Marsha > Recent Status Updates

Count Dracula told me I was blocked. How to Feel Lustful Against Your Will. He never told me how it goes in waves from your belly up to your chest, and then into your head, and then down again, when I felt nothing above the belly-button he seemed to think that was A-OK-the Lurker in his Attic was "genital insufficiency," which the ladies seemed prone to (said Count D.), the poor ladies who wanted a lot...

I know that somewhere lives a beautiful, intellectual, gracious, charming woman who has eight children, bakes her own bread, takes care of her own house, does her cooking, brings up her children, holds down a demanding 9-5 job at the decision-making level in a man's field and is adored by her equally successful husband because she comes home at night, slips into a filmy negligee and turns instanter into a Playboy.

Who is this for?
Stuart grinned. The Crow.
Is that a metaphor?
Stuart burst into laughter. You don't need to take it so seriously! Gino gives you the tray, you bring it here, you go to bed with your boy safe in the knowledge you've kept the spooky creatures at bay for another day.
Do I have to pick up the tray too? he'd asked, stupidly, wondering what the penalty might be if he overslept...

Six twenty-five, and the door to the musician's green room opens. There's a commotion outside. Henry checks his slightly late watch--it says six twenty-three--and reaches into his bag for the extra roll he filled with a slice of cheese at lunch. A long stream of musicians wander in, lugging their instruments, brushing rain off their jackets, exhaling garlic fumes of Gino's lasagne.

And then, like a forgotten, impossible miracle, it happened. He was caught by Thomas, caught by the moment, not falling but flying, and he was free. Micha opened his eyes, drove himself into Thomas, into the blissful, sinful heat of him, and claimed himself, his past, his future, and the body he chose now to surrender entirely to pleasure. Culmination rushed over him, ferocious as fire, annihilation and renewal.

Micha wished he could pretend he did not understand, but he did. Where once he had looked at Thomas and seen only privilege, wealth, and ease, things Micha regarded with mingled envy and disdain, now he saw restraint, sacrifice, and duty. The price of being good carved straight from a man's soul. And Thomas was too honest, too clever, and too worthy not to know his own failings and suffer in that knowledge.

My knees give out and Dain catches me, pulling me into his hug.
"She's fine, Vi," Dain whispers into my hair. "Mira's fine."
I nod, fighting against a swell of emotions to keep my control. I will not break down. I will not cry. I will not show weakness. Not here.
There's only one place I can go, one person who won't chide me for crumbling.
The second I have myself in hand, I step out of Dain's arms.
Xaden is gone.

Emery's eyes widen. "You want me to leave my dragon and go on foot?"
"Why do you think we get all that hand-to-hand training? Or are you going to leave all those innocent people to die? The real question is, how do we get you close enough without getting you killed?" She glances around the table. "Since I'm guessing the others will be busy fighting off the gryphons that launch once the fireworks start."

The king was strapped to a wooden post in the middle of the road, and he was as naked as the day he was born. Ropes spread his arms and legs wide, ensuring nothing would be hidden from the crowd's eye.
Atalius appeared to be unconscious, though Sanos had to ask, "did anyone check if he's breathing?"
"I got close," Ikanos, the youngest of the Ladicus brothers, said. "No such luck. He's alive."

When the invention of printing was combined with the zeal for biblical doctrine in Reformation theology and with the zest for literary and historical knowledge of the Bible in Renaissance humanism, the combination was responsible for an intellectual explosion and a scholarly revolution. Biblical scholarship as a field of study, indeed as a profession unto itself, came of age through the printed book.

More than any leading Christian thinkers int he preceding thousand years, Reformation theologians identified themselves as, first and last, biblical theologians. The "sacred page" of which Thomas Aquinas had been a "Master" now became the central focus in a way and to a measure that it never had before.

With the sacred text of the Tanakh in a language that was increasingly unintelligible to the worshiping congregation, Jewish liturgical practice had to resort to the use of Aramaic paraphrase and translation, known as Targum (meaning "translation"), which also became part of the normative tradition.

Exhaustion settles over me as the sky darkens. I eventually have the bench to myself, so I lie across it and wrap my wings around me like a blanket. The moon replaces the sun and stars splatter the sky with light. There aren't as many as on my ceiling back home, but they're there.
I breathe deeply as one last tear trickles from the corner of my eye.
Unlike the painting in my room, the sky above is endless.

Sweat beads the back of my neck as I grit my teeth and raise my foot against whatever force is trying to keep me planted to the floor. One step takes all of my energy, but I press on. A second step. Arms outstretched, I inch forward, crying out as my palms ram into a mirror.
I walk my fingers across the col glass until I find the edge of the mirror. Maneuvering int he darkness, I make it down another hallway.

Have you heard the story of the boy who was left to his own devices? A boy with a loud family always at war with one another? On one of his walks away from the mountain, he passes through a village. And he finds a little puppy abandoned on the street. Very much like him, the dog does not fit in. It has three heads and no one wants it. So the boy picks up the puppy. Holds it close to his chest.

