Ward Work Quotes

Do more than belong: participate. Do more than care: help. Do more than believe: practice. Do more than be fair: be kind. Do more than forgive: forget. Do more than dream: work.

...When it was finished, the scaled dragon looked around and as the thing spotted V, a growl rippled up to the bleachers, then ended in a snort. "You finished, big guy?" Va called down. "FYI, goalpost over there would work righteous as a toothpick.

Okay. Right. Horror meets romance meets erotica meets fantasy meets hip hop. Throw in some leather and some Miami Ink shit, stir with a baseball bat and a tire iron, sprinkle on some baby powder, and serve over a hot bed of Holy-Mary-mother-of-God-this-has-to-work-or-I'm-going-to-be-a-lawyer-for-the-rest-of-my-natural-life. No problem." (J.R. Ward on the elements of writing the Black Dagger Brotherhood)

So,” Marasi said, “you traded a dead man’s scarf for another dead man’s gun. But…the gun itself belonged to someone dead, so by the same logic—” “Don’t try,” Waxillium said. “Logic doesn’t work on Wayne.” “I bought a ward against it off a traveling fortune-teller,” Wayne explained. “It lets me add two ’n’ two and get a pickle.

When she orgasmed, she said his name. Twice. And didn’t it make him glad that even though he had no voice, his ears worked just fine. –JM

-BDB on the board- Knitter's Anonimous May 8, 2006 Rhage (in his bedroom posting in V's room on the board) Hi, my name is V. ("Hi, V") I've been knitting for 125 years now. (*gasping noises*) It's begun to impact my personal relationships: my brothers think I'm a nancy. It's begun to affect my health: I'm getting a callus on my forefinger and I find bits of yarn in all my pockets and I'm starting to smell like wool. I can't concentrate at work: I keep picturing all these lessers in Irish sweaters and thick socks. (*sounds of sympathy*) I've come seeking a community of people who, like me, are trying not to knit. Can you help me? (*We're with you*) Thank you (*takes out hand-knitted hankie in pink*) (*sniffles*) ("We embrace you, V") Vishous (in the pit): Oh hell no...you did not just put that up. And nice spelling in the title. Man...you just have to roll up on me, don't you. I got four words for you, my brother. Rhage: Four words? Okay...lemme see... Rhage, you're so sexy. hmmm.... Rhage, you're SO smart. No wait! Rhage, you're SO right! That's it, isn't it...g'head. You can tell me. Vishous: First one starts with a "P" Use your head for the other three. Bastard. Rhage: P? Hmm... Please pass the yarn Vishous: Payback is a bitch! Rhage: Ohhhhhhhhhhhh I'm so scuuuuuurred. Can you whip me up a blanket to hide under?

You know why it didn’t work out with him?” “Why?” “Because God made you for me.

Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up.

Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

Maybe your life will work. Most likely it won't at first but that will give you poetry.

Study while others are sleeping; work while others are loafing; prepare while others are playing; and dream while others are wishing.

For people who like that kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they like.

How many of them were there?' Her voice wasn't joking around. Eighteen. Hundred.' Four,' Blaylock interjected. 'An honor guard of four.' What did they work you over with? Those bruises on your thighs are severe?' Crowbars. Big, massive-' Blay cut in. 'Clubs. Had to be those ceremonial black clubs.

In some ways, com­ing to terms with my­self and work­ing to­ward re­cov­ery has been like say­ing “I love you” to some­one but keep­ing a loaded gun hid­den in your back pocket, just in case that per­son pisses you off enough.

This is going to be a really long couple of months if we worry about ever little twinge." "You just tried to throw up your liver." "I did not." So you were working on your pancreas?

-BDB on the board- VAMPIRES WITH ONE EYEBROW ARE SEXY May 8, 2006 Vishous (Back in the Pit, posting in Rhage's room on the board) Hi! My name is Rhage.....:) I'm starting a new trend in facial hair. Having one eyebrow is COOL. Having one eyebrow is SEXY. Having one eyebrow is very INTELLECTUAL. Come. Join me. Rhage: (In his bedroom) 1. He immobilized me, the motherfucker. Or I woud have gone to work on the goatee. AND IF HE WERE SO TOUGH HE WOULDN'T HAVE HAD TO PUT A WHAMMY ON MY ASS TO GET AT ME. 2. My hair grows back VERY fast. I should be BACK TO NORMAL in a couple of days. 3. Even if it takes me the rest of this month...he has SO got it coming for him. Vishous: Rhage! What happened to your eyebrow? Why...it's gone. Did you slip while you were shaving? Hey....lemme ask you something...Does your head feel off-kilter? You know, heavier on one side?

Pritkin muttered something that sounded fairly vicious. “My clothes are warded! Even if I wished to accede to your demand, it would not work on them.” “Then strip.” “I beg your pardon?” He sounded almost polite suddenly, as if he believed he couldn’t possibly have heard right.

Vishous: "...we both would slaughter anything that so much as startled you." Jane: "I'm scared of mice and spiders. But you don't need to use that gun on your hip to blow a hole in a wall if I ran into one, okay? Havaheart traps and rolled newspapers work just as well. Plus, you don't need a Sheetrock patch and plaster job afterward. I'm just saying.

Ah, hell. His peripheral vision was working far too well tonight. His slut of a cousin, his cocksucking, suit-wearing, Montblanc-up-the-ass cousin Saxton the Magnificent, was standing next to the queen, looking like a combination of Cary Grant and some model in a goddamn cologne ad. Not that Qhuinn was bitter. Because the guy was sharing Blay's bed. Nah. Nope. Not at all. The Cocksucker- With a wince, he thought maybe he should switch that insult to something a little farther away from what the two of them ... God, he couldn't even go there. Not if he wanted to breathe.

What.” Oh, for God’s sake. “Fine. Why wouldn’t it ever work out?” “Because I was, and I remain, utterly and completely and totally… in love with you.” Qhuinn’s mouth dropped open.

We work together. That’s it. So I want you to do us both a favor before you think I ‘need’ to know something. Ask yourself, ‘If I were flipping burgers at McDonald’s, would I be telling the fucking fry guy this?’ If the answer is no, then shut the hell up.

Do me a favor?” he whispered. Beth's hold tightened on his hand. ”Anything, what do you need?” ”Hum the Jeopardy theme.” There was a pause.Then Beth burst out laughing and swatted his shoulder. ”Wrath-” ”Actually,take your clothes off and hum it while doing some belly grooves.” As his shellan bent down and kissed his forehead, he looked up at her through his wraparounds. ”You think I'm kidding? Come on, we both need the distraction. And I promise I'll tip well” "You never carry cash." He extended his tongue and swept it over his upper lip. "I plan on working it off.

Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was.

Evagrius said, ‘A wandering mind is strengthened by reading, and prayer. Passion is dampened down by hunger and work and solitude. Anger is repressed by psalmody and long-suffering and mercy. But all these should be at the proper times and in due measure.

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the biggest hardship can lead to your greatest blessing. It just takes time to see that God works in mysterious ways.

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.

WARD: I’ll be home in time for dinner, honey. JUNE: Alright—I’m pregnant—Have a fine day at work, dear. WARD exits… WARD reenters. JUNE: Did you forget something, dear? WARD: What did you say? JUNE: I asked if you’d forgotten anything—

When her blue-black eyes lifted to his, everything disappeared. Their bodies dematerialized. The room they were in ceased to exist. Time became nothing. And in the void, in the wormhold, Wrath's chest opened up sure as if he'd been shot, a piercing pain licking over his nerve endings. He knew then that there are many ways for a heart to break. Sometimes it's from the crowding of life, the compression of responsibility and birthright and burden that just squeezed you until you couldn't breathe anymore. Even though your lungs were working just fine. And sometimes it's from the casual cruelty of a fate that took you far from where you had thought you would end up. And sometimes it's age in the face of youth. Or sickness in the face of health. But sometimes it's just because you're looking into the eyes of your lover, and your gratitude for having them in your life overflows...because you showed them what was on the inside and they didn't run scared or turn away: they accepted you and loved you and held you in the midst of your passion or your fear...or your combination of both. Wrath closed his eyes and focused on the soft pulls at his wrist. God, they were just like the beat of his heart. Which made sense. Because she was the center of his chest. And the center of his world.

Leaning down onto his arms, he prowled up the bed to her body, his eyes fixated on her secret skin as if he'd never seen anything like it. When he got in range, wide hands smoothed their way up the insides of her thighs, opening them even farther. But then he frowned and looked up at her. "Wait, I'm supposed to kiss you on the mouth first, aren't I? I mean, males start at the top and work their way down, don't they?" What and odd question... like he'd never done this at all? Before she could reply he began to move back, so she sat up and captured his face in her hands. "You can do whatever you like to me." His eyes flashed and he held his position for a split second. Then he lunged at her, taking her down onto the bed. His tongue shot into her mouth and his hands tangled in her hair, pulling on her, arching her, trapping her head. The hunger in him was ferocious, a warrior's thick-blooded need for sex. He was going to take her with all the strength he had, and she was going to be sore when he was through using her. Sore and utterly blissed out. She couldn't wait.

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?-- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,-- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,-- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,-- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.

This was hers and hers alone. Forevermore. Or at least so I thought… but shit didn’t work out that way, and then you came along… and circle be damned, I don’t want to be finished with you.” Now it was her turn to feel poleaxed, her body going numb as she struggled to comprehend what he was saying. “Autumn, I’m in love with you—that’s why I came here tonight. And we don’t have to be together, and you don’t have to get over what I said, but I wanted you to hear that from me. And I also want to tell you that I’m at peace with it, because…” He took a deep breath. “You want to know why Wellsie got pregnant? It wasn’t because I wanted a young. It’s because she knew that every night when I left the house I could get killed in the field, and as she said, she wanted something to keep on living for. If I had been the one to go? She would have carved out a life for herself, and… the strange thing is, I would have wanted her to do that. Even if it included someone else. I guess I’ve realized that… she wouldn’t have wanted me to mourn her forever. She’d have wanted me to move on… and I have.

They wore their professional clothes like armor. They wielded their work like weapons, warding off the presumption of inferiority because they were Negro or female.

If man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do. If, for instance, Siddhartha had not learned to fast, he would have had to seek some kind of work today, either with you, or elsewhere, for hunger would have driven him. But as it is, Siddhartha can wait calmly. He is not impatient, he is not in need, he can ward off hunger for a long time and laugh at it. Therefore, fasting is useful, sir.

I am somewhere else now. I am part human, part metaphysics, and I still haven't worked out which parts of me are which. I love this new form. I can feel space traveling through me. I am porous and wondrous and bold ... It's not that I loved to leave, rather that staying was always completely impossible.

‎"Do more than belong: participate. Do more than care: help. Do more than believe: practice. Do more than be fair: be kind. Do more than forgive: forget. Do more than dream: work."- William Arthur Ward ♥

Antony said to Poemen, ‘Our great work is to lay the blame for our sins upon ourselves before God, and to expect to be tempted to our last breath.

You, Doctor Martin, walk from breakfast to madness. Late August, I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talk of pushing their bones against the thrust of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel or the laughing bee on a stalk of death. We stand in broken lines and wait while they unlock the doors and count us at the frozen gates of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken and we move to gravy in our smock of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates scratch and whine like chalk in school. There are no knives for cutting your throat. I make moccasins all morning. At first my hands kept empty, unraveled for the lives they used to work. Now I learn to take them back, each angry finger that demands I mend what another will break tomorrow. Of course, I love you; you lean above the plastic sky, god of our block, prince of all the foxes. The breaking crowns are new that Jack wore. Your third eye moves among us and lights the separate boxes where we sleep or cry. What large children we are here. All over I grow most tall in the best ward. Your business is people, you call at the madhouse, an oracular eye in our nest. Out in the hall the intercom pages you. You twist in the pull of the foxy children who fall like floods of life in frost. And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, counting this row and that row of moccasins waiting on the silent shelf.

Lot of folks was in there for stealing food because everybody was poor and starving, and even though White people couldn’t get your work for free, they did everything they could to avoid hiring you and paying you for it.

And it was kind of funny to see all these professional fighters unwilling to get within a mile of the female. Then again, if you wanted to survive doing the work they did, accurate risk assessment was something you developed early -- and even Qhuinn, who was the object of the protective instinct the Chosen was rocking, wouldn't have dared touch her.

As he stepped forward, it dawned on her that this was a bad idea. If he wanted to talk she should meet him downstairs. After all, he was very male. And she was very naked. And they were now... yup, shut in a bedroom together. Good planning. Excellent work. Maybe she should jump out a window next.

We’re both fucked up. Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe we see a little of ourselves in each other. We’re two wrongs that somehow make a right. Inseparable we’re miserable, but together… we somehow work.

Mary tucked into a ball, shielding herself from the tail's barbs. She covered her ears and closed her eyes, cutting off the juicy sounds and the horrible sight of the killing. Moments later she felt her body being nudged. The beast was pushing at her with its nose. She rolled over and looked up into its white eyes. "I'm fine. But we're going to have to work on your table manners." The beast purred and stretched out on the ground next to her, resting its head between its forelegs. There was a brilliant flash of light and then Rhage appeared in the same position.

In the context of the English language, there were many more important words than “in.” There were fancy words, historic words, words that meant life or death. There were multi-syllabic tongue-twisters that required a sort out before speaking, and mission-critical pivotals that started wars or ended wars…and even poetic nonsensicals that were like a symphony as they left the lips. Generally speaking, “in” did not play with the big boys. In fact, it barely had much of a definition at all, and, in the course of its working life, was usually nothing but a bridge, a conduit for the heavy lifters in any given sentence. There was, however, one context in which that humble little two-letter, one-syllable jobbie was a BFD. Love. The difference between someone “loving” somebody versus being “in love” was a curb to the Grand Canyon. The head of a pin to the entire Midwest. An exhale to a hurricane.

Success is not the result of making one good choice, of taking one step. Real success requires step, after step, after step, after step. It requires choice after choice, it demands life-long education and passion and commitment and persistence and hunger and patience.

she thought about what happily-ever-afters were about, and decided that true love didn’t mean effortless, and ever-after wasn’t about cruise control. You started with the attraction, and then you opened your heart and your soul—but all that, which was no small thing, just got you to first base. There were many, many other trips to take to deeper levels of greater acceptance and understanding. That was where you found the happy. And the ever-after was the work you were always willing to put in to stay close, to learn, and to grow as people together.

It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is the rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution which destroys the machinery but the friction. Fear secretes acids; but love and trust are sweet juices.

Whether we are speaking of a flower or an oak tree, of an earthworm or a beautiful bird, of an ape or a person, we will do well, I believe, to recognize that life is an active process, not a passive one. Whether the stimulus arises from within or without, whether the environment is favorable or unfavorable, the behaviors of an organism can be counted on to be in the direction of maintaining, enhancing, and reproducing itself. This is the very nature of the process we call life. This tendency is operative at all times. Indeed, only the presence or absence of this total directional process enables us to tell whether a given organism is alive or dead. The actualizing tendency can, of course, be thwarted or warped, but it cannot be destroyed without destroying the organism. I remember that in my boyhood, the bin in which we stored our winter's supply of potatoes was in the basement, several feet below a small window. The conditions were unfavorable, but the potatoes would begin to sprout—pale white sprouts, so unlike the healthy green shoots they sent up when planted in the soil in the spring. But these sad, spindly sprouts would grow 2 or 3 feet in length as they reached toward the distant light of the window. The sprouts were, in their bizarre, futile growth, a sort of desperate expression of the directional tendency I have been describing. They would never become plants, never mature, never fulfill their real potential. But under the most adverse circumstances, they were striving to become. Life would not give up, even if it could not flourish. In dealing with clients whose lives have been terribly warped, in working with men and women on the back wards of state hospitals, I often think of those potato sprouts. So unfavorable have been the conditions in which these people have developed that their lives often seem abnormal, twisted, scarcely human. Yet, the directional tendency in them can be trusted. The clue to understanding their behavior is that they are striving, in the only ways that they perceive as available to them, to move toward growth, toward becoming. To healthy persons, the results may seem bizarre and futile, but they are life's desperate attempt to become itself. This potent constructive tendency is an underlying basis of the person-centered approach.

