Marsha > Recent Status Updates

AFTER WE'VE eaten pizza, we're sitting around in Rex's living room and Leo is trying to teach Marilyn to roll over. She keeps sitting instead, as if Rex has taught her not to listen to people who tell her to do stupid things. "Hey, don't you have any friends you should be hanging out with an on Halloween?" Will asks, lazily running his finger around the mouth of his beer bottle.

"Ready? You sure you don't want us to carry you?" Jacob stuck close to Linc while the others transported Garrick. "I've got it." Linc hoped he wasn't lying as he tried to match the pace set by the stretcher bearers and not wanting the other guy with a twisted ankle to outdo him. They were a ragtag crew for sure, trying to outrace the fire and their own limitations.

"Aren't you worried about being seen here? People talk." Linc made adismissive gesture. "Garrick told me to come. And Sims told me what brand of electrolyte beverage to get for you." "Oh, well, if you got permission, by all means."

The pair shared a fond, secretive smile that Levi didn't completely understand. He excused himself through the backdoor and began a light jog toward cabin row. Some lights were on in various windows as the hands slowly came awake for the new day. Levi ran familiar paths through the lands he'd come to memorize over the last year of his life, thankful to live in such a beautiful place.

Slater couldn't remember the last time he'd had a truly great evening in this house. Last month, the graduation party had been good but also had lingering tension. Tonight, Slater and Rachel chatted without that tension. Nothing was magically perfect between them but they had a relationship, and that was everything.

Slater resisted the very real urge to raid his dad's cupboards for the bottle of whiskey that was always on hand for "medicinal" purposes. Rachel said he'd stopped drinking but Dad kept the whiskey well hidden. Well, except from his bullheaded, rebellious teenage son, because Slater had gotten good at taking nips and refilling it with water.

"You're the most exhausting human being I've ever come across." They walked into the office, and Ace dropped into the chair next to Red, his fist held out for a fist-bump but his smile aimed at King. Red chuckled and fist-bumped him. "I love you," Ace told King. "I love you too, now shut up."

I gulp it down in one long go, not stopping to breathe until the last drop shakes onto my tongue. I gasp. My head is screaming with pain as memories surface like a buoy forced underwater. "I remember," I say. "I remember the other injections. None of them did shit." "No, they didn't," Jess says. "But this one is doing shit."

Mariah looks to Gabriela for direction. The attorney nods. "Let's move on to what you do know. Did your friendship with Alex change at all, after he signed Elisha?" She licks her lips, waits, then says, "Yes. It was slow at first, as they got used to each other. He was nervous bringing Elisha around, like someone with a new dog they're afraid will pee on the carpet."

I will not lie to Alex. I will not tell him about my mother's biannual visits home, and how I watched her change. Won't tell Alex how his drug bent her slowly over a decade. How her voice lost its edge, then personality, then humanity, until she spoke like the automated service that calls to tell you your bills are past due, before your father flings a cell phone he can't afford to replace into the reservoir.

We both look at the contract in my hands. "If I live until I'm eighty that's about sixty years of stipend. With twelve months in a year it comes out to...seven hundred twenty thousand dollars." Alex Bishop is exactly what I came looking for: a trillionaire who'll use me for sex rather than dangerous labor, and is willing to pay extra for the privilege. "How do I accept his offer?"

The clergy in general oppose the Sunday opening of museums, mainly because it encourages people to stay away from church. Of course they put another face on the matter, saying they are concerned for the Sunday rest of the workers or the showing of proper respect for the First Cause--anything but their own interests, their own power, their own pocket.

I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.

No other problem of theology or the philosophy of religion has excited so sustained and wide an interest as the problem of suffering. In spite of that, people keep saying, as if it were a well-known truth, that you cannot prove or disprove God's existence.

The pope appointed Kramer and Sprenger to write a comprehensive analysis, using the full academic armory of the late fifteenth century. With extensive citations of Scripture and of ancient and modern scholars, they produced the Malleus Maleficarum, the "Hammer of Witches".

I know that Christians in the present day often declare that Christianity had a large share n bringing about the abolition of slavery, and this because men professing Christianity were ABolitionists. I plead that those so-called Christian Abolitionists were men and women whose humanity...was, in this, in direct conflict with Christianity.

Pleasant tot eh clerical flesh under such circumstances is the arrival of Sunday! Somewhat at a disadvantage during the week, in the presence of working-day interests and lay splendours, on Sunday the preacher becomes the cynosure of a thousand eyes.

First, she Googled "body switches." Since Tom's computer didn't have any blocks on it, several sites of naked women popped up. Did boys do anything except look at naked girls and try to kill each other? Apparently not.

Ever since that time there have been men who were not content to accept passively the religious opinions of their neighbors, but endeavoured to consider what reason and philosophy might have to say about the mater. In the commercial cities of Ionia, where philosophy was invented, there were free-thinkers in the sixth century B.C. Compared to modern free-thinkers they had an easy task.

Zora adjusted her grip on Airrol's mane and turned to look back at Downtown, which was quickly receding. Were the skyscrapers...moving?

As summer neared, three more states ratified the amendment. But there were few likely candidates to become the thirty-sixth and final state to climb on board. Ratification seemed stuck.

In 1850, she risked imprisonment by signing a petition stating that she would not obey the Fugitive Slave Law, which prohibited any citizen of the United States from assisting slaves in their quest for freedom.

In nineteenth-century America the belief that men were superior to women ran very deep, so deep that most people--men and women--didn't think twice about it; they simply assumed a society in which women had fewer rights was "just the way things are."

At the height of the Rushdie affair, some fellow writers had the courage to hold public readings of The Satanic Verses. In a similar spirit, a cartoonist from Seattle responded to the censored South Park episode of April 2010 by announcing "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day." Far from being frivolous, as some people suggested, this initiative was a magnificent and courageous act of solidarity.

He seemed to understand how lost I felt, and I was grateful for that, because an older guy like him should've steered clear of an uncool middle-schooler like me. But Luke had welcomed me into the cabin. He'd even stolen me some toiletries, which was the nicest thing anybody had done for me all day. I decided to ask him my last big question, the one that had been bothering me all afternoon.

Intelligence is the force of the intellect whereby man perceives the immaterial, after reason has made him certain of the cause of its existence. Reason--that force or function by which the mind is able to compare and contrast that which exists with other existent things. Memory is that function which allows man firmly to retain what he has thus previously understood.

What would the people in those houses think of a well-dressed Negro, a redheaded beauty, and an olive-skinned boy puttering by in a spotless German car? Would a patrolman pull us over? Would Penny have to explain that I was her chauffeur? Would the cop knock out a headlight and write us a ticket? Or would he bring us to an abandoned schoolhouse for reeducation?