Marsha > Recent Status Updates

While the big manly menfolk go to the next car to talk diplomacy and drink vodka or whatever they do in there, Katya and I remain in the royal car. For once, Katya's not dedicated to annoying me; she's too busy playing some card game with Zefirov.

The prince nods and rubs his forehead again. "Yes," he says, as if approving of Shoe's recitation. "It's not anything I could put my finger on, but I have long suspected that something in this city was not right." Shoe knows the prince isn't going to like this next bit. "You're caught up in it too," he explains. "You're meant to be Pin's ending."

I wish I could freeze time, freeze this afternoon and hang with him and Willow, instead of having to go home to Violet. Fun and laughter seem to follow Goose around, and I wish I could too. I like him, and suddenly it's really important that he like me. "So you don't think I'm a snob anymore, do you?" "Nah, you went along with my stupidity, so you must be okay."

Dinner at Duncan's house was always a noisy affair. his family enjoyed discussing their days, usually all at once. Aiah told them about a family she was working with who was trying to get out of a homeless shelter. Avery talked about the Aston Martin he had worked on that afternoon and how exhilarating it was to take it for a test drive. "I felt like a spy," he said, smiling at his son. The Creature complained.

While she talks, I scan the Wall of Power behind her and locate my mother's picture toward the bottom left. she's next to a young Maurice Dodge, now the jowly, gray-faced investigative reporter for Channel Ten who's always shouting Manny Marks is soft on crime! My mother was gorgeous in high school, with fluffy blond hair and beestung lips that smiled sweetly, back when she was carefree and seventeen.

Time passed and the nurse died. The two girls cried for her, as though she were their mother. They wept so hard that they pined away and lived no longer. The light that had grown brighter ended with them. Darkness was everywhere. The men and animals were afraid. They wondered why the children had cried themselves to death. Perhaps it was because the nurse had stolen from them.

Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, "and then," thought she, "what would become of me? They're dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is there's anyone left alive!"

We were in ACT UP because we didn't have a choice. We were gonna die if somebody didn't do something. These kids out here, they're getting tickets for disorderly behavior; people in ACT UP got arrested by the kind of cops who join the force because it gives them an excuse to beat the shit out of the kind of people they don't like.

Roman husbands had the legal right to chastise, divorce or kill their wives for engaging in behavior that they themselves engaged in daily. But it did not take something as extreme as marital infidelity to rouse the man of the house to raise club and boot--or sandal--to the erring wife. If she were caught tippling in the family wine cellar or walking outdoors with her face uncovered, she could be beaten.

Herr Nowak got up from the table to give imitations of the different ways in which Jews and Catholics pray. He fell down on his knees and bumped his head several times vigorously on the ground, gabbling nonsense which was supposed to represent Hebrew and Latin prayers: 'Koolyvotchka, koolyvotchka, koolyvotchka. Amen.'

I woke early and go out to sit on the veranda in my pajamas. The wood casts long shadows over the fields. Birds call with sudden uncanny violence, like alarm-clocks going off. The birch-trees hang down laden over the rutted, sandy earth of the country road. A soft bar of cloud is moving up from the line of trees along the lake. A man with a bicycle is watching his horse graze on a patch of grass by the path.

He had about him that sad, American air of vagueness which is always attractive; doubly attractive in one who possessed so much money. He was vague, wistful, a bit lost: dimly anxious to have a good time and uncertain how to set about getting it. He seemed never to be quite sure whether he was really enjoying himself, whether what we were doing was really fun. He had constantly to be reassured.

Most of the women we spoke with discussed their areas of degustation with such qualitative words as never and always. "I always eat at the table. I would never eat in bed. I never watch television; I never watch for more than an hour; I only watch the news and that while sitting on the edge of the bed." A man wouldn't say things like that. Funny. They just eat where they wish. End of story.

'I could clean the kid up with my wrong hand.' 'So do it," Aishky dared him. 'I'd like to see you.' 'I'm in my coat,' Gershom said. 'I'm not taking my coat off.' 'Keep it on. If you can clean him up with your wrong hand, you can clean him up in your coat.' 'I don't have anything to prove. And I don't give free lessons.' Whereupon he went walkabout again.

