Reader

“Guests began drifting toward the edge of the lawn.
Jane heard the shift around her as someone whispered,
“Graham’s here.”
― D.L. Maddox, Secrets

“I called and called until someone took pity and told me what was going on. She developed COVID-19 pneumonia and they put her on a ventilator.”
My sister’s crying was bordering on hysteria. “Jack, she died this morning! Deloris is gone! I still can’t believe it!”
I swerved, slammed on the brakes, and pulled the Ram over to the side of the highway.”
― Behcet Kaya, Deception: A Jack Ludefance Novel

“Ferret took out a folded scrap of paper and passed it to him.
'My guy Ben doesn't know where the other club is, but the girls are being shipped in from here, a rehab centre in Newtonville.'
'What's this other place called?' Tazeem asked as he slipped the scrap of paper into his pocket.
'The place is just known as The Club. But the behind-the-scenes bit that only the real big spenders get to see, there's no official name, 'cause officially it doesn't exist, that's know as The Zombie Room.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“… the primitive comprehension that the state property represents a social one, their identification, and their equalization  could not resist the criticism of the time. The state property is not socialism. The state-monopoly property, as it was on the both sides of the Berlin Wall and which continues to be such one even after it dropped down, is not social property. There was never and nowhere any socialism! In the twentieth century, we passed through a system of utopian socialism as proof that this was not socialism that was not possible, but the utopia of the writers before Marx and after Marx. We were visited by a utopian socialism, which at the contemporary stage is simply capitalism—state, monopolistic.”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face