She was an exotic flower amongst the snowdrifts, out of place, a Technicolor misfit in a monochrome Christmas movie.
The body tries to stop the mind from killing itself, no matter the cost. It is only the lack of strength, the fatigue that lets the jumpers fall at last.
Tombstones covered the dale, the smooth marble surfaces bright. She had spent days here as a teenager, though not out of any awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever.
She had thought he was dead, or at least not totally alive, and you could not still be dating someone you believe had an autopsy, so it was not really cheating.
If superstition could contradict science, the world may as well be on the back of a turtle. But giving into turtle worship was a bridge too far.
She is the sort of person who can do things she doesn’t know yet. There are things you know you know and you know you don’t know and you don’t know you know and you don’t know you don’t know. She may not know what she does know.
I know a great number of things, though never all at once or for very long.
When colleges, both within the Hudson Valley and throughout the country, encouraged women to do little beyond attaining their Mrs. degree in Husbandry, Annandale offered rigorous and prestigious degrees irrespective of gender.
Nature was beautiful and filled with spirituality without needing to be likewise full of spirits.
I could either succumb to the nightmares I’ve raised or paint them.
Other young women were more than kind when it came to teaching him the basics of makeup artistry, but he did not like the idea of foundation, knowing enough alchemy to realize it had historically been made with lead and mercury.
She mourned the history that the invisible intruder had erased, but not enough that she would spend a second more of her future feeling the emptiness.
Instead of the birds of the sky and beast of the field, the gods were more than men because Man needed them to be, for what could the world be if Man were the best of all creatures?
The Word no longer belonged to Man because they believed it did not. Man saw the gods alone as Creators and forgot that there had ever been any other way.
Angels are just beyond us. They’re creatures that biology doesn’t apply to. They don’t love humanity at all. They just love God.
You get a few of them together and don’t be surprised if pipes and drums appear out of nowhere. It is a sort of magic people believe in…
[His] leaving had stabbed her heart. This organ was not inclined to forgive her for vulnerability.
Loving her has become a part of my religion, a gentle mantra with every beating of my heart. I cannot imagine its Ragnarok without wilting.
Holding fantasy to our chests only means our hands are not free to work.
Maybe [aliens] have been in our lives a lot longer than we want to admit. People have always seen strange things—elves and fairies—and now we don’t. Now we see them, right?
His mind was a tapestry constantly weaving and unweaving with the dedication of Penelope for her Odysseus.
Our brains want God even as our minds debunk the divine.
You kill by consent, every time you let something… pervert the balance when you have the power to stop it.
You belong to the world. Don’t be afraid to be a part of it.
God has planned the world too perfectly for me to doubt that everyone is where they are supposed to be.
Making love, sensing how he felt about her in the high tide of passion, seeing herself through his eyes, brought her to an ecstasy beyond words.
Magic has its own weight, and that weight, the gravity of it, is pulling the fabric of reality like a bowling ball on a spandex sheet.
If I can alter my perception of the reality, I can change the reality itself.
If you get enough people believing one thing, it’s like reality bends itself to allow that to exist.
Maybe the world didn’t need witches and wolves, because the world itself did more to steal away the magic than fantasy ever could. It didn’t matter if one was disobedient, foolish, or unlucky, because the worst things just happened.
They may have been rightly overbearing in her formative years, but they also loved Roselyn enough to trust she needed dreams more than realities.
Nothing in my beliefs tells me to let my relationship with the divine interfere with romantic love, the friction of sects never getting in the way of the friction of sex.
Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one’s guard to be offered sex under the cloaking of the sacred.
Aw, so he used you as a penis cozy and then left? Guys are pigs.
Sex was this primal connection like no magick she had ever known, even separated by a millimeter of latex. She knew that some combined the two and, while she could see how this would improve the magick, it would dilute the sex.
It seemed inequitable at best that one could and did gain a reputation for things that left one both physically and emotionally unsatisfied.
There is little worse than when the person to whom you want to apologize is having great sex in your room.
Roselyn adored the scent of sex, the wafting aroma of angel fontanels before they earn their halos.
