Novelettes

"For five minutes they discussed Blomkvist’s shortcomings in the most irritating terms...."

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 20:05:03 -0400

“For five minutes they discussed Blomkvist’s shortcomings in the most irritating terms. Blomkvist leaned back and pretended to be insulted, but he frowned when Berger made some cryptic remarks that might allude to his failings as a journalist but might also have applied to sexual prowess.”

- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

"Being a homicide detective can be the loneliest job in the world. The friends of the victim are..."

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 19:59:51 -0400

“Being a homicide detective can be the loneliest job in the world. The friends of the victim are upset and in despair, but sooner or later - after weeks or months - they go back to their everyday lives. For the closest family it takes longer, but for the most part, to some degree, they too get over their grieving and despair. Life has to go on; it does go on. But the unsolved murders keep gnawing away and in the end there’s only one person left who thinks night and day about the victim: it’s the officer who’s left with the investigation.”

- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

"I don’t hate my brother. If anything, I pity him. He’s a complete idiot, and he’s..."

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 19:45:05 -0400

““I don’t hate my brother. If anything, I pity him. He’s a complete idiot, and he’s the one who hates me.”
“He hates you?”
“Precisely. I think that’s why he came back here. So that he could spend his last years hating me at close quarters.””

- The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

"She had forgotten them all; forgotten Richard down in the mud, and the marquis and his foolish..."

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:12:02 -0400

“She had forgotten them all; forgotten Richard down in the mud, and the marquis and his foolish crossbow, and the world. She was delighted and transported, in a perfect place, the world she lived for. Her world contained two things: Hunter, and the Beast. The Beast knew that too. It was the perfect match, the hunter, and the hunted. And who was who, and which was which, only time would reveal; time and the dance.”

- Neverwhere

"One time I entered a house through an unlocked back door. I heard voices and laughter. I moved..."

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 20:56:57 -0400

“

One time I entered a house through an unlocked back door. I heard voices and laughter. I moved through the kitchen and suddenly found myself standing in a doorway, staring at a family of people having dinner around a long table. Food and silver and glass sparkled everywhere. In the middle was a great, golden roasted bird, perhaps a goose or turkey. I must have surprised them, for all movement stopped as they stared at me while I stared at the table - but not for long. As always, I was the first to move. I believe this was the first rule of life that I learned, though it was a twich in my muscles rather than a thought in my head: Always be the first to move. As long as that happened, they would have to catch up, and I could not be caught.

I snatched the bird by the leg and bolted from the back door before they were out of their seats.

”

- Milkweed

"Many green tomatoes dangled from the vine, and two plump red ones. I was still hungry. I pulled off..."

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:34:00 -0400

“

Many green tomatoes dangled from the vine, and two plump red ones. I was still hungry. I pulled off a red tomato, sat myself down cross-legged on the ground, and ate it. The juice spilled down my chin as pickle juice often did on Uri. I picked off the other tomato. As I was eating it, I turned my eyes toward the back of the house. Someone was sitting on the step. A little girl. Watching me.

I never ate with someone watching me, unless it was Uri or the boys. Eating came after running. And yet I didn’t move. I sat there and ate the last red tomato in the city and I watched her watching me. Her elbows were on her knees and her face leaned into her cupped hands. Her hair was curly and the color of bread crust. Her eyes were brown as chestnuts. They were very big.

When I finished eating the tomato I stood and walked off. I didn’t run. When I looked back, she was still watching me. Her round, unblinking eyes made me feel as if I had just become visible, as if I had never been seen before. When I was far from the backyard, I kept looking back.

”

- Milkweed

"The abbot shook his head. There really was nothing to say: he led the seekers to the door. And the..."

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:05:45 -0400

“

The abbot shook his head. There really was nothing to say: he led the seekers to the door. And the he would wait, for an hour, or two in the corridor outside. Then he would go back in, and remove the remains of the seeker from the shrine, and inter it in the vaults. And sometimes, which was worse, they would not be dead, although you could not call what was left of them alive, and those unfortunates the Black Friars cared for as best as they could.

“Right,” said Richard. And he smiled, unconvincingly, and added, “Well, lead on, Macduff.”

