Marsha > Recent Status Updates

In the room, I settled in the place I was before, head on the pillow, blanket pulled to my chin. Rook blew out the light on the vanity and carried the other candle to the far side of the bed. He set it on the nightstand, then blew it out, bathing the room in total darkness. There was a rustle of fabric, then the bed dipped, and Rook slid in. He was right. There was enough space to fit a pillow between us.

"Lulu, we'll still be friends after this," I promise her. "You're still my friend."
It feels more true the more I say it, like I have the power to speak it into existence. We're an Odd Couple. I'm quiet and she hardly ever stops talking. She might be a genius and I'm a bit of a meathead, but she is my friend and I am hers and this silly little crush I have won't change that.

"I thought I'd be friends with the people I work with. That's what it's like on sitcoms, right? Everyone is together for eight hours a day so why wouldn't they become friends? But it turns out that sometimes your coworkers are just your coworkers. You don't have to like them. You just have to work with them."
I liked my coworkers. We went out for drinks and had barbecues and they came to visit me in the hospital.

Mael Colum was silent as he thought it over, and I found my eyes straying to Gillecomghain's face. He would have been the preferable match between the two brothers, but lacked ambition - that much was clear. Despite my pitiful circumstances, I clung doggedly to my grandmother's prophecy. Without her words - that promise of greatness - my existence would be without purpose, without meaning.

In the foreground, an immense fortress stood out proudly at the highest point of the land, not hiding in the rocky shoreland as ours had, but proclaiming its authority for all to see. It looked to be twice, no, three times the size of ours, with walls, both taller and more numerous, forming rings around the central keep. As we approached, my eyes darted this way and that, trying to take in everything.

Mistress Klara passed Lizzie a wooden box to sit on and Lizzie perched, looking up from under her hair at the passersby every now and then. Mistress Klara, realizing at once that Lizzie wasn't going to hawk her goods the way Minka did, took on the job herself, advertising Lizzie's as well as her own.
"Here, good people, are the sweetest squashes, the crustiest breads, the most vine-ripe tomatoes you've every seen!"

The four of them made their way into a rusty caged car. As the ground retreated beneath them, Carter's stomach dropped and he came face-to-face with the full moon. Ridley called out to the woman at the controls. "Keep an eye on my chair, please! That bell was very expensive!" When the others stared at her, aghast, she added., "What? You guys are the only ones allowed to crack jokes?"

The American study conducted by the American Psychological Association in 2007 was entitled "The Sexualization of girls," and stressed the omnipresent pressure brought to bear on girls through the media, peers and family that leads girls to sexualize themselves and to perceive themselves only in objectified terms.

The women who undergo the makeover, whether fictional characters or real people, gleefully embrace their newfound feminine power and are rewarded with social acceptance and praise. The transformation is characterized as freeing the women from the burdens of not being properly feminine and from not conforming to cultural expectations.

I can hear Fea's voice in my head, pushing me to tell Antoine what I feel, and boy, do I wish I was thinking about something else.
"What's going on?" I say.
Antoine wipes at his face again. "Okay," he says. He takes a deep breath, then lets it out. "I think I need Fea and her powers."
Just like that, Fea appears between us and yips very loudly. "Fea, your friendly timeline guide, at your service," she says.

The first bell rang.

Héctor's hear dropped.

He couldn't be late to homeroom. That would get him sent to Ms. Heath. So he slowly inched open the door, and, as naturally as he could, he slipped into the flowing crowd, bound for homeroom. He did not look back.

If he had, he would have seen that the door to the janitor's closet was no longer there on the smooth, flat expanse of wall.

Nora played with the cloth napkin in her lap and tried to think of the right way to phrase it. "I thought I did." Before Parsons promised her a world of books and then shut her behind a door labeled Assistant. Even after Rita's promotion news, it was hard to reconcile one glittery promise with the last five years of her life. It left her doubting the existence of dream jobs.

The conversation turned to books, as it always did. Lynn asked Nora if she'd ever read Dorothy Dunnett and slid a book across the table like she already knew the answer--another unsolicited but welcome loan from the library of Lynn. Nora studied the back cover wistfully and tucked it into her purse. Maybe this would be the book that got her back into reading.

The place had a private entrance and was situated above a small theater where the two of them worked building sets, mending costumes, hanging lanterns, and keeping troublesome drunks on the right side of the doorway during shows. the tinkle of a piano, the voices of performers, and the roar of rowdy audiences rattled up through the floorboards almost every evening, but it afforded enough privacy and excuses.

But I was missing a crucial component of myself that everyone else possessed. In some way or another, I've felt apathetic about every job I've ever had. Even with my last job at the media company, I hadn't been excited when my boss had called to offer the job. I'd just politely accepted, because I needed money and health insurance and a roof over my head, and a job would provide me with all those things.

I had no idea what the Schwa had in mind, but I didn't like his eerily calm tone of voice. It haunted me all the way home. I started to think of that cartoon where Daffy Duck gets no respect, so, to prove he's a better act than Bugs, he swallows a few sticks of dynamite, guzzles a can of gasoline and then swallows a lighted match.
"Yeah," he says as he floats up toward the pearly gates, "but I can only do it once."

