Marsha > Recent Status Updates

"What were you working on?" he asked innocently, as if he had no idea at all. Miles didn't buy it, glaring over the rims of his glasses. "Yes, I know it's a book. But what book? Something new?"
"Must be, seeing as I've already written all the old ones."
"Fair enough." He took a few light steps over to the desk. He could tell by the amusement at the corner of Miles's mouth that he was not being successfully casual.

I pocket the only photo of Juliette among her things: one where she's standing in front of Heaven's gates with a nervous smile, ready to embark on her first research trip with her parents.
"Esaal." I'm not sure when Derrick appeared again in the room or how long he's been saying my name. Everything is a blur. Between my pounding head and the emptiness eating me up inside, nothing seems to make much sense.

"There she is." Jacob smiled from behind the wheel. Sophie made sure to smile the shy, closed-lip smile he expected, the one he liked. "You up for a house party?"
"On a Wednesday?"
"My parents left for Barbados again," Emily said, her arms flayed out in exasperation. "They never get bored of that place. So, you coming?" Her green eyes sparkled. Her makeup was always so good and her skin had never known a blemish.

Bacon has been the victor over Dee, for while the latter may have concurred with Marlowe's Faustus that "necromantic books, are heavenly," the former had the benefit of results. Wizards like Dee held to a faith that from their scrying mirror they were speaking to angels, that Enochian truths were imparted through arcane rituals, but Baconian empiricism led to the entire technological revolution.

Lilith enters Jewish and Christian mythology as a bit of a rounding error. Because the Bible offers two clashing tales of creation--Adam and his partner are first having been described as simultaneously generated from the earth and only later is the more famous story about Eve drawn from Ada's rib recounted--Lilith was introduced as a means of correcting such an obvious disjuncture.

Paradise Regained is an epic which reads as if it were written by a Puritan, a triumph not of the purple but of the plain. Milton's second great epic sings "not of arms/But to vanquish by wisdom hellish wiles." Any attempt at temptation which Satan makes to Christ--neither appeals to pride, power, or knowledge are capable of swaying Jesus from his mission--fails.

In Which I Woke Up with a Curious Lightness and Went through the Day Humming under My Breath until I Realized, with Something Not Unlike Horror, that This Is the Happiest I've Ever Been in My Life, and that I Have No Desire for Humanity to Forgive Me.
Heresy became our preferred method of bonding. I followed the mad sorcerer like a little black lamb, absorbing his forbidden teachings. "A goat," he corrected.

"Speaking of being a massive gay boy, did Oliver message you back? I'm sorry for winding you up about it before. I know you really like him..."
"It's okay," I say with a shrug. "Alicia was right. He is just a boy...A boy who's taking me on a date!"
"He is not!"
"He is!" I say. "He came right up to me this morning and asked me out like it was nothing. Oliver Chen asking me on a date."

"Look," Chris says, surprisingly gently. "I don't know what's going on here, but you seem pretty torn up about something, so maybe you should head home."
"Whatever," I say, pushing myself off the fence. "I never liked you anyway."
"Never liked you either, mate," he says, laughing. If Mum heard him say that, she'd have dropped him in a heartbeat. "Get home safe, though, okay?"
"Don't tell me what to do!" I yell back.

In the final hearing, the court ordered the children into the care of their father, again favoring the expert evidence of Dr. X. Six months after the children were removed from Sandra, Robert moved them to another school.
Sandra says she still can't believe the court would tear the children away from their primary attachment figure when there was no evidence that she or her parents were a threat to them.

Brendan can't even remember why he started abusing his wife. He had never hit a woman before. "But once I had, that was it." His abuse didn't come in a rage; rather, "it was just cold-blooded revenge." It became like an addiction he couldn't shake and ruined not only the lives of his wife and children, but also his own life; by the time he was planning to murder his wife, he was also planning to kill himself.

Gottman talked about this particular study with such enthusiasm and detailed recall, it was as if the results came in yesterday. "Here's another thing that surprised us," he said. "The violence decreased over time, so we thought, Oh, maybe this problem just takes care of itself. But we were wrong. Once a perpetrator has frightened the victim, they don't have to use as much violence to get control.

Olympian rule has lasted longer than any other. Maybe all the time that Hera thought she was fighting against her family, she was strengthening them without realising. and now that she's built this empire with them, the one she wanted to destroy for so long, she discovers that she is afraid of it falling apart.
The last hero of Troy reaches home. The survivors grow old and die and their feats live on in memory.

The pandemic destabilized our already ramshackle structures of childcare. Although relief funding from the Paycheck Protection Program was able to keep a good chunk of centers from closing during the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, 80 percent of child-care centers are experiencing staffing shortages, a third have longer waitlists than pre-pandemic, and about a quarter have reduced their operating hours.

I was spending what felt like half my waking hours sitting in a rocking chair, attached to the pump. I would get up to change her and feed her the bottle, put her back down, and then sit in that rocking chair listening to the radio with the flanges hanging off my breasts, long enough to bleed through my pad onto the cream colored fabric, which I then tried to scrub in the pitch-dark room.

