Ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The surface of the sun gets that hot. (The chromosphere and corona get hotter than that, but that's twisted-up magnetic fields for you.) In any case, at ten thousand degrees you can pretty much make steel give up and be liquid. Or vapor, even.

This is the bin they put it in when it's like that. You set fire to wood and use the wood-fire to light high-grade coal. It burns like the sun, and you drop lumps of unformed iron and ore into the bin.

There's a spigot on the bottom. You open it and molten iron glowing like the goddamn sun comes out, and you can pour it into molds. It's more fun to do it at night, when it's cooler, but it hardly matters when. It will be the light source, the heat source. The sun's a hundred million miles away. This stuff is right here in your hands.

It's odd, kinda, because iron is the death of suns. Suns die from iron. Elements fuse together, releasing energy as they go, until you get to iron. You can get iron to fuse, but it takes more energy than it releases. If a star is down to iron, it's dying. And some stars don't take dying well. They explode. Iron and anything heavier can be nothing other than the exploded corpse of a dead star. There's no other way to make it.

And here's where we heat it up until it glows like it used to, reminding it of home. Another reason to do it at night: doing it where the sun can see it might be in poor taste.

But a bin like this is an awesome place to dispose of a body. There's barely enough iron in a body to make a coffin nail, but it comes out the spigot with the rest, and absolutely everything else is ash.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

I don’t know why it started, why you arrived here or why it is you. I don’t know how you lit the germ of hope or what it will mean in the future. Yes, I had my line paid out, fishing for something in the coming darkness. But maybe it was just for the look of the thing, out of principal rather than hope. Despite helpful friends I looked to myself to survive. Stoic, isolated and ready for the worst.

How can I tell you of the shadow pursuing, the loneliness of wanting and desperation of waiting. How can I show how the spaces of health between sickness were filled, the rising shadow of worry and helplessness, the white noise aggregate of fatigue and pain. How can I tell you how the blurring of hope, the wishful sound of distant engines, jet planes and wind in leaves, all faded in and out with the lazy pulses of our first clear calm night.

Ever since we… ever since we… you know. Ever since it became possible to hope, to feel, to touch. Ever since it became possible to think of places where friends and those close can join us to stand or sit or play. It’s now impossible to hide from potential, easier to forsee a time when pain and sickness are blasted away by light.

Ever since then I look at the roofs and the chimneys. I look at the rising sun, at reflections in windows, at buildings and rain and roads and the sky. I wait, think of the future, talk with friends or stay reverently silent. I accept the rising tide of your comfort, know that the darkness and exhaustion will end with relief and wait...

What do you think will happen when it's over. Tell me if you can, please... What happens next





in answer to http://moblog.net/view/901098/facing-the-rising-tide

Posted by Dhamaka

Wind whips around the trees and houses
Seasons change shift
While we too are in for a change
The birth of new life doesn’t only happen in Spring
Sweet friends and family are telephoning -
Their energies felt around us -
Is the baby their yet?
Then they make their predictions of arrival and sex
No, no not yet, I say. It will be soon
Then I explain that I feel baby’s head descend in my womb
On a mental, spiritual, physical and practical level we are strong
We are ready for the leap into the unknown
It is ok to be nervous or scared
But we are not (yet)
Avidly going about our day to day rituals
In consciousness and unconsciousness there is and all knowing
that labor could begin at any moment
We’ve succumb to nature
Rejoicing in the adventure
It’s soon, it’s soon…
Soon that we will cradle in our arms pure bliss
Rapture!

Posted by Skip

‘Don’t think too much,’ said the Butcher to the Scientist.

‘But that is my nature,’ said the Scientist to the Butcher.

‘It’s no ones nature. I feel your mind exploding,’ the Butcher explains as he leans forward on the rickety bar stool, edging into the Scientists space.
The Butcher continues, ‘All you do is sit and be. Let the mind stop. Talk and listen to me. It will give your brain a break.’

‘Do you ever think about forward or the future?’ asked the Scientist to the Butcher.

‘No. I just stay in the here and now. I allow the rest to happen,’ said the Butcher to the Scientist.

‘I don’t think I can do that. My mind has two thousand wheels and cogs working as machines of different thoughts.’

‘You can do that. You have to want to. I can talk your mind silly with my Butcher’s philosophy. You have to do it yourself,’ rattled the Butcher to the Scientist.

‘Ok. Then I diminish all in my brain?’ asked the Scientist to the Butcher.

The Butcher turned and spoke to the Scientist, ‘That’s it. All you need is one wheel, one cog.’

Posted by Skip

They lined up sparsely at the rails of the concrete wharf, propped casually on elbows pitched to avoid the sporadic mounting brackets for fishing gear. A couple of people had lines paid out, maybe fishing for something in the coming darkness or maybe just for the look of the thing.