The bottom line is...if you were in the civilian population, you'd be a serial killer. Working for the government means you get to wave the American flag around when it suits you, but the truth is, you do what you do because you enjoy picking the wings off of flies. And everybody's an insect in your eyes.

Encounters between people, it often seems to me, are like trains passing at breakneck speed in the night. We cast fleeting looks at the passengers sitting behind dull glass in dim light, who disappear from our field of vision almost before we perceive them. Was it really a man and a woman who flashed past like phantoms, who came out of nothing into the empty dark, without meaning or purpose? Did they know each other? Did they talk? Laugh? Cry? People will say: That's how it is when strangers pass one another in rain and wind and there might be something in the comparison. But we sit opposite people for longer, we eat and work together, lie next to each other, live under the same roof. Where is the haste? Yet everything that gives the illusion of permanence, familiarity, and intimate knowledge: isn't it a deception invented to reassure, with which we try to conceal and ward off the flickering, disturbing haste because it could be impossible to live with all the time. Isn't every exchange of looks between people like the ghostly brief meeting of eyes between travellers passing one another, intoxicated by the inhuman speed and the shock of air pressure that makes everything shudder and clatter? Don't our looks bounce off others, as in the hasty encounter of the night, and leave us with nothing but conjectures, slivers of thoughts and imagined qualities? Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?

...His eyes are very dark now. They’re watching his fingers as he gently winds my hair around them. It looks as if he isn’t in control of his own hand, as if even he’s trying to work out what it’s doing. I’m watching his eyes and I’m positive he can hear my heart, which is racing, pounding inside my chest now...

No? Not working for you, huh? Okay. How about, Simon –my love for you is brighter than all the stars in the sky. Now let’s go put some sour cream on the big burrito.

Now, I ask this question of all of us and lay this burden upon us: What circumstances are at work right now in our wards, silently separating one sister here and another sister there from the sisterhood of the Relief Society, marginalizing them, making them invisible? And what can we do about it? . . . For example, LDS women are participating in the labor force in ever-increasing numbers. These women need Relief Society. They need the strength of sisterhood. They need to be understood. They need support with their families. They don’t need to be told that they’re selfish or unrighteous because they’re working. They need to be told they are loved.

When humans work, they frequently become unaware of their own body, their own senses, are surprised to find that their wrists ache or their backs are sore or their friend has left the building. It's as close to an out-of-body experience as can be achieved short of fifty volts, a circle of warding, a pigeon's claw cut from an albino female of purest white feathers, or a lot of mushrooms.

Good, glad you agree,” Wrath muttered as he cued George. The dog signaled that they’d come up to a barrier by halting, and Wrath reached out, his palm finding a sheet that was stiff and thick. Dropping his hold on the halter, he used two hands to pull it aside so he didn’t tear it from its tethers above. The voices stopped immediately. Except for one that breathed, “Holy . . . shit.” All at once there was a clattering, as if tools were being dropped to the floor—and then a rustling. Like seven males of some size had just gone down on their knees. For a moment, Wrath’s eyes teared up behind his wraparounds. “Evening,” he said, trying to be all casual. “How’s the work going?” No answer. And he could smell the stunned disbelief—it was like sautéed onions, not entirely unpleasant. “My lord,” came a low greeting. “It is a great honor to be in your presence.” He opened his mouth to blow that off . . . except as he inhaled, he realized that was the truth. For each and every one of them. They were honestly in awe and overcome. In a hoarse voice, he said, “Welcome to my home.

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn red or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant. She is always carrying bags of clothes, bouquets of roses, take-out Chinese containers, or bagels. Museum tags fill her pockets and purses, along with perfume samples and invitations to art gallery openings. When she is walking to work, to ward off bums or psychos, her face resembles the Statue of Liberty, but at home in her candlelit, dove-colored apartment, the stony look fades away and she smiles like the sterling roses she has brought for herself to make up for the fact that she is single and her feet are sore.

No, I was just trying to burn a hole in the side of your face with my laser vision. It didn't work.

And the least stupid, fleeing the herd where fate has penned them fast, take refuge in the wards of opium, so much for what is news around the world.

I hover over myself Watching. Mind and body separated, Each in control As though there are two puppeteers Working the strings of my marionette self.

A relationship is a very delicate business. You have to work at it every day.

Work till you drop dead, and get back up till you drop again!

Logic doesn’t work on Wayne.” “I bought a ward against it off a traveling fortune-teller,” Wayne explained. “It lets me add two ’n’ two and get a pickle.

Conversation between Siddhartha, who has temporarily given up all worldly possessions in order to experience total poverty first hand, talks to a merchant. That seems to be the way of things. Everyone takes, everyone gives. Life is like that" (said Siddhartha) Ah, but if you are without possessions, how can you give?" Everyone gives what he has. The soldier gives strength, the merchant goods, the teacher instructions, the farmer rice, the fisherman fish." Very well and what can you give? What have you learned that you can give(the merchant asks of Siddhartha) I can think, I can wait, I can fast." Is that all?" I think that is all." And of what use are they? For example, fasting, what good is that?" It is of great value, sir. If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do. If, for instance, Siddhartha had not learned to fast, he would have had to seek some kind of work today, either with you, or elsewhere, for hunger would have driven him. But, as it is, Siddhartha can wait calmly. He is not impatient, he is not in need, he can ward off hunger for a long time and laugh at it. Therefore, fasting is useful, sir.

He knew then that there are many ways for a heart to break. Sometimes it’s from the crowding of life, the compression of responsibility and birth right and burden that just squeezed you until you couldn’t breathe anymore. Even though your lungs were working just fine. And sometimes it’s from the casual cruelty of a fate that took you far from where you had thought you would end up. And sometimes it’s age in the face of youth. Or sickness in the face of health. But sometimes it’s just because you’re looking into the eyes of your lover and your gratitude for having them in your life overflows... because you showed them what was on the inside and they didn’t run scared or turn away, they accepted you and loved you and held you in the midst of your passion or your fear... or your combination of both.

she was attempting to deploy enchantments of her own — the fiancé, the ordinary hobbies and the sensible office job were so many sigils to ward off chaos. It was not an ineffective magic. It worked

Sorry. My medium powers are on the fritz, and I can’t channel spirits or bells right now. I’ll get them worked on later. For–” – Sundown “Shh. The wasps are talking to someone. I hear them so clearly.” – Abigail ‘Okay, time to get someone to a psych ward.’ – Sundown

He swiveled his head towards Eddie. "Tell me how to get over to the Four Lads. Do I have to die again?" If he did, he had a Beretta on him and he knew what kicking the bucket from a gunshot was like. Snore. "Don't bother." Adrian cracked his knuckles. "They're not going to tell you anything. They can't." What the fuck? "I thought I worked for them." "You work for both sides, and they've given you all the help they can." Jim looked back and forth between the two angels. Each of them had the tight expression of a guy with a shoestring noosing up his balls. "Help?" he said. "Where's my goddamned help?" "They gave you us, asshole," Adrian snapped. "And that's all they can do--I've already gone over and asked them who's supposed to be next. I figured it would help you, you ungrateful bastard.

I began to see her mind like an old television set, one with a dial you had to change the channels. She'd gotten stuck between channels and all that was broadcasting in her mind was crackling white noise which drove her mad and scared me to death. The medicine was like turning down the volume. The channles might still be stuck but at least the set was no longer spewing the deafening static. The volume had to be lowered until the channels could work again

just as children have growing pains as their bodies work to attain maturity, as people’s souls deepen and gain resonance it’s the same thing. To be challenged, to stretch, to get stronger comes only with the hard stuff—loss, heartache, disappointment.

especially those of us who use magic on a regular basis, have to work the wards." "So hes basically blocking members of the Authority?" "Hounds use magic every day. Doctors, teachers." "Point taken. Good to know she's safe from evil magic-using teachers.

... I've run out of options. Stay with the lying psycho or work for the other lying psycho.

I was taught that the most hardworking nurse is found at the dirtiest part of the clinical ward.

Walt Whitman, who worked as a nurse in the hospital wards, that the harrowing experience made one’s “little cares and difficulties” disappear “into nothing.

Former design studios that now do nothing more than curate their blogs showing other people's work and sell ad space to make a living. It all feels very strange to me.

That is the real work of elite performers in any sport or industry.

You know why it didn’t work out with him?” “Why?” “Because God made you for me.” Not

What my mother left unsaid: I’ll keep working, supporting us all, while you try to live your dream. Her sacrifice remained unacknowledged.

Just so we’re clear, I am not going to apologize to anyone for being a waitress. Work is work. You do everything the best you can, and it doesn’t matter what it is.

I’ve missed you,” he blurted. “More than I’ve wanted to admit—and now that you’re here with me, I can’t figure out why I worked so fucking hard to avoid telling you that.

Here's the way it works. You're going to find yourself at a crossroads.. There's going to be a dcision you'll have to make, an action to be taken or not, a choice between polar opposites. All of what you are and what you have been and what you could be will be measured on your decision. And the consequences? They don't just affect you. They affect everyone. This is not simple life and death - it's about eternity. Yours. Others'. Do not understimate how far this goes.

As he kissed her back, she thought about what happily-ever-afters were about, and decided that true love didn’t mean effortless, and ever-after wasn’t about cruise control. You started with the attraction, and then you opened your heart and your soul—but all that, which was no small thing, just got you to first base. There were many, many other trips to take to deeper levels of greater acceptance and understanding. That was where you found the happy. And the ever-after was the work you were always willing to put in to stay close, to learn, and to grow as people together.

Good news: it's Christmas morning. Bad news: I have to work on labour ward. Worse news: my phone goes off. It's my registrar. I didn't set my alarm and now they're wondering where the hell I am. Even worse news: I'm asleep in my car. It takes me a while to establish where I am or why. Good news: it seems I fell asleep after my shift last night and I'm already at work, in the hospital car park.

V smiled, his eyes a little shiny as if he too were choked up. "Don't worry, I'm covered. So, I guess you're back, true?" "And ready to rock and roll." "Really." "For sure. I'm thinking about a future in contracting. Wanted to see how this bathroom was put together. Excellent tile work. You should check it." "How about I carry you back to bed?" "I want to look at the sink pipes next." Respect and affection clearly drove V's cool smirk. "At least let me help you up." "Nah, I can do it." With a groan, Butch gave the vertical move a shot, but then eased back down onto the tile. Turned out his head was a little overwhelming. But if they left him here long enough-a week, maybe ten days? "Come on, cop. Cry uncle here and let me help." Butch was suddenly too tired to front. As he went totally limp, he was aware of Marissa staring at him and thought, man, could he look any weaker? Shit, the only saving grace was there wasn't a cold breeze on his butt. Which suggested the hospital gown had stayed closed. Thank you, God.

Don't you want to find out who else you are—other than a receptionist?" She frowned. "There is honor in all works." "And maybe there is greatness waiting for you—if you only get back up on your feet and keep going.

Please, be kind to yourself. Please love yourself. Please work through your fears (dive deep), your insecurities (speak loudly), your anger (scream into the ground, the ocean, your pillow – not into the mirror, nor at your parents, nor at your friends, your lover, your neighbours, your dog. They don’t deserve it.) The ocean and the Earth can handle your anger. They are as volatile. Powerful. Inherently energetic. So are you. Don’t numb yourself. Don’t kill yourself. We need you. We need your love, your generosity, your joy, your bright, bright, light.

Don’t try,” Waxillium said. “Logic doesn’t work on Wayne.” “I bought a ward against it off a traveling fortune-teller,” Wayne explained. “It lets me add two ’n’ two and get a pickle.” “I … have no response to that,” Marasi said.

The thing was all mortals were going to lose the ones they loved. It was the way life worked. But for the most of the time, that reality was so far off in the mind that it had no more weight than a mere hypothetical. There were reminders, however, and the almost's, the near-misses, the oh-God-please-no's, snapped your chain and got you to stop and feel what was in your heart.

We can already see this process at work in geriatric hospital wards. Due to an uncompromising humanist belief in the sanctity of human life, we keep people alive till they reach such a pitiful state that we are forced to ask, ‘What exactly is so sacred here?

...it was easy to forget that Washington was just another glum city of government, like Albany or Sacramento, legislators and lobbyists and bureaucrats and their clerks working and reworking the sodden language of government in order to distribute the spoils.

Everyone needs something from their mother. It's the way it works." When he smiled, she said, "What?" "No one ever disagrees with me. But you." Jane looked down at her own hands, her brows getting tight. "Not one of my virtues, huh." "Actually, it's a part of you I love most." When she glanced at him in surprise, he leaned in quick and kissed her on the mouth--even though he shouldn't have.

Vera always seemed to be in a hurry, but when she got into a bus she would sit herself down as comfortably as possible on the broken springs of the seat, or else reach out for a strap, hang onto it and think to herself, “I don’t want to do anything.” In spite of common sense she knew that she merely had to kill the hours of the evening, then hurry back to work the next morning in an identical bus.

It’s peaceful. Death can be a release and a relief for the person, and that is a blessing. The thing is, a lot of times, it is work to die. It requires physical and emotional effort. What sucks is that for most, particularly if they’re dying out of sequence, it’s a job they don’t want. It’s about loss of control, loss of function, loss of identity and independence…loss of choice and decision, of family and friends. But if you can let go of all that, what comes with it is freedom. A soaring freedom, the soul released from its temporary prison of mortality.” - Ivie

In real life, I looked at my father and mother and understood dimly that it was harder to be a girl, that boys had it easier. Here, boys could buy and ride motorcycles and come and leave when they wanted to and exude a kind of cool while they stood shirtless at the edge of the street, talking and laughing with one another, passing a beer around, smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile, the women I knew were working even when they weren’t at work: cooking, washing loads of clothes, hanging them to dry, and cleaning the house. There was no time for them to just relax and be. Even then I dimly knew there was some gendered differences between my brother and me, knew that what the world expected of us and allowed us would differ.

That’s all very well, but how many family doctors would you need? It simply doesn’t fit into the system of a free universal national health service.” “It’ll fit into a universal national health service, but it won’t fit into a free health service,” said Oreshchenkov, rumbling on and clinging confidently to his point. “But it’s our greatest achievement, the fact that it’s a free service.” “Is this in fact such a great achievement? What does ‘free’ mean? The doctors don’t work for nothing, you know. It only means that they’re paid out of the national budget and the budget is supported by patients. It isn’t free treatment, it’s depersonalized treatment. If a patient kept the money that pays for his treatments, he would have turned the ten roubles he has to spend at the doctor’s over and over in his hands. He could go to the doctor five times over if he really needed to.

