Did your new friends mention xactly how Union plans to overthrow a state with a standing pureblood army of 2 million backed by a further 2 million fabricant troops? Yes. By engineering the simultaneous ascension of 6 million fabricants.
After, the young man smoked a nervy marlboro in silence and studied my birthmark, curiously.
Once I knew a stable-boy,” says Francis Bacon. “He used to say, ‘Grief is the bill of love, fallen due.’ I can’t recall his face or even name, but I remember that line. Isn’t it odd, what sticks?
To have relied on a man to stay alive is a bond closer than blood.
Worship still happens here, thinks Jasper. Not of us four, but worship of music itself. Music frees the soul from the cage of the body. Music transforms the Many to a One. The Marshall stacks vibrate his skeleton. We touch something divine. His Stratocaster speaks of ecstasy and despair. We’re not gods, but we are channels for something that is godlike.
While much of her true name lay beyond my knowledge of the Noongar language, as the minutes passed I understood that her name was also a history of her people, a sort of Bayeux Tapestry that bound myth with loves, births, deaths; hunts, battles, journeys; droughts, fires, storms; and names of every host within whose body Moombaki had sojourned.
All defectors have a complex relationship with truth.
In the end, it was a Bach motet that shooed me away – choristers weren’t damnably bad, but the organist’s only hope for salvation was a bullet through the brain. Told him so, too – tact and restraint all well and good in small talk, but one mustn’t beat around any bush where music is concerned.
His favorite position is, uh, called ‘the Plumber.’ You stay in all day but nobody comes.
Commuters sway like sides of beef and slump like corpses: red-eyed office slaves plugged into Discmans; their podgier selves in their forties buried in the Evening Standard; and nearly retired versions gazing over West London wondering where their lives went. I am the System you have to beat, clacks the carriage. I am the System you have to beat.
Forty minutes, times sixty seconds, that’s twenty-four thousand seconds to go.
They bartered fair an’ never spoke knuckly like savages at Honokaa, but politesome speakin’ it draws a line b’tween you what says, I respect you well ’nuff but you an ‘I ain’t kin, so don’t you step over this line, yay?
My in-ear Babelfish provides synopses of the passages rather than a running translation, but now and then the interpreter confesses, “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what he just said. I’m not sure the author knew, either.
People stare at the floor. Even to look at a homeless person is to sign a contract with them. I dabbled with joining the Samaritans once. The supervisor had been homeless for three years. I remember him saying that the worst thing was the invisibility. That and not being able to go anywhere where nobody else could go. Imagine that, owning nothing with a lock, except a toilet cubicle in King’s Cross Station, with a junkie on one side and a pair of cottagers on the other.
True metamorphosis doesn’t come with flowcharts.
I begged Yoona to stop, or at least to fake normalcy in the dinery: I was a well-orientated server in those days, you see, not the evildoer, the threat to civilization, I am now.
Guest lists, I warned him, don’t apply to established family friends. The man smiled an apology – I was dealing with a professional. Sequined gaggle of mantled goslings streamed past me just then, and the butler unwisely let ’em pass me. Was halfway down the glittering hallway before the white-gloved hand clamped my shoulder.
The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.
Where there’s bluster, thinks Luisa, there’s duplicity.
Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks.