Kitay had been the first to reach out with his fingers, and then all three of them were holding hands, Nezha and Rin on either side of Kitay, and it felt and looked absolutely, terribly wrong and still Rin never wanted to let go.
Was this how Daji, Jiang, and Riga had once felt? What were they like at the height of their empire? Did they love one another so fiercely, so desperately?
They must have. No matter how much they despised one another later, so much that they’d precipitated their own deaths, they must have loved one another once.
I can’t believe the Witch Collector and I are on the same side. A day ago, I planned his end. Envisioned it. Tasted the sweetness of revenge and wondered if I was brave enough to take the life of a man who threatened all I hold dear. Now I stand here with the deaths of dozens painting my hands, speaking with one of the three people I hate most in this world, forced to be his ally because we share a common goal.
Seen from Above
A dead beetle lies on the path through the field.
Three pairs of legs folded neatly on its belly.
Instead of death’s confusion, tidiness and order.
The horror of this sight is moderate,
its scope is strictly local, from the wheat grass to the mint.
The grief is quarantined.
The sky is blue.
To preserve our peace of mind, animals die
more shallowly: they aren’t deceased, they’re dead.
They leave behind, we’d like to think, less feeling and less world,
departing, we suppose, from a stage less tragic.
Their meek souls never haunt us in the dark,
they know their place,
they show respect.
And so the dead beetle on the path
lies unmourned and shining in the sun.
One glance at it will do for meditation—
clearly nothing much has happened to it.
Important matters are reserved for us,
for our life and our death, a death
that always claims the right of way.
You saw yourself as an unholy triptych, three into one, one into three; she the girl, you the Devil and I the Saint. And you understood, finally, that there had never truly been a she or a you but only a terrible and lonely I.
Marylou was so lovely, but I whispered, 'Wait until we be lovers in San Francisco; my heart isn't in it.' I was right, she could tell. It was three children of the earth trying to decide something in the night and having all the weight of past centuries ballooning in the dark before them. There was a strange quiet in the apartment. I went and tapped Dean and told him to go to Marylou; and I retired to the couch. I could hear Dean, blissful and blabbering and frantically rocking. Only a guy who's spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely physical realization of the origins of life-bliss; blindly seeking to return the way he came. This is the result of years looking at sexy pictures behind bars; looking at the legs and breasts of women in popular magazines; evaluating the hardness of the steel halls and the softness of the woman who is not there. Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live. Dean had never seen his mother's face. Every new girl, every new wife, every new child was an addition to his bleak impoverishment. Where was his father? — old bum Dean Moriarty the Tinsmith, riding freights, working as a scullion in railroad cookshacks, stumbling, down-crashing in wino alley nights, expiring on coal piles, dropping his yellowed teeth one by one in the gutters of the West. Dean had every right to die the sweet deaths of complete love of his Marylou. I didn't want to interfere, I just wanted to follow.
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Alcohol
Alcohol affects every part of the human body, from brain function to circulation and even nail growth. When a certain level of blood alcohol concentration is reached, the intoxication can damage organs and lead to death. Three million deaths occur every year as a result of the harmful use of alcohol, according to the World Health Organization.
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