I can tell you quite frankly: even when we were having the most intellectual conversations and I honestly thought and believed everything I said, I still wanted all the time, all the time, to pick you up and kiss you on the lips. So try to work that out. And now, without your permission, I kiss them.

Let me get this straight. You and I are in the Brotherhood's mobile surgical van, on our way to the training center because you were shot and now have a tube in your head to reduce brain swelling...and you're coming on to me?" "My gray matter isn't the only thing getting bigger." "You're like the indestructible slut, aren't you." "You know, to most people, slut is an insult." He tried to lift his had to make the point. And failed. "I personally take it as a compliment. Shows commitment to my work.

I felt her tension lift as soon as my hands went to work. Massaging her upper back, I pressed my thumbs especially hard into her. She hung her head low as she relaxed her body, giving me full control. The sounds she was making were driving me a bit mad. This woman was wound up and needed a hell of a lot more than my hands. It took everything in me not to bend down and devour her neck. My fingers were definitely working on behalf of my cock that unfortunately couldn’t be here to accept this award tonight.

Phury laid a hard one on the male’s mouth, the kiss a punch between faces, not anything even remotely sexual. And he did it only to wipe the expression off the bastard’s face. It worked. The Reverend stiffened and growled, and Phury knew he’d called the guy’s bluff. But just to make sure the lesson was learned, he clipped the male’s lower lip with a fang.

Sometimes you had to sit on the sidelines while the one you loved worked their shit out.

My buddy’s just being an ass. It’s his life’s work.” “Everyone needs a purpose.

I have worked locked psych wards and had patients give me stories they wrote or poems and this reminded me of that... Word salad!

Sometimes things don't work out and the reason has nothing to do with you, or how good you are.

Thomas Ward found, we are twice as creative when the first impulse doesn’t work.

With a gentle hand, he brushed his shellan’s cheek. “I’ve never been in a relationship before you. I should have known that we’d hit a wall at some point.” “That’s the way it works.

The more intermingling of races, which a modern city shares with those old towns of Asia Minor, predisposes the mind to a greater openness and receptiveness, whether for good or evil.

He said he enjoyed doing security work for Mr. Jimmerson, keeping nuts and gangsters out of grenade range of the Master, but that one day he hoped to marry a woman who owned a Jeep with raised white letters on the tires. He would take her home and ride around town some. “Look,” the people would say, “there goes Ed in four-wheel drive, with his pretty wife at his side.” The way to get women, he said, was with a camera. Chloroform was no good, at best a makeshift. But all the girls liked to pose for a camera and became immediately submissive to anyone carrying a great tangle of photographic equipment from his shoulders. You didn’t even need film. He said he had once killed a man when he was in the Great Berets by ramming a pencil up his nose and into his brain. Babcock said, “It’s the Green Berets.” "What did I say?" "You said the Great Berets. But you weren’t in the Green Berets or the Great Berets either one, Ed. I don’t know why you want to say things like that. I’ve seen your records." "I was in a ward with a guy named Danny who was a Green Beret." "Yes, but that’s not the same thing.

They also bring to mind what sometimes seems to be a rapt predilection of small but influential cults of intellectuals or esthetes for what is generally regarded as perverse dispirited or distastefully unintelligible. The award of a Nobel Prize in literature to Andre Gide who in his work fervently and openly insists that pederasty is the superior and preferable way of life for adolescent boys furnishes a memorable example of such judgments. Renowned critics and some professors in our best universities reverently acclaim as the superlative expression of genius James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake a 628page collection of erudite gibberish indistinguishable to most people from the familiar word salad produced by hebephrenic patients on the back wards of any state hospital.

It is always helpful to us to fix our attention on the God-ward aspect of Christian work; to realise that the work of God does not mean so much man's work for God, as God's own work through man.

I’d heard that in some of the newer mental wards they set the mad and congenitally stupid to rote tasks, having them sew buttons onto mounds of fabric, the futile labor working as a salve to their broken minds. I wonder sometimes whether the guard is not an extension of this therapy on a far grander scale, an elaborate social program meant to give the low functioning an illusion of purpose.

You were never able to understand how he could do what he did to you, why things happened that way. I figured it out. You know why it didn’t work out with him?” “Why?” “Because God made you for me.

Work and boredom.- Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards. if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men all kinds belong· to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery if only it is associated with pleasure. and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise. their idleness is resolute. even if it speIls impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable "windless calm" of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure. Perhaps Asians are distinguished above Europeans by a capacity for longer, deeper calm; even their opiates have a slow effect and require patience, as opposed to the disgusting suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.

I just don't want to have more people to lose. It sounds mental, but I'd rather be alone than be devastated when things don't work out and he leaves. Or something horrible happens and I lose him entirely.

outfit for work that day. She matched the colors of the Washington Wolves perfectly. She was all sleekness and shine with her black dress, white jacket, red shoes, red lips, and a silvery white bob that fell

It is not work that kills men, it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more on a man than he can bear. But worry is rust upon the blade. It is not movement that destroys the machinery, but friction.’ —HENRY WARD BEECHER

It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery but the friction.—Henry Ward Beecher.

Blay leaned in, his upper lip peeling back from his fangs. “Just so we’re clear, your cousin is giving me what I need. All day long. Every day. You and me?” He motioned back and forth between them with the cigarette. “We work together. That’s it. So I want you to do us both a favor before you think I ‘need’ to know something. Ask yourself, ‘If I were flipping burgers at McDonald’s, would I be telling the fucking fry guy this?’ If the answer is no, then shut the hell up.

Rhage glared over the top of the Caldwell Courier Journal. From his vantage point on V and Butch’s leather sofa, he had more view than he wanted of a shirtless Lassiter playing with himself. Foosball, that was. The fallen angel was working V’s table like a pro, flashing back and forth between the two sides—and hurling insults at himself. “Question,” Rhage muttered, as he rearranged his injured leg. “Are either of your personalities aware that you’re schizo-freakin’-phrenic?

If you are bewildered and clinging tenaciously to some course you love, be patient. Work hard. Hold your dream tightly to you, and do everything you can to realize it within reason. Take a step that will lead you toward the realization of your dream, and then take another, and another, and another. Hold fast to your oars, hoist the sails to the wind, read the pictures in the stars, look beyond the horizon to that which you can't see but dimly sense in your future: the curving inlet, the sandy beach.

Snow crunched under the feet of three cloaked figures – a queen, her lady, and a gravedigger – as they hurried along a moonlit path in Windsor Castle's lower ward. The gravedigger pushed a cart that held a slab of marble, his pick and shovel, and some straw. When the trio reached the steps of St. George's Chapel, Queen Mary stopped. She turned her head, pushing aside the fur of her hood, and a gust of wind needled her with crystallized snow. She looked back at her attendants. Was she wrong to trust them with this night's work?

But in my grandmother’s generation, this changed. In the sixties, men and women began to divorce, and women who’d grown up with the expectation that they’d have partners to help them raise their children found themselves with none. They worked like men then, and raised their children the best they could, while their former husbands had relationships with other women and married them and then left them also, perhaps searching for a sense of freedom or a sense of power that being a Black man in the South denied them. If they were not called “sir” in public, at least they could be respected and feared and wanted by the women and children who loved them. They were devalued everywhere except in the home, and this is the place where they turned the paradigm on its head and devalued those in their thrall.

An obsession, a mania, Lib supposed it could be called. A sickness of the mind. Hysteria, as that awful doctor had named it? Anna reminded Lib of a princess under a spell in a fairy tale. What could restore the girl to ordinary life? Not a prince. A magical herb from the world's end? Some shock to jolt a poisoned bite of apple out of her throat? No, something simple as a breath of air: reason. What if Lib shook the girl awake this very minute and said, Come to your senses! But that was part of the definition of madness, Lib supposed, the refusal to accept that one was mad. Standish's wards were full of such people. Besides, could children ever be considered quite of sound mind? Seven was counted the age of reason, but Lib's sense of seven-year-olds was that they still brimmed over with imagination. Children lived to play. Of course they could be put to work, but in spare moments they took their games as seriously as lunatics did their delusions. Like small gods, children formed their miniature worlds out of clay, or even just words. To them, the truth was never simple. But Anna was eleven, which was a far cry from seven, Lib argued with herself. Other eleven-year-olds knew when they'd eaten and when they hadn't; they were old enough to tell make-believe from fact. There was something very different about - very wrong with - Anna O'Donnell.

I can't believe he's going to make me give him the speech. I am livid that he's going to make me give him the speech. I do it, piecing it together from times I've seen it done on TV and in movies. I tell him that there are many people who love him and would be crushed if he were to kill himself, while wondering, distantly, if that is the truth. I tell him that he has so much potential, that he has so many things to do, while most of me believes that he will never put his body and brain to much use at all. I tell him that we all have dark periods, while becoming ever more angry at him, the theatrics, the self-pity, all this, when he has everything. He has a complete sort of freedom, with no parents and no dependents, with money and no immediate threats of pain or calamity. He is the 99.9th percentile, as I am. He has no real obligations, can go anywhere at any moment, sleep anywhere, move at will, and still he is wasting everyone's time with this. But I hold that back--I will save that for later--and instead say nothing but the most rapturous and positive things. And though I do not believe much of it, he does. I make myself sick saying it all, everything so obvious, the reasons to live not at all explainable in a few minutes on the edge of a psychiatric ward bed, but still he is roused, making me wonder even more about him, why a fudge-laden pep talk can convince him to live, why he insists on bringing us both down here, to this pedestrian level, how he cannot see how silly we both look, and when, exactly, it was that his head got so soft, when I lost track of him, how it is that I know and care about such a soft and pliant person, where was it again that I parked my car.

Aporia can not only prepare you to learn but make you want to learn.4 It feels frustrating. In effect Socrates says: good—now get going on the search for an answer, this time with a better sense of the work it takes. You are made hungry for knowledge by discovering how little you have.

Do you want to hold her?” Qhuinn asked. Xcor recoiled as if someone had inquired whether he’d like a hot poker in his hands. Then he recovered, shaking his head as he made a manly show of scrubbing his tears away like they were permanent marker on his cheeks. “I don’t think I’m quite ready for that. She looks…so delicate.” “She’s strong, though. She’s got her mahmen’s blood in her, too.” Qhuinn looked at Blay. “And she’s got good parents. They both do. We’re in this together, people, three fathers and one mom, two kids. Bam!” Xcor’s voice got low. “A father…?” He laughed softly. “I went from having no family, to having a mate, a brother, and now…” Qhuinn nodded. “A son and a daughter. As long as you are Layla’s hellren, you are their father, too.” Xcor’s smile was transformative, so wide that it stretched his face into something she had never seen. “A son and a daughter.” “That’s right,” Layla whispered with joy. But then instantly that expression on his face was gone, his lips thinning out and his brows dropping down like he was ready to go on the attack. “She is never dating. I don’t care who he is—” “Right!” Qhuinn put his palm out for a high five. “That’s what I’m talking about!” “Now, hold on,” Blay interjected as they clapped hands. “She has every right to live her life as she chooses.” “Yes, come on,” Layla added. “This double-standard stuff is ridiculous. She’s going to be allowed…” As the argument started up, she and Blay fell in beside each other, and Qhuinn and Xcor lined up shoulder to shoulder, their massive forearms crossed over their chests. “I’m good with a gun,” Xcor said like that was the end of things. “And I can handle the shovel,” Qhuinn tacked on. “They’ll never find the body.” The two of them pounded knuckles and looked so dead serious that Layla had to roll her eyes. But then she was smiling. “You know something?” she said to the three of them. “I really believe…that it’s all going to be okay. We’re going to work it out, together, because that’s what families do.” As she rose up on her tiptoes and kissed her male, she said, “Love has a way of fixing everything…even your daughter starting to date.” “Which is not going to happen,” Xcor countered. “Ever.” “My man,” Qhuinn said, backing him up. “I knew I liked you—” “Oh, for the love,” Layla muttered as the debate resumed, and Blay started laughing and Qhuinn and Xcor continued bonding. -Qhuinn, Xcor, Layla, & Blay

Much of what it takes to succeed in school, at work, and in one’s community consists of cultural habits acquired by adaptation to the social environment. Such cultural adaptations are known as “cultural capital.” Segregation leads social groups to form different codes of conduct and communication. Some habits that help individuals in intensely segregated, disadvantaged environments undermine their ability to succeed in integrated, more advantaged environments. At Strive, a job training organization, Gyasi Headen teaches young black and Latino men how to drop their “game face” at work. The “game face” is the angry, menacing demeanor these men adopt to ward off attacks in their crime-ridden, segregated neighborhoods. As one trainee described it, it is the face you wear “at 12 o’clock at night, you’re in the ‘hood and they’re going to try to get you.”102 But the habit may freeze it into place, frightening people from outside the ghetto, who mistake the defensive posture for an aggressive one. It may be so entrenched that black men may be unaware that they are glowering at others. This reduces their chance of getting hired. The “game face” is a form of cultural capital that circulates in segregated underclass communities, helping its members survive. Outside these communities, it burdens its possessors with severe disadvantages. Urban ethnographer Elijah Anderson highlights the cruel dilemma this poses for ghetto residents who aspire to mainstream values and seek responsible positions in mainstream society.103 If they manifest their “decent” values in their neighborhoods, they become targets for merciless harassment by those committed to “street” values, who win esteem from their peers by demonstrating their ability and willingness to insult and physically intimidate others with impunity. To protect themselves against their tormentors, and to gain esteem among their peers, they adopt the game face, wear “gangster” clothing, and engage in the posturing style that signals that they are “bad.” This survival strategy makes them pariahs in the wider community. Police target them for questioning, searches, and arrests.104 Store owners refuse to serve them, or serve them brusquely, while shadowing them to make sure they are not shoplifting. Employers refuse to employ them.105 Or they employ them in inferior, segregated jobs. A restaurant owner may hire blacks as dishwashers, but not as wait staff, where they could earn tips.

I just want to hit the groom. Once. Is that too much to ask?" Saxton popped his brows. "Is that a human tradition for this type of ceremony?" "Why, yes," the male said. "As a matter of fact it is--" Novo slapped her palm over his mouth. "No. it most certainly is not. And no matter how I might have felt about my sister in the past, I don't want her special night ruined, okay?" Peyton mumbled a little longer. And when she dropped her hand, he muttered, "First of all, I volunteered to do it after the pictures--and if it's realllllly important to you, I could catch him in the gut and not the face. I'm willing to work with you.

a friend told me that in a good marriage, nobody wins.” Matthew frowned, nibbling his thumbnail, noticing she’d sidestepped his question about the wards quite neatly. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.” “A marriage is a state of dynamic tension. It works as long as nobody gets the upper hand and keeps it.” She

getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up. And it could be something simple as sex, or it could be something as complicated as falling in love, or it could be like going to jail with your brother, thinking you going to protect him.

...A great night, yes sir, exclaimed one of them licking his chops and another confirmed, Those seven were worth fourteen, it's true that one of them was no great shakes, but in the middle of all that uproar who noticed, their men are lucky sods, if they're man enough for them. It would be better if they weren't, then they'd be more eager. From the far end of the ward, the doctor's wife said, There are no longer seven of us, Has one of you vamoosed, someone in the group asked, laughing, She didn't vamoose, she died, Oh, hell, then you lot will have to work all the harder next time, It wasn't much of a loss, she was no great shakes, said the doctor's wife. Disconcerted, the messengers did not know how to respond, what they had just heard struck them as indecent, some of them even came round to thinking that when all is said and done all women are bitches, such a lack of respect, to refer to a woman like that, just because her tits weren't in the right place and she had no arse to speak of.

