Ms. Smartarse > Recent Status Updates

The moment you finally place a stone on the board - after having turned it over and over for such a long time between your fingers - is the moment the board becomes a universe through which new energy reverberates along thin black lines.

"I think I have had my fill of corpses for a while."
A sad, nervous laugh escaped his lips. "So I should expect that you'll be avoiding my lab for a while?"
"What? No, your corpses are polite. I take back what I said about Aldorhaven's corpses being better quality."

"I can see the resemblance around the eyes and mouth."
"Really?" Oliver squinted at the picture but still couldn't see it. "My nana always said I took after my grandfather."
"Your coloring is the same," Gwen added.
"The photograph's black and white!"
"Exactly."

"After how chaotic this year has been, I thought Oliver would leap at the chance to get away. I didn't realize it would be a problem."
"You thought the man who hates change would like a change of scenery?"

How could he not understand that it was always his fault? He was the ticklish one, the difficult one, the one who couldn't speak, the one who made things unnecessarily hard because body fluids repulsed him and touch made him want to crawl out of his skin. He was always the problem. Why would it have been different that time?

🥺🥺🥺

"I still don't understand how you managed this."
"Neither do I! I've never been offered a job like that before, and I certainly do NOT align with that man's values."
"Well, you did a good job sounding cross with me in there."
"That wasn't hard."

Skin on a book or an anatomical heart in a jar weren't much different when devoid of the context of their owner's lives. Flesh given willingly didn't bother him nearly as much as flesh stolen from a corpse.

... but he made sure to downplay his abilities. After all, he could barely make a bone dance. Mostly because he didn't try hard in front of them, but they didn't need to know that.

As I understood, she couldn't come to the festivities because she had just started a course with nine women, where they hugged trees in the park to breathe out their problems. When we last spoke two days ago, two of the women had still not found a tree that would listen to them. They'd been cuddling their way through the woods for the past four days with no end in sight.

Recently Gertrud said to me at a party: "Renate, one of the women here is vegan. Which one do you think it is?".

To that I said: "Wait 10 minutes at most, and she'll have told everyone here about it." And that was exactly how it went.

This is like when Ilse goes to the hairdresser. The young women cut, turn, roll, diffuse and wash, and 4 hours later she looks exactly the same, only she smells nice. And it cost way too much.

Ilse started to hit my back, which only made things worse. I couldn't even breathe now and turned quite red. Ilse stopped at once, and started to clear up the table, picking up the good cups.

These are the times where Ilse's domestic tendencies come out. Before she helps her best friend, who's about to suffocate, she'll make sure the china is safe.

Kurt stood there still dressed, waiting for Ilse to help him unbutton. Ever since his doctor told him that he had incipient Arthritis, Kurt prefered to have other people serve him. The fact that the doctor had also told him to exercise and train his fingers is something he tends to leave out.

It was Sir Geram. A brutish guy, however as he was a knight he didn't lie.

I... just... have no more expletitives left. 😮‍💨😮‍💨😮‍💨

Neither her facial expressions nor her gestures gave it away, but Wolf knew that the woman had to be livid on the inside. She was clever and knew how to charm her way into most hearts, but Wolf was not a complete idiot. He had seen through her games.

... I'm too jaded to root for a protagonist that's essentially a mix between Geralt of Rivia and Harry Potter 🙄😮‍💨😒

The city of a thousand scents turned into the city of several odours, and eventually settled into a single breathtaking stench.

"Maybe that was our mistake."
"Yeah. That was the holdup. We never took the time to see if we agreed on..." I looked down at the magazine page and read aloud: "What is your idea of a romantic date?"
"Obviously a crime scene."
"Right? It doesn't get more romantic than that."

There are two ways to get richer: one is to make more money and the second is to discover that more of the things we could love are already at hand (thanks to the Industrial Revolution).

Paradoxically, it is friendship that often offers us the real route to the pleasures that Romanticism associates with love. That this sounds surprising is only a reflection of how underdeveloped our day-to-day vision of friendship has become.

We need to become better friends to ourselves. The idea sounds odd, initially, because we naturally imagine a friend as someone else, not as part of our own mind. But there is value in the concept because of the extent to which we know how to treat our own friends with a sympathy and imagination that we don't apply to ourselves.

I raged and I murdered with none the wiser. I was a criminal with no crime... yet.

"But I'll tell you something: I'm glad I can't even imagine it. Because it must be absolutely horrible! The worst thing that could ever happen to someone. Nevertheless I'm here to help you."
"Nobody can help me anymore. I came too late. Simply too late. My daughter had to die, because another child was more important to me."

It didn't take all that long and at most 3 minutes after entering the [Euro]tunnel we saw Bax's horned fox head peak out of the backpack in all its stony glory.
'Based on your stares, I'm assuming that the salt water is showing its effect already,' he said shivering. 'Quite a tight fit, this backpack. Plus it smells like a eucalyptus candy had died in here.'

I couldn't afford to ponder my lacewing anatomy too much, or I'd remember that I had neither vocal chords nor a tongue.
"You can't see me, but we're here to help you. We'll get you out of here."
I felt it couldn't hurt to sound bit more optimistic. If I had said: hey, a lacewing and a fluffy gargoyle are here to confront 14 trained fighters on a flying island, the poor woman would've lost every bit of hope.

Someone was playing the guitar nearby, and everything felt harmonoius and inviting, like in an ad for happy city life. The place where Hyacinth wanted to meet, lay a bit further from the hustle and bustle, next to the bridges down by the river. Nobody was having a picknick here, there were no benches either, but instead it smelled strongly of urine and pidgeon droppings.

What is certain is that there is no such thing as an intelligent person per se - and probably no entirely dumb one either. We are all astonishingly capable of messing up our lives, whatever the prestige of our university degrees, and never beyond making a sincere contribution, however unorthodox our qualifications.