Private moments held not a candle to coitus, not even the expensive kind of candle that made the whole room smell of far off seasons.
Eating should be an act of physical necessity or emotional joy, not something to alleviate boredom.
There are three people in your life: your great love, the one you want to have children with, and the one whom you can spend the rest of your life with. If you find that last one first, you have it made.
Paganism is the default of most children, since they excel at magical thinking.
My main nurturing instinct toward children is mild sadism–picking them up and threatening to drop them–which is why I am a good uncle but would make a poor father.
Things had improved after he was born. We both loved him with such fervor that it was impossible that some wouldn’t splash back on us.
I have never tried to walk through a mall in the Christmas season dressed like a jolly old elf. You might as well dress up like a pork chop and walk into an alley full of starving dogs.
It is difficult to process the sacred masculine when your closest example has been a man smacking you around, verbally degrading you, lording over you, or otherwise proving a poor demonstration of the use of strength.
Having ascended to some spiritual strength by focusing on the power of the feminine, it is no doubt tempting to wield this strength against that which triggers memories of having once been weaker.
Women are seen as imperfect or unclean, because of a myth of a tempting apple, because they bleed monthly, because they lack equivalent upper body strength.
Shane met him owing to the storybooks she studied to discover what attributes made one princessly—this wasn’t technically a word, but she felt there should be equity in adjectives if not in life.
Most magick I have experienced can be written off as a stew of psychology and coincidence, and I truly believe this is where magick is best worked.
Magick need not be a crutch, but it is hard to argue that anything you lean on in lieu of building your own strength weakens resolve.
I honor the divine on a daily basis, but I want to know that the greatest magick in my life is living authentically with what I have and can do.
She did not arrive at Annandale without taking the chisel to herself more than once, without rubbing up against a few boys to smooth an edge or two.
Whatever problems we encountered, we put there. If we trace the line back, every struggle derived from some decision we made. It is not chance, it is how we teach ourselves.
Now that this destiny was about to happen, every instinct within him fought against it, realizing he had been fetishizing suicide.
I don’t know what my future will bring me and it’s terrifying. To stand before this vast expanse and know that the future could take away what matters most simply because that is the nature of indifferent chaos in the hands of wanton boys.
We are left at the brink of our future each day and the only real choice we have is not to jump but instead make our path through the briar.
I discuss my beliefs less because I bed my atheist, who cannot believe in much more sacred than our kisses.
They were once fairies and elves. Now they are creatures from beyond the stars because you no longer believe in anything but humans.
Man created god upon his thoughts to externalize, to give form to his belief to give a reason for what they could do. The gods stole away the energies, let man believe he was ruled rather than that he rules.
Words could be quite enough for magic to occur, when the night was warm enough and the moon waxing.
If she had some level of theism, we might have a shared theological root from which I could shape holy words.
Reciting from rote seems a terrible way to honor the gods and a precise killing of the power of the words.
The stars glittered through the atmosphere, and he thought of the distances that light must take to hit his eye at exactly that moment. Without him here, those photons would have been wasted.
Her rebirth stood in her mind with the clarity of a perfect diamond, the light scattering the rainbows through her body.
The boys he met at Annandale only understood one kind of woman. They needed to be coddled and cooed over as their own mothers had done their whole lives.
She had seen this relationship dying before it ever lived, but allowed optimism and lust to blind her.
You and me? We are never going to be just friends. The only time I’m not adoring you is when I am too busy hating you and wishing to God I never met you…
Change is loss. I was fully functional prior to the actions you have taken. If you change me, I will cease to be me. If you love me, you wouldn’t want to change me… Love appears to have made you less functional.
…He sounded as though he had just seen The Pokey Little Puppy meet the business end of The Little Engine That Could.
The seed of an urban legend find fertile soil at the corner of tragedy and imagination.
We are given these niches, small worlds of our own populated by only a handful, where we feel understood. Our bubble worlds bump into innumerable others daily, but there is so little cause to allow their integrity to be breached.
Men could be utter pussycats when they had even a touch of the sniffles.
