Marsha > Recent Status Updates

"No truffles?" asked Tariq.
"I've learned my lesson. Although I almost considered getting some as a joke. But I thought it might not have gone down well."
Tariq gave a nod. "Yeah, I'm not sure I've evolved from the kind of guy who buys expensive beautiful things because he doesn't know how to express himself into the kind of guy who wastes expensive things on a gag is quite the growth arc you were going for."

IT WAS THE hottest day of the year so far. And the contestants were making delices--which meant they had to temper chocolate under studio lights while hoping against hope that their delicately flavoured custards would set in fridges that, like Paris's nerves, seemed wholly inadequate for the task before them., His parents still hadn't got back to him, and he was largely resigned to the fact that they wouldn't.

"Your mum doesn't really wish I was a nice Bangladeshi boy, does she?" asked Paris., It was a safer question than does your sister really think I'm a weirdo you're trying to fix?
After dinner, Tariq had driven Paris back to his flat, and now they were curled up on the sofa together, Paris with his head in Tariq's lap, and Tariq's fingers playing lightly in Paris's hair.

"WELCOME," ANNOUNCED Grace Forsythe, "my oblectatious octet of oxygeusians to--"
Colin Thrimp stepped forward, one hand on his earpiece, "Jennifer says, and I quote, 'Stop f**king about and use normal words, you miserable sack of overeducated, overpaid, overrated sh**.'"
"I've always taken a certain pride in being overrated," Grace Forsythe mused in a way that made it very clear she wasn't actually replying to him.

"So," Paris tried as casually as he could manage. "Why did you sign up?"
"For the show, you mean?" asked Tariq. And for once, somebody else was doing the squiring. Tariq might even have blushed a little. "I'm aware how this sounds, but I think I just really wanted to be on TV?"
"Um..." Paris stared at him. Then he realised that wasn't a particularly useful response., So he said, "Um..."
Tariq kept squirming.

Much worse than any physical pain is the anxiety--the dread--of walking up the aisle and not knowing what type of plane you're on. Every model has different seat widths and belt lengths, which also vary from airline to airline. Am I going to fit this time? Will I have to ask for a seat-belt extender? Is this a 17-incher or an 18-incher? Is the person next to me going to hate me? Does everyone on this plane hate me?

I sit down behind one of the candy canes, hiding from people coming in and out, until I'm sober enough to drive home.
Today was a failure in so many ways, I realize as I get home. Today I was a failure. And it's not a disease or because of my mother dying, or anything like that.
It's just me. It's who I am. A failure--at matchmaking, at understanding love, and at being the one thing I always thought I was nice.

In the next second, Taam had grabbed Jainan's arm, twisted it behind his back, and shoved him against a wall. Jainan said something else. Taam backhanded him across the face.
In the frozen vid, Jainan's expression was one of pure shock. He wasn't even looking at Taam but past him, to the corridor where they'd come from. He was checking if anyone had seen.

Jainan felt suspended, like a fragment caught in the force between two fields. The idea that Taam's death might have been murder was farcical but the memory of the Auditor saying it circled around his head. He could do nothing about it. No Iskaner was obliged to tell him anything. Internal Security failed to reply to Kiem's nudge; even Taam's old colleagues were quiet.

Here in the essay, Evangelyne told my story the way she always told it: I was a victim of sexual abuse who'd been blamed for the crimes of a powerful male. Then she talked about our romantic friendship and how I'd haplessly broken her heart. In this section, I'm described through the eyes of love, which I find saccharine and mortifying. She uses words like "pure" and "gentle."

The plan has a hierarchy of goals and at the top is "kill the demon." There are two prongs to Drew's plan, one depending on if it follows its own rules and one if it cares more about us breaking ours. I want to doubt that its reasoning powers are so great that it would follow Drew's predicted path, but I know that the demon is smarter than it looks.

"What is there to think about?" Drew asks.
Avery; stares at her in disbelief. "Well, first off, whether or not I still want to be friends with you, Andrea."
Finally, to my surprise, Drew's expression cracks open, and when it does, it's so vulnerable, it hurts to look at. "What?" she asks, voice small.
Avery flinches, like the ability to make Andrea, of all people, feel small, weighs heavily on him.

"Hidden files," she said.
"Dr. Achebe mentioned finding some of her research recently."
"If she was so secretive, it's odd that she would leave anything on the Mirror Tech servers."
"He had pictures of me," Coal said.
"It's almost as if she left pieces of information in different places so you could follow the breadcrumbs."
Coal threw his head back and yelled in frustration at the ceiling.

This struck Julia forcibly. She wanted to object that in the SAZ there had been wild places where one could hide for a time, but people who did this could only survive by robbery, and sooner or later they were hunted down. But then she thought of Eurasia and remembered the boat she'd seen from Hubert's plane. Smugglers! Smugglers must go back and forth to Eurasia all the time. If one could pay them...

Another time he'd lingered beside her to say: "Party members can't think independently. They have lost the capacity to dream of something different. If there is any hope--I don't say that there is--it must lie in the proles." Walking home, Julia felt unspeakably annoyed. She couldn't think? She couldn't dream? Who did he think had devised their affair? Was that not dreaming of something different?

