Ele me afogou na água verde debaixo da ponte. Fizeram um violino do meu esterno. Fizeram cravelhas dos meus dedos. No inverno, eu me deito sob o gelo… - Caitlín R. Kiernan

I inspect everything more closely, and there is about every surface — the river, the forest, the bark of the trees, the underbrush between them, even my own skin — there is about it all the unmistakable texture of linen stretched and framed. And this is when I feel the camel’s hair brush and the oil paint dabbing tenderly, meticulously, at the space below my navel.

El mundo está lleno de sirenas. Siempre hay una sirena cantándote para hacerte naufragar. Algunos de nosotros tal vez seamos más susceptibles que otros, pero siempre hay una sirena. Puede estar con nosotros toda nuestra vida, o pueden pasar muchos años, décadas, antes de encontrarla o de que nos encuentre. Pero cuando nos encuentra, si no tenemos la suerte de ser Odiseo escuchando la canción con perfecta nitidez atado al mástil del barco, tripulado sin riesgos por marineros con los oídos taponados con cera de abeja… si no tenemos esa suerte, somos otra clase de marino, de la clase que salta por la borda y se ahoga en el mar.

Isn't there some great, grim irony in the fact that the whole country gets a day off work in honor of a man who struggled against and died to end oppression, even after having re-elected one of the greatest would-be oppressors of the last century? And that the threat of freedom for a minority may have been what finally tipped the electoral scales in Dominar Bush's favor? Yes, I think that's what it is, a great, grim irony. King said, "No one is free until we are all free." Somehow, the Reverend Bernice King has missed that part, as have so many other Americans. All or nothing. Personally, I think that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day should have been suspended this year in recognition of Bush's second term. A nation cannot simultaneously pat itself on the back for granting this group of people freedom and strive to deny freedom to this other group. Or, rather, it can, but it should not be permitted to do so. The vacation has not been earned because the work is not finished.