You said the demon’s signature is faint. I may be able to heal her if she’s been injured.” “Not in your present state, you said.” She scowled at him. “I won’t let you back into my uncle’s home.” “Then I can’t protect you if the ...
Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. 'If the sight of ...
I tumbled into the taxi alone, closing the door closed with a dull thud before I could possibly change my mind. Not like this, I remember thinking. Whatever this thing is between us, it could only be tainted and cheapened by a semi-drunken encounter ...
He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He’d been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken to its fullest capacity, so as soon as a restaurant served ...
Thank you. There were three of us kids, all right together. I’m the oldest, she was the knee-baby, and my brother Henry came last. Funny, I miss her all the time, but I miss her most when I’m reading Austen. We’d been fans since we were in the ...
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light…unless all ages and races of men have been delu...
Now you’re going to get it,” I said, guessing Al was coming when the ones in the back scattered. “You should have been nice.” With a weird cry, the closest surface demon fell back, but it was too late. A flash of red light exploded overhead, ...
You are unwilling to pay that price, even knowing that the consolation prize is not only to learn every philosophy that has ever existed, but ones which have not yet been conceived? Even knowing that if you do not accept, you will soon cease to learn...
In Darwin's time no serious attempt had been made to examine the manifestations of variability. A vast assemblage of miscellaneous facts could formerly be adduced as seemingly comparable illustrations of the phenomenon "Variation." Time has shown thi...
The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didn’t, the programs just seemed dreamlike and baffling. In ...
Liall realized that this was the first time he had really been alone with Scarlet. He stood up and held out his hand. The blanket dropped from his shoulders. "Come here." Scarlet reached out to him tentatively and Liall quickly dragged him into his a...
The day may come when the rest of animal creation acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being shoul...
The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man's true state. The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that re...
Can't it be stopped?" said Lina. She shifted around under her blanket, trying to find a place to sit where rocks weren't digging into her. Maybe it can be stopped at the beginning," Maddy said. "If someone sees what's happening and is brave enough to...
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim acro...
I am thinking that I don't want this to happen. I don't want to die. I don't want my friends to die. And to be honest, as the time slows down and my hands are in the air, I am afforded the chance to think one more thought, and I think about her. I bl...
Sean looks up at her, and he wants to explain it all to her. Explain what it’s like to be rubbed so raw, to have your emotional threshold exceeded day after day, your psyche beaten so completely that you have no choice but to turn inward, shunning ...
I need a break after school," she told me later. "School is hard because a lot of people are in the room, so you get tired. I freak out if my mom plans a play date without telling me, because I don't want to hurt my friends' feelings. But I'd rather ...
I became skilled at covering my tracks, filling in the blanks. Sometimes the blanks were never filled. At other times, I would recall places where I had been or things I had done as if from a dream, which made the playback of my father and other men ...
Elder's Meditation of the Day - February 18 "laughter is a necessity in life that does not cost much, and the Old Ones say that one of the greatest healing powers in our life is the ability to laugh." --Larry P. Aitken, CHIPPEWA Laughter is a good st...
To be honest, it was pretty hard to leave. I desperately wanted to turn around, and tell him everything would be okay. That I adore him and I trust him and that I'll stand by him while he goes through this tough time. But I'm just too tired. I'm thir...
