid we fall off the linear path of success and take a detour into the fertile void of “I don’t know.” We boldly opt out of the system to create one that works for us, and then we work ourselves to the bone, following the model that we wanted to escape in the first place.

You and Me! In the summer garden, Where flowers abound, With joys never felt before or begotten, There my love I always have found, You, In the soft fluttering of butterflies’ wings, In the tender swaying of these beautiful Summer flowers, In the heart beat of those young lovers whose hearts a melody sweet sings, While I seek you in these Summer flowers and in the shadows of carefree lovers, And as the afternoon Sun shines brighter, And the angle of every shadow changes, Then how I miss to hold you tighter, Before like these shadows the feeling escapes into new emotional ranges, Where you are the peak and summit of everything, The Summer, The Summer bliss and my love for you, And then with my feelings I wrap everything, Now in the moment it is just us: the Summer, me and you, Then as dusk descends on the scenes of life, I stack your memories in my heart and in my mind, To embark on my new ambition, the night and our life, Where now, your memories and my feelings I unwind, And cast them over these golden beams, As they spread everywhere, My love Irma, my heart with my mind teams, And then it is you, just you, in everything and everywhere!

He wanted to escape. To get to the Spring Court, cross the wall, and flee south into human territory. He had no accomplices, no motive beyond his own pathetic cowardice.” He jerked his chin toward the puddle of piss beneath the male. But out of the corner of my eye I saw the Summer High Lord sag a bit—enough to make me wonder … wonder what sort of choice Rhys had made in that moment he’d taken to search the male’s mind.

A strangled sob she can’t choke back escapes her, and my heart collapses, bottoms out, a basket full of red summer berries bruised and splattering crimson on the tiles. If my emotions had form and shape, they’d be visceral, thick like spews of blood.

They had evidently been here all night and all the forenoon, afraid to go out to feed. Having escaped restraint, they were, like some people we know of, afraid of their freedom, did not know what to do with it, and seemed glad to get back into the old familiar bondage.

A careful man I ought to be, A little fellow follows me. I dare not go astray, For fear he'll go the self-same way. I cannot once escape his eyes, Whatever he see me do, he tries. Like me, he says, he's going to be, The little chap who follows me. He thinks that I am good and fine, Believes in every word of mine. The base in me he must not see, That little fellow who follows me. I must remember as I go, Thru summers' sun and winters' snow. I am building for the years to be, This little chap who follows me.

With her and that someday He entered the quietness of his own mind, Where he could not be by anyone found, Neither by the rays of the bright sun, Nor by the deeds that seek him for acts still undone, But he lies in the silence of his mind, quiet and silent, Here he deals with million feelings, many permanent and a few transient, He thinks of her and her beautiful ways, In the darkness of nights and brightness of sunny days, Seeking something that would lead him to her, And then rest there, in that sacred space of his mind, forever with her, Time calls him but he appears to be heedless to its every call, The day invites him, but all its invitations collide against a robust wall, The wall of his mind that surrounds him permanently, Because there he likes to be with her virtual entity, Maybe he wants to escape from this state of morbid stillness, But in this stillness, a state of nothingness, he experiences a feeling of fullness, For imagination is the darling muse of every beautiful mind, And maybe there he lies with her, beyond the evil fangs of reality, in the imagination of his mind, Undisturbed by the evil intended men and women, Who always want to act in other’s lives as specialist foremen, Without realising winter can never know the feelings of the summer, And without having loved and lost, how can others think they are better, So they force him to digress and retire to his mind, and the quiet space there, A place that actually is nothing and nowhere, but for him for now, it is his only somewhere, Where love finds him because he always finds it, In her memories, in her imaginations, and in the strange devices of his own wit, So he has become anonymous for the world, but a sort of forced anonymity with a hidden intent, Because whenever I see him, I feel he did not go there, there he was forcefully sent, Maybe he is long dead now, and it is his ghost that visits this mind, Because he is obsessed with knowing the undefined, For most of us have to muster courage, But a few of us are born with it way above the normal average! And perhaps a typhoon of thoughts is on its way, Who knows when, because they murdered him a long ago, but his ghost is still seeking to resurrect him one day, that anonymous someday!

We know almost nothing of the rural class relations of lowland Scotland in the last two centuries and, as a consequence, are still struggling to escape from accounts of class relations in lowland agriculture which are in fact generalised accounts of the relations noted by observers (with keen eyesight, to be fair) sitting in Edinburgh. The north-east, the south-west, Strathmore were not like the Lothians; and folk music provides important evidence to support the point.