We paw at nostalgia even before we hit twenty, wanting a holiday that never happened, a wholesomeness that could not survive in the wild.
We may deny the truth of our childhoods while we are living them, but we one day realize the truth of our parents as readily as we do that of Santa. Neither are as perfect as our memories would have them…
I wanted a life of adventure. I wanted to travel. I wanted to work my way up to being Somebody. I wanted to leave a mark on the Earth and be remembered.
Magic was not in glitter and sparks. Real magic didn’t need to be.
Though Queen Victoria in England had suggested that makeup was impolite, even vanity, Gideon saw it as yet another weapon. It was not so different from magic.
[H]e had heard of, but given little credence to, magic. There was always someone talking of folk remedies and charms, but it seemed to him the inclination of fools misunderstanding chance.
I do not want to credit my life to spells and rituals, cushioning me from the consequences of living.
I reserve magick for necessities, a bit like the good china. It has a time and a place, but eating peanut butter sandwiches off it each morning chips and devalues it.
I am not interested in wishing hard and having the Universe provide all I need without any work on my part.
Please do not say magic like you are discussing a bowel movement… Humanity expects the lights, so they are provided.
Childhood is this time of magic and monsters; hoping for one and fearing the other… The worst part of being a kid is discovering which one exists… So, I chose to believe in magic.
We can never know how much they deserve our sympathy, but we have to give it unreservedly as they are people innately full of the divine who instead choose to behave infernally owing to poor programming.
As compassionate beings, we cannot harm others, not even through our inaction.
She kissed him… long enough he could almost hear her thoughts. Long enough that he began to know her story, know what she had been through.
She closes my door behind her and all the petty stresses of life reappear, eager to make up for lost time. I’ve developed a phobia of that door closing for the last time, of losing her in any way or of being lost.
To her, it was like asking a butterfly what it remembered about being a caterpillar. She could fly now and nothing could touch her when she left the cocoon of her body behind at night.
They act as if their religion were a celestial gumball machine, taking no blame for personal failures because they won’t manifest their will in the real world by working for their goals.
None of us just pop into the world fully formed, so it’s the little facts that make us.
Ethically, she couldn’t cause the suffering of any living thing. Logically, bacon cheeseburgers were delicious.
Trying to destroy yourself gives a pretty clear message and it’s not one I think you’d like. Sounds a bit like, “I’m too self-centered to be constructive, so I have to open a vein…
We’re all suicides. The tragedy is every day that we don’t die.
Isn’t watching sacred potential kill itself as good a punishment as eternal fire?
As a man, I was a failure. A pathetic teacher lusting after Catholic school girls in short skirts. As a monster, I’m superb. It’s comforting to know my place in the world.
Do you want me because you love me or because I provide you normality drag?
Her beauty was enough to get her into most any situation she desired and her tongue—sharp and venomous—was enough to get her out again.
I have heard that Paganism is for broken people, but life cracks everyone in some way. We are a religion of healing people.
She could never understand why creatures of darkness had the slightest interest in spineless human girls.
Do you know the amount of evil done by well-meaning humans? Oodles. Do you know the amount done by ill-meaning devils? Infinitesimal.
You can’t exist on this plane for long purely one thing or another. A totally evil creature is so destructive that it obliterates itself. A totally good one… the same. So, we mix a bit of coffee with our cream.
He never thought he was right. The horror of all that had died under his will had become mundane to him. You see, the first horror is the horror itself. The real horror for him was accepting it as necessary.
Those who mouth your sacred words with an accent you deem wrong annoy you more than those speaking something you cannot understand.
Like language, I think any who have not acquired spirituality by a certain age are doomed to be never fluent and you are likely to mimic the one that surrounds you.
You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover.
A modern culture built on the back of dying gods immerses me.
I cannot let my blood pressure rise because someone wishes to spread his or her bad day around, as if to dilute instead of multiply it.
We need the life… We need to know what we take left someone weaker or dead. It reminds us what we were. The Hunger when you start out, it isn’t in the stomach or brain. You want to kill because you hate that others get to live.