She had never taken anti-sex pills before, and was unprepared for how they turned ordinary things into romance. Everyone seemed dear and admirable; all the old dangers felt like gay adventure. The factory floor with its raucous noise and bustle was a festival. She had little to do and could dream on the walkway, smoking, so happy she felt a keen nostalgia for these hours even as they happened.

"Everyone is born with color," Alice said carefully. "Mines is simply contained on the inside. That is not talent, it is biology."
"That is a biology the rest of us don't have," Oliver pointed out.
"I dance," she said to him. "That is what I do. That is my gift. I feel it, Oliver. I feel it in my heart. I's what I'm meant to do."

"The secret was about someone I know," Dally said. She had so many questions about what had occurred. Maybe there was a way to ask them without revealing the secret itself.
"Secrets aren't meaningful unless you know the person or at least understand the context," Jennacake answered. "That's part of what makes the library so dangerous."
Dally nodded. "Powerful things are always considered dangerous."

He drove up the winding drive through the Rain Forest and when he came out at the top, the large, fieldstone mansion sat there, hidden from all sides by tall stands of trees and thick foliage. He pulled up on the crushed rock drive and sat for a moment staring at the leaded windows that looked down emptily. It was cool here and dusky, even though it was burgeoning day. He got out and went to the carved oak door.

But when Chatley was gone, perhaps having been saved from the Dust Man's special attentions on that other plain beyond the membrane, Pen realized he had not asked what the Chinese epigraphs meant, nor why he had written a check for cash in the amount of one hundred and fifty dollars, nor how he--using Ottmar's method--had been able to get the papers into that old book.

Finally, I heard her say, "I am really fit to be tied. Do you have any idea what they have put me through? Do you have even the faintest idea how many times they've made me watch The Partridge Family? Do you have any idea how much I hate that kind of music? Never Cole Porter, never Sammy Cahn, not even a little Gus Edwards; I'd settle for Sigmund Romberg after those squalling children."

Oddly, the taller Slightly grew, the further back he remembered, so that now he could picture Cadogan Square again, and Kensington Gardens--even, once upon a time, a piano teacher who held pen-nibs under his wrists to make him arch them. (That was why he had taken up the clarinet.) Slightly-more could even remember his first time in Neverland...
'Tell me a story,' demanded Fireflyer.

You'd only ever lived two places and they were polar opposites.
during your early, idyllic childhood, Riley, Brian and you had climbed trees, started a lemonade stand, ridden bikes and, once or twice, played Truth or Dare in the woods. you didn't live in the wealthiest part of Canon, but it was a relatively nice, objectively safe subdivision.
After your dad lost his job, you moved to Pine Hollow Trailer Park.

You were floating in a room with no walls.
Sometimes it got darker, like someone had pulled the blinds down on a window you couldn't see. But there were always faint sounds and smells. You'd sussed out that you were in some sort of hospital after wondering for a while if you were dead.
Time felt weird here. It felt both endless and instant. How long had passed between now and when you woke up here for the first time?

"So? When's the interview start?" I leaned closer, confidential. "Something tells me you're not very good at this, Thomas Abbott."
One drink. Vodka, the cheap kind that blazed through me swiftly, leaving me pleasantly hollow. This place was perfect. Accidental mood lighting from busted bulbs, the low whine and melancholy wailing of country music, a few obvious regulars at the bar. Tom and I sat hidden in a booth.

"Start with that, then." The bag rustled as Cate fished for another fry, though the food had gone cold an hour ago. "What's so interesting about the Homestead? Are you a weirdo? One of those guys who say our mothers wouldn't be virgins anymore if you could just get your hands on them?" She waggled her eyebrows.
Virgin birth had always been a colloquialism, fitting our mothers uncomfortably.

"There's this system for Stellas called wandering," he says. "Does that interest you?"
She tilts her head, watching him. "Is this a test?"
"No. Why?"
"You haven't forgotten I ran away."
"That was different," he says. "You were upset. You thought I was made at you."
"You were mad at me."
"Yes, but I'm not anymore," he says. "Maybe because you're so good in bed."
"You're not so bad yourself," she says, smiling.

This story made a strong impression on my father. He fell to pondering seriously, lapsed into hypochondria, and in the end became fully convinced that his brush had served as a tool of the devil, that part of the moneylender's life had indeed passed somehow into the portrait and was now troubling people, inspiring them with demonic impulses, seducing the artist from his path, generating terrible torments of envy.

But was it not a dream? Could it be that she, for one of whose heavenly glances he would be ready to give his whole life, to approach whose dwelling he already counted an inexplicable bliss--could it be that she had just shown him such favor and attention? He flew up the stairs. He did not feel any earthly thought; he was not heated with the flame of earthly passion, no, at that moment he was pure and chaste.

"SO, CHUM, YOU haven't been to the deacon's new house yet?" the Cossack Choub was saying as he came out the door of his cottage to a tall, lean muzhik in a short sheepskin jacket with a stubbly chin that showed it hadn't been touched in over two weeks by the broken piece of scythe a muzhik usually shaves with for lack of a razor. "There'll be good drinking there tonight!" Choub continued, with a grin on his face.