Mr. Brock’s account of his adventure in London has given the reader some short notice of his friend, Mr Macshane. Neither the wits nor the principles of that worthy Ensign were particularly firm: for drink, poverty, and a crack on the skull at the battle of Steenkirk had served to injure the former; and the Ensign was not in his best days possessed of any share of the latter. He had really, at one period, held such a rank in the army, but pawned his half-pay for drink and play; and for many years past had lived, one of the hundred thousand miracles of our city, upon nothing that anybody knew of, or of which he himself could give any account. Who has not a catalogue of these men in his list? who can tell whence comes the occasional clean shirt, who supplies the continual means of drunkenness, who wards off the daily-impending starvation? Their life is a wonder from day to day: their breakfast a wonder; their dinner a miracle; their bed an interposition of Providence. If you and I, my dear sir, want a shilling tomorrow, who will give it us? Will OUR butchers give us mutton-chops? will OUR laundresses clothe us in clean linen? — not a bone or a rag. Standing as we do (may it be ever so) somewhat removed from want,[*] is there one of us who does not shudder at the thought of descending into the lists to combat with it, and

She had, she declared, "no patience with women whom I hear telling what wonders they would do if they were only men, when I see so much of their legitimate work left undone.... I could name many things they could do," she continued in a revealing concession to prevailing anxieties about respectability, "without ever going into a ward."47

A desire to attain short-term happiness while laboring under the weight a looming death sentence is an obvious paradox. Suicide, as distinguished from medical euthanasia, is an emotional reaction to the absurdity of life. Suicide is a panic-stricken reflex induced by the sinister twins of fear and foreboding. A rational person does not commit self-murder because their longing for happiness is incongruent with their present day reality. Suicide is a superficial response to hard times; suicide is a pusillanimous solution. A more measured reaction and, therefore, ultimately a braver and logical tactic is to meet life’s pillbox of irrationality headfirst. Upon soul-searching reflection, a thinking person accepts that while he or she might never comprehend a unifying meaning of life they still prefer to experience each permitted day of life to the fullest. A pragmatic person accepts the cold fact that happiness is fleeting and death is inevitable. By acknowledging and accepting the underlying absurdity of life, the prisoner awakens to discover his own humanity. By refusing to cooperate with death, by working each day to expand personal consciousness, by savoring each moment of life regardless of its hazards, adversities, misfortunes, and seemingly lack of overriding purpose, an impertinent ward of time transcends his or her incarnate incarceration.

For the artist who endured childhood shaming—over any form of neediness, any type of exploration, any expectation—shame may kick in even without the aid of a shame-provoking review. If a child has ever been made to feel foolish for believing himself or herself talented, the act of actually finishing a piece of art will be fraught with internal shaming. Many artists begin a piece of work, get well along in it, and then find, as they near completion, that the work seems mysteriously drained of merit. It’s no longer worth the trouble. To therapists, this surge of sudden disinterest (“It doesn’t matter”) is a routine coping device employed to deny pain and ward off vulnerability.

For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable 'windless calm' of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure.

To an economist, the strategy is obvious. Since even a penny is more valuable than nothing, it makes sense for Zelda to accept an offer as low as a penny—and, therefore, it makes sense for Annika to offer just a penny, keeping $19.99 for herself. But, economists be damned, that’s not how normal people played the game. The Zeldas usually rejected offers below $3. They were apparently so disgusted by a lowball offer that they were willing to pay to express their disgust. Not that lowball offers happened very often. On average, the Annikas offered the Zeldas more than $6. Given how the game works, an offer this large was clearly meant to ward off rejection. But still, an average of $6—almost a third of the total amount—seemed pretty generous. Does that make it altruism? Maybe, but probably not. The Ultimatum player making the offer has something to gain—the avoidance of rejection—by giving more generously. As often happens in the real world, seemingly kind behaviors in Ultimatum are inextricably tied in with potentially selfish motivations.

He knows something I don't. Perhaps he's looked into his own mirror and seen my father when I had only seen my father's absence. Perhaps my father taught my brother what it meant to be a Black man in the South too well: unsteady work, one dead-end job after another, institutions that systematically undervalue him as worker, a citizen, a human being.

Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction. While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.

This is old politicians," says Joel Swerdlow, the twenty-six-year-old who ran McGovern's operation in the North half of Milwaukee. "We have precinct captains, ward leaders, car captains, the whole bit. That's the only way you win. But instead of patronage bosses and sewer commissioners, we've got young people who work because they're interested in the issues.

At the sessions of the organization department, the importance of establishing good contacts with the religious organizations so that the Communists could infiltrate the missions in China and use them for Communist purposes, was given serious consideration and special attention was drawn to the effective work which Dr. Harry F. Ward did for communism in China.

I’m so sorry about Payne, I wanted to talk to you, but she’d made up her mind. I tried to work with her, I really did, but in the end, I just . . . I didn’t . . . I didn’t want you to be the one to do it. I would have rather lived with the horrible truth on my conscience for an eternity than have you kill your sister. Or have her hurt herself even more than she was.” - Jane

Brian was known to value courage as the crown of the virtues, and he exhibited it by coming into work every day in the same clothes. To his credit, there was nothing malodorous about him - presumably he bathed and visited the dry-cleaners on a regular basis – but thirty years in a tweed jacket and khaki trousers was a long time. What made it doubly odd was that he also valued glamour.

So many! Toni Morrison is, of course, the queen of all things literary. I heard her read from Beloved as a work in progress and it nearly stopped me dead. Other favorites: Colson Whitehead, Jesmyn Ward, Jacqueline Woodson, Nicola Yoon, Brit Bennett, Ta-Nehesi Coates, Jason Reynolds, Zadie Smith, Cristina Henríquez, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, Ellen Oh, Sabaa Tahir, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Lisa See…and Celeste Ng.

Another Presidential election was less than two years off. There would have to be fast work to ward off disaster. Far-sighted people, North and South, even foresaw the laboring people soon forsaking both of the old parties and going Socialist. Politicians and business men shuddered at the thought of such a tragedy and saw horrible visions of old-age pensions, eight-hour laws, unemployment insurance, workingmen’s compensation, minimum-wage legislation, abolition of child labor, dissemination of birth-control information, monthly vacations for female workers, two-month vacations for prospective mothers, both with pay, and the probable killing of individual initiative and incentive by taking the ownership of national capital out of the hands of two million people and putting it into the hands of one hundred and twenty million.

She was the first close friend who I felt like I’d re­ally cho­sen. We weren’t in each other’s lives be­cause of any obli­ga­tion to the past or con­ve­nience of the present. We had no shared his­tory and we had no rea­son to spend all our time to­ gether. But we did. Our friend­ship in­ten­si­fied as all our friends had chil­dren – she, like me, was un­con­vinced about hav­ing kids. And she, like me, found her­self in a re­la­tion­ship in her early thir­ties where they weren’t specif­i­cally work­ing to­wards start­ing a fam­ily. By the time I was thirty-four, Sarah was my only good friend who hadn’t had a baby. Ev­ery time there was an­other preg­nancy an­nounce­ment from a friend, I’d just text the words ‘And an­other one!’ and she’d know what I meant. She be­came the per­son I spent most of my free time with other than Andy, be­cause she was the only friend who had any free time. She could meet me for a drink with­out plan­ning it a month in ad­vance. Our friend­ship made me feel lib­er­ated as well as safe. I looked at her life choices with no sym­pa­thy or con­cern for her. If I could ad­mire her de­ci­sion to re­main child-free, I felt en­cour­aged to ad­mire my own. She made me feel nor­mal. As long as I had our friend­ship, I wasn’t alone and I had rea­son to be­lieve I was on the right track. We ar­ranged to meet for din­ner in Soho af­ter work on a Fri­day. The waiter took our drinks or­der and I asked for our usual – two Dirty Vodka Mar­ti­nis. ‘Er, not for me,’ she said. ‘A sparkling wa­ter, thank you.’ I was ready to make a joke about her un­char­ac­ter­is­tic ab­sti­nence, which she sensed, so as soon as the waiter left she said: ‘I’m preg­nant.’ I didn’t know what to say. I can’t imag­ine the ex­pres­sion on my face was par­tic­u­larly en­thu­si­as­tic, but I couldn’t help it – I was shocked and felt an un­war­ranted but in­tense sense of be­trayal. In a de­layed re­ac­tion, I stood up and went to her side of the ta­ble to hug her, un­able to find words of con­grat­u­la­tions. I asked what had made her change her mind and she spoke in va­garies about it ‘just be­ing the right time’ and wouldn’t elab­o­rate any fur­ther and give me an an­swer. And I needed an an­swer. I needed an an­swer more than any­thing that night. I needed to know whether she’d had a re­al­iza­tion that I hadn’t and, if so, I wanted to know how to get it. When I woke up the next day, I re­al­ized the feel­ing I was ex­pe­ri­enc­ing was not anger or jeal­ousy or bit­ter­ness – it was grief. I had no one left. They’d all gone. Of course, they hadn’t re­ally gone, they were still my friends and I still loved them. But huge parts of them had dis­ap­peared and there was noth­ing they could do to change that. Un­less I joined them in their spa­ces, on their sched­ules, with their fam­i­lies, I would barely see them. And I started dream­ing of an­other life, one com­pletely re­moved from all of it. No more chil­dren’s birth­day par­ties, no more chris­ten­ings, no more bar­be­cues in the sub­urbs. A life I hadn’t ever se­ri­ously con­tem­plated be­fore. I started dream­ing of what it would be like to start all over again. Be­cause as long as I was here in the only Lon­don I knew – mid­dle-class Lon­don, cor­po­rate Lon­don, mid-thir­ties Lon­don, mar­ried Lon­don – I was in their world. And I knew there was a whole other world out there.

The line between straight men having sex with men and "actual" homosexuality is under constant scrutiny, and for straight men, violence is a key element that imbues homosexuality with heterosexual meaning, or untangles hetero-erotic forms of homosexuality from the affective, political, and romantic associations with gay and lesbian life. Sometimes this violence takes the form of humiliation or physical force enacted by one straight man as he makes sexual contact with another; in other cases, it may take the form of two men fantasizing about sexual violence against women. In many cases, violence is a central part of the work of reframing homosexual sex as an act that men do to build one another's strength, or to build what I call "anal resilience," thereby inoculating one another against what they imagine are the sincere expressions of gay selfhood.

Mary.” Turning at the soft sound of her name, she glanced behind herself. Then frowned. “Lassiter?” “I’m over here.” “Where?” She looked all around. “Why is your voice echoing?” “Chimney.” “What?” “I’m stuck in the fucking chimney.” She raced over to the fireplace and got on her hands and knees. Looking up into the dark flue, she shook her head. “Lass? What the hell are you doing up there?” His voice emanated from somewhere above her. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?” “What are you—” An arm came down. A very sooty arm that was encased in a red sleeve that had white trim. Or what had been white trim and which was now smudged with ash. “You’re stuck!” she exclaimed. “And thank God no one lit this fire!” “You’re telling me,” he muttered in his disembodied voice. “I had to blow out Fritz’s match like a hundred times before he gave up. Fuck, that sounds dirty. Anyway, just remind me never to try to be Santa for your kid, okay? I’m not doing this again, even for her.” Mary stretched a little farther in, but the logs on the hearth stopped her. “Lassiter. Why can’t you free yourself by dematerializing—” “I’m impaled on a hook that’s iron. I can’t go ghost. And will you just take this?” “What?” “This.” He turned his hand toward her and there was…a box…in it? A small navy blue box. “Open it. And before you ask, I already cleared it with your pinheaded hellren. He’s not jel or anything.” Mary sat back and shook her head. “I’m more worried about you—” “Justopenthefuckingthingalready.” Taking off the top, she found a slightly smaller box inside. That was velvet. “What is this?” As she lifted the lid, she…gasped. It was a pair of diamond earrings. A pair of perfectly matched, sparkly, diamond… “A mother’s tears,” Lassiter’s slightly echo-y voice said softly. “So hard, so beautiful. I told you everything was going to be all right. And those are to remind you of how strong you are, how strong your love for your daughter is…how, even in the worst of times, things have a way of working out as they should.” Blinking away tears, she thought of her crying in the foyer in front of the angel, crying because all had been lost. “They’re just beautiful,” she said hoarsely. -Lassiter & Mary

but sitting down with so many fellow-animals to ward off thirst and hunger as a business; to empty, each creature, his Yahoo’s trough as quickly as he can, and then slink sullenly away; to have these social sacraments stripped of everything but the mere greedy satisfaction of the natural cravings; goes so against the grain with me, that I seriously believe the recollection of these funeral feasts will be a waking nightmare to me all my life.

I began to see her mind like an old television set, one with a dial you had to change the channels. She'd gotten stuck between channels and all that was broadcasting in her mind was crackling white noise which drove her mad and scared me to death. The medicine was like turning down the volume. The channels might still be stuck but at least the set was no longer spewing the deafening static. The volume had to be lowered until the channels could work again

Scripture says our hearts are deceived in incomprehensible ways. So often the church is naïve about deception and its workings in our lives. That leads to “I’m sorry,” being a sufficient response to hideous abuse and stopping outward behavior a sure sign of repentance. Repentance means to have another mind about something. It is not merely words and tears and promises, but an intensely god-ward sorrow that results in lasting transformation exhibited repeatedly over time.

The ego is continuously, zealously, in search of the world. Compelled to navigate among beacons emitting conflicting and fragmentary signals and exposed to internal pressures of its own, it seeks to extract as much information from its sensations and perceptions as it can. It works to ward off dangers and to repeat pleasures. It organizes, with impressive efficiency, the individual's capacities for response and his encounters with men and things. It reasons, calculates, remembers, compares, thus equipping men to grope their way toward the future. Its appraisals are never beyond suspicion; they are bound to be distorted by conflicts and compromised by traumas. Thus the outside world never really enters the mind unscathed; the impressions with which the individual must work are so many mental representations of the real thing. But the ego, obeying its appetite for experience, bravely continues to determine what is and more difficult, what can be.