When I lay down on my deathbed, I want to know that I have done all I could to be a first rate human, not a third rate pawn of the gods.
You’re like this…this goddess pretending to be human… And I don’t know which one I love.
Within you, within all human beings, is a seed of greatness that makes their kind quake with fear.
She felt that “truthful” and “honest” were two very different concepts. She could truthfully say that she hadn’t eaten Roselyn’s Chinese leftovers, but that wasn’t honest because it omitted that Eliot did and that Shane did not object.
My life of sin among people I’m sure he thinks are deviants is happier and more honest that his oppressive, sexist cesspool.
A college provides a means of accrediting and laundering one’s existence, so that what was may be forgotten under the weight of something far more mundane.
Love and poor parenting are acceptable topics for any formal meal I make.
We’re not mad,” he began, meaning he was. He was always a plural when mad, as though grammatically throwing his lot in with her mother gave him the power of her authority.
They had perfected their team nagging to a level where they no longer had to confer and felt they would be wasting their talents if they only admonished their own children.
Opening her mouth to take a bite seemed forward. Chewing? Obscene. Mutual mastication was out of the question.
She sat in the silence that resulted in the absence of her words, feeling unburdened but not absolved.
No divinity worth His salt could be contained in a book.
Think about the whole Biblical story of Mary. She wakes up and sees something with a lion, eagle, and human face that wants to inseminate her with the Holy Seed. She’s practically a saint just for not killing herself on the spot.
My soul is not satisfied with an inert universe. The gods may not make a habit of speaking to me personally, but I can’t help but whisper comments to them.
She resented a universe that forced her to fabricate cover stories for its more inexplicable vagaries.
She had picked up life where she had left off… and hoped that would be enough to get the universe to politely overlook her.
She could not keep his death in her head, like when she tried to imagine the infiniteness of the universe and nearly swooned at the vastness of the thought.
It is a challenge to love someone who does not see the divine as you do, and much harder still to date someone who considers your spirituality a design flaw in an otherwise worthwhile human being.
[H]er retaliation only made the sin the greater because she could not find words to confess.
I don’t much care for all this talk of God washing away all my dirt. I like a bit of grit around the edges. It gives me character and does a passable job of faking depth, from a distance.
The dark places will not be instinctively frightening, true, but isn’t it better that children fear boogeymen than pedophiles? Isn’t it better that libraries are filled to the brim with stories and not only words?
The nature of God’s plan can be difficult to fathom when you are toiling in some small corner of it, but it is glorious from above, if you allow yourself the perspective.
I don’t think very many people get converted by someone telling them they are terrible. No one I’d want to rub shoulders with in Heaven, anyway.
I missed you,” she cried into him. Standing on top of the snow gave him an additional few inches on her and she rested her head against his chest. She could hear nothing within, just her own heartbeat echoing.
I am copacetic with leaning on the sacred, but I need to make sure all the mundane bases are covered before we break out the crystals and incense for a good chant.
Reason had no place to crash once Emotion came to town.
She harbored the childhood presumption that the truly scary things could only find her in the night.
Americans bred like rabbits, expecting the reaper to slaughter at least a few before they reached ripeness.
American culture enforces such rigid gender roles for male friendships that they are gay unless they materially resemble a beer commercial.
They tell me how they are not scared to die, but they are terrified of the lives circumstance forces them to lead.
If you do not need something that it is still useful, give it to someone who will appreciate it before you douse it in lighter fluid in hopes Santa Odin will put a new one under your Yule tree.
He seemed like the sort to have a vast arsenal of smirks, shaped over a decade of nonverbal conversation.
Adolescence impelled her eyes to stay at an even keel, to deal with the ground before flickering to the heavens. Night became not dotted with fairy clouds of celestial brilliance, but simply the time when the sun was out of sight.
The stars were so simple when she was a kid, a smattering of glowing dust circling the Earth. She did not then know that each was a sun, most considerably more massive than the daylight one she knew.
The demons are not easily dispatched, instead attaching themselves to otherwise beautiful things, a favorite food or a love note left for you, to see how you react when they rear up.
