Her gaze travels back to the lie twisted in a tempest of mud and blood. She witnesses the culmination of her recklessness through a curved lens. Absorbed in life uncoiling, unaware of the world beyond this ridge. His light hair, darkened by rain. His...
the normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet wh...
He was dead again when I got home that day. His corpse was in the kitchen, near the counter, where it appeared he'd been chopping vegetables when the urge to stab himself through the wrist had struck. I slipped on the blood coming in, which annoyed m...
And just like that, something inside shifted very subtly, so that all the empty spaces in him suddenly disappeared, so that his breath timed to hers, so that his blood sang. This is why there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that just...
My story ended where so many stories have ended since the Rising: with a man—in this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun—holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood betrayed me, transforming me from a thinking huma...
I should have been conceived during Woodstock; it’s in my blood: that burning desire to turn an absolute on its head and see what’s underneath. I’m as random as I can be and as responsible as I should be. Attempting to fuse the two makes for in...
You're new here, aren't you?" Rolan asked. "Rose is visiting. She's a friend of the family." Viktoria said. "Ah," he said. "Now I remember hearing about you. I had no idea such a fierce Strigoi killer would be so beautiful." "It's part of the job des...
She exhaled curtly. ‘I’m a serryn. That’s all you see. I’m just something to be tortured, slain or sold off as a commodity. That’s hardly the most appealing of traits.’ ‘Tell your eyes that. Because you really shouldn’t look at me the...
It's already bad. I'm honestly not sure how much worse it's going to get." Notice that I didn't say couldn't get worse. It can always get worse. I know this. And thus I refuse to tempt fate. Superstitious - probably. But magic exists. So does karma, ...
Ik wilde haar weer horen lachen. Sterker nog: ik wilde de lach uit haar tevoorschijn toveren, ik wilde de reden zijn waarom die melodie gespeeld werd, want het was de klank van geluk, van tevredenheid, van alles wat goed en mooi was in de wereld.
Alannah took a step back. “Brennus, are you intoxicated?” “I am King Brennus. I do not become intoxicated. I am intoxicating.” Alannah let out another giggle. “This is not like you. How much have you had?” Brennus leaned his shoulder agai...
The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadv...
You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring ...
Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pu...
His fingers skimmed down her body, over skin and satin, and she shivered, leaning into him, and she was sure they both tasted like blood and ashes and salt, but it didn't matter; the world, the city, and all it's lights and life seemed to have narrow...
I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve,...
Girls, on the other hand, have always come easy. I don't know why that is, exactly. Maybe it's the outsider vibe and a well-placed brooding look. Maybe it's something I think I see sometimes in the mirror, something that reminds me of my father. Or m...
There was a very slight chance she might actually kill him that way, and if she did, she’d be brought up on charges. Unless, of course, she could prove harmful intent. She could see it now. See, Your Honor, he was going to f*ck me silly, make me li...
No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one�...
it may be worth while to note again how often finely developed skulls are discovered in the graveyards of old monasteries, and how likely seems Galtons conjecture, that progress was arrested in the Middle Ages, because the celibacy of the clergy brou...
To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecratio...
