thuvia ptarth

with_a_kay

Jared had to beg his parents for weeks before they let him take the scholarship he got offered for Maple Academy.

"But it's so far away," his mother said. "We'll never see you, sweetie."

"Summer! And Christmas. And it's a great opportunity, mama, and I'll get a lot more attention for a good college."

"I don't like the idea of you being all alone up north," she hedged. "We haven't even got any family around there."

"It's the age of technology," said Jared. "I'll always be just a phone call or an e-mail away. Please, mama. I really want this."

Of course, she'd caved in the end, as Jared knew she would, and Jared got to go off to private school, where he assumed there would be a rose-themed dueling society, or a cat for a ballet teacher, or maybe everyone would just secretly be a blackbelt and involved in a complicated fight club.

Maybe, if he was lucky, all of the above.

with_a_kay

wordsofastory

You will always be loyal to Justin. You will always protect Justin. You will always love Justin.

They forget Monkey was born of stone, not womb, they forget Monkey creates new monkeys from handfuls of fur, chewed up and spat out.

If everything's gone according to my plan, and I may as well assume it has for the sake of this letter, at least, I am quite safe now, far away. If you don't get this, it hardly matters, so I am writing in the expectation that you are reading it. I wonder what you thought when you saw Mme Pompadour, though? Poor thing, I brought her back from across the galaxy only to abandon her in Boston. The boys in the lab thought it was rather pathetic how I carried her around still, now that I'm practically grown-up, but aside from you and me, she's the only other thing on earth that has seen what we've seen. And Oscar, of course.

sanj

Women have a choice in Luna: wife, or whore.

You make that choice by the time you're fourteen, maybe fifteen. Sixteen is really pushing it. Girls that age ought to be, ought to be-- How many times have I heard a man telling me what a woman ought to be?

Back when I still thought I had to choose... I chose wife.

"Lady Vidal seems to be taking the matter with tolerable serenity," said the Duke. "I advise you to follow her example."

"That's Mary," Vidal said with admirable economical use of a large and filthy vocabulary. "She'd face her own death with - "

He paled significantly at this invocation of a dread spirit and fell silent. His Grace, reading the paper with less equanimity than might have been supposed, could only be thankful.

It was the fourth day, and on the fourth day we always went down into the basement and counted the seasons that the Blackwood women had left us, the peaches suspended like embryos in their thick and golden fluid, the spears of white asparagus pressed like fingers against the glass of their jars.

At the end of a long hallway, at the top of a staircase on an island somewhere to the east of Narnia, there lies a book.

It is a book of magic, and if it could speak it would tell a thousand tales of the spells it has cast, the lives it has changed. It once belonged to a great Magician, and though he has long since departed, his book remains, sitting on a table and waiting for the day when it will be opened again.

Harriet pushed open the kitchen door carefully, balancing the tray on one hand. (Well, it was a baking sheet, actually, because what use was owning a tea tray when people were drinking out of any old thing? She would have liked one all the same, but it was the sort of thing Philip hated - he'd smile that rather condescending smile and make some clever remark about how she was a poor excuse for modern woman. Harriet privately thought that possession of a tea tray said less about one's bourgeois leanings than about the impracticality of juggling two mugs, a glass tumbler, and a bottle of not-terribly expensive champagne - but she was rather tired of rows, and lately even stupid things like tea trays had been known to provoke them, so she held her tongue.)

"Ah, that is another matter entirely. Eyarkuk, that means a man foolish enough to put up a tent in the rain." [Corlath] paused a moment as Harry took off her helmet; even tightly braided, her hair was bright as a patch of sunlight. "Most of the words are insults or complaints. Kinik, that's unimportant, petty. Kinik fights mean nothing and go nowhere. Ethasur, that's a small room, one that will only get smaller. My father, when the rains came, would call the City an ethasur."

Shapeshifting is a terrible gift to be granted, especially when you are uncertain of the shape of your desires.

He flung himself onto Sei's bed, collected his limbs and sat up. They were face to face, knee to knee, hand to hand. His were callused and stained black; Sei's fingertips were a mixture of charcoal, ultramarine, vermilion, and burnt sienna.

Rei closed his eyes and sniffed. For the first time he could remember, they were two.

You thought you'd be free of it, didn't you: the old oak tree, the ink, the pen-shaped scar on your hand where you stabbed yourself. You thought the old fairytale had found its proper ending, tick-tock, that the clocktower's machinery of narrative had come to a halt. Maybe you were even right, for a little while. The raven had been slain, the prince's heart restored. The raven's dark daughter had found her happily ever after with the prince.

It is a law of fictional probability that the odd couple will somehow work out their differences to ride off into the sunset at the end of the reel. In real life, of course, what usually happens is that the odd couple becomes the bickering couple becomes two people who can't stand the sight of each other -- and they part, and fade into photographs brought out for the grandchildren.

The girl at the head of the crowd is blonde and sharp as a knife. She carries an axe, or something like an axe, and behind her there are girls of every kind, every color, every age but old. No two are dressed alike. He sees the girl in the sari, alive again, arm in arm with a girl whose yellow braids swing in time to her steps. There are dreadlocks and ponytails and curls cropped short, silk gowns and gym shorts and animal skins.

Dan DiDio had a large, very important desk.

During meetings with writers, Dan liked to run his hands over the full width of the desk's front just above the drawers that contained very important pencils and very powerful paper clips.

Shouts of street vendors trying to sell their zongzi ring through the air, and every store has a wizened old lady sitting on a plastic stool, a bucket of soy-soaked glutinous rice placed between her flip-flopped feet. They pack the rice into cones of bamboo leaves, watch the dragon boat races on the tiny televisions perched in a corner.

He remembers Yichun telling him that zongzi were first made to keep fish from eating a dead man's body.

She had fine brown hair, and grey eyes, and a solemn, oval face -- her teeth were bad, she liked sweets too well, and her figure was not good -- too thin, too bony. When we were not together, I would fix upon her faults: when she was with me, I would cease to notice them.

"Be kind to your muse, youngster." Florian's smile that encompassed both Theo and Stock. "She's been kind to you. This may be more valuable to our cause than a wagon full of muskets."

"It's only ink on paper," said Justin.

"So is a constitution," said Florian.

When he gets back, Kubota is carefully dusting the shelves. He looks up at the slam of the door shutting, smiles blandly at Tokitoh. "Did you eat it all already?"

"I saved one for you," Tokitoh says, and generously hands it over. It's soggy and cold, and there's probably some lint stuck on it from being in his jacket pocket, but it's the thought that counts, he always figures. Tokitoh always has good thoughts, except for like, those times when he doesn't. He always has good thoughts for Kubota anyway.

What can I tell you about Herman Melville? I, like everyone else on God's green earth, know far too little about the man; our everyday habits and customs are as alien to him as they would be to any one of the Polynesians he writes about. There are some men, boy, who are as surely owned by the ocean as others are by their kin, kind, or worldly possessions; the small comforts of hearth and home hold no joy for them, and are often scorned instead of sought.