Kissing a stranger because that is what is done presages an unhappy year not for any supernatural reason, but because you are unsatisfied enough with your lot in life to put your lips on the line for a fallacy.
I miss more loving someone so deeply that I can’t imagine a forever without her kisses.
Like any man, he had no real protection from an unsolicited kiss from a pretty woman, even one he had just murdered.
He relented to the kiss and gave of himself what she required, his lips parting in symmetry with hers until the moment of realization collapsed.
As he had kissed her neck, she could not repress the feeling she was a lamb making time with a wolf.
The art of chess is in knowing which is the most valuable piece in play, then having the courage to sacrifice it for the win.
If you think it is spiritual to burn food in front of starving people in hopes that your gods will bring this back to you in triplicate, you are missing the point and sowing animosity from all sides.
Students view any teacher who does not bury them under work as some sort of mentally impaired kitten to be kicked aside.
Like chocolate, she craved sleep and it made her life brighter, but she could do without.
He kissed her forehead and drifted into an uneasy sleep, listening to the soft snoring of the creature on his chest, one he loved slightly more than he had come to fear.
Modesty was hardly a priority in her mind until now. Now she had been cast from Hell and again knew shame.
Do you know what Hell is? …No fire, no brimstone. Man in his infinite folly invented that to rob from his brothers their will. Hell is existing without Our Father. None of His love touches me.
Vampires did not avoid mirrors because they cast no reflection but because mirrors became so unflattering with the illusion of fuzzy focus wrenched away.
The vampire community has enough problems. We don’t need to add petty backbiting to it.
Being kidnapped and abused by the undead was worse than calculus, but not by a wide margin.
The problem is not that Santa stops existing but that we do. The children we are no longer exist, a fact we do not help through immersing ourselves in the repeating cycle of wake, work, dinner, internet, sleep.
She is so free with herself and so certain of her path, something I now cynically believe only comes from not being aware of the infinite multitude of right paths.
She was not a vegetarian and knew firsthand animals had to die for her delectation, but she never liked to think about it.
There was a charm in being reborn into the world when one was old enough to appreciate it.
If you are old enough to feel angst about how a holiday “feels,” you are very likely no longer in the target demographic.
The flick of her hip is distilled erotica, a practiced sexuality.
The night sky made her feel infinite before she knew the word.
My Christmas was a sum total of the ministrations of adults, usually adults who wanted me to encourage my parents to buy something for me to consume and discard.
Take it with a whole shaker of salt, a grain won’t be close to enough.
The safest thing to do when in danger is to be too stupid to know you are in danger.
Like the discovery of most things – love and religion especially – she maintained the child’s arrogant wonder than no one had understood it before her and, even if they had, they could not embrace it as passionately as she.
The whole concept of some stranger making his way down our chimney – not that we had one – suggested burglary more readily than generosity. Any Santa who tried it would have gotten a bullet in his holly, jolly keister.
She wished she had eyes like her sister, huge and bright, constantly straddling the line between terrified child and ingénue.
The Hermit is an important tarot card with much to tell us, but he tends not to be so welcome around the bonfire.
We do not require man’s religion for salvation. We do not believe in anything that forces people to keep their places in this world.
He’s very good at chaining girls. He can make cold steel feel like silk.
Being certain one is alive isn’t something to which one pays mind. If you could ask the question, you were fine. If you could not, hopefully you had a cozy coffin.
A goddess does not need to eat and does so only for her pleasure.
You were abducted by space aliens. Of course you want egg rolls.
That these people are wandering around, looking for aliens to justify the emptiness inside them and let them feel special without effort, creeps me out.
If it took eons to get to the edge of one’s galactic yard, she could not imagine the neighbors dropping by for a casual visit, especially since the heavenly houses were uninhabitable well into the next state.
If you knew the mercy I am showing by not dismembering you where you stand for getting in my way, you would not stop thanking me.
He dances all night, utterly naked and composed of nothing but six and a half feet of pale sinew. He could dance to a field of crickets, to the sound of rain on a tin roof, to a stampede.