Break the bond. The bargain, the- the mating bond. He- he made me do it, made me swear it-' 'No,' Rhysand said. I ignored him, even as my heart broke, even as I knew that he hadn't meant to say it- 'Do it,' I begged the king, even as I silently prayed he wouldn't notice his ruined wards, the door I'd left wide open. 'I know you can. Just- free me. Free me from it.' 'No,' Rhysand said. But Tamlin was staring between us. And I looked at thim, the High Lord I had once loved, and I breathed. 'No more. No more death- no more killing.' I sobbed through my clenched teeth. Made myself look at my sisters. 'No more. Take me home and let them go. Tell him it's part of the bargain and let them go. But no more- please.' Cassian slowly, every movement pained, stirred enough to look over a shredded wing at me. And in his pain-glazed eyes, I saw it- the understanding. The Court of Dreams. I had belonged to a court of dreams. And dreamers. And for their dreams... for what they had worked for, sacrificed for... I could do it. Get my sisters out, I said to Rhys one last time, sending it into that stone wall between us. I looked to Tamlin. 'No more.' Those green eyes met mine- and the sorrow and tenderness in them was the most hideous thing I'd ever seen. 'Take me home.' Tamlin said flatly to the king, 'Let them go, break her bond, and let's be done with it. Her sisters come with us. You've already crossed too many lines.' Jurian began objecting, but the king said, 'Very well.' 'No,' was all Rhys said again. Tamlin snarled at him, 'I don't give a shit if she's your mate. I don't give a shit if you think you're entitled to her. She is mine- and one day, I am going to repay every bit of pain she felt, every bit of suffering and despair. One day, perhaps when she decides she wants to end you, I'll be happy to oblige her.' Walk away- just go. Take my sisters with you. Rhys was only staring at me. 'Don't.' But I backed away- until I hit Tamlin's chest, until his hands, warm and heavy, landed on my shoulders. 'Do it,' he said to the king. 'No,' Rhys said again, his voice breaking. But the king pointed at me. And I screamed. Tamlin gripped my arms as I screamed and screamed at the pain that tore through my chest, my left arm. Rhysand was on the ground, roaring, and I thought he might have said my name, might have bellowed it as I thrashed and sobbed. I was being shredded, I was dying, I was dying- No. No, I didn't want it, I didn't want to- A crack sounded in my ears. And the world cleaved in two as the bond snapped.

Any Justification that does not lead to Biblical sanctification and mortification of sinful desires is a false justification no matter how many Solas you attach to it”. “See that your chief study be about the heart, that there God’s image may be planted, and his interest advanced, and the interest of the world and flesh subdued, and the love of every sin cast out, and the love of holiness succeed; and that you content not yourselves with seeming to do good in outward acts, when you are bad yourselves, and strangers to the great internal duties. The first and great work of a Christian is about his heart.” ~ Richard Baxter Never forget that truth is more important to the church than peace ~ JC Ryle "Truth demands confrontation. It must be loving confrontation, but there must be confrontation nonetheless.” ~ Francis Schaeffer I am not permitted to let my love be so merciful as to tolerate and endure false doctrine. When faith and doctrine are concerned and endangered, neither love nor patience are in order...when these are concerned, (neither toleration nor mercy are in order, but only anger, dispute, and destruction - to be sure, only with the Word of God as our weapon. ~ Martin Luther “Truth must be spoken, however it be taken.” ~ John Trapp “Hard words, if they be true, are better than soft words if they be false.” – C.H. Spurgeon “Oh my brethren, Bold hearted men are always called mean-spirited by cowards” – CH Spurgeon “The Bible says Iron sharpens Iron, But if your words don't have any iron in them, you ain't sharpening anyone”. “Peace often comes as a result of conflict!” ~ Don P Mt 18:15-17 Rom 12:18 “Peace if possible, truth at all costs.” ~ Martin Luther “The Scriptures argue and debate and dispute; they are full of polemics… We should always regret the necessity; but though we regret it and bemoan it, when we feel that a vital matter is at stake we must engage in argument. We must earnestly contend for the truth, and we are all called upon to do that by the New Testament.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Romans – Atonement and Justification) “It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher “Truth bites and it stings and it has a blade on it.” ~ Paul Washer Soft words produce hard hearts. Show me a church where soft words are preached and I will show you a church of hard hearts. Jeremiah said that the word of God is a hammer that shatters. Hard Preaching produces soft hearts. ~ J. MacArthur Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified, prepare the soul for glory. ~ Richard Sibbes “Cowards never won heaven. Do not claim that you are begotten of God and have His royal blood running in your veins unless you can prove your lineage by this heroic spirit: to dare to be holy in spite of men and devils.” ~ William Gurnall

You may disagree, but I have a prediction to make: even before you drift into the indifference of old age, you will come to bless this day, the day you did not commit yourself to share my life ... Now that I am going away ... I can tell you quite frankly: even when we were having the most intellectual conversations and I honestly thought and believed everything I said, I still wanted all the time, all the time, to pick you up and kiss you on the lips. So try to work that out. And now, without your permission, I kiss them

Henry Ward Beecher used the parade and the IWA’s eight-hour-day battle to hector the working poor from the pulpit. Fewer hours would tend “to make men feel that work is not a good thing… hard knocks, and a good many of them” were the only way to “carve out independent fortunes.” Beecher admitted that underpaid workers could not make enough in an eight-hour day to advance from their lowly state at their present pay, but he neglected to denounce the owners who paid them so poorly. Working longer hours was his Christian solution.

Paradise, blooded daughter of Abalone, First Adviser to the King, frowned at the screen of her Apple lappy. She’d set herself up here in her father’s library ever since he’d started working each night for Wrath, son of Wrath, because in the old rambling Tudor mansion, Wi-Fi was strongest at this desk. Not that a good signal was helping her at the moment. Her Hotmail account was full of unread messages, because, with iMessage on her phone and her Twitter, Instagram, and FB accounts, there was no reason to sign into it very often.

You are all wrong, quite wrong,” said Sir Louis, petulantly; “it isn’t that at all. I have taken nothing this week past — literally nothing. I think it’s the liver.” Dr Thorne wanted no one to tell him what was the matter with his ward. It was his liver; his liver, and his head, and his stomach, and his heart. Every organ in his body had been destroyed, or was in the course of destruction. His father had killed himself with brandy; the son, more elevated in his tastes, was doing the same thing with curaçoa, maraschino, and cherry-bounce.

It’s critical to know that our bodies don’t attack themselves. Here is the truth: the inflammation in the joints is there to protect you from attack by a particularly common virus. Your body is working hard to stop pathogens from digging deeper into the joints and the tissue around them. When the inflammation becomes long-term and chronic, that’s when it becomes the problem known as RA—but it is still your body working to ward off viral damage. Doctors also believe that there’s no way to heal from rheumatoid arthritis. They’re mistaken about that, too.

There is no one disabled future. But in mine, there is guaranteed income, housing, access, food, water, and education for all—or money has been abolished. I get paid to write from my bed. The births of disabled, Autistic, Mad, Neurodivergent, Deaf, and sick kids are celebrated, and there are memorials and healing and reparation sites on every psych ward, institution, nursing home, youth lockup, and “autistic treatment center” where our people have been locked up and abused. Anyone who needs care gets it, with respect and autonomy, not abuse. Caregivers are paid well for the work we do and are often disabled ourselves. Disabled folks are the ones teaching medical school students about our bodies. Schools have been taken apart and remade so that there’s not one idea of “smart” and “stupid,” but many ways of learning. There is a disability justice section in every bookstore and a million examples of sick and disabled and Deaf and autistic and Mad folks thriving. I have a really sick lipstick-red spiral ramp curving around my house. Because it’s beautiful. Because I want it. Because I get to live free. -LEAH

I took a moment to study the wards. They were a smooth patchwork of enchantment, probably the result of several lesser talents working together. Somebody like me can put up a ward that is like a huge iron wall. This was more like a curtain of tightly interwoven steel rings. For most purposes, both would serve fairly well -- but with the right tool, the latter kind of wall is easily dealt with. "And I'm the tool," I muttered. Then I thought about it, sighed, and shook my head. "One day," I told myself, "one brave and magnificent day, I will actually be cool.

Gitlow then quoted from an article Dr. Ward wrote in the August 1934 issue of Fight, which was the official publication of the American League Against War and Fascism. Titled “Churches and Fascism,” Ward wrote: They live narrow starved lives with no knowledge of economics or politics, no interest in science, no contacts with literature or art. Their religion supplies them with an opiate that takes them into the dream world. They are the natural followers of a powerful demagogue who can deceive them with vague promises and revolutionary phrases. When their economic security is gone or threatened, their undisciplined emotions can quickly be turned into hate of the Jew, the Communist, the Negro. The only preventative serum that will make them immune from these poisonous germs is propaganda in emotional terms that enables them to locate the real enemy. The people who come to know that the capitalist system is the source of their economic troubles are not easily led to chase and beat scapegoats. To work at that task the American League Against War and Fascism needs to get members in all religious organizations. [emphasis original]

Life is thus a constant state of striving. There are sometimes reprieves, but the striving ends only with the end of life. Moreover, as should be obvious, the striving is to ward off bad things and attain good things. Indeed, some of the good things amount merely to the temporary relief from the bad things. For example, one satisfies one’s hunger or quenches one’s thirst. Notice too that while the bad things come without any effort, one has to strive to ward them off and attain the good things. Ignorance, for example, is effortless, but knowledge usually requires hard work.

As he kissed her back, she thought about what happily-ever-afters were about, and decided that true love didn’t mean effortless, and ever-after wasn’t about cruise control. You started with the attraction, and then you opened your heart and your soul—but all that, which was no small thing, just got you to first base. There were many, many other trips to take to deeper levels of greater acceptance and understanding. That was where you found the happy. And the ever-after was the work you were always willing to put in to stay close, to learn, and to grow as people together. “I

Is there anywhere else to sleep tonight... Anywhere?' I pleaded. There's Mei's office, but you'll have to sleep on the floor I'm afraid.' Mei was one of the Ward 9D dietitians. 'I'll sleep on the floor any day. I'm used to it back in the Islands,' I laughed tiredly. I settled down on the floor. The three rugs I had brought to cushion my back worked surprisingly well. It was almost more comfortable than the thin mats on the cold concrete floors of the fales in Samoa. The idea of sleeping in someone's office was the best idea I had had all year. I decided that I would keep this secret to myself.

Where do I see and recognize God’s presence? Where do I see the imprint of God’s hand? God is present in the oncology ward where I work. Patients arrive for treatment, tired and apprehensive. They are newly vulnerable, and their expensively acquired market skills are gone for now. Yet their eyes fill with tentative hope of the beginning of healing. This is a different place to any they have known. With the help of a caring staff, they learn to relax in the presence of their fellow patients. They remove wigs, hairpieces, and jewelry and expose poor, hurting bodies. For the time they are here, they allow themselves simply to be who they are. As the medicine enters their bodies, the feelings of trust, hope, and love are tangible all around. No marketplace here—simply pure and humble dependence on God, on science, and on the loving kindness of others. The trappings of the commercial world are no help when people are at their most vulnerable. The patients need not camouflage their poverty in the ways of the world. But they can trust—simply trust—that in the oncology ward they are in our Father’s house. There they are welcomed simply as they are. There they are in the hands of good people, escorts of healing and grace, whom God has sent to them. It is all right to be poor here.

The British Bible translator J. B. Phillips, after completing his work on this section of Scripture, could not help reflecting on what he had observed. In the 1955 preface to his first edition of Acts, he wrote: It is impossible to spend several months in close study of the remarkable short book … without being profoundly stirred and, to be honest, disturbed. The reader is stirred because he is seeing Christianity, the real thing, in action for the first time in human history. The newborn Church, as vulnerable as any human child, having neither money, influence nor power in the ordinary sense, is setting forth joyfully and courageously to win the pagan world for God through Christ…. Yet we cannot help feeling disturbed as well as moved, for this surely is the Church as it was meant to be. It is vigorous and flexible, for these are the days before it ever became fat and short of breath through prosperity, or muscle-bound by overorganization. These men did not make ‘acts of faith,’ they believed; they did not ‘say their prayers,’ they really prayed. They did not hold conferences on psychosomatic medicine, they simply healed the sick. But if they were uncomplicated and naive by modern standards, we have ruefully to admit that they were open on the God-ward side in a way that is almost unknown today.1

As a colored man I felt greatly encouraged and strengthened for my cause while listening to these men, in the presence of the ablest men of the Caucasian race. Mr. Ward especially attracted attention at that convention. As an orator and thinker he was vastly superior, I thought, to any of us, and being perfectly black and of unmixed African descent, the splendors of his intellect went directly to the glory of race. In depth of thought, fluency of speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness, and general intelligence, Samuel R. Ward has left no successor among the colored men amongst us, and it was a sad day for our cause when he was laid low in the soil of a foreign country.

Pity me'--the unspoken words upon a nation's lips--'because I am indeed pitiable. I have been deprived of freedom--yes, of course, all that. And of proper food and of fancy things, consumer durables and material wealth of every kind, all that. But mostly I have been robbed of my birthright, my mother, my father, my home. And how can I ever recover from that?' Then there is a murmur, as a last, despairing cry, the latest prayer--'Market forces, market forces.' Say it over and over, as once the Hail Mary was said, to ward off all ills and rescue the soul, but we know in our hearts it won't work. There is no magic here contained. Wasted lives, lost souls, unfixable. Pity me, pity me, pity me.

We rightly admire the celebrated artists of the past who created great work, knowing their prize would be a happy life and a generous reward. How much more, then, should we praise and exalt those rare men of genius who create priceless work and who live not merely unrewarded but in circumstances of wretched poverty! It is undeniably true that if the artists of our own time were justly rewarded they would produce even greater works of art, far superior to those of the ancient world. Instead, the artist today struggles to ward off famine rather than to win fame, and this crushes and buries his talent and obscures his name. This is a shame and disgrace to those who could come to his help but refuse to do so.

So out of the six major subcontractors who buy from us, there are two left? Man, that’s a turf war, right there.” “And whoever’s pulling this shit is probably going to try to work his way up the food chain.” Trez spoke up. “Which is why iAm and I think you should have someone with you twenty-four/seven until this shit shakes out.” Rehv seemed annoyed but he didn’t disagree. “We got any intel on who’s leaving all those bodies around?” “Well, duh,” Trez said. “People think it’s you.” “Not logical. Why would I kill off my own buyers?” Now Rehv was the one getting the hairy eyeball from the peanut gallery. “Oh, come on,” he said. “I’m not that bad. Well, okay, but only if someone fucks with me." -Rehv & Trez

I’ll let you help.” When he smiled broadly, because he was getting his way, she cut through his robin-breasted satisfaction. “But there are conditions.” He laughed. “You’re putting restrictions on a gift given to you?” “It’s not a gift.” She stared at him with dead seriousness. “It’s only until I find some kind of work, not my dream job. And I want to pay you back.” He lost a little of his satisfaction. “I don’t want your money.” “And I feel the same way about yours.” She folded her napkin. “I know you’re not hurting for cash, but that’s the only way I’ll be okay with this.” He frowned. “No interest, though. I won’t accept even one penny in interest.” “Deal.” She put her palm out and waited. He cursed. And cursed again. “I don’t want you to pay it back.” “Tough.” After his mouth performed some intricate f-bomb acrobatics, he put his hand in hers and they shook. “You drive a hard bargain, you know that,” he said. “But you respect me for it, right?” “Well, yeah. And it makes me want to get you naked.” “Oh…” Ehlena flushed from head to toe as he slid off his stool and towered over her, cupping her face in his hands. “You going to let me take you to my bed?” Given the way those purple eyes of his were shining, she was willing to let him take her down on the damn kitchen floor if he asked. “Yes.” A growl rolled up out of his chest as he kissed her. “Guess what?” “What?” she breathed. “That was the right answer.” -Ehlena & Rehv

There was a period when I lived on book reviews, when I had basked and drawn sustenance from what I deemed the light of their intelligence, the beneficience of their charm. But something had gone sour. Over the years I had read too much, in dim-lighted railway stations, lying on the davenports of strangers' houses, in the bleak and dismal wards of insane asylums. That reading had forced the charm to relinquish itself. Now I found that reviews were not only bland but scarcely, if ever, relevant; and that all books, whether works of imagination or the blatant frauds of literary whores, were approached by the reviewer with the same crushing sobriety. I wanted to reviewer to be fair, kind, and funny. I wanted to be made to laugh.

metastases has become talk of a few months left. When I saw her in A&E, despite obvious suspicions, I didn’t say the word ‘cancer’ – I was taught that if you say the word even in passing, that’s all a patient remembers. Doesn’t matter what else you do, utter the C-word just once and you’ve basically walked into the cubicle and said nothing but ‘cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer’ for half an hour. And not that you’d ever want a patient to have cancer of course, I really really didn’t want her to. Friendly, funny, chatty – despite the litres of fluid in her abdomen splinting her breathing – we were like two long-lost pals finding themselves next to each other at a bus stop and catching up on all our years apart. Her son has a place at med school, her daughter is at the same school my sister went to, she recognized my socks were Duchamp. I stuck in a Bonanno catheter to take off the fluid and admitted her to the ward for the day team to investigate. And now she’s telling me what they found. She bursts into tears, and out come all the ‘will never’s, the crushing realization that ‘forever’ is just a word on the front of Valentine’s cards. Her son will qualify from medical school – she won’t be there. Her daughter will get married – she won’t be able to help with the table plan or throw confetti. She’ll never meet her grandchildren. Her husband will never get over it. ‘He doesn’t even know how to work the thermostat!’ She laughs, so I laugh. I really don’t know what to say. I want to lie and tell her everything’s going to be fine, but we both know that it won’t. I hug her. I’ve never hugged a patient before – in fact, I think I’ve only hugged a grand total of five people, and one of my parents isn’t on that list – but I don’t know what else to do. We talk about boring practical things, rational concerns, irrational concerns, and I can see from her eyes it’s helping her. It suddenly strikes me that I’m almost certainly the first person she’s opened up to about all this, the only one she’s been totally honest with. It’s a strange privilege, an honour I didn’t ask for. The other thing I realize is that none of her many, many concerns are about herself; it’s all about the kids, her husband, her sister, her friends. Maybe that’s the definition of a good person.

