Margaux looks around the table; this is not working. All of a sudden she's thinking about a safe room, something she's only heard of but suddenly wants: water, oxygen, bulletproof door, dead bolts, a thousand books. Utterly quiet. Completely silent. ...
It was an unusual sunset. Having sat behind opaque drapery all day, I had not realized that a storm was pushing in and that much of the sky was the precise shade of old suits of armor one finds in museums. At the same time, patches of brilliance enga...
Don't we all have a certain number of images that stay around in our head, which we undoubtedly call memories and improperly so, and which we can never get rid of because they return in our sky with the regularity of a comet - torn away also from a w...
No I am not okay. I've just been pulled out of play tryouts where I had to be the first to audition and everyone's trying out for the same parts, I just had a very bizarre conversation with the school secretary, Megan may be throwing up her cucumber ...
Ruric clung to me and shouted, "Your father." Looking down below I saw my father running after us, several alarmed guards trailing him. As I watched, the High Lord's slight demon shape began to shimmer in a remarkable transformation that stretched hi...
Will my eyes adjust to this darkness? Will I find you in the dark – not in the streaks of light which remain, but in the darkness? Has anyone ever found you there? Did they love what they saw? Did they see love? And are there songs for singing when...
I want to make it perfectly clear that although I believe in the continuity of existence, I do not hold to the simplistic theory that upon death a vaporous ghost containing our soul floats out of our dead body and goes to some cosmic waiting room whi...
I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a...
Legend tells us that the High King of Tara, who ruled supreme over all the Kings of Ireland, looked out from his castle one day during the festival of Eostre and saw a fire blazing away on a far hillside. Furious with this obvious disregard for the l...
I am a bomb but I mean you no harm. That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15, 1957, but I didn’t go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father, developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children m...
Honestly, Evie," I huffed, flopping back to the centre of my bed and glaring at the ceiling. "Why don't you whine some more instead of actually doing anything?" "Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness," Arianna volunteered, leaning on the f...
*For eleven years, I've been worked over and abused in ways you can't imagine by things you don't want to know about. I've killed every kind of vile, black-souled, dead-eyed nightmare that ever made you piss your pjs and cry for mommy in the middle o...
The only thing that can break the unbreakable is the unthinkable. I knew the moment I saw them alone in the waiting room that my worst fears were confirmed. They were all dead. I turned around and walked out. I didn't want to be there. I had to go ou...
Madoka: Won't anyone notice that Mami-san is dead? Homura: Mami Tomoe's only relatives are distant relations. It will be quite some time before anyone files a missing persons report. When one dies on that side of the wards, not even a body is left be...
Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by hi...
Think about what it would mean to fight," he said. "Say we barricade ourselves here in the hotel and refuse to leave. They come at us with their Weapon, whatever it is. Some of us are hurt, some die. We go out to meet them with whatever weapons we ca...
You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there--the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All th...
When I was twelve, my sixth-grade English class went on a field trip to see Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. From that moment forward I dreamed that someday I’d meet my own Juliet. I’d marry her and I wou...
He lowered his voice. "You are a true shield-maiden; you do not turn from a scar on a man's face."I looked at him and did not lower my eyes. "My father was an ealdorman, and his brother ealdorman after him. He taught me that a scar is the badge of ho...
Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it. And then...Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another and against these moon people. It will only spread warfare and multiply the occasion...
Do you know, I sometimes, catch myself wishing that I too were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They're wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most...