The rising tide of shadow was the opposite of ocean, quietness in waves, like the spaces between waves out at the ocean. The white noise aggregate of distant engines, tires on roadways, wind in leaves and branches, sounds of shuffling and quiet conversation and breathing all faded in and out with the lazy pulses of the lapping night.

Ever since the... ever since the... you know. Ever since then, ever since that, people gather and face the other way at sunset, watching their shadows thrown for miles ahead of them, anywhere they care to stand a perfect place to watch the tides of darkness sidle up to them, sucking at their toes, lapping around their calves, tickling at their knees, licking up their thighs, insinuating itself higher and higher and by sensual degrees engulfing...

On the east coast, where the wharves already face the right direction at sunset, that was where people who first left their lines out realized that they were catching some of the oddness on their hooks -- scraps of comforting darkness to carry home in their buckets and coolers, shreds of old tattered memories and bittersweet fantasies, dreams blasted away by daylight on the other side of the world, visions of lovelier places and times chased away into the surf of darkness by the ugly, stark realities revealed by harsh light.

Ever since the... ever since the... you know. Ever since when it became impossible to scrub the images of horror off the concrete and tarmac, impossible to look at places where friends and loved ones once stood or sat or played, impossible to not see where joy and happiness once lived and now was blasted away in daylight.

Ever since then, we gather at the piers, at the wharves, at the rims of buildings and parking decks, chatting with friends or reverently silent, facing the rising tide of comforting, covering darkness with exhaustion, with relief, and, for some of the more unsettled and desperate of us, with lines out to snare whatever might be worth catching and bringing home in our buckets and coolers.

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

So often there is little time in the moment to do anything but breathe
in
It is on reflection you exhale, share the moment
And in others we seek people who can reflect our interpretations,
isolating common features for comfort
And those others come in many forms, a hall of mirrors from around the
world, I seek them out
And this is my Narcissus, my fascination.
The reflected world, one step away from the real world, exaggerated
and retold with a density somehow richer than the moment, pervading
the cavities behind my eyes like perfect casts in the sand.
We hold up these mirrors and shine out our little messages like morse
code.
So often you dazzle me with your light
So often it's just like watching fireflies in the night

Posted by beth

"Is that new?"

"Most babies are new, or at least newish, by definition."

"Most? Not all?"

"It's not important, but there are rare exceptions. I had a second cousin that I met when I was eight, nine, maybe ten years old. He was more than twenty years old, but he never grew more than the level of development of a couple of months old. Never learned to crawl, couldn't hold his head up. Would be a baby all his life. Clearly a rare exception to the rule. Not important."

"Ah."

"But this little head is empty. How shall we fill it?"

"Cereal and milk?"

"Traditional. I like it. What else?"

"Blood and brains? Teeth?"

"Too young for teeth, I fear, but I like the way you think. What else?"

"Television. Sesame Street and Spongebob."

"Classics. What else?"

"Lullabyes. The alphabet. Crayons and blocks with numbers."

"You're on a roll. Keep going!"

"Popping balloons and laughter. Fear of clowns. The flavors of Pla-Doh and Elmer's. Useless scissors with rounded tips. Popcicles."

"Fantastic! And then?"

"Night terrors. Dreams of the smell of spoiled milk. Segments of insects. Puppies that lie there and never move."

"It's like a lasagna of layered flavors! Keep going!"

"The chill of a darkened room with blinking fireflies outide the sunset-heated windows. The frustration of a wooden box you can't get open. A discarded revolver found in a hollow tree behind the playground."

"Slowing down yet? I can see you're slowing down..."

"The smell of a strange woman's perfumed breast. Car headlights at eye-level. Fragments of steel and rich soil."

"Is there room for another layer?"

"Cheese-flavored crackers shaped like fish. The smell of hospital antiseptic. Buttercream frosting salted with tears. More crayons. Purple and black. And a lollipop."

"Perfect! You're more than ready to be a parent. Congratulations!"

[*]

Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri

"Pathetic", he said as he stepped over the homeless man sitting outside his
office building. "Some people have no self respect."

As he rode the lift up to the 27th floor, he was seized by a ferocious
sneeze. Looking down into his handkerchief, he saw that his nose had fallen
off. The other people in the lift looked at him in horror. He covered the
gaping hole in his face and fled.

Outside. he phoned his doctor, but while he was speaking his tongue slipped
out of his mouth. It dropped to the ground and lay flopping uselessly on the
pavement.

"This is just a nightmare," he thought. "I'll wake up soon."

He lit a cigarette to calm his nerves. He lost three fingers sparking his
lighter and when he flicked the ash his whole hand fell off. He hurried
away, shedding feet and legs as he tried to run, eventually collapsing in a
limbless heap in front of a smart office building.

He leant against the wall and his eyeballs trickled down his face and landed