One day, me and him was sitting on my mama and daddy front porch and we heard Stag a ways off, coming up the road, singing, and River said: There's things that move a man. Like currents of water inside. Things he can't help. Older I got, the more I found it true. What's in Stag is like water so black and deep you can't see the bottom. Stag was laughing now. But then Pop said: Parchman taught me the same in me, Philomène. Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up. And it could be something simple as sex or it could be something as complicated as falling in love, or it could be like going to jail with your brother, thinking you going to protect him.

Josh’s father felt Josh should bond with his fellow injured patients in the ward. This was something I really dissuaded Josh from doing. I didn’t want him to hear the hardships, battles, and frustrations that others were going through. I also didn’t want Josh to take on their fears and frustrations. We were always pleasant and polite to everyone else in the ward, but my only concern was Josh, and it was enough for us to focus just on his issues. I found the whole Acute Spinal Ward experience extremely negative and distressingly sad with no great healing or recovery objective. The message from the medical team was always, without fail, acceptance of the prognosis. This was totally the opposite message of what we presented and instilled into Josh. We slowly gained evidence that our non-traditional approach was working.

The train scooted along the fried coast. We made solid headway into the Marston's. Mo was down a testicle since the spring. We'd called in at the Royal the night of his operation. We'd stopped at the Ship and Mitre on the way—they'd a handsome bitter from Clitheroe on guest tap. We needed the fortification: when Real Ale Club boys parade down hospital wards, we tend to draw worried glances from the whitecoats. We are shaped like those chaps in the warning illustrations on cardiac charts. We gathered around Mo and breathed a nice fog of bitter over the lad and we joshed him gently. “Sounding a little high-pitched, Mo?” “Other lad's going to be worked overtime.” “Diseased bugger you'll want in a glass jar, Mo. One for the mantelpiece.” Love is a strong word, but. We were family to Mo when he was up the Royal having the bollock out. We passed Flint Castle and Everett Bell piped up.

Fritz.” The butler rushed over from the crudité arrangement he was working on. “Yes, master! I am eager to be of aid.” “Take this.” iAm peeled the cat off himself, prying both of its front claws out of his fleece. “And do whatever it is you do with it.” As he turned away, he felt like glancing back and making sure G*dd*mn was okay. But why the fuck would he do that? He had to get to Sal’s and check on his staff. Usually he hit the restaurant in the early afternoon, but shit had not been “usual,” what with that migraine: Every time his brother had one, they both got a headache. Now, though, with Trez rebounding and no doubt soon to be on the grind with that Chosen, it was time to get back on his own track. If only to keep himself from going psychotic. Jesus Christ, Trez was now going to fuck that female. And God only knew where that was going to land them all. Just as he hit the exit, he called out over his shoulder, “Fritz.” Through the din of First Meal prep, the doggen answered back, “Yes, master?” “I never find any seafood in this place. Why is that?” “The King does not favor any manner of fin.” “Would he allow it in here?” “Oh, yes, master. Just not upon his table, and certainly never upon his plate.” iAm stared at the panels of the door in front of him. “I want you to get some fresh salmon and poach it. Tonight.” “But of course. I will not have it ready afore First Meal for you—” “Not for me. I hate fish. It’s for G*dd*mn Cat. I want him served that regularly.” He pushed the door open. “And get him some fresh veggies. What kind of cat food does he eat?” “Only the best. Hill’s Science Diet.” “Find out what is in his food—and then I want everything hand-prepared. Nothing out of the bag for him from now on.” Approval bloomed in the old doggen’s voice: “I’m sure Master Boo will appreciate your special interest.” “I’m not interested in that bag of fur.” -iAm, Fritz, & Boo

Ideally, work is consecrated. It is something that happens within the present moment . . . Ideally, work is just another beautiful form of joining the cosmic sparkle. But this is an ideal. . . . I worked as a psychiatrist in public institutions . . . for nearly 20 years. During the last 12 of those years, I was consciously trying to be mindful of love, to practice the presence of God. It was the most frustrating thing I ever tried to do. . . . as soon as I entered the ward everything changed. I was immediately kidnapped. I was gone: away from the present, away from any sense of love or its source, away from even appreciating my own being. . . Looking back, it seems clear that I went into my sense of responsibility for the diagnosis and care of the patients. . . . And there was so much paperwork! Most days I would remain forgetful until my work was done and I was driving home. Then I would remember, and such sadness would fill me. Where had I been? How could I have allowed myself to be so captured? I can remember driving home one day after I had spent a long time feeling helpless with a very disturbed patient. I actually slapped myself in the face when I realized I could have been praying for her and praying for myself instead of just worrying about what to do. I tried everything . . . and still it did not “work”. . . . It stopped only when I left the psychiatric institutions and started working full-time with Shalem. . . . I go into this detail because what I am saying does not apply only to psychiatric institutions. It applies, to some extent, to almost every institution we have. It applies to education and social work, to government and business, and to religious institutions as well. People are stuck in all these places, and they can neither get out of them nor find a loving quality of presence within them. Love demands defenselessness, and in many if not most of our workplaces that is just too high a price.

Although industry was now in control of the national government, the Republican party which represented it was a minority party; and Northern and Southern Democrats, especially Southern Democrats with increased power by counting the full Negro population, together with Western malcontents, could easily oust the Republicans. It was because of this thought that Northern industry made its great alliance with abolition-democracy. The consummation of this alliance came slowly and reluctantly and after vain effort to- ward understanding with the South which was unsuccessful until 1876. When Lincoln first laid down his general proclamation concerning Reconstruction, industry paid little attention to it: let the South come back; let it come back quickly, and let us go to work and make money and repair the losses of the war by increased business; and then let the nation go far beyond this through domination of the American market, and perhaps even of the markets of the world.

He got up out of bed, walked across the room, and put his glowing hand to her face with hesitation. On a sigh she leaned into the imprint of his palm and the warmth of his flesh. “Is this you?” he said hoarsely. She nodded and reached out to his cheeks, which were a little red. “You’ve been crying.” He captured her hand. “I feel you.” “Me, too.” He touched her neck, her shoulder, her sternum. Brought her arm forward and looked at it…well, through it. “Um…so I can sit on things,” she said for no particular reason. “I mean…while I was waiting out there, I sat on the couch. I also moved a picture on the wall, put a penny back in your change dish, picked up a magazine. It’s a little weird, but all I have to do is concentrate.” Shit. She had no idea what she was saying. “The, ah…the Scribe Virgin said I could eat but I didn’t have to. She said…I could drink, too. I’m not sure how it all works, but she seems to know. Yeah. So. Anyway, I think it’s going to take some time to figure out the drill, but…” He put his hand into her hair and it felt the same as it had before. Her nonexistent body registered the sensations exactly as it had before. He frowned, then looked downright angry. “She said it required a sacrifice. To bring someone back. What did you give her? What did you bargain with?” “How do you mean?” “She doesn’t give things away without demanding something in return. What did she take from you?” “Nothing. She never asked me for anything.” He shook his head and seemed like he was going to speak. But then he wrapped his heavy arms around her and held her against his trembling, glowing body. Unlike the other times when she had to concentrate to find solidity, with V it just happened. Against him, she was corporeal with no effort on her part. She could tell he was crying by the way he breathed and the fact that he leaned on her, but she knew that if she made any mention of it, or tried to soothe him with words, he would stop on a dime. So she just held him and let him go. Then again, she was kind of busy holding herself together. “I thought I would never get to do this again,” he said in a voice that cracked. -Vishous & Jane

A writer toils to combat the insufficiency plaguing his or her life. Every writer seeks to ward off the corrosive obliteration wrought by the passage of time upon memory by capturing on paper his or her present day thoughts on life. For these intrepid souls, writing not only entails a lifetime of work it also represents their very lifeblood spilled out onto sheets of virgin white paper. Writers’ inkblot of words forms a pictograph for present and future generations to view; their thoughtful elucidations speak to us from the grave. Writers’ words transcend time by creating indelible images that survive wars, famines, epidemics, and censorship. Thanks to great writers, every man, woman, or child can escape the confines of their own cloistered environment and converse with other people of every occupation and lifestyle whose communal heartbeats form the bloodstream of every city. Thanks to literary figures, each reader can peer into the depths of past generations whose eclectic filament forms the ever-evolving equitable eye in humankinds’ collective consciousness, or colloquially what we refer to as humanity.

In the preface to The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins describes how he refines his writing by asking his wife, the actor Lalla Ward, to read his words aloud to him ‘so I could apprehend very directly how it might seem to a reader other than myself… I recommend the technique to other authors, but I must warn that for best results the reader must be a professional actor, with voice and ear sensitively tuned to the music of language’, he says. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to see the amusement value of Professor Dawkins – who I think is a terrific writer – listening to his wife declaim all 420 pages of his book, maybe from a little lectern in his front room. And she did the whole book twice, he explains. She must love him very much. Dawkins’ advice to marry an actor so that he or she can read your work to you might seem impractical, especially to your current spouse, but Dawkins has a point – which his prose reinforces. You might disagree with his concept of a godless universe, but if you have read The God Delusion you wouldn’t say that he expresses himself with anything less than complete clarity. You can disagree with him because you know exactly what he’s thinking.

The fury which destroys an opponent’s character, would stop at nothing, if barriers were thrown down. That which is true of the leaders in politics, is true of subordinates. Political dishonesty in voters runs into general dishonesty, as the rotten speck taints the whole apple. A community whose politics are conducted by a perpetual breach of honesty on both sides, will be tainted by immorality throughout. Men will play the same game in their private affairs, which they have learned to play in public matters. The guile, the crafty vigilance, the dishonest advantage, the cunning sharpness;—the tricks and traps and sly evasions; the equivocal promises, and unequivocal neglect of them, which characterize political action, will equally characterize private action. The mind has no kitchen to do its dirty work in, while the parlor remains clean. Dishonesty is an atmosphere; if it comes into one apartment, it penetrates into every one. Whoever will lie in politics, will lie in traffic. Whoever will slander in politics, will slander in personal squabbles. A professor of religion who is a dishonest politician, is a dishonest Christian. His creed is a perpetual index of his hypocrisy.

Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides affect the soil food web, toxic to some members, warding off others, and changing the environment. Important fungal and bacterial relationships don’t form when a plant can get free nutrients. When chemically fed, plants bypass the microbial-assisted method of obtaining nutrients, and microbial populations adjust accordingly. Trouble is, you have to keep adding chemical fertilizers and using “-icides,” because the right mix and diversity—the very foundation of the soil food web—has been altered. It makes sense that once the bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa are gone, other members of the food web disappear as well. Earthworms, for example, lacking food and irritated by the synthetic nitrates in soluble nitrogen fertilizers, move out. Since they are major shredders of organic material, their absence is a great loss. Without the activity and diversity of a healthy food web, you not only impact the nutrient system but all the other things a healthy soil food web brings. Soil structure deteriorates, watering can become problematic, pathogens and pests establish themselves and, worst of all, gardening becomes a lot more work than it needs to be.

The modern holiday of Mother's Day was first celebrated in 1908, when Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother at St Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia.[9] St Andrew's Methodist Church now holds the International Mother's Day Shrine.[10] Her campaign to make Mother's Day a recognized holiday in the United States began in 1905, the year her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, died. Ann Jarvis had been a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War, and created Mother's Day Work Clubs to address public health issues. She and another peace activist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe had been urging for the creation of a Mother’s Day dedicated to peace. 40 years before it became an official holiday, Ward Howe had made her Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870, which called upon mothers of all nationalities to band together to promote the “amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”[11] Anna Jarvis wanted to honor this and to set aside a day to honor all mothers because she believed a mother is "the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world" Ghb구매,물뽕구입,Ghb 구입방법,물뽕가격,수면제판매,물뽕효능,물뽕구매방법,ghb가격,물뽕판매처,수면제팔아요 카톡【AKR331】라인【SPR331】위커【SPR705】텔레【GEM705】 첫거래하시는분들 실레지만 별로 반갑지않습니다 이유는 단하나 판매도 기본이지만 안전은 더중요하거든요 *물뽕이란 알고싶죠? 액체 상태로 주로 물이나 술 등에 타서 마시기 때문에 속칭 '물뽕'으로 불린다. 다량 복용시 필름이 끊기는 등의 증세가 나타나고 강한 흥분작용을 일으켜 미국에서는 젊은 청소년들속에서 주로 이용해 '데이트시 강간할 때 쓰는 약'이라는 뜻의 '데이트 레이프 드러그(date rape drug)'로 불리기도 한다. 미국 등 일부 국가에서는 GHB가 공식적으로 여성작업용으로 시중에서 밀거래 되고있다 미국에서는 2013년부터 미국FDA에서 발표한데의하면 법적으로 물뽕(GHB)약물을 사용금지하였다 이유는 이약물이 사람이 복용후 30분안에 약효가 발생하는데 6~7시간정도 지나면 바로 몸밖으로 오즘이나 혹은 땀으로 전부 빠져나간다는것이다 한번은 미국에서 어떤여성분이 강간을 당했다면서 미국 경찰청에 신고를 했다 2번의재판끝에 경찰당국과 여성분은 아무런 증거도 얻을수없었다 남성분이나 혹은 여성분이 복용할경우 30분이면 바로 기분이 좋아지면서 평소 남성의 터치나 남성의 시선까지 거부하던 여성분이그녀답지않은 스킨쉽으로 30분이 지나서 약발이 오르면 바로 작업을 걸어도 그대로 바로 빠져들게하는 마성의 약물이다 이러한 제품도 진품을살때만이 효과를 보는것이다. 더궁금한것이 있으시면 카톡【AKR331】라인【SPR331】위커【SPR705】텔레【GEM705】로 문의주세요. In 1908, the U.S. Congress rejected a proposal to make Mother's Day an official holiday, joking that they would also have to proclaim a "Mother-in-law's Day". However, owing to the efforts of Anna Jarvis, by 1911 all U.S. states observed the holiday, with some of them officially recognizing Mother's Day as a local holiday (the first being West Virginia, Jarvis' home state, in 1910). In 1914, Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating Mother's Day, held on the second Sunday in May, as a national holiday to honor mothers.

