Getting up, Luc finished his beer and set the empty bottle on the small outdoor table. The sooner he apologised for his outburst, the better. Walking into the house, he heard a thud. Panic filled him as he ran towards the back of the house. He rounde...
For shit’s sake, it wasn’t like there was a twelve-step for being the Scribe Virgin’s kid: Hi, I’m Vishous. I’m her son and I’ve been her son for three hundred years. HI, VISHOUS. She’s done a head job on me again, and I’m trying not ...
I leave her to chemically combust and find Wren in the student council office, filling out extremely interesting paperwork. He’s buried behind piles of the stuff. I can barely see tufts of his blonde hair poking out. I reach into the paperwork pile...
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered into World War II to protect our way of life and to help liberate those who had fallen under the Axis occupation. The country rallied to produce one of the largest war efforts in his...
And,” Annabeth continued, “it reminds me how long we’ve known each other. We were , Percy. Can you believe that?” “No, he admitted. “So…you knew you liked me from that moment?” She smirked. “I hated you at first. You annoyed me. The...
The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon. Our government's got a war on drugs....But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of...
If someone were to propose that the planets go around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an ‘oomph,’ this theory could explain a number of other phenomena as well. So this is ...
Andrea worked to harden herself to the onslaught of feelings. The problem with feelings was, first you had one, which was generally bad enough. But then you had a feeling about your feeling, and then a feeling about how you were feeling about your fe...
Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as...
Make life easier for those around you, not harder. Every person you know is fighting their own great battle. Few of us ever know what those battles entail, and so often we say and do things that push others deeper and harder into the front lines of t...
There’s an organic grocery store just off the highway exit. I can’t remember the last time I went shopping for food.” A smile glittered in his eyes. “I might have gone overboard.” I walked into the kitchen, with gleaming stainless-steel app...
In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read their letters to each o...
The deeper I went into the valley, the greater the rewards. First, it was a clump of birches, the bottoms wrapped in thick fog, the uppermost branches clear now, nesting birds waking with bright-eyed songs. Next, I passed under the pines, browned nee...
Your violin has only two strings,” I say. “You’re missing the other two.” Yes, he says. He’s well aware. “All I want to do is play music, and the crisis I’m having is right here. This one’s gone,” he says of the missing top string, ...
The quintessential emblem of religion and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core is the sacrifice of a child by a parent. Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually m...
It was strange to us that none of these three victims made any attempt to resist the attack. Indeed, not one inhabitant in any of these worlds considered for a moment the possibility of resistance. In every case the attitude to disaster seemed to exp...
In the midst of aches in the joints, anxiety over the payment of bills, concern for the safety of those you love, envy of the rich, fear of robbers, dog-weariness at the end of a long day, and the unacceptable slipping away of youth, there does occas...
The Everglades was the only place on earth where alligators (broad snout, fresh water, darker skin) and crocodiles (pointy snout, salt water, toothy grin) lived side by side. It was the only home of the Everglades mink, Okeechobee gourd, and Big Cypr...
It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death...
Both the mentally healthy and the neurotic are driven by the need to find an answer [to the problem of human existence], the only difference being that one answer corresponds more to the total needs of man, and hence is more conducive to the unfoldin...
I stand before her, meeting her eye to eye and nose to nose. My head takes a slight bow as I clench my fist. “I should have just killed you like any other bloodsucking vampire.” “So why didn’t you?” She tiptoes, clenching her first as well....