My mom tried to find us like-minded people to hang out with. Problem was, our family's minds weren't like any others. Especially in southern Mississippi. My brother and I tried to hang out with other homeschooled kids but in the ass-crack of the Bible Belt, parents who kept their kids home were not going to intersect with our liberal points of view. Ever.

We swept the endless underground hallways using soft-brooms that could not possibly gather every last mote of dust, at least not to the Inquisitors' expectations. We polished the bars of our cage, rubbing them with rags until they gleamed dully in the torchlight. We pared mountains of apples, pears, and turnips, and we punched down hundreds of loaves of sharp rye bread--the food for all of Bestius's Inquisitors.

"Did you say of Jessica that you would rather any of the stock of Barabbas had been her husband than a Christian?" "You take me out of context. Those Christian husbands were falling over one another to shed their wives, so they could rescue Antonio from my cluthces. A father wants his daughter to marry a man who values her above his friends."

"I lost it." "Then let's hope Plury believes you when you tell her that." "Why shouldn't she?" "Because it sounds like an excuse." "I lost it." "That's an excuse for carelessness." "D'Anton, get off my case. You're as bad as she is." A great wave of weariness with men and women and their tawdry ring culture overcame D'Anton.

To those in his community who thought his devotion morbid he argued that the opposite was the case, that it was only Leah's company that kept him from falling into that dejection of spirits that was such a common afflication of the times and to which he had more reason than most to be susceptible.

Toby faces my mental block about not believing stuff from the Bible by pointing out that with my current spiritual construct, only stuff that happens to me firsthand counts as divine intervention.

Three weeks after the lamest stab in suicide's history, I sit typing in the sunlit hall of that asylum. I'm finishing a poem about a particular circle of hell in which a sinner is fixed on endless video reruns of her every screwup. It's a crappy poem, but I haven't written in nine months so I type it with a jeweler's lapidary care, the goal being to get through without having to trek to the nurses's station.

How much money would seem like a gift from God? Having only made $9,000 that year, I tell her twelve would be nice. Then pray for it. Just pray every day for 90 days and see if your life gets better. It's like you're showing me a tree stump and telling me to talk to it.

Dev reached for it and Jonathan cupped one hand around it. It has less sugar than yours. His next sentence was so remarkable, I noted it down in my journal: I first had this sandwich in Vienna....

By age thirty, I'm not writing squat, which I blame on my ramped up consulting schedule, knowing full well my favorite poet was a full-time insurance exec. Warren keeps urging me to deal with my complicated family on the page, but that seems too damp-eyed, though even I know the crap I crank out referring to Homer and Virgil is pretentious.

I told him I sometimes felt like smacking Quinn for mocking me anytime I recited poetry.
Nah, it ain't like that, Doonie said. He just associates poems with some teacher telling him he's a dumbass.

A wisp of her hair
is coming loose
from her ponytail

my hand twitches
to touch it,
to touch her.

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner is still considered the best book ever written about water issues in the arid western United States. Reisner is fascinated with geopolitics and discusses, among other topics: western history; the role of John Wesley Powell, the developers, and the environmentalists.

"Take her." "I can't take the toboggan, Mr. Roy. It's an antique. It's been in the Roy family for--" "She's yours. What am I hanging on to her for? It's not like I have any grandchildren to pass her on to." He whacks the seat cushion. "Nick would want you to have her."

"After Lew died I need something else to do," Trudy says. "Something different. I wanted something more creative. And also, what I wanted was something more...aggressive." "Aggressive?" I say "Aggressive." Trudy winks at Ingrid. "Show her, Trudy," she says. "Show Zell the Barn."

"I can make you into a princess, too," Yxta said. "You're so pretty." Usually Lex did not want to look pretty but this made her stomach swirl pleasantly. She let Yxta brush the tangles from her haif and even pain her fingernails bright watermelon pink with the nail polish her mother had bought her.