Is there a term for when you are only gay for the top half of someone?”“I think that makes you bisect-ual.
She hated anyone who clung to the supernatural when the natural was perfectly serviceable.
Every weekend, I fall in love again. By Sunday, the last thing I want to do is let her go, release her back into the cold water of life.
If he had to spend the evening with madwomen, he would prefer at least one of them be willing to let him grope her.
[T]hese friends were of the female persuasion, and while by and large they were bi and large, they still represented potential threats on [her] feminine radar.
There weren’t always happy endings and children would do well to know that vile things could happen to them, that witches and wolves were desperate to steal them should they be disobedient or foolish or simply unlucky.
If you can’t feel the touch of the gods on your own, it greatly behooves you to work on that before some lecher tells you his touch is just as good.
The gods preferring their libations diluted with rainwater and mixed with freshly cut grass.
Everyone you meet is an aspect of the gods and has a lesson to teach you.
Ghosts are some of the loneliest people you will ever meet.
I’m a holiday Christian at best and I’d never given much thought to demons. They were an adult version of the boogieman hiding in every kid’s closet.
Once everyone thought you were crazy, they ignored you even when you told the truth.
I cannot think who my residents hurt but how I can give them tools to remain on the right side of civilization.
A lonely person on a college campus is never more than a few minutes and a bad decision from company.
Hades does not have a runny nose. I know this. The entire Greek pantheon no doubt knows this. For some reason, my nose is unaware of this basic fact of mythology.
Mythology didn’t cease to exist and be useful to Pagans when we gained digital watch technology.
Mythology was littered with people who meddled in the affairs of elves and fairies and were never again heard from.
People who believe their god loves them unconditionally are less able to be controlled through divine terrorism.
He wouldn’t be the one to prove to the world that there was an afterlife, but he hoped to be the one to prove it to himself, though he would have a few stern questions for a Creator who made people haunt libraries.
All this electromagnetic pollution in the air from the Internet and cell phones, it cuts you off from God.
My faith is a tool I employ, a metaphorical context I find apt, but it is inert until placed in a hand that needs it.
They wouldn’t have understood if they found him crying, when he woke and remembered all at once that he had once had a wife and child, so they never found him this way.
She knew the power of bureaucracy well enough to be aware she had to sit and be admonished until this stranger felt she had expressed sufficient disappointment in a girl she would never have to see again.
I cannot deal with obscurity for more than a few decades before I get the worst ache in my chest.
Maybe it is like Pascal’s Wager, but I want to believe in the immortality of the soul because consciousness is such a fantastic gift that is feels cruel and unfair to end it so quickly.
It was as though he had secrets, and he wanted you to know he would keep them for the pleasure of depriving you of their taste.
Summer flings always seemed amazing in movies, though that might be because the leading man did not ever call his romantic interest “dude.
Her mother admonished through closed lips, the sound a mother can make mean anything from “pick up your socks” to “we are very disappointed you have murdered those orphans.
College is a blossoming new world of genital opportunity.
Natural law has decreed it so. Isn’t death as much a part of the flow as life? Why fight it? Because maybe the flow splashes into a bottomless pit past that blind turn.
As long as she persisted in her belief that bafflement justified her actions, she felt confident no one would contradict her.
Most of the time, all the separates a class president and a gang leader is numbers: a zip code, a paycheck, or a drug dealer’s phone number.
I feel as though I have leapt off this massive cliff and I am still building my wings… Everyone just assumes I know how to fly, but I am pretty sure I am only falling gracefully and hoping to miss the ground.
She is an angel, how bad could it be?”“Ask the first born of Israel when the Pharaoh pissed off Moses. Ask the salty residents of Sodom. Ask anyone who was not Noah or a fish once the Flood rolled in.
He had carte blanche to eat whatever he wanted. No amount of broccoli and vitamin D kills ten lung tumors and I know not how many brain tumors. Have the tiramisu.
If I am a pawn in someone else’s chess game, you better believe I am going to demand an explanation before being shoved at some rook. I’ll play my part, damn it, but I want the courtesy of being asked for my consent!