Aňa > Recent Status Updates

Her mother feels more present in the way her father and aunt tiptoe round her absence, how their silences build an outline of a woman glimpsed only fleetingly in the corner of a room.

As de Vries assesses the painting, Nella wonders: what does it do to a person to have their fantastical views removed, these visual stories contained within heavy oak frames? Do you make up more in your head in place of the want? She has become so accustomed to these various pictures, even the ones she didn’t like—(…)

She is a falcon to his wrist, flying to the sight of her love.

Why take the risk? Her life was difficult, but it was hers. She had fought and paid the price for her tiny dominion.

And Sin answered not, not a word, and made his face a stone. L

They fled! The glorious gods were appalled; as frightened as we, they bolted for the sky god’s top heaven — Anu’s outermost sphere, where they cowered like dogs at the base of the wall.

I’ve slept very little. This face you see of a carcass, unsweetened by sleep. These sinews that ache, that bite at each step… These cumbersome shoulders…

He stripped off his skins, held them aloft like a sail, put himself in the bow like a mast. 🤣

She wears a veil; Gilgamesh in lion skins, plods wearily toward her — mayhap the flesh of the gods on his body, but woe still flush in his heart.

Come now, ye elders of Uruk, give ear to me! O, men of Uruk, what you hear is my weeping, keen as the wailing of women! // The axe, it slips in my grip, my bow unstrung; the sword of my belt, the shield before me, my festival clothes, sash of my loins — a demon has fancied them, made off with them all.

Before the altar of Shamash they laid the offering, placing the heart on top. // They prayed, prostrate, then backed away, completing all obeisance. // And they sat down together, two brothers: this was work well done.

A butcher could not, on a carcass still free of flies, a cleaner cut effect.

Look. Put our heads together. Two men and a plan are strong as any three-banded cord. Try breaking that.

And even as she spoke Enkidu could see a plan, and it pleased him. He liked these magic dancing words; he would have a friend to swap them with.
Up, priestess. Take me to your Uruk, your temple gods, your bully Gilgamesh. Big and bad as he may be, I’ll stand up to him.

Who built the great wall around Uruk, and the temple for Anu, king of the gods, protector of our city; and for his daughter, too — Ishtar, goddess of love?

When he was a boy he didn't know anyone who got their hands dirty for a living. Now he was an MP everyone he knew had dirty hands.

Would her children be happy? Lucy won-dered. Probably not. Hardly anyone was. Little moments - that was the best you could ask for, an epiphany here and there, the occasional short-lived burst of joy. The world turning one more time. (…) Little lights in the dark.

He would have made an excellent politician: he had good hair and lied easily.

THE TYRE
(…)
Being more in tune with the feel of things
than science and facts, we knew that the tyre
had travelled too fast for its size and mass,
and broken through some barrier of speed,
outrun the act of being driven, steered,
and at that moment gone beyond itself
towards some other sphere, and disappeared.

His silence had the heavy mass of rock and the tenacious resistance of rubber (…)

He wasn't making a porn movie, but nor was it enough for them to just feign the motions. He needed authenticity, and that meant actual penetration. [WTF‽]

Her calm acceptance of all these things made her seem to him something sacred. Whether human, animal or plant, she could not be called a 'person', but then she wasn't exactly some feral creature either - more like a mysterious being with qualities of both.

She’s a good woman, he thought. The kind of woman whose goodness is oppressive.

Like a cough that tickles the throat, he could feel a long-suppressed yell threatening to burst out from deep inside him.

As far as I was concerned, the only reasonable grounds for altering one's eating habits were the desire to lose weight, an attempt to alleviate certain physical ailments, being possessed by an evil spirit, or having your sleep disturbed by indigestion. In any other case, it was nothing but sheer obstinacy for a wife to go against her husband's wishes as mine had done.

(…) she is satisfied to stick to simple gluttony and she eschews all overtones of the sensuality of indulgence. Since she relishes not one single mouthful of the food she eats, she knows her ceaseless gluttony is no transgression.

[The Fall River Axe Murders] Five living creatures are asleep in a house on Second Street, Fall River. They comprise two old men and three women. The first old man owns all the women by either marriage, birth or contract.

(…) the Puck, a constant inquisitive spy on mortal couples come to make the beast with two backs in what they mistakenly believed to be privacy, had noticed there is a vexed question of handed-ness about caresses, so that all right-handed lovers truly require left-handed lovers during the preliminaries to the act, and Mother Nature, when she cast the human mould, took no account of foreplay (…)

(…) it might well be formidably labyrinthine. Yet there is always a way out of a maze, and, even if you cannot find it for a while, you know that it is there. A maze is a construct of the human mind, and not unlike it; lost in the wood, this analogy will always console.

I am Herm, short for *hermaphrodite verus*, one testis, one ovary, half of each but all complete and more, much more, than the sum of my parts. This elegantly retractable append-age, here ... is *not* the tribade's well-developed clit, but the veritable reproductive erectile tissue, while the velvet-lipped and deliciously closable aperture below it is, I assure you, a viable avenue of the other gender. So there.