Nitlon

Or the frozen prickling rooftop marks The bottoms of his feet with pink dents, Ten feet three inches above the road, with nothing But pavement to catch him if he fell. Instead cars scream sideways turning The corner barely in time to avoid a woman Fat and generous, coccooned in swathes Of organic wool, lilting lily tones, Boots padded, proofed, soft, immune To the frost screeching and whirling on the shingles. Maybe Socrates was right to ask us to avoid Elation and despair. The blundering careless Angry seething roaming city washes away Dust and the scattered fragments of nomads Who stayed under blinking signs only to take pict

They found him just after five in the morning on a Sunday, running away from a man they'd deemed too rich who wasn't anymore. "Is he dead?" Hayner asked. The thing lay under the only tree growing on this side of the river, which wasn't really a river in the winter so much as frozen black glass. A shard of bone, pinkish-yellow with the stains of blood veins, pierced the air and its head lolled back, mouth open and wide with a tongue hanging out like a panting dog. Mostly-whole pieces of cloth stuck to the thing, and resting halfway on the ground and halfway on the breast of the jacket was a clump of hair torn from the scalp. Five in the mo

"I was born," the Mouse said. "I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you." Samuel R. Delany, Nova I Otto Shaughnessy had never felt anything but lonely. And lonely...wasn't even an emotion, not a real one. He knew that's what anyone would tell him, if he asked. So, Otto kept to himself, mostly. Quiet kids got away with thinking whatever. But he couldn't sleep. This late at night, when he'd been trying for almost two hours. Or at least what felt like two hours. Even though only an orange glow slithered in around the curtains, leaving the rest of the room dark, and only occasional traffic interrupted perfec

Soon. I'm all talk and no play. Why do people always need a reason for doing things? Do do do try try try I don't think I've ever met anyone who's weird, I mean I don't think I've ever met anyone who isn't normal. I'm never going to feel like this again. What was it she said? Who? We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment. This is my moment. To shine? No. Shining. Too concrete; it means light, where? This is not okay. Everything will probably not be okay, I can't bring myself to look it in the face. It keeps going. Stop changing. No? No. The hardest thing is seeing nothing you do will matter. Easier never to try a

Summary: Yes, we are terrible for each other, and yes, we are a disaster. But tell me your heart doesn't race for a hurricane or a burning building. I'd rather die terrified than live forever. "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insiduously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to seperate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Morning comes, and Roxas is up with the sun the way he always is. A quietness

"Remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable." - Clifton Fadiman ------------ It could be worse. There are carpet slaves. There are tiny catatonic children whose tiny fingers fit together tiny machine parts. They stare blankly at walls all day, and their daydreams don't stretch beyond waiting for their six hours of time allotted for sleep before they have to wake up and do it again. Roxas knows that. He's been preached at by books and other kids his age. But just because some have it worse doesn't mean that Sable doesn't have it bad, and him especially. It's a

He lived in echoes and lined his walls with words that weren't his own. He was determined to shape his life without ever himself touching it. For three years he created to no avail and in six months let it go, because the world knew him, and what he had done would be enough. If he went back and looked at it at any point he would find himself under the layers of change, that one early-formed spike of self buriedburiedburied. Any more creating and he would lose, become selfish, tired, because he had nothing to say. In his mind he had a much more noble cause. He was going to find himself in everyone else. A sentence he would have said before re

I feel like all my insides are rotted and slowly dripping down my rib cage. This is the sort of failure I've never even tasted. Everyone is better than me. Everyone will be disappointed in me. I can find other things to blame, but it doesn't feel genuine. And every time I feel defeated, something else comes to rub it in my face. They walk down the isles with their third medals clinking against their seconds and firsts, sit on either side of me, laugh at our collective failure. They did something, at least. I did nothing. I am useless. I had thought there were things I was good at. I was wrong. I cannot do anything that someone with little pra