She walks toward me, takes her cloak off and places it around my shoulders. "Better?"
"Yes. Thank you." I almost swoon in the warmth of the cloak. I breathe in her scent, a mix of wildflowers and lavender. I have to remind myself to focus.
She's wearing a pair of close-fitting trousers and a tunic. A thick belt encircles her waist and from it hangs a gleaming dagger.

On the church steps, the Purity Pledgers waited on their rides. It was one of those springtime-warm nights that was very Virginia because it was actually fall and it had been ten degrees cooler two hours ago. If not for the sky darkening to purple when it was barely five p.m., we could've been in mid-May. Kiera noticed Jameer walking with me. Her classroom scowl returned.

Brenna was eighteen, a senior, when she was killed. At six foot one, she was the star of the girls' basketball team. She'd already scored an athletic scholarship. The previous fall, when VCHS had released its School Pride Calendar, a way of raising funds for the various sports teams, Brenna and her boyfriend, Aiden Stroud (the captain of the football team), were featured on the cover.

I scrolled past the picture, guilt already creeping up from my stomach and into my chest. I couldn't bring myself to do more than skim the article. My hands were shaking and my eyes kept flitting around the screen, unable to focus on the same spot from more than a few seconds. But i got the gist of it.
Sara's parents were going to publish her biography. They had found her old diary and wanted to use excerpts.

My Student Health Center doc put me on birth control, which triggered skull-fracking cluster headaches and a thunderhead of ill temper that was not improved by the itching and scaling from Retin-A. Accutane gave me such bad nosebleeds I had to rip my face off the pillow each morning: I hoarded the free Student Health Center tampons to jam up my nostrils.

It takes Kant a year to write the one-paragraph mass email, another three weeks to compile the mailing list of friends, family and colleagues and three bourbons to send it. For his entire life he has so grotesquely imagined the consequences of coming out that he's only recently stopped hedging to himself as bi or "flexible." He pictures his mother saying through tears that she never wants to speak to him again.

As if it were a movie screen, the windshield turned fiery, and from the shapes of the flames, tall and sharp rocks erupted into the darkness, and beyond them stretched a charcoal-covered plain, and slow-moving rivers, some of fire.
"This is Simon's home," she said. "His and a trillion others'. It's crowded, but Hades could find a place for you, because he hates Simon and anybody who is deluded enough to like him. "

He was easy to follow. the pressure of his hand, the step of his foot, the angle of his frame...it was like reading his mind. When he leaned right, they turned in perfect unison. He swept her across the gallery in a quick three, a dizzying pace. gilded frames and glass cases and the window blurred in her vision and Azalea spun out, her skirts pulling and poofing around her.

“Oh, yes,” said Azalea. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I think—now that mourning is over, we should have a Yuletide. Not for me, naturally. It’s never mattered for me. But for Bramble and Clover, they’re both over fifteen now and they should meet gentlemen. Real gentlemen and not the riddle nonsense. If they don’t, they’ll just fall in love with—anyone. I thought perhaps Clover could host it?”

"Will the King be home soon, Minister?" said Flora, the first to dare a question.
"He should arrive within three weeks," said Fairweller, smelling the tea and cringing. "He remained behind to see to the regiments. If you had written him, you would have known this already.
"We haven't written him?" said Bramble, her ears red. "He hasn't written us!"
"Yes. Your family is very interesting."

It was round, flounce-skirted Kali the kitchen-queen who saw me in the bustle and scramble of the Great Market, kicking the shins of an older urchin who attempted to steal my tiny, pathetic bundle. I had not eaten in three days, but I was used to that, and it was her approach that caused the boy's friends to scatter. The cut on my forehead bled into my eyes.

"Does this mean," Joan asked as they hustled along, "that your romantic life rests on your being so lazy and pampered that you've never noticed how lazy and pampered you were?"
He stopped so abruptly she lurched past him and he took the chance to bring his mouth to her ear. "Not anymore," he whispered.
"I like that answer," she said.
"Also," he said, beaming down at her in the dusk. "I know where we can go."

At Oliver's old school some people had more money, some had less, but he'd never really thought about it. He'd been to his friends' houses and it always felt like being in his own home, just with different food. He'd thought this apartment was fine that morning, but now that he saw Colette scrutinizing it, it suddenly felt cramped and shabby.

"You need to be really careful, Vivi. You don't know what power does to people. I've seen it. You can't trust any of those so-called sorority witches."
Vivi felt a surge of anger burn its way through her foggy exhaustion. "At least they took the time to tell me I was a witch. Right now, it seems like they're the ones looking out for me." Furious, she ended the call.
The Ravens weren't the problem. Daphne was.

"And Olokun, what did he want in return?" presses Kola. The way he watches me fractures my heart. I want to sit down with him, to tangle my fingers in his.
But I know I can't.
"I made a vow to help him."
"What?" Kola asks, a spark of panic in his eyes. "How?"
"Esu was right when he said we could never be together. I'm sorry. I pause to take a deep breath.
I don't speak for a moment, taking in the shape of his mouth.