short-story

Misery comes to miser; joy comes to wiser. (A Very Hot Cup of Tea, Empathy)Juvenile invites, youth tries, adult applies, and the old man dies. (A Straw Man, Empathy)In everyone, there lives a superhero. (The Medicine Man, Empathy)Faith is the strongest word in any dictionary. (The Wisdom Beard, Empathy)I__e entered into your feelings; it__ your turn now. (Empathy)

I beam back at her. Fuck the surgery, fuck the kids, fuck the men in our lives or no longer in our lives. This is sweet. When she catches up with me, I say, How many, just how many forty-plus women would do that?We gaze back up at the face bleeding into the chute we__e just skied. We *did* that, I crow. Someone should love us just for that. --Hangfire

In the beginning we start with roses. The king__ flower right? Only they wilt in less than a day, especially when exposed to the elements. But Carnations? Oh, what a beautiful flower. They come in every color. True, some are painted, but that doesn__ mean they are less beautiful, and they never wilt.

Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out.

Gareth Miller grabbed the beer first, then the hotdog, because if there__ one thing you don__ want to be caught dead without at these sorts of events it__ beer. The hotdog was strictly for show, a prop, a way of blending in.Burst of static in his right ear: __-man, you read me? What__ yo_ twenty, dawg?__areth departed the concession stand, stopped, looked down at his hands, and tossed the hotdog into the first trash receptacle he saw. Raising his wrist to his mouth, he spoke into the cuff of his long-sleeved tee. __oncession stand, Section B. Over.__llowing his hand to linger by his chin, he gingerly scratched his cheek as if he had meant to do it all along. The same voice: __o, I__ in position. Ready when you is.__areth cringed while crossing the wide concourse, checking both directions. The giant hallway was the main drag of a ghost town, its only residents a solitary custodian sweeping debris into a portable waste bin and the concession crew to his rear.

Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it--love yourself

I have read that long ago there was a land of glass castles that sank beneath the sea. It was not called Atlantis, but Lyonesse. This happened before history and across the ocean, but when I was little I wondered about that place, how it could be so beautiful and so lost. Sometimes it seemed that the land around my New England home was like that flooded country, with mud where the streets of gold should be and mayflies swarming where there should be lovely fishes, but here and there a shard of crystal to call the heart to beauty. --"Wetlands," in Phoebe.

He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was--if you couldn't run a machine. A duel was under way.

On a nightstand in a teenager__ room, a glass vase filled with violets leans precariously against a wall. The only thing saving the vase from a thousand-piece death on the hardwood floor is the groove in the nightstand__ surface that catches the bottom of vase, and of course the wall itself. The violets, nearly a week old, droop in the light of a waning gibbous moon. Wrinkled petals are already piling up on the floor between the nightstand and the wall, and a girl only six days sixteen stares at the dying bouquet from her bed.

There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.

Sarucha (age 8): "Look, down there, I recognize it, ciudad de Jerusalén (the city of Jerusalem)! Jerusalén!, Jerusalén!" she exclaimed.

She stared at the faded tile floor before her feet, but knew his every step around her small kitchen. When Martin touched the coffee cup patterned curtains he must assume she__ made, her fingers throbbed. When his eyes slid across the flowery aluminum water bottle at the table, her throat cracked with thirst.The radio clicked off.The silence of the room soaked up her raspy breaths, her pounding heart, her ache, and stirred them around the one man she ever longed for in a way that changes how you taste the world.Her desire swirled in a pulsing, betraying, blurry hook, and encouraged him to move closer.Martin obeyed.

Light has a voice?_ Sarucha inquired, amazed.

Shimmel: __EVER TRUST THE GOYIM. They are just like these other weird dangerous people, Messianic Jews! How dare Jews become __hristian-like_, Messianic? We should cherem (ban) them from every aspect of Jewish life. And we must strip them of every Jewish privilege!

My whore of a brother has done it again." "Then, as always, orders me to clean up the mess." "I think I hate him." Poseidon to his brother, Zeus.

Grandpa Sereno: "There is nothing as dangerous as fear, fear of people who are different than you. Fear is the REAL danger and we must start to put all our efforts into fighting THAT instead of each other. Fight fear not people!!! Let there be light!

There was something vaguely sad about the rock. It was as old as it looked, standing weathered and lonely amidst the stretch of sand, and its thoughts were quiet as it listened to the waves.

Shaw Centre has restaurants on the fourth floor, where the ACS boy can pull chairs out for her. Girls love this because no one else does it for them, especially not those sotong RI boys.