42
" As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet." Ah, humanity..." But he was heavy with shadow and the joke went into a dying fall. He trist to break its fall by laughing at himself. "
47
" ...All who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your immortal self! What is it? Who are you?" " I am myself. My body will not decay and die-" " A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it dies. Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life." " I do not pay it! I can die and in that moment live again! I cannot be killed; I am immortal. I alone am myself forever!" " Who are you, then?" " The Immortal One." " Say your name." " The King." " Say my name. I told it to you but a minute since. Say my name!" " You are not real. You have no name. Only I exist." " You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is yourself. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw your world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness. "
55
" Rushing out the door on his way back to the street, he ran into someone with his shoulder. Turning to apologize to them, he stopped, horrified at what he saw.
It was the white-eyed man he’d met a week ago.
“Watch your back.” He said standing there just long enough for Raven to take in the meat between his teeth, the milky, nearly opaque color of his eyes and the madness within them. Then, after only a few seconds, he was gone, vanished into the crowd as if he had never existed.
Certain his mind was playing tricks and tired of being terrified for his sanity, he headed down the street as fast as he could in pursuit. As he rushed through the tightly packed crowd, he saw others like the man he’d just seen, and each of their white eyes gazed blankly into his. A woman here, a hunched drifter there, shapes and faces that shifted and darted all around him. “Watch your back.” They hissed, and he tried to move faster, his heart racing and the nerves of his body jangling painfully with fear as he fought to get beyond them.
Hands reached out for his clothes, pulling him in different directions as they tugged and he struggled to be free. Their fingers felt like talons clasped into the folds and gaps of his clothing, ripping and popping stitches in their fervor to gain some small grasp on his flesh beneath his jacket. Along with the horror of their cold, dead eyes, he could smell some strangeness—a sickly sweet smell of rot and decay only barely closeted by preserving fluids. The smell dug into his sinuses as their fingers and hands dug at him. He gagged, his teeth clenched tight as he exerted energy he didn’t really have. He pushed away from them and on through the empty space he saw at the end of this group of pedestrians. Many of whom mingled with what he now felt must be the dead, wholly unaware of why he flailed and pushed against them. "
― Amanda M. Lyons
58
" My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of perserving certain moments for prosperity , and as time moved forwards I also came to see what a powerful influence these framed scenes exerted over us as we went about our daily lives.To watch my uncle pose my brother a maths problem , and at the same time to see him in a picture taken thirty-two years earlier ; to watch my father scanning the newspaper and trying , with a half-smile , to catch the tail of a joke rippling across the crowded room,and at that very same moment to see a picture of him to me that my grandmother had framed and frozen these memories so that we could weave them into the present.When,in the tones ordinarily preserved for discussing the founding of a nation , my grandmother spoke of my grandfather who had died so young,and pointed at the frames on the tables and the walls , it seemed that she , likes me , was pulled in two directions , wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture the moment of perfection , savouring the ordinary life but still honouring the ideal.But even as I pondered these dilemmas-if you plucked a special moment from life and framed it , were you defying death , decay and the passage of time. or were you submitting to them ?-I grew very bored with them.pg.13 "