I watched her face. She reminded me of a Francis Bacon painting, fading in and out of her resemblance to anything human, struggling to resist disappearing into an undifferentiated world of pain. I brushed her hair out of her face, made braids again. ㅤㅤㅤWomen’s bravery, I thought as I worked on her hair from bottom to top, untangling the black mass. I would never be able to go through this. The pain came in waves, in sheets, starting in her belly and extending outward, a flower of pain blooming through her body, a jagged steel lotus. ㅤㅤㅤI couldn’t stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was. That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He’d have had to change his whole philosophy. ㅤㅤㅤThe mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain. Gasping on the bed, Yvonne bordered on the unrecognizable, disintegrating into a ripe collection of nerves, fibers, sacs, and waters and the ancient clock in the blood. Compared to this eternal body, the individual was a smoke, a cloud. The body was the only reality. I hurt, therefore I am.

In August 1977 Canadians reacted with horror and revulsion when they learned that in the 1950s and early 1960s, one of the most eminent psychiatrists in the country had used his vulnerable patients as unwitting guinea pigs in brainwashing experiments funded by the CIA and the Canadian government. Behind the doors of the so-called sleep room on Wards 2 South, Dr. Ewen Cameron, the director of Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, exposed dozens of his own patients to barbaric treatments from which some never fully recovered. Operating under the belief that he could wipe brains clean of "bad behavior" and program in new behaviour, Cameron kept patients in a chemical sleep for weeks and months at a time exposing them to massive amounts of electro-shock and drugs such as LSD, and forced them to listen to tape-recorded messages repeated endlessly through headphones. Cameron was not alone in his desire to reprogram the human brain. The U.S. intelligence establishment found in him an eager collaborator, and funded his work substantially and covertly. Eventually, after years of stonewalling by the CIA, nine of the dozens of victims were at last given a chance to claim restitution for Cameron’s “treatments” by taking the powerful U.S. intelligence agency to court.

I know I said this before, but it bears repeating. You know Tate won’t like you staying with me.” “I don’t care,” she said bitterly. “I don’t tell him where to sleep. It’s none of his business what I do anymore.” He made a rough sound. “Would you like to guess what he’s going to assume if you stay the night in my apartment?” She drew in a long breath. “Okay. I don’t want to cause problems between you, not after all the years you’ve been friends. Take me to a hotel instead.” He hesitated uncharacteristically. “I can take the heat, if you can.” “I don’t know that I can. I’ve got enough turmoil in my life right now. Besides, he’ll look for me at your place. I don’t want to be found for a couple of days, until I can get used to my new situation and make some decisions about my future. I want to see Senator Holden and find another apartment. I can do all that from a hotel.” “Suit yourself.” “Make it a moderately priced one,” she added with graveyard humor. “I’m no longer a woman of means. From now on, I’m going to have to be responsible for my own bills.” “You should have poured the soup in the right lap,” he murmured. “Which was?” “Audrey Gannon’s,” he said curtly. “She had no right to tell you that Tate was your benefactor. She did it for pure spite, to drive a wedge between you and Tate. She’s nothing but trouble. One day Tate is going to be sorry that he ever met her.” “She’s lasted longer than the others.” “You haven’t spent enough time talking to her to know what she’ s like. I have,” he added darkly. “She has enemies, among them an ex-husband who’s living in a duplex because she got his house, his Mercedes, and his Swiss bank account in the divorce settlement.” “So that’s where all those pretty diamonds came from,” she said wickedly. “Her parents had money, too, but they spent most of it before they died in a plane crash. She likes unusual men, they say, and Tate’s unusual.” “She won’t go to the reservation to see Leta,” she commented. “Of course not.” He leaned toward her as he stopped at a traffic light. “It’s a Native American reservation!” She stuck her tongue out at him. “Leta’s worth two of Audrey.” “Three,” he returned. “Okay. I’ll find you a hotel. Then I’m leaving town before Tate comes looking for me!” “You might hang a crab on your front door,” she said, tongue-in-cheek. “It just might ward him off.” “Ha!” She turned her eyes toward the bright lights of the city. She felt cold and alone and a little frightened. But everything would work out. She knew it would. She was a grown woman and she could take care of herself. This was her chance to prove it.

When I was twelve years old, I looked in the mirror and I saw what I perceived to be my faults and my mother's faults. These coalesced into a dark mark that I would carry through my life, a coating of what I saw, which came from others' hatred of me, and all this forested a hatred of myself. I thought being unwanted and abandoned and persecuted was the legacy of the poor southern Black woman. But as an adult, I see my mother's legacy anew. I see how all the burdens she bore, the burdens of her history and identity and of our country's history and identity , enable her to manifest her greatest gifts. My mother had the courage to look at four hungry children and find a way to fill them. My mother had the strength to work her body to its breaking point to provide for herself and her children. My mother had the residence to cobble together a family from the broken bits of another. And my mother's example teaches me other things: This how a transplanted people survived a holocaust and slavery. This is how Black people in the South organized to vote under the shadow of terrorism and the noose. This is how human begins sleep and wake and fight and survive. In the end, this is a how a mother teaches her daughter to have courage, to have strength, to be resilient, to open her eyes to what it is, and to make something of it.

They had shared much of their pasts, most of their fears, and all of their tenuous and fragile hopes, but Deborah had noticed over the years that whenever she mentioned her art, or something on which she was working, a subtle change would come over Carla. Her face would harden almost imperceptibly; her manner would edge toward coolness. Because it was a subtle emotion in a world of erratic oscillations of feeling, of violence, and of lies told by every sense of perception, Deborah had not noticed it in their sick times. But one day the world had cleared enough so that she realised that at any mention of her art, her friend drew back. In their new eagerness for experience and reality, the strange aloofness stood out clearly. [...] She had a dream. In the dream it was winter and night. The sky was thick blue-black and the stars were frozen in it, so that they glimmered. Over the clean white and windswept hills the shadows of snowdrifts drew long. She was walking on the crust of snow, watching the star-glimmer and the snow-glimmer and the cold tear-glimmer in her own eyes. A deep voice said to her, "You know, don't you, that the stars are sound as well as light?" She listened and heard a lullaby made by the voices of the stars, sounding so beautiful together that she began to cry with it. The voice said, "Look out there." She looked toward the horizon. "See, it is a sweep, a curve." Then the voice said, "This night is a curve of darkness and the space beyond it is a curve of human history, with every single life an arch from birth to death. The apex of all of these single curves determines the curve of history and, at last, of man." "I cannot show you yours," the voice said, "but I can show you Carla's. Dig here, deep in the snow. It is buried and frozen - Dig deep." Deborah pushed the snow aside with her hands. It was very cold, but she worked with a great intensity as if there were salvation in it. At last her hand struck something and she tore it up from burial. It was a piece of bone, thick and very strong and curved in a long, high, steady curve. "Is this Carla's life?" she asked. "Her creativity?" "It is bone-deep with her, though buried and frozen." The voice paused a moment and then said, "It's a fine one - a fine solid one!" [...] "Please don't be angry," she said, and then told Carla the dream. [...] She wiped her eyes. "It was only a dream, your dream..." "It's true anyway," Deborah said. "The one place I could never go..." Carla said musing, "...the one hunger I could never admit." When Deborah finished, Furii said, "You always took your art for granted, didn't you? I used to read in the ward reports all the time how you managed to do your drawing in spite of every sort of inconvenience and restriction.

The pause that followed was one she couldn’t interpret. Maybe he was pissed she was interfering? “I just want to make sure you’re okay.” “Do you do this with patients a lot?” “Yes,” she lied. “Havers know you’re checking his work?” “Did he even look at your veins?” Rehvenge’s laugh was low. “I would rather you had called for a different reason.” “I don’t understand,” she said tightly. “What? That someone might want to have something to do with you outside of work? You’re not blind. You’ve seen yourself in mirrors. And surely you know you’re smart, so it’s not all just pretty window dressing.” As far as she was concerned, he was speaking in a foreign language. “I don’t understand why you’re not taking care of yourself.” “Hmmm.” He laughed softly, and she felt the purr as well as heard it in her ear. “Oh…so maybe this is a pretense just so I can see you again.” “Look, the only reason I called was—” “Because you needed an excuse. You shut me down in the exam room, but really wanted to talk to me. So you called about my arm to get me on the phone. And now you have me.” That voice dropped even lower. “Do I get to pick what you do with me?” She stayed quiet. Until he said, “Hello?” “Are you finished? Or do you want to run around in circles a little longer, reading into what I’m doing here?” There was a beat of silence, and then he broke out in a rich baritone belly laugh. “I knew there was more than one reason I liked you.” -Ehlena & Rehv

I grabbed my favorite exfoliating facial scrub, the same one I’d used all the way through college. Not quite as abrasive as drugstore-brand apricot scrubs, but grainy enough to get serious and do the trick. It had to be the magic bullet. It had to work. I started by washing my unfortunate face with a mild cleanser, then I squirted a small amount of the scrub on my fingers…and began facilitating the peeling process. I held my breath. It hurt. My face was in a world of pain. I scrubbed and scrubbed, wondering why facials even existed in the first place if they involved such torture. I’m a nice person, I thought. I go to church. Why is my skin staging a revolt? The week of a girl’s wedding was supposed to be a happy time. I should have been leaping gleefully around my parents’ house, using a glitter-infused feather duster to sparkle up my wedding gifts, which adorned every flat surface in the house. I should have been eating melon balls and laughing in the kitchen with my mom and sister about how it’s almost here! Don’t you love this Waterford vase? Oooh, the cake is going to be soooooo pretty. Instead, I was in my bathroom holding my face at gunpoint, forcing it to exfoliate on command. I rinsed my face and looked in the mirror. The results were encouraging. The pruniness appeared to have subsided; my skin was a little rosy from the robust scrubbing, but at least flakes of dead epidermis weren’t falling from my face like tragic confetti. To ward off any drying, I slathered my face with moisturizing cream. It stung--the effect of the isopropyl alcohol in the cream--but after the agony of the day before, I could take it. When it came to my facial nerve endings, I’d been toughened to a whole new level of pain.

Honestly, sir,” I said, “I don’t see why you’re making such a fuss.” We had excused ourselves to speak privately for a moment, leaving poor Charlie politely rocking on his heels in the foyer. The office was warm and smelled of sage and witch hazel, and the desk was littered with bits of twine and herbs where Jackaby had been preparing fresh wards. Douglas had burrowed into a nest of old receipts on the bookshelf behind us and was sound asleep with his bill tucked back into his wing. I had given up trying to get him to stop napping on the paperwork. “You’re the one who told me that I shouldn’t have to choose between profession and romance,” I said. “I’m not the one making a fuss. I don’t care the least bit about your little foray into . . . romance.” Jackaby pushed the word out of his mouth as though it had been reluctantly clinging to the back of his throat. “If anything, I am concerned that you are choosing to make precisely the choice that I told you you should not make!” “What? Wait a moment. Are you . . . jealous?” “Don’t be asinine! I am not jealous! I am merely . . . protective. And perhaps troubled by your lack of fidelity to your position.” “That is literally the definition of jealous, sir. Oh, for goodness’ sake. I’m not choosing Charlie over you! I’m not going to suddenly stop being your assistant just because I spend time working on another case!” “You might!” he blurted out. He sank down into the chair at his desk. “You just might.” “Why are you acting like this?” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because things change. Because people change. Because . . . because Charlie Barker is going to propose,” he said. He let his hand drop and looked me in the eyes. “Marriage,” he added. “To you.” I blinked. “I miss a social cue or two from time to time, but even I’m not thick enough to believe all that was about analyzing bloodstains together. He has the ring. It’s in his breast pocket right now. He’s attached an absurd level of emotional investment to the thing—I’m surprised it hasn’t burned a hole right through the front of his jacket, the way its aura is glowing. He’s nervous about it. He’s going to propose. Soon, I would guess.” I blinked. The air in front of me wavered like a mirage, and in another moment Jenny had rematerialized. “And if he does,” she said softly, “it will be Abigail’s decision to face, not yours. There are worse fates than to receive a proposal from a handsome young suitor.” She added, turning to me with a grin, “Charlie is a good man.” “Yes, fine! But she has such prodigious potential!” Jackaby lamented. “Having feelings is one thing—I can grudgingly tolerate feelings—but actually getting married? The next thing you know they’ll be wanting to do something rash, like live together ! Miss Rook, you have started something here that I am loath to see you leave unfinished. You’ve started becoming someone here whom I truly want to meet when she is done. Choosing to leave everything you have here to go be a good man’s wife would be such a wretched waste of that promise.” He faltered, looking to Jenny, and then to the floorboards. “On the other hand, you should never have chosen to work for me in the first place. It remains one of your most ill-conceived and reckless decisions to date—and that is saying something, because you also chose to blow up a dragon once.” He sighed. “Jenny is right. You could make a real life with that young man, and you shouldn’t throw that away just to hang about with a fractious bastard and a belligerent duck.” He sagged until his forehead was resting on his desk.

If administration actions are not to mock its own rhetoric, the President must now take the lead in mobilizing public opinion behind a new resolve to meet the crisis in our cities. He should now put before Congress a National Emergency Public Works and Reconstruction bill aimed at building housing for homeless victims of the riot-torn ghettos, repairing damaged public facilities, and in the process generating maximum employment opportunities for unskilled and semiskilled workers. Such a bill should be the first step in the imperative reconstruction of all our decaying center cities. Admittedly, the prospects for passage of such a bill in the present Congress are dismal. Congressmen will cry out that the rioters must not be re-warded, thereby further penalizing the very victims of the riots. This, after all, is a Congress capable of defeating a meager $40 million rat extermination program the same week it votes $10 million for an aquarium in the District of Columbia! But the vindictive racial meanness that has descended upon this Congress, already dominated by the revived coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats, must be challenged—not accommodated. The President must go directly to the people, as Harry Truman did in 1948. He must go to them, not with slogans, but with a timetable for tearing down every slum in the country. There can be no further delay. The daydreamers and utopians are not those of us who have prepared massive Freedom Budgets and similar programs. They are the smugly "practical" and myopic philistines in the Congress, the state legislatures, and the city halls who thought they could sit it out. The very practical choice now before them and the American people is whether we shall have a conscious and authentic democratic social revolution or more tragic and futile riots that tear our nation to shreds.

