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He was dropped under a streetlamp, the only person left on the bus. A patch of mauled light. Gritty pavement, scarred with a million cigarette burns. Weeds and spit and oil. Place like this, the only glitter was the knife just before it sank in. Place like this, there wasn't any gold.
Rupert Thomson The Five Gates of Hell
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He was dropped under a streetlamp, the only person left on the bus. A patch of mauled light. Gritty pavement, scarred with a million cigarette burns. Weeds and spit and oil. Place like this, the only glitter was the knife just before it sank in. Place like this, there wasn't any gold.

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Mind", can't make differences between real and not..., (OFF NOW THAT..., then that...), you are saying lie after lie..., then believing in false stuff. And thinking in positive sides so to scream not much as the other do, but as always you one moment scream you can't stop it... Now putting against me a knife and saying "Go away... give me my daughter... give me her back"..., don't you see the people laugh at you, don't you see it. Look their faces, with so many smiles, but they aren't people, they are from the army, off, off for god sake they are soldiers which have guns. Have killed few people, have taken your daughter and they are many as a number than you and your whole family... Probably this part as an General I must skip it, because it's logical however look it and from this side, nobody will sacrifice so you to be happy... you will die.. O, o, the poor little girl crying in front of the people, she just saw her mother pointing with a knife against the soldiers and now she is killed by one of the soldiers.

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The city had grown, implacably, spreading its concrete and alloy fingers wider every day over the dark and feral country. Nothing could stop it. Mountains were stamped flat. Rivers were dammed off or drained or put elsewhere. The marshes were filled. The animals shot from the trees and then the trees cut down. And the big gray machines moved forward, gobbling up the jungle with their iron teeth, chewing it clean of its life and all its living things.Until it was no more. Leveled, smoothed as a highway is smoothed, its centuries choked beneath millions and millions of tons of hardened stone. The birth of a city... It had become the death of a world.

CB
Charles Beaumont

Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories

"

There is one kind of laugh that I always did recommend; it looks out of the eye first with a merry twinkle, then it creeps down on its hands and knees and plays around the mouth like a pretty moth around the blaze of a candle, then it steals over into the dimples of the cheeks and rides around in those whirlpools for a while, then it lights up the whole face like the mellow bloom on a damask rose, then it swims up on the air, with a peal as clear and as happy as a dinner-bell, then it goes back again on gold tiptoes like an angel out for an airing, and it lies down on its little bed of violets in the heart where it came from.