You're not the boy they knew; you're a man they don't recognize. Something marks you as separate, and they won't ever understand it." "Because I was cursed." It wasn't a question, and Belle knew she had to tread carefully. "It's more than that. The curse forced you to change, but the transformation was yours alone." "Not just mine." He stepped to her and brought her hands to his chest. Heat rose to her cheeks, but she leaned into the warmth. Lio tilted her chin up and kissed her, sending a shiver down her spine despite the summer heat. She pulled her hands from his and wrapped them around his neck, twining her fingers in his hair, trying to close any distance between them. Every kiss was like their first- capable of wrecking her and healing her in equal measure. A soft growl escaped his lips. She pulled away and looked up, watching as his blue eyes softened. "I was in that darkness for ten years before you gave me a reason to seek the light," he whispered.

My fear traveled alongside me as an almost constant companion. It caused me to doubt myself all the time, to hesitate, to second-guess my decisions. Every day, I waged war against my mind and the fear that plagued it. I fought to live a life of my own choosing rather than a life dictated by fear and comfort. I fought the impulse to close, to numb, or to seek some form of escape. Every day, over and over, I chose to see, to stay open, to remain open.

We who are white men can’t change who we are. But we could do worse than to follow what I took that summer as his example: to be aware of and curious about the world around you, to give what you have with neither apology nor self-congratulation. When praise comes to see you, get out on the fire escape. When it’s someone else’s time to talk, listen. Don’t turn your house into a museum. When your work is done, get out of the way.

In the past, Darcy would have agreed that novels of the Gothic bent were frivolous, silly, and quite possibly a waste of ink and paper. But the more he read, the more he understood the promise of hope they offered. The escape into a world where love could be found. Where such joy must be fought for and held onto with all your strength, for happiness was fleeting in this life.

seat. ‘We’re escaping the grimy city for the summer,’ she says cheerily, even though she loves London in August, its fractious energy and greasy hotdog heat.

Violet Everly is twelve years old, and dreaming of other worlds. This usually involves climbing into the old wardrobe at the back of the library, and shutting the door in a whirl of cedar and dust. There she sits, with a thin torch between her teeth and a fat book spread across her lap, its thick and creamy pages layered in old-fashioned type and rich with glossy sentences. Every one of them whispering adventure. The worlds spring up behind her eyelids: cities of gold and silver filigree buildings; lands of intertwining waterways with bright boats sculling through the water; a forest of witches, their skin shades of eggshell blue all the way to deepest twilight, constellations twinkling across their shoulders. All of this a siren song that she can’t quite shake. It’s because of her desire to escape into a good book that she finds herself inside the wardrobe, as Ambrose converses with a stranger in his midst.

eye combination my mother always made a fuss about. Maybe that’s why my skin crawled every time someone commented on how attractive a couple we were. It was more a reflection on me than us. He lifts his hand and moves my hair off my forehead. The gesture is intimate, but I’m too stunned to stop him. He brushes his thumb over the scar on my temple. “I was worried about you. You wouldn’t let me see you in the hospital. Or after?” A sigh escapes before I can school my features into something a little more… regretful. “Well, I was embarrassed.” That’s a lie. I just didn’t want to face whatever the fuck emotional roller coaster I was riding the last six months. Seriously. My life went from normal to shit in a split second. Adding Jack—and the life that I thought I had, the one that seemed to go up in a puff of smoke when I woke up in the hospital—would’ve been more pain than I was ready to accept. “Violet!” I step away from Jack, ignoring his wounded expression, and turn to my other friends. Half the dance team is here, and they all crowd around me. Someone pulls at my coffee-stained blouse, and another swoops in to clean the floor where my cup dropped. I had forgotten, in my Jack-shock. “Lucky it wasn’t hot.” Willow nudges me. “Luck and I aren’t on speaking terms.” She visited faithfully every day while I was stuck in the hospital. Kept me sane, kept me looped in to the gossip. She’s the only one who knows what I went through, and I’m keeping it that way. I’m not in the habit of airing my dirty laundry—or my newfound nightmares. I’ve been plagued by bright lights, crunching metal, and snapping bones. She rolls her eyes at my luck comment. “You need to change. We’re taking you out.” Oh boy. My first instinct is to say no, but honestly? I could use a bit of normalcy. My therapist—the talk one, not the physical one—said something about getting back into a routine. Well, for the last two years, I’ve gone out with my girls on Friday nights. There’s nothing more normal than that. I’m actually looking forward to it. She leads the way to the bedroom I haven’t been in since… before. She steps aside and lets me do the honors. Opening the door is like cracking into a time capsule. Fucking devastating. Willow stands behind me, her hand on my shoulder, as I stare around at the remnants of the person I used to be. If I wasn’t aware of how different I was after six months away, I am now. Mentally, physically. There are still clothes that I left on the floor. My chair is pulled out and covered in clothes. There’s a pile of books that I had planned to conquer over the summer in the center of the desk. My bed is made. “I kept the door open

At the fair each summer when I was a kid, we visited the Fun House, with its creepy grinning plaster face, two stories high. You walked through its mouth, between its giant teeth, along its hot-pink tongue. Just from that face, you should have known. It was supposed to be a lark, but it was terrifying. (...) The Fun House was scarier by far than the Haunted House, not least because I was supposed to enjoy it. I just wanted to find the way out. But the doors makes EXIT led only to further crazy rooms, to endless moving corridors. There was one route through the Fun House, relentless to the very end. I've finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it.