IT'S THE LAST WEEK of school, and suddenly it's all a roller coaster hurtling so fast your teeth rattle and your eyes tear up.
We have a graduation rehearsal that goes so badly that Ms. Davis comes storming in to make us behave. It doesn't go much better with her there, maybe cause she has a giant line of pollen across her butt, and Ollie and Ugh Keven are laughing so hard that Ollie runs out of the gym.

My bedroom window faces the street. I press my nose against it and stare out at the neighbors' houses, wondering which window conceals the sicko who did this to my sister.
Is it old Mrs. Gorski or Spencer Helman or Bree Connors or maybe one of the Glovers?
I shiver, pulling my head away from the window and yanking my curtains shut. I always thought we lived in a nice neighborhood with good families.

'We are coming, Mum?'
Their friend and houseguest, who was a crow, stopped them at the door.
My loves, he said.
My dear, sorry loves. It isn't her. Go back to bed and let me deal with this. It isn't her.
The boys floated their crumpled crêpe-paper dad back up, one under each arm steering his weightlessness, and they laid him down to sleep. Then they sat at the window looking down and watching what happened.

"No, he has na danced in years," Siobhán says. "We all used to, though."
We slide into the car and she pats his shoulder.
"But Lochy was the best dancer, weren't you?"
"That wall of trophies in my room did na win themselves."
Siobhán leans into me. "He's lying. He was awful."
"Oh, you're one to talk," Finn jeers. "Nearly breaking your ankle every performance.
"At least Mam and Da dinna have to beg me to stop."

So for my right half-sleeve, I asked Iris to help me with the design. That one has two pine trees set against snow-covered mountains with wrapping script woven through them. I'm half sure she worked her name into the mountain range somewhere, but I've never been able to find it.
Loch leans closer to my right side. "Once more unto the breach?" he reads.
Yeah, I should've worn sleeves.

I text Coal I'm coming and, ten minutes later, I bolt into the foyer of Claus Palace and nearly tackle Wren to the floor.
No other staff are around. It's our off-season, so most everyone is taking a much needed break, but the woodsy entrance to the palace is done out in our perpetual theme: draping greenery, lit candles that scent the air with cinnamon and cloves, jolly red ribbons hanging from the banisters.

He held his breath and eased himself down. A whisper unfurled across the room, a sigh almost. One of us, the throne echoed. No, not the throne, the Sisters. Relief wound through him as resplendent gold spread over the darkness.
"Did you really believe the throne would not accept you?"
The Silver Witch stepped from the shadows.
"My own mother didn't accept me."
"A sin I will forever regret."

IN THE END, RAMEELA PITTED NASIR AND, AFTER ASSURING him that she would keep watch over Zafira through the night, showed him to a small room used to store spare covers and other odds and ends. It was cramped, but the door had a lock and her son left him a bedroll before the tiny fireplace, so it served its purpose.
He was dreading the moment when he'd tell Zafira that he had orders to stop in Leil.

His eyes fell to the little bedside table, and her own gaze followed, pulse quickening. On it, beside a tin of wrapped malban, was the Jawarat. The sight of it brought on a wave of guilt, strangely detached and not entirely hers--as if it belonged to the Jawarat. What reason would the book have to feel guilty? She had done what it wanted. It had fulfilled its chaotic desires.
If anything, it should be gleeful.

"Please," he whispered and begged. His compass. His queen. His life. "Don't go."
But death listened to one, not even the Amir al-Maut. And Nasir watched as her butterfly wings fluttered once, and Zafira Iskandar fell to the ground, a silver star driving the light from his world.
His yesterdays and his tomorrows, gone just like that.

A small figure darted through the gates. Nasir's gauntlet blad pulsed against his wrist before he recognized the luminescent green shawl. Lana stopped in front of his horse, wide-eyed and out of breath.
Aya rushed to her. "What is it, little one?"
"A--a Sultan's Guard," she blustered.
Nasir was off his horse in an instant. If the man had even tried to touch her, he would lose his fingers, then his tongue.

Shame held her tongue, stopped her from telling them he promised something far worse than anything any of them could imagine. Laa, it wasn't shame but fear. How would they regard her if they knew she had not only given him the Jawarat but conversed with him? Kissed him?
It was the exact reason she couldn't speak of the Jawarat's malevolence. Of its vision and its whispers.

A cloak of darkness followed Arawiya's crown prince inside. He was effortless, as always. Almost careless, if one wasn't paying close enough attention to his deliberate movements. His gray gaze swept the small space and she couldn't stop the flitter in her chest when it locked on hers.
And strayed to her mouth for the barest of moments.
"Are you hurt?" Nasir asked, in that voice that looped with the shadows.

She squinted up at the cuffs. Her head would not stop throbbing, the skin beneath her arms aching like she had rubbed it raw with a scrubber. The brass knuckles from Jin pulsed in her pocket, almost taunting her.
The cuffs were just wider than her wrists, leaving a gap where she could only fit two fingertips. She pressed her thumb tight and flush against her index finger, tugging downward with more force. Nothing.

"Right this way," the butler said, leading her into the house. Willard's foyer was lavish, but decorated in a sparse way, as if he'd suddenly been thrust into wealth and didn't quite know what to do with it. His wife stood in the back of the room and waved as Arthie passed, her cheeks rosy and her eyes kind. They stopped at a door with a sign that read WILLARD OTIS, INSPECTOR.