Brother Fuliginous pulled back the bolts on the door. They opened with a crash, like twin gunshots. He pulled the door open. Richard stepped through it. Brother Fuliginous pushed the door closed behind him, and swung the bolts back into place. He led the abbot back to his chair and placed the cup of tea back in the old man’s hand. The abbot sipped his tea, in silence. And then he said, with honest regret in his voice, “It’s ‘lay on, Macduff,’ actually. But I hadn’t the heart to correct him. He sounded like such a nice young man.”

”

- Neverwhere

"“Oh fine, fine,” he whispered. “T’ang dynasty indeed. Twelve hundred years..."

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:48:44 -0400

“

“Oh fine, fine,” he whispered. “T’ang dynasty indeed. Twelve hundred years old, the finest pottery figurines ever made on this earth. This was created by Kai Lung, finest of potters: there is not a twin to it in existence. Examine the color of the glaze; the sense of proportion; the life…” He was smiling now, like a baby; the innocent smile looked lost and confused on the shady terrain of Mr. Croup’s face. “It adds a little wonder and beauty to the world.”

And then he grinned, too widely, and lowered his face to the figurine, and crushed its head in his teeth, chomping and chewing wildly, swallowing in lumps. His teeth ground the china to a fine powder, which dusted the lower part of his face.

He gloried in its destruction, throwing himself into it with the strange madness and uncontrolled blood lust of a fox in a henhouse. And then, when the statue was nothing but dust, he turned to Mr. Vandemar.

”

- Neverwhere

"When she noticed him looking at her, she shrugged and shimmied down further into her layers of..."

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:12:56 -0400

“When she noticed him looking at her, she shrugged and shimmied down further into her layers of clothes, deeper into her leather jacket. Her face looked out at the world from inside the jacket. The expression on her face made Richard think of a beautiful homeless child he had seen the previous winter, behind Covent Garden: he had not been certain wether it was a girl or a boy. Its mother was begging, pleading with the passers-by for coins to feed the child and the infant that she carried in her arms. But the child stared out at the world and said nothing, although it must have been cold and hungry. It just stared.”

- Neverwhere

"Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiance, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as..."

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:59:00 -0400

“Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiance, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as any life makes sense.) Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement, and I tried to be a a Good Samaritan. Now I’ve got no fiance, no home, no job, and I’m walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruitfly.”

- Neverwhere

"The great fox nodded assent. Then he looked down at her, and it seemed to the fox that he could see..."

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 17:25:43 -0400

“

The great fox nodded assent. Then he looked down at her, and it seemed to the fox that he could see everything she was, everything she dreamed, and hoped, and felt. “He is only a human,” said the great fox, “while you are a fox. These things rarely end happily.”

And the fox would have told him what she thought of this, and opened her heart to him, but with a flick of his tail the great fox leapt from the rock down to the desert floor below. And it seemed to the fox that he grew and grew, until he was the size of the sky, and the huge fox was the night, and stars twinkled in the blackness of his coat, and the white tip of his tail was the half-moon, shining in the night sky.

“I can be crafty,” said the little fox to the night. “And I can be brave. And I would die for him.”

And the fox imagined that a voice in her head was saying, almost tenderly, “Then catch his dreams, child,” as she woke.

”

- The Dream Hunters

"On and on he talks, scooping the fruit out of his life and dropping it into her lap. He gives her..."

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 17:17:08 -0400

“

On and on he talks, scooping the fruit out of his life and dropping it into her lap. He gives her his lucky pink bubblegum stone. She rubs it againts her dress and gives it back. Through his tears she is blurry, ghostlike. Her white hair sits upon her head like a puff of cotton.

The kid he has always known himself to be seems to be napping nearby. When he wakes up he is on the sidewalk. The lady is calling “Bye, mailman!” from the step and the sun is bright beyond the rowhouse roofs. School is over: Knap-sacked kids are racing home. The air feels cool and new, the air feels good upon his face.

”

- Loser

"On the second day after returning home from the hospital, he tries to sneak off to school. So his..."

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 17:06:00 -0400

“

On the second day after returning home from the hospital, he tries to sneak off to school. So his mother creates an alarm. She places the alarm in front of the front door. If her son ever tries to leave, the alarm goes off. The alarm is Polly.

