The bridges QUOTES

23 " Did you ever think that maybe we’re like that?” she asks me.
I smile into the dark. How many times have I thought of myself as the ocean? “You think we’re like water?”
Gemma sits up. The salty wind coming off the water snaps her hair around her shoulders. With one hand in the middle of my chest, she tries to push me into the sand. I’m strong enough to hold her off, but I don’t want to. I willingly collapse back and she crawls over me. Holding a smile on her face, she slips her legs on either side of my hips and settles her weight on me.
In a voice thin as smoke, she says, “Well, maybe that’s how we start. Maybe, in the beginning, we’re nothing but a theoretical vast and empty sea with this huge open sky above us.”
Her hands press down on my stomach and her fingers pull at the bottom of my shirt. She leans forward until her breasts are rubbing against me and her mouth is almost touching the skin of my neck.
“Then slowly,” she continues, “over time, the currents change and we build up these continents inside our bodies.” Now her fingers walk a path from my bellybutton to my sternum. “And eventually, we have canyons and deserts and trees and beaches and all sorts of places where we can go and live.”
I suck in a breath as Gemma flattens her hand on the skin just above my heart and kisses me just below my ear. Then she turns her face, fitting the crown of her head beneath my jaw and says, “Most of the time we’re safe on the land, but sometimes we get sucked out to sea. What do you think happens then?”
I think about everything we’ve shared today. I think about Gemma and me. And how it feels like the geography inside of my own body is changing, how it’s been changing from the moment I met her. Maybe even before that.
And I think about the continents we’re building between us. The bridges of land moving from her fingers to mine and the valleys and mountains formed by her lips on my skin and her words in my head.
I use both of my hands to cup her face and pull her to my mouth. I press my lips to hers, parting her mouth and drinking in her breath. “I think you’d have to start swimming.”
A minute of silence ticks by.
Over the low drone of the waves on the beach, she whispers, “And what if you can’t swim very well?”
I think for a minute. “Then you fly. "

― Autumn Doughton , This Sky

25 " LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. "

― Charles Dickens , Bleak House