His eyes burned. His throat swelled and knotted. For the first time in his life he was faced with a situation where he had no idea what to do. She had every right to hate him. She put a hand to her head and rubbed. She swayed and then bent over as if she was about to fall. “Kelly!” He went forward, but she jerked upright again and thrust out a hand to ward him off. “Just stay away,” she said in a low, desperate voice. “Kelly, please.” It was his turn to beg. And God, he would. He’d do anything to make her stay long enough that he could make it up to her. “I love you. I never stopped loving you.” She lifted her gaze again, her eyes drenched with tears—and pain. “Love isn’t supposed to hurt this much. Love isn’t this. Love is trust.” He moved forward again, so desperate to hold her, to offer the comfort he had denied her when she’d needed him most. Anger and sorrow vied for control. Grief welled in his chest until he thought he might explode. Rage surged through his veins like acid. She put her hand to her head again and started to walk past him. He caught at her elbow, anything to stop her, because he knew in his heart she was going to walk away. He didn’t deserve a second chance. He didn’t deserve for her to stay. He didn’t deserve her love. But he wanted it. He wanted it more than he wanted to live. “Please don’t go.” She turned back to him, sadness so deep in her gaze that it hurt him to look at her. “Don’t you see, Ryan? It can never work for us. You don’t trust me. Your family and friends hate me. What kind of life will that be for me? I deserve more than that. It’s taken me long enough to figure that out. I settled again, when I swore I’d never do it. I agreed to marry you. Again. Because I was so in love with you and I believed that we could move forward. But I was a fool. Some obstacles are insurmountable.

She told him the origins of the “buck dance,” when “white people would come up and say ‘N____r, dance’, and then start shooting around the feet of blacks so that they would dance like everything.” 45 Big Ma was an important presence in Jimmy’s childhood and adolescence, and he credited her with giving him a unique and powerful sense of historical change. “When she talked about slavery,” he recalled, “she always talked not about how they freed the slaves, but about how [slaveholders] surrendered. There was a big difference. She saw the change as something that had been won by somebody, not something that had been given. She realized that there had been a struggle and that somebody had to lose.” 46 It would not take much for young Jimmy to see a historical connection and a continuity in struggle between these two moments—the buck dance that Big Ma witnessed in her childhood and the marauding Selma sheriff who came to town “shooting and raising Cain to see the colored folks run” during his childhood. Big Ma lived until the mid-1930s, when Jimmy was in his teens. By this time he could see new spaces of struggle emerging from shifts in the region’s economy and black people’s employment patterns. These shifts had impacted his family, specifically through his father’s work opportunities, and would shape his own prospects. Cotton continued to be an important part of the economy, both in the state and in the Black Belt region, but its significance declined relative to Alabama’s growing industrial economy. African Americans saw expanded employment opportunities, as labor shortages, strikes, and union organizing during the first two decades of the century led companies to open up jobs previously unavailable to black workers. The steel industry, which had previously satisfied its need for cheap labor with immigrant workers, came to rely heavily on black labor after World War I. 47

The phone went off. Private caller. “Thank fuck,” he said as he accepted it. “Payne—” “No.” Manny closed his eyes: Her brother sounded like hell. “Where is she.” “We don’t know. And there’s nothing that we can do from here—we’re trapped inside.” The guy exhaled like he was smoking something. “What the fuck happened before she left? I thought she’d be spending all night with you. It’s cool if you two . . . you know . . . but why did she leave so early?” “I told her it wasn’t going to work out.” Long silence. “What the fuck are you thinking?” Clearly if it hadn’t been all bright and sunny outside, motherfucker would have been knocking on Manny’s door, looking to kick some Italian ass. “I thought that would make you happy.” “Oh, yeah. Abso—break my sister’s fucking heart. I’m all for that.” Another sharp exhale, like he was blowing smoke. “She’s in love with you, asshole.” Didn’t that stop him in his tracks. But he got back with the program. “Listen, she and I . . .” At that point, he was supposed to explain the stuff about the results of his physical and how he was all freaked out and didn’t know what the repercussions were. But the trouble was, in the hours since Payne had taken off, he’d come to realize that however true that shit was, there was a more fundamental thing going on at the core of him: He was being a little bitch. What the go-away had really been about was the fact that he was shitting in his pants because he’d actually fallen in love with a woman . . . female . . . whatever. Yeah, there was a tremendous overlay of metaphysical stuff he didn’t understand and couldn’t explain, blah, blah, blah. But at the center of it all, he felt so much for Payne that he didn’t know himself anymore, and that was the terrifying part. He’d pussied out when he’d had the chance. But that was done now. “She and I are in love,” he said clearly. And damn him to hell, he should have had the balls to tell her. And hold her. And keep her. “So like I said, what the fuck are you thinking.” “Excellent question.” -Manny & Vishous

Hey, can I help you—whoa!” As he wheeled around and settled into his attack stance, the black human salesperson jumped back and put his palms up. “Forgive me,” Xcor muttered. At least he hadn’t outed one of his weapons. “No problem.” The handsome, well-dressed man smiled. “You looking for something specific?” Xcor glanced around, and nearly walked back to that fancy stairwell. “I require a new shirt.” “Oh, cool, you got a hot date?” “And pants. And socks.” Come to think of it, he never wore underwear. “And undergarments. And a jacket.” The salesman smiled and raised a hand as if he were going to clap his customer on the shoulder—but then caught himself as he clearly rethought the contact. “What kind of look are you going for?” he asked instead. “Clothed.” The guy paused like he wasn’t sure whether that was a joke. “Ah . . . okay, I can work with non-naked. Plus it’s legal. Come on with me.” Xcor followed, because he didn’t know what else to do—he’d gotten this ball rolling; there was no reason not to follow through. The man stopped in front of a display of shirts. “So I’m going to go with the it’s-a-date thing, unless you tell me otherwise. Casual? You didn’t mention a suit.” “Casual. Yes. But I want to look. . . .” Well, not like himself, at any rate. “Presentable.” “Then I think what you’re going to want is a button-down.” “A button-down.” The guy regarded him steadily. “You’re not from here, are you.” “No, I’m not.” “I can tell by the accent.” The salesman passed a hand over the dizzying array of folded-up squares with collars. “These are our traditional cuts. I can tell without measuring you that the European stuff isn’t going to do you right—you’re too muscled in the shoulders. Even if we could get the neck and arm size right, you’d bust out of them. Do you like any of these colors?” “I don’t know what to like.” “Here.” The man picked up a blue one that reminded Xcor of the backdrop on his phone. “This is good with your eyes. Not that I go that way—but you gotta work with what you got. Do you have any idea of your size?” “XXXL.” “We need to be a little more exact.

While Mum was a busy working mother, helping my father in his constituency duties and beyond, Lara became my surrogate mum. She fed me almost every supper I ate--from when I was a baby up to about five years old. She changed my nappies, she taught me to speak, then to walk (which, with so much attention from her, of course happened ridiculously early). She taught me how to get dressed and to brush my teeth. In essence, she got me to do all the things that either she had been too scared to do herself or that just simply intrigued her, such as eating raw bacon or riding a tricycle down a steep hill with no brakes. I was the best rag doll of a baby brother that she could have ever dreamt of. It is why we have always been so close. To her, I am still her little baby brother. And I love her for that. But--and this is the big but--growing up with Lara, there was never a moment’s peace. Even from day one, as a newborn babe in the hospital’s maternity ward, I was paraded around, shown off to anyone and everyone--I was my sister’s new “toy.” And it never stopped. It makes me smile now, but I am sure it is why in later life I craved the peace and solitude that mountains and the sea bring. I didn’t want to perform for anyone, I just wanted space to grow and find myself among all the madness. It took a while to understand where this love of the wild came from, but in truth it probably developed from the intimacy found with my father on the shores of Northern Ireland and the will to escape a loving but bossy elder sister. (God bless her!) I can joke about this nowadays with Lara, and through it all she still remains my closest ally and friend; but she is always the extrovert, wishing she could be on the stage or on the chat show couch, where I tend just to long for quiet times with my friends and family. In short, Lara would be much better at being famous than me. She sums it up well, I think: Until Bear was born I hated being the only child--I complained to Mum and Dad that I was lonely. It felt weird not having a brother or sister when all my friends had them. Bear’s arrival was so exciting (once I’d got over the disappointment of him being a boy, because I’d always wanted a sister!). But the moment I set eyes on him, crying his eyes out in his crib, I thought: That’s my baby. I’m going to look after him. I picked him up, he stopped crying, and from then until he got too big, I dragged him around everywhere.

You’ll have stopped making sentences in quarantine, In the special ward set aside for sentence making once the outline is finished, The way you were taught in school. Instead, writing becomes intrinsic to the act of thinking, Completely intertwined with it. You’re also learning to trust the ability to work in your head And learning how your mind works, Which is something you may not have noticed before. We’re always hastening to be done writing, But we’re also hastening to get out of the presence of our thoughts. Everything about thinking makes us nervous. We don’t believe there’s much of value to be found there. We don’t know when we’ll come to the end of our thoughts, But we think it may be soon. Why? Your mind is silent yet filled with voices and uncertainty. The uncertainty you feel is one of the places sentences will come from, And experience will make your uncertainty more certain. Stop fearing what you’ll find as you think. Give yourself over to this experiment. Your intentions will diverge from themselves. Your starting point may lead to places you didn’t imagine, Places that ask you to reconsider your starting point. You may feel yourself clinging to your original intention. Why? Because it came first? Why not follow the crosscurrents of your thinking And see where they lead? I don’t mean follow them blindly. Allow your thinking to adjust your intentions in the light of your discoveries. This may mean relinquishing your original intention If you find a better one as you write. The piece you’re writing is simply the one that happens to get written. If you’d begun another way, made a different turn, even started in a different mood, A different piece would have come into being. The writer’s world is full of parallel universes. You discover, word by word, the one you discover. Ten minutes later—another hour of thought—and you would have found your way into a different universe. The piece is permeable to the world around it. It’s responsive to time itself, to the very hour of its creation. This is an immensely freeing thing to understand. It liberates you from the anxiety of sequence, The fear that there’s only one way through your subject, Only one useful approach. Learn to accept the discontinuity between yourself and what you write, The discontinuity between your will, your intention, your plan And the discoveries you make as you work. Abandon the idea of predetermination, The shaping force of your intention, Until you’ve given it up for good. Bring your intentions, by all means, but accept that the language we use Is a language of accidentals, always skewing away from the course we set. This is something not to mourn but to revel in— Not only for the friction and sideslip inherent in the language But for freeing us from the narrowness of our preconceptions.

Wrath…” “What,” he murmured against her, working her with his nose. “You don’t like?” “Shut up and get back to doing—” His tongue slipping under the panties cut her off…and made him have to slow himself down. She was so slick and wet and soft and willing, it was all he could do to keep himself from hauling her on the rug and going at her deep and hard. And then they’d both miss out on the fun of anticipation. Moving the cotton aside with his hand, he kissed her pink flesh, then delved in. She was oh, so ready for him, and he knew it because of the honey that he swallowed as he dragged upward in a long, slow lick. But it wasn’t enough, and holding the panties to the side was distracting. With his fang, he punctured them, then split them apart right up the middle, leaving the two halves to hang off her hips. His palms went up to her ass and squeezed hard as he quit fooling around and got busy working out his female with his mouth. He knew exactly what she liked best, the sucking and the licking and the going in with his tongue. Closing his eyes, he took it all in, the scent and the taste and the feel of her shuddering against him as she peaked and came apart. Behind the fly of his leathers, his cock was screaming for attention, the rasp of the buttons not nearly sufficient to satisfy what it was demanding, but tough shit. His erection was going to have to chill for a while, because this was too sweet to stop anytime soon. When Beth’s knees wobbled, he took her down to the floor and stretched one of her legs up, keeping to his pace while shoving her fleece to her neck and putting his hand under her bra. As she orgasmed again, she grabbed onto one of the desk legs, pulling hard and bracing her free foot into the rug. His pursuit pushed them both farther and farther beneath where he discharged his kingly duties until he had to crouch down to fit his shoulders. Eventually her head was out the other side and she was gripping the pansy-ass chair he sat in and dragging it with her. As she cried out his name once more, he prowled up her body and glared at the stupid, nancy chair. “I need something heavier to sit in.” Last coherent thing he said. His body found the entrance to hers with an ease that spoke of all the practice they’d had and…Oh, yeah, still as good as the first time. Wrapping his arms around her, he rode her hard, and she was right there with him as the storm rolling through his body gathered in his balls until they stung. Together, he and his shellan moved as one, giving, receiving, going faster and faster until he came and kept going and came again and kept going until something hit his face. In full animal mode, he growled and swiped at it with his fangs. It was the drapes. He’d managed to fuck them out from under the desk, past the chair, and over to the wall. Beth burst out laughing and so did he, and then they were cradling each other.

Merry Christmas.” he says quietly, pulling something from his back pocket. I frown in confusion then smile in delight when I see what it is. It’s a shiny, sharp trowel with a holly green handle. It’s stolen from the gardens for sure. It is the single greatest gift I’ve ever received. “It’s so pretty.” I whisper happily, turning it over to test its edge. “I promised you something shiny.” “And you delivered.” I press my finger against the tip then pull it back quickly. “It’s sharp.” “Why else have it, right? Keep it with you when you can. If something goes down while I’m gone I want to know you have it.” I nod my head as I slip it into my back pocket. The handle sticks up but the point is hidden. When I look up at Vin my heart skips. His eyes are sharp, intense. “Come with me.” he commands quietly. “No.” I reply immediately. I was waiting for this. From the moment he woke me up, the second I saw his eyes, I knew. And just as quickly as I recognized it, I knew what my answer would be. He shakes his head in disbelief. “You know I’m not coming back here. Not for you, not for anyone.” “Maybe not, but if I go with you then you definitely won’t.” “It’s not going to work, Joss.” he tells me seriously. “The Hive won’t bite. They don’t want to rock the boat with the Colonies and the pot isn’t sweet enough to convince them to try. They’ll pass and everyone here is going to either stay here forever or die in a revolt.” “Nats included.” I remind him coolly. “She’s a big girl. She knows how it really is. She can yell at me all she wants, but she knows just as well as I do that no one will come here to help.” “Especially if you don’t ask.” “What the hell do you want from me?” he whispers fiercely. “You want me to go out there and rally the troops, bring them back here riding on a tall white horse and save the day? I’m no hero. I never have been. It’s how I’ve stayed alive.” “It’s also a great way to stay alone. And if you do this, if you go and pretend we don’t exist, then I’ll pretend I never knew you. Nats will too, I’m sure. You’ll be nothing to no one and won’t that make life easier for you? So go on and go, you coward, and don’t ever look back because there’s nothing to look back on. You were never even here far as I’m concerned.” I turn to leave him standing there in the cold beside the words I wrote to Ryan, words that have gone unnoticed and feel like nothing in the night. I’m spun around roughly and pinned against Vin’s chest. His breath is coming even and hard, sharp inhales and exhales that burst against my face leaving my skin freezing in their absence. “Don’t turn your back on me.” he growls. I can see the enforcer in him now. The hard ass who lived on the outside by the skin of his teeth and grit under his knuckles. It’s something I understand, something I can respect. Something I can relate to. I lean closer, no longer being pulled but rather pushing against him until our faces almost touch. “No, don’t you turn your back on me. On us.” I whisper harshly, pushing at him aggressively. He lets me go and I stumble back from him. “I’m no hero.” he repeats. “How do you know until you’ve tried?” * * * “You’ll come back for us, Vin.” I whisper in his ear. “I know you will.” I know no such thing, but I want it to be true and I can tell he does too so I tell him that it is. I lie to us both and I hope it makes it real. Vin nods his head beside mine and buries his face in my shoulder. I do the same. We stand huddled together against the cold and the uncertainty of everything tomorrow will bring.