Polly is seventeen months old by now. She speaks very little at this point, but one thing she does say is “Bye-bye.” She says it distinctly - in fact, she shouts it - and she says it whenever she sees someone leaving the house. Each morning Mother Zinkoff padlocks the back door. Then she wheels the playpen up against the front door and places Polly inside. Then she goes about her chores, ready to come running whenever she hears “Bye-bye!”

It happens only once. Mrs. Z comes running to find her son halfway out the door and Polly yelling “Bye-bye!” at the top of her lungs. She also finds a chocolate cupcake mashed in Polly’s hand. A bribe.

”

- Loser

"I was nauseated at the sight of bobby pins. I would not touch them. Once, on the day I was going..."

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 17:01:54 -0400

“I was nauseated at the sight of bobby pins. I would not touch them. Once, on the day I was going home from the hospital after having my tonsils out, a woman in my ward asked me to carry some bobby pins to the lady in the next bed. Revolted, I held out a stiff unwilling hand, flinching as the cold clammy little pins touched my skin. They were cold and shiny, as with grease, and sickeningly suggestive of warmth and disgusting, intimate contact with dirty hair.”

- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

"I don’t care any more about the handsome wealthy boys who come gingerly into the living room..."

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:57:00 -0400

“I don’t care any more about the handsome wealthy boys who come gingerly into the living room to take out the girl they thought would look nice in an evening cocktail dress… I said I wanted to go out with them to meet new people. I ask you, what logic is there in that? Why go places with guys you can’t talk to? You’ll never meet a soul that way —- not the sort you want to meet. Better stay in your garret reading than go from one party to another. Face it, kid: unless you can be yourself, you won’t stay with anyone for long. You’ve got to be able to talk. That’s tough. But spend your nights learning, so you’ll have something to say. Something the “attractive intelligent man” will want to listen to.”

- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

"Yours truly sat on the bottom of the bed, partly a stranger, wanting to be loved by the little one,..."

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:46:00 -0400

“Yours truly sat on the bottom of the bed, partly a stranger, wanting to be loved by the little one, touched when he asked to stay and keep him company. Then it was time to leave him to sleep. The man got up and left. He had no identity, but as his back loomed dark in the light cracking in through the open door, he was the Man who would be the chosen one to father children and I was the Mate, bending last over the bed, whispering a little word into my son’s ear as I closed the door. But in the light, downstairs, I was Sylvia and he was himself, and there was the sea between us again. (I said there was a “sea.” No, I will chide myself. There was only a cushion, and a tray of icecream and cookies. But it served, it served.)”

- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

"What is more tedious than boy-girl episodes? Nothing; yet there is no tedium that will be recorded..."

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:39:59 -0400

“What is more tedious than boy-girl episodes? Nothing; yet there is no tedium that will be recorded so eternally.”

- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

"Madame V begins the lesson by reading aloud the first stanza of a famous French poem: Il pleure..."

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:29:00 -0400

“

Madame V begins the lesson
by reading aloud the first stanza
of a famous French poem:

Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville;
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui penetre mon coeur?

Then she looks up and without any warning
she calls on me to translate it.
I swallow hard, and try:

“It’s raining in my heart
like it’s raining in the city.
what is this sadness
that pierces my heart?”

Saying these words out loud,
right in front of the whole class,
makes me feel like I’m not wearing any clothes.

”

- Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy

"They set foot on Night’s Bridge and Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something..."

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:10:11 -0400

““They set foot on Night’s Bridge and Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth…””

- Neverwhere

"He pointed the pipe stem at me. “You know, there’s a place we all inhabit, but we..."

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:57:55 -0400

“

He pointed the pipe stem at me. “You know, there’s a place we all inhabit, but we don’t think much about it, we’re scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“It’s in the morning, for most of us. It’s that time, those few seconds when we’re coming out of sleep but we’re not really awake yet. For those few seconds we’re something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then…”

He pulled out his pouch and repacked his pipe. Cherryscent flew. He struck a match. The pipe bowl, like some predator, or seducer, drew down the flame, “…and then - oh - we open our eyes and the day is before us, and” - he snapped his fingers “we become ourselves.”

”

- Stargirl