As Hsiang-yen put it, "There's no use for artificial discipline, For, move as I will, I manifest the ancient Tao." At this level, human life is beyond anxiety, for it can never make a mistake. If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it. A Zen master was once asked, "It is terribly hot, and how shall we escape the heat?" "Why not," he answered, "go to the place where it is neither hot nor cold?" "Where is that place?" "In summer we sweat; in winter we shiver." In Zen one does not feel guilty about dying, or being afraid, or disliking the heat. At the same time, Zen does not insist upon this point of view as something which one ought to adopt; it does not preach it as an ideal. For if you don't understand it, your very not-understanding is also IT. There would be no bright stars without dim stars, and, without the surrounding darkness, no stars at all.

HE HARVEST IS PAST, THE SUMMER IS ENDED, AND WE ARE NOT SAVED. — JEREMIAH 8:20 Not saved! Dear reader, is this your sorry condition? Warned of the judgment to come, invited to escape for your life, and yet at this moment not saved! You know the way of salvation, you read it in the Bible, you hear it from the pulpit, it is explained to you by friends, and still you neglect it, and therefore you are not saved. You will be without excuse when the Lord shall execute judgment. The Holy

I swear by the creek in back of the house," I said, our private childhood variation on an oath by the river Styx. And while I said the words I was telling the truth. Because I remembered spring mornings when she helped me escape lessons to run through the woods, summer nights catching glowworms, autumn afternoons acting out the story of Persephone in the leaf pile, and winter evenings sitting by the fire when I told her everything I had studied that day and she fell asleep five times but would never admit to being bored.

Was it ghastly?" I remembered the sunlit summer of 1940, the crowds rushing from Paris, as from a fire, to join the snake-like lines of mattress-topped cars that drove slow, slower and slowest of all just before their closely packed passengers scattered into ditches where the dive bombers still found them. I remembered Nice with its sea and sky and palm trees still as bright as new travel posters and its sidewalks crowded with the most typical of twentieth-century tourists: displaced persons. I remembered the sensation of living in a dull fear-encircled vacuum and the incredulous joy with which I greeted my husband when he arrived hollow-eyed from his narrow escape and long hitch-hike across two countries. I remembered Lyons in the unheated winters, the wind scything between the cliff-like gray houses and inserting itself into the city's labyrinth of passageways. I remembered the turnip meals, the recurrent colds and chilblains, the disinclination to wash in icy water, the sordid temporary lodgings and false identity cards, the drearily uncomfortable atmosphere, and the exhilarating meetings with friends who had also escaped arrest. And then I remembered my husband's arrest and the nightmare that followed. "Yes," I said, repudiating stiff upper lips, "yes, it was ghastly.

It was 1992, and the Knicks were hosting their first annual summer camp for youngsters. Like many camps with professional teams, the club wanted to have one of its players make an appearance for a day. Not someone like Ewing, a star who had too many demands on his time already. But not someone from the end of the bench, either. So they asked Mason—basically still new to the NBA—if he’d appear for $1,500. The forward said yes, and the team provided him with a limousine to the camp that day. Mason had his window rolled down as the vehicle arrived, and the kids hovered around it like paparazzi, wanting to catch a glimpse of him up close. Yet Mason stayed in the car. First for two minutes. Then five. Then almost fifteen. Finally Ed Tapscott, then the club’s administrative director, came outside. He’d been responsible for Mason’s appearance at the camp that day, and couldn’t figure out why Mason wasn’t making his way inside the gym. “I’m not getting out of the car for anything less than $2,000, bro. And I want cash,” Mason told him. Tapscott figured he was joking at first. But Mason was completely serious. Sure, he’d agreed to the $1,500 figure before, but now—with an army of young, excited kids waiting inside—he had the leverage to play hardball. Tapscott said he wasn’t even sure he could realistically get access to that much cash that soon. “I had to give one of our staffers my ATM card,” he recalls. “What choice did I really have in a situation like that?” With assurance of the pay increase, Mason hopped out. He played in a couple of scrimmages with the children. But, in classic Mason fashion, he couldn’t turn off his competitiveness. While playing, Mason inadvertently elbowed a kid, knocking the child out cold and breaking his nose, which gushed with blood. When the boy regained consciousness, he woke to find a worried Mason hovering over him. The child smiled and asked the Knick to sign his bloody T-shirt. Meanwhile, Tapscott said he and others running the camp were merely happy to escape the situation without the threat of a lawsuit.

