Solid unit sister“Listen,” she said, “please go now. You’ve told me that you like me, but you don’t have to fall in love with everyone you like. Perhaps you don’t even realize yourself that we don’t have anything in common. We can’t just stand here any longer like this. Someone passing may see us. You’d better go now.” ‘I’ll lose Hilltop though,’ I realised. Jesus. Not that Hilltop would even begin to cover it. After several minutes Duncan stepped back to his blanket. He stood with his hands over the smoldering fire, remembering nights spent in the lodges of the Iroquois elders, witnessing rituals handed down over many generations that were meant to keep the link to their gods strong. As he knelt and pulled back his blanket, something like a ceremonial rattle sounded in his mind and he looked up, half fearful that the Blooddancer was approaching. Gabriel made a strange hissing sound that propelled drops of saliva from his mouth. The braying of hounds broke the silence as he moved along the line. Four men on horseback rode along the end of the fields, escorted by the dogs. Gabriel stopped in front of Tanaqua.“Take off your shirt,” he ordered. The Mohawk glared at him but complied. “You damned bucks love killing Virginians. None of the others ever lifted a hand against them. But you arrive and now I have a dead one.” Suddenly the strange old myth seems to be just a straightforward and basically realistic tale about babies: their arrival feels supernatural, they seem to come from another world, life near them takes on a certain unaccountable richness, and they are certain, eventually, to leave you. A more“realistic” description of a baby — e.g., “born after a seventeen-hour labor… at 7 pounds 11 ounces… nursing every two hours… smiling at eight weeks, grasping at twelve weeks…”—misses most everything. Only the supernatural gets at the actual. Or so it can seem to a mother on a good day, at least to the mother of a relatively easy baby, who is lying on her side, looking at a picture of an owl. ‘I’ll lose Hilltop though,’ I realised. Jesus. Not that Hilltop would even begin to cover it. Yet I’m thankful for having finally stammered out the question. “There, you see!” the porter said, and switched off the light on the staircase. “You know who is in that manor house. You know the roads, by both water and land, and the way of the tobacco trade.” solid unit sister Just let out whatever it is that’s bothering you. It’s just me you’re talking to. “You know,” my mom said, planting her feet. “Tomorrow night should be perfect.” “I wanted to see… Ferdinand,” she finally said. I put the crucifix into the drawer of the nightstand and pushed it shut. The garda looked disappointed. I should perhaps have given the relic its day in the sun after centuries spent nailed to an underground wall, but I was done with all that Higher Power stuff. A piece of wood wasn’t going to save me. He went up to the front gate and rang the bell. While he was waiting, he suddenly fancied he could see Marisabelle’s outline in the shadow of the gate, like the other morning when her shadow receded as she shrank back, and the gate closed. He had not followed her then. Now, however, he would go through the gate, and the fact that she had backed away wouldn’t help her in the slightest. He would reach her. “I’m gonna kick your ass, bitch.” The character, me— young Sandy Peel — was fifteen and on the run from the police. I had been giving blow jobs in a parking lot south of Hollywood Boulevard and the cops were cracking down on that activity. My best friend at the time, Amy Chapman, had been arrested and sent to jail for thirty days even though she was my age. I grew bored, with that squalid boredom that idleness and riches bring about. For ten years, I did everything that he wanted. A woman does not humiliate herself by making concessions.. |