Although Catholics faced heavy punishments, economic difficulties and political harassment, they were never as a group confronted with a threat to their very survival, nor did they as individuals face total economic ruin if they continued in their faith. The queen wanted to push them into conformity not to persecute them, to milk them of money but not to reduce them to such penury.

In the alehouses tobacco or a species of wound-wort are also obtainable...the powder is lit in a small pipe. The smoke is sucked into the mouth and the saliva is allowed to run freely, after which a good draught of Spanish wine follows. This they regard as a curious medicine for defluctions and as a pleasure. The habit is so common with them that they always carry the instrument on them and light up on all occasions.

The 'banners of arms' showing the heraldic arms of the deceased could be anything up to 7 1/2 yards long, for a duke. A mere knight's banner was only four yards long. Guidons, the standard issue for esquires, were three yards long. As long as the wind blew, they must have made a wonderful sight, but when they drooped on the muddy ground they must have been seriously in the way of the mourners.

I DON'T REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME AN ANONYMOUS MAN TOLD me to go f**k myself or said I was a c**t. I know it was probably by email, since social media wasn't in full swing in 2004 when I started a blog. I remember the first time I called the FBI, when a man wrote us a few years after we launched to say that he wanted to rape us and cut our breasts off.
I remember that I thought about what his real name could be.

"My father," Bastian said. "What was he doing? His plaque said he delved deeper than others dared. What does that mean?"
Ever since his conversation with Professor Luscinia, he couldn't get the question out of his mind. His dad had been the last Psychopomp to study at Gallowgate. After him, all memory of the skill had been intentionally wiped out. Was his dad somehow the reason Psychopomps were no more?

Here is the living room. Always cramped and crowded with women chatting and working around the hearth. The furniture, like all the furniture in the house, is old, inherited from another generation. The couches, still in situ, are big and lumpen, stuffed with grass and fathers. Emer felt like she was being swallowed whole when she sat in them. A book sits open on the leather of one.

I feel her hand on my shoulder and see that she's now standing in the water. "You okay, mijo?"
My feet find the bottom of the pool. "Yeah."
She raises one eyebrow. "I'm worried about you, mijo. Something's not right."
I go back to floating without answering her. Sometimes she can be a bit nosey, my mom. A little controlling. I hear her exit the water, and then the patio door slides shut and I look up at the sky.

This gets Lydia Edwards to smile at me for the first time, and when she does her face energizes. There is something kind of--charismatic?--about her.
"What can I get ya?" she asks.
The menu is printed on a whiteboard with orange marker. The handwriting looks like a third grader's, and I wonder which one of them wrote it. There are four items. "Can I try...the chicken parm hero?"
Her eyes light up.

She feels her thighs, her crotch. No pain. No blood.
"Jesus," she gasps.
"Not quite," a voice from behind her.
Louis, again, with those dead-X eyes.
He smiles.
"Don't come near me," she warns. "You come near me, I will break your tree-trunk neck."
He chuckles. "C'mon, Miriam. You've already established that this is a dream. You already know that I'm you. So are you saying you want to break your own neck?"

"This thing here is definitely a rip-off of what your parents created. A very advanced rip-off with some additional capabilities."
"Like what?"
Inaya said, "There's a lot of data stored in this thing. Way more than what the Futurelink bands store. Your bands take just enough data from someone to create the holographic copy. But this thing...it takes triple that amount of information and stores it."

"He looks just like me" I interrupted.
"Well, yeah! He is you. You'll probably look just like this when you grow a few more inches and get your first peach fuzz. Minus the sparkly skin, of course. It's like looking into a future mirror."
"So cool." I stared at my Holo-pal in wonder.
"Speaking of the skin," he explained. "Had to make them so we could tell the different between Holo-pals, human guests and revs."

Angels fall from heaven but most of them don't know that. Once they enter the earth's atmosphere, their wings sizzle then shrivel like meat in a frying pan, sliding from their shoulder blades, same as a scab or flake of dandruff to be swept into the garbage or rot unnoticed in the dirt, before their human mind finds consciousness. Most spend the entirety of their human lives with no knowledge of their divine lineage.

Nathan chuckles. "That's probably a normal response. To be honest, if you totally expected everyone to love everything you make, you'd probably be some super pretentious art douche."
"I'll have to borrow your turtlenecks and hipster glasses."
"Like I'd ever give those up., You can have my coffee though." He starts to laugh again. "Can't believe I'm gonna be in an art show." He finally hands my phone back to me.

I glance over at Nathan, watching him watch the dancing, his head bobbing along to the beat. He says something to Sophie, but the music drowns it out. Everyone's having so much fun, and he looks like he's missing it, like he'd rather be out there dancing with someone, actually having a good time.
And I've ruined it all.
"I just, um...I'm going to wait by the car. You go have fun," I tell him.