Leaning back, expecting to feel the wall behind me, I bump against someone. The scream that wants to escape gets stuck in the back of my throat as a strong hand covers my mouth. His other arm snakes around my waist, hauling me up until I feel his entire body. “Struggle for me, doll,” Carter whispers.

Something in me snapped and I accepted my life was over and I’d have to move to Siberia to escape my shame after this. If I had to do that, I might as well spell everything out for them. “I have a dildo glued inside me and I can’t get it out!

Tomas thinks he is the Prince of Hungary” - Why would Adam say that to Martina? That wasn't the right question I kept asking myself. Did Adam say that to Martina or someone else? Was it meant as a message to me? How in what kind of conversation could it be said like that and why? What was Adam referring to when he said “The Prince of Hungary”? I was arguing with Rachel and Adam over the summer before. I challenged their belief that the UK was victorious in World War II and they were both puzzled, asking why. I tried to convince them by telling them the story of an Austrian Jewish lady who had migrated to the UK before the Anschluss and sensed that Nazi forces were approaching, but the UK denied her documents to stay and she ended up stuck between the Nazis in France and the UK on the Channel islands. The Nazis took all Jews from the islands, including Therese Steiner, and she ultimately ended up in Auschwitz and in the gas chambers. My point was that if the UK didn't defend its own citizens to avoid conflict, then how could they be seen as 'winners'? Who was the Jew here who was stuck between good and evil? I didn't realise that Adam in 2014 was trying to disprove my point, gaining victory without direct confrontation. Perhaps he was offended that I cared more about a poor, lonely Jewish girl trying to escape death and horrors than he would have cared himself.

It was 11 A.M. on a fine summer morning in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, when the driver of an automobile carrying two passengers made a wrong turn. The car was not supposed to leave the main street, and yet it did, pulling up into a narrow passageway with no escape. It was an unremarkable mistake, easy enough to make in the crowded, dusty streets. But this mistake, made on this day and by this driver, would disrupt hundreds of millions of lives, and alter the course of world history.

I’m surrounded by great people, and yet I still get lonely.

Father Ted picked up where Father Stephen had left off, becoming my confessor. Parishioners paid for my children to attend summer camps that were nothing like the ones I’d grown up with, and when gas prices spiked, I found random twenty-dollar bills in my church mailbox. These were kind people extending generosity to us at a time when I most needed it and I understood now what it meant for God to work through people. Mr. Fred Rogers had said, after disasters, “Look for the helpers,” and he was right. Helpers were the source of hope. Hope was not born from following a list of rules. The truth was life was full of hurt. But the truth was also we were surrounded by help and hope.

thinking the same two things. It would have been bad had they not escaped. It’s a miracle something like this hasn’t happened before. Because of the Stacey Patterson near disaster, they decide it’s best if Mallory goes to the fish store to pick up the lobsters by herself. Jake misses her the entire time she’s gone, though it gives him a chance to poke around the cottage unobserved. He could also do this while she’s out running in the morning but usually he just sleeps

Summer in New York can get infernally hot. And during that season, the whole population migrates to the roofs of their apartments and, in the absence of proper balconies, their fire escapes. Sensible people, my expatriate friends assure me, depart for Cape Cod and other points upstate.

Now in this forest is a dwarf who is no more than three feet in height, but whose beauty eclipses that of the summer sun. His name is Aubéron. Once they have entered this wood, none can escape him. If ever they address a word to him and once they have spent an instant near him, they will no longer ever be able to leave. I must add that this dwarf possesses three great powers: when you seek to travel through this forest, before you have crossed twelve leagues, you will find him standing in your way. He will speak the name of majestic God in such wise that none can fail to be impressed, and if you refuse to speak to this noble person, he will become so furious that you will become terrified, for he will make it rainy and blustery, he will break the trees and tear them to pieces; after this demonstration he will make appear a river so large that a large boat could sail down it. . . . But take it as written, all of this is naught but illusion

I wasn’t one hundred percent certain you’d be down with the makeup.” “Oh?” He lifted an eyebrow, propping a hip against the table to sip his beer. “Why wear it, then?” I stepped closer, enough so that if he’d parted his knees a little bit, I could have pressed right up flush against him. I brushed my lips along his jaw, somewhere between a kiss and a nuzzle, not quite either. “Because I didn’t wear it for you.” I could swear I heard a soft groan escape his throat under the bass of the music, and then his knees did inch apart a bit more, his hands settling more firmly on my hips again to draw me closer until we were eye-to-eye and crotch-to-crotch. We gasped in unison at the friction of that first electric contact. “And that is why you’re so fucking hot,” he rasped. Our mouths were a breath apart and he could have kissed me, or I could have kissed him. But we didn’t. We just breathed together, savoring that madly intense moment of perfect wanting. After a moment he stepped back and led me to the dance floor.

C-3PO Now is the summer of our happiness Made winter by this sudden, fierce attack! Our ship is under siege, I know not how. O hast thou heard? The main reactor fails! We shall most surely be destroy’d by this. I’ll warrant madness lies herein! R2-D2 —Beep beep, Beep, beep, meep, squeak, beep, beep, beep, whee! C-3PO —We’re doomed. The princess shall have no escape this time! I fear this battle doth portend the end Of the Rebellion. O! What misery! [Exeunt C-3PO and R2-D2.

doing something for yourself for once. Anyway, being in New Zealand in summer sure sounds more appealing than staying here and watching it rain.” “I think New Zealand

Grief he had always thought of as an emotion, a mood, something that possessed you but that you eventually escaped. Now he knew it was different. Grief was a country, a place you entered hesitantly, or were thrown into without warning. But once you were there, amidst the roiling formless blackness and stench of despair, you could not leave. Even if you wanted to: you could only walk and walk and walk, traveling on through the black reaches with the sound of screaming in your ears, and hope that someday you might glimpse far off another country, another place where you might someday rest. Jason

That dog’s smarter than I am.” She winked at Ash, and Ashley giggled. Then she left the house. Kristin gazed through the window and in the near distance, saw Rick, Madison, Danny and Quincy on their boat coming into dock. She immediately understood what her daughter hadn’t voiced. The dog’s real family was here now. Ashley would be left out. “The hordes will want lunch, so I’ve got to leave,” said Cathy. “I came over to invite you guys to supper. We’ll grill outside - very informal. I hope you can make it.” Kristin did not have a social calendar, but neither was she sure about having Rick’s “hands-on” family in her personal life. Still, after last night’s get together, it was probably too late for keeping many secrets. “What can we bring to the party?” “Oh, goody!” Cathy was back in form. “Rick will be happy.” The two women walked outside in time to see Quincy race toward Ashley and cover her with kisses. “Ugh!” Ashley protested. “You’re all wet and yucky, Quince.” She stepped back. “You would be too if you kept jumping in the lake for a swim.” Rick joined them, tee shirt soaked, hair standing on end. Eyes bright. He jerked his head toward his sister. “From now on, it’s either the hound or your monsters. Not both.” She punched him lightly on the arm. “Sure, sure, sure. When I see it, I’ll believe it. Ricky, the kids play you the way you play a fish - pulling in the line, letting it out, pulling it in until they catch you. And they always catch you.” She grinned at Kristin. “A real fish might escape, but this fish doesn’t have a chance with the kids. He

In the early summer, Capt. Wirz issued to the prisoners picks and shovels, with which to dig wells for increased water supply. From some of these wells the men started tunnels through which to escape. Discovering this, the commander withdrew the tools, and ordered the wells to be filled up. Permission to keep one of them open was purchased by a group of prisoners. It was sunk to a necessary depth, covered with a platform and trap door, and supplied about one thousand men.

Anger was such an easy emotion to feel, the refuge of someone who didn’t want to work too hard. Because his life in the summer of 2011 had been unfulfilling and going nowhere and he was so angry about it. Angry at his mother for leaving, angry at Bethany for not loving him, angry at his students for being uneducatable. He’d settled into the anger because the anger was so much easier than the work required to escape it. Blaming Bethany for not loving him was so much easier than the introspection needed to understand what he was doing that made him unlovable. Blaming

The Scripture of Zen is written with facts simple and familiar, so simple and familiar with everyday life that they escape observation on that very account. The sun rises in the east. The moon sets in the west. High is the mountain. Deep is the sea. Spring comes with flowers; summer with the cool breeze; autumn with the bright moon; winter with the fakes of snow. These things, perhaps too simple and too familiar for ordinary observers to pay attention to, have had profound significance for Zen.

Josephine looked at the scrawled note from her sister. A small huff escaped her, but she was not as overcome as Charley had been. “It will be hard to pass up an invitation like that,” she said. She passed the note to Krista. Krista did not laugh at all. “Good, I hoped you’d say that,” Charley said.

Variations on a Summer Day" I Say of the gulls that they are flying In light blue air over dark blue sea. II A music more than a breath, but less Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech, A repetition of unconscious things, Letters of rock and water, words Of the visible elements and of ours. III The rocks of the cliffs are the heads of dogs That turn into fishes and leap Into the sea. IV Star over Monhegan, Atlantic star, Lantern without a bearer, you drift, You, too, are drifting, in spite of your course; Unless in the darkness, brightly-crowned You are the will, if there is a will, Or the portent of a will that was, One of the portents of the will that was. V The leaves of the sea are shaken and shaken. There was a tree that was a father. We sat beneath it and sang our songs. VI It is cold to be forever young, To come to tragic shores and flow, In sapphire, round the sun-bleached stones, Being, for old men, time of their time. VII One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guineas, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent. VIII An exercise in viewing the world. On the motive! But one looks at the sea As one improvises, on the piano. IX This cloudy world, by aid of land and sea, Night and day, wind and quiet, produces More nights, more days, more clouds, more worlds. X To change nature, not merely to change ideas, To escape from the body, so to feel Those feelings that the body balks, The feelings of the natures round us here: As a boat feels when it cuts blue water. XI Now, the timothy at Pemaquid That rolled in heat is silver-tipped And cold. The moon follows the sun like a French Translation of a Russian poet. XII Everywhere the spruce trees bury soldiers: Hugh March, a sergeant, a redcoat, killed, With his men, beyond the barbican. Everywhere spruce trees bury spruce trees. XIII Cover the sea with the sand rose. Fill The sky with the radiantiana Of spray. Let all the salt be gone. XIV Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle Of mica, the dithering of grass, The Arachne integument of dead trees, Are the eye grown larger, more intense. XV The last island and its inhabitant, The two alike, distinguish blues, Until the difference between air And sea exists by grace alone, In objects, as white this, white that. XVI Round and round goes the bell of the water And round and round goes the water itself And that which is the pitch of its motion, The bell of its dome, the patron of sound. XVII Pass through the door and through the walls, Those bearing balsam, its field fragrance, Pine-figures bringing sleep to sleep. XVIII Low tide, flat water, sultry sun. One observes profoundest shadows rolling. Damariscotta dada doo. XIX One boy swims under a tub, one sits On top. Hurroo, the man-boat comes, In a man-makenesse, neater than Naples. XX You could almost see the brass on her gleaming, Not quite. The mist was to light what red Is to fire. And her mainmast tapered to nothing, Without teetering a millimeter's measure. The beads on her rails seemed to grasp at transparence. It was not yet the hour to be dauntlessly leaping.

Jill Falls for Jack" Really, they fell from bramble-scrawled oak trees, became snow angels without snow. Instead they made wings from the swept scars of lawn grass. After the mower blade cut, they tucked green shards between armpits, against elbows. It was still summer, but hardly, and they took turns jumping off limbs to let the wind escape them, again and again. On purpose they fell. Their throats scratched as they gasped for air, first he, then she. And then he reached over, put his lips on hers and blew breath, mouth to mouth, as if she suffered from drowning, as if her lungs were pails of water instead of dry, hollow. Until she breathed in, and the wind again made her feel like tumbling, like tumbling after.

destiny by the throat and wring its neck. My Japanese name is Masaji Ishikawa, and my Korean name is Do Chan-sun. I was born (for the first time) in the neighborhood of Mizonokuchi in the city of Kawasaki, just south of Tokyo. It was my misfortune to be born between two worlds—to a Korean father and a Japanese mother. Mizonokuchi is an area of gently sloping hills that now grows crowded on the weekends with visitors from Tokyo and Yokohama seeking an escape from the city and some fresh air. But sixty years ago, when I was a child, it consisted of little more than a few farms, with irrigation canals that led from the Tama River running between them. Back then, the irrigation canals were used not just for farming but also for household tasks like laundry and washing dishes. As a boy, I spent long summer days playing in the canals. I’d

She has touched me. My hatred for her has gone the way of the wind. She saved my life.” He quickly related the tale about the rattlesnake and how she had broken her silence to warn him. “You would prefer that she live for always away from you?” Hunter’s gut contracted. In that instant he realized how much he wanted the woman beside him. “I would prefer that my eyes never again fall upon her than to see her die.” His mouth twisted. “She has great heart for one so small. She makes war with nothing, and wins.” Many Horses nodded. “Huh, yes, Warrior and Swift Antelope have already told me.” “I would take my woman back to her land,” Hunter said. “I know the words of the prophecy, eh? And I would not displease the Great Ones, but I see no other path I might walk.” Hunter’s mother rose to her knees. “My husband, I request permission to speak.” Many Horses squinted into the shadows. “Then do it, woman.” She moved forward into the light, her brown eyes fathomless in the flickering amber. “I would but sing part of the song, so we might hear the words and listen.” She tipped her head back and clasped her hands before her. In a singsong voice, she recited, “‘When his hatred for the White Eyes is hot like the summer sun and cold like the winter snow, there will come to him a gentle maiden from tosi tivo land.’” “Yes, wife, I know the words,” Many Horses said impatiently. “But do you listen?” Woman with Many Robes fixed her all-seeing gaze on her eldest son. “Hunter, she did not come to you, as the prophecy foretold. You took her by force.” “Pia, what is it you’re saying? That she would have come freely?” A breath of laughter escaped Hunter’s lips. “The little blue-eyes? Never.” His mother held up a hand. “I say she would have, and that she shall. You must take her to her wooden walls. The Great Ones will lead her in a circle back to you.” Hunter glanced at his father. Many Horses set his pipe aside and gazed for a long while into the flames. “Your mother may be right. Perhaps we have acted wrongly, sending you to fetch her. Perhaps it was meant for her to come of her own free will.” Hunter swallowed back an argument. Though he didn’t believe his little blue-eyes would ever return to Comancheria freely, his parents had agreed that he should take her home, and that was enough. “What will lead her back to me, pia?” Woman with Many Robes smiled. “Fate, Hunter. It guides our footsteps. It will guide hers.

cold which threw me back a little.” As the weather grew warmer, she hoped to come home but was uncertain when they might be able to; politics was too consuming. “I do not know yet what we shall do this summer about going to Tennessee as Congress has not adjourned and [there is] no prospect of it soon. Uncle says we must go, if only to stay ten days.…” Jackson’s eagerness to escape Washington was understandable. A tariff reform bill was wending its way

Come inside and we’ll talk,” she says, opening my car door. “I’m freezing my butt off here. Oh, why don’t the Chicago summers last longer?” Inside, I take off my shoes so I won’t wake up her parents. “Don’t worry, they left for the health club an hour ago.” “Then why was Doug escaping out your window?” Sierra winks. “You know, to keep the relationship exciting. Guys love adventure.

We will need to hire a great deal of help if we’re ever to live in a proper house,” Annabelle had said pertly. “Unless you plan to have me on my hands and knees, scrubbing the floors and cleaning the grates?” The suggestion had caused Hunt’s coffee black eyes to glint with a wicked humor that escaped her. “I plan to have you on your hands and knees, my sweet, but I can guarantee that you won’t be scrubbing.” He had laughed softly as he saw her bewilderment.

Ambrose was ejected from the arena by Triple H. Later that night, Rollins came out and announced that he had won their match by forfeit. Ambrose would then burst into the ring and attack Rollins and a vicious brawl ensued where both men had to be pulled apart by both The Authority and security. Rollins was then shown leaving the arena into the parking lot, where Ambrose was hiding in the trunk of a car and attempted to attack Rollins with a tire iron before Rollins managed to drive away. On the August 4 edition of Raw, Ambrose won the Beat The Clock challenge against Rollins when he distracted him on his match to pick the stipulation for their match at SummerSlam. Later in the week on Smackdown, Ambrose revealed the stipulation to be a Lumberjack match against Rollins at SummerSlam. They fought at the SummerSlam pay-per-view where Ambrose lost to Rollins. The following night on Raw in Las Vegas, Nevada Triple H allowed the WWE Universe vote on the match stipulation for a rematch between Ambrose and Rollins that night on Raw. The stipulation ended up as a "Falls Count Anywhere" Match. During the contest Kane made his way out assisting Rollins. Kane uncovered a stack of cinder blocks at ring side and held Ambrose down to allow Rollins to perform his curb stomp on Amborse against the cinder blocks. Ambrose was then sent to a local medical center, had he not thrown off his restraints, refused treatment and escaped from WWE officials altogether and he hasn't been seen since that night. On Night of Champions, Ambrose returned and attacked Seth Rollins after Rollins issued an open challenge. On the October 6th episode of Raw, The Authority would make the first match of the Hell in a Cell pay-per-view to be Ambrose against John Cena with the stipulation of the winner facing Rollins in a Hell

WHY I WRITE POETRY It gives rhyme to reason, It is as elusive as a dream, Like the changes of the season, Poetry isn’t always what it seems. Like spring is to summer, And winter is to fall, It can be a beautiful sunrise, Or an ugly brawl. Why I write poetry, It can be a way to vent, An escape from reality, When nothing makes sense. Upheaval and neutrality, A soldier going into war, Conflicting moralities, Poetry defines what they are. Why I write poetry, Is to right a wrong, For racial equality, Not for some, but for all. One voice, one people, Joined by grace, Poetry is the rhyme and reason, Defining the human race.

I'm too lonely. Pull in this belly that I never used to think about and that now I can't forget. One of the tangible signs of a revolting maturity. The intoxication of forty is unimaginable to someone who hasn't reached this age. Up till then, the years roll by without leaving any sign except their too-certain but imponderable accumulation. Abstract vertigo. The idea but not the suffering of growing old. Knowledge without consciousness. And then a heaviness materializes, something we call the weight of years, without knowing what we're saying. Sickness and death cease being a virtual danger by which only others are threatened, or that other person who is ourself. Another self of mine that I see from outside, in the shelter of my youth, while it leans over the transom and watches Paris slowly emerging from the night in the happy summer dawn. Easy serenity. Faked revelation. Life begins at forty. End of youth. We all have the absurd certainty of escaping the common fate. Happy aberration to which I owe an excessive youth. So long that finally I got used to it. It's at fifteen that you suffer over growing old. Every protest's futile. Yet I refuse to consent. I reject decrepitude. Let the others submit.

