Eunice had deposited St John upon the balcony of the first-floor apartment of former Liberal MP, The Rt. Hon. Leonard Cossins, the disgraced Lord Mayor of Mitchell-Baines who had been removed from office having been caught administering counterfeit b...
I'm not a detective from Baker Street or an old lady who solves crimes while she's knitting in an easy chair. I'm just a book girl. So I can't make a deduction, only take a flight of fancy--er, forget I said that. I meant, I can only take a guess.
She'd been a good nurse, and now she'd never be a nurse again. She was bitter about it and had turned herself into the slut bride from Planet X, as if even in human form, she wanted people to know what she was now: different, other. Trouble was, she ...
You deserve someone better than me. Someone young and idealistic…someone who can experience things for the first time along with you. I'm not always kind, and I have more faults than I'd care to name. All I can promise is that I'll want you until m...
Don’t you want to know what I did?” I could have killed her for all he knew. “Nope.” He motioned me to him. “Could you be anymore chivalrous?” I touched his face. He smiled. “I’d be anything you need me to be. That’s just who I am,�...
I have a whole set of problem-solving behaviors and I am anxious to use them, in much the same way that I would stand up on the train to give my seat to someone who seems to need it more than I do: here is something I can address, and I do, and all i...
All attempts at law, all religion, all ethical norms might be nothing more than attempts by the weak to restrain the strong. Then, within the law, arise the new strong, who subvert the law for their own ends of power and family interest, leaving the ...
Leo resisted the urge to throw a grenade in Frank's face. "I suppose I should know who Pelops was?" "He was a prince, won his wife in a chariot race. Supposedly he started the Olympic games in honor of that." Hazel sniffed. "How romantic. 'Nice wife ...
PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATH Conventions bleed my soul squeeze me old wear me grey like a headstone in transit. It’s tradition and form— fear of the unknown— driving me dead in tight spaces darkly. I cry aloud but who can hear when I...
People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as "the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken."... Understood, however, as the pr...
The word felt good, liberating. So, I repeat it. "Fuck." Then, again. And again. Because it made me someone else, someone normal and happy, someone who used words like that, like St. John. I repeated it, over and over until she walked away, wounded. ...
But I am just a woman who thinks her duty is not to forget. And this duty, which I believe I must fulfill, is: "as a woman" living now I must repeat again and again "I am a woman," because we exist in an epoch still so ancient and ignorant and slow t...
Those who feel guilty contemplating "betraying" the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal—the "eternal" tradition introduced to the...
She waited, thinking you were different from those who used and betrayed her. She believed you would find her, come charging to her rescue. That belief was as misplaced as the monsters we faced were deadly. The day came she finally lost her faith in ...
Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for...
She has gone back to Brooklyn,' her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmire Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years already when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come...
Jake wasn't about to be seduced like some schoolgirl. Not by a man who went by the unlikely name of Tornado, not by anyone. He stood as firmly as he could in the mud and tore his mouth from the kiss, staring into too dark eyes. As his hands made thei...
Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional inv...
She resembled the swallow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised up in every age; they obstinately insist on transporting their grains of w...
Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes i...
I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almos...