Once the solar years blended into my rhythmic patterns on stone and critical screens, millions telling me the same old twisted scenes, glimmering glances of delight disguised as silver lining pause and model frames. Be very careful which universe you dwell in from now on, for even my own territory is casted within many phrases gone into the cracks where smoke can't escape, many have slit their tongues and throats for a splash of Spanish haze, and lost thick jungle heat only chest and breath could ever match in mid sonic reframe of resonance imagined in west coast hues scanning my pupils to yours, at once and foreseen many summer moons ago when the unknown was merely an oasis of water falling from heavenly thrones, getting off on this planet; getting off on your tones in phantom cosmic zones.

I always dream of some great unexpected infidelity. But I have not yet been able to escape my bigamous state." Milan Kundera, "The Paris Review" summer 1984 no. 92

All this may seem trivial. But in 1997 such corruption at the bottom end of the tourism industry helped to allow a band of heavily armed jihadists to breeze their way through numerous police and army checkpoints leading to the Hatshepsut Temple, near Luxor. There they proceeded to massacre dozens of tourists and Egyptians before escaping into the desert unhindered. Before the attack, the priority of many local soldiers and cops had been to extract bribes from locals working with tour groups, smoke cigarettes, and sleep away the long hot summer afternoons in the backs of their vans.

Until 2008 the mosquitoes on Cape Hatteras were the worst I’d ever experienced. That would all change once we stepped foot into Sky Lakes Wilderness in southern Oregon during my second thru-hike of the PCT. The Oregon snowpack during the previous winter had been well above average, which left lingering snow in the high country that summer. P.O.D. and I had been on a faster pace than I had in 2004 on the PCT and we ended up being in Sky Lakes Wilderness about 3 weeks earlier which was theoretically about six weeks earlier considering the timeframe of the snow melt. Long story short, we showed up during the peak of the mosquito season. The mosquitoes in Sky Lakes made those in Cape Hatteras look like lazy houseflies. It was beyond brutal. We were lucky to escape without requiring a transfusion.

Anita Sundström hoped she wasn’t making a ghastly mistake. A decision made in haste to be repented at leisure. Well, over the next two weeks. She stood nervously on the single platform of the small station in Simrishamn. The end of the line from Malmö. The day had turned out bright and warm after the previous night’s heavy rain, though she found herself shivering slightly as she looked down the deserted track while she waited for his train. She knew he was on it as he had texted ahead. She glanced across to the red-brick police station. Windows were open to let in much-needed air. Police life would be going on as usual. It reminded her that it was good to be on holiday. Her month-long summer leave had begun three days ago. When the weather was like this, it was good to get out of the city and escape to the countryside and coast of her beloved Österlen. She

The seasons come and go, summer follows spring and fall follows summer and winter follows fall, and human beings are born and mature, have their middle age, begin to grow older and die, and everything has its cycles. Day follows night, night follows day. It is good to be part of all of this.’ When you begin to have that kind of trust in basic creativity and directness and fullness, in the alive quality of yourself and your world, then you can begin to understand renunciation.

cigarette. They floated in the middle of the tropical green ocean with the islands in view. The water was doing something to Tatiana. It was dismantling her. With every flutter of the water she saw the Neva, the River Neva under the northern sun on the sub-Arctic white night city they once called home, the water rippled and in it was Leningrad, and in Leningrad was everything she wanted to remember and everything she wanted to forget. He was gazing at her. His eyes occasionally softened under the sticky Coconut Grove sun. “You’ve got new freckles, above your eyebrows.” He kissed her eyelids. “Golden, soft hair, ocean eyes.” He stroked her face, her cheeks. “Your scar is almost gone. Just a thin white line now. Can barely see it.” The scar she got escaping from the Soviet Union. “Hmm.” “Unlike mine?” “You have more to heal, husband.” Reaching out, she placed her hand on Alexander’s face and then closed her eyes quickly so he couldn’t pry inside her. “Tatiasha,” he called in a whisper, and then bent to her and kissed her long and true. It had been a year since she had found him shackled in Sachsenhausen’s isolation chamber. A year since she dredged him up from the bottomdwellers of Soviet-occupied Germany, from the grasping hands of Stalin’s henchmen. How could it have been a year? How long did it seem? An eternity in purgatory, a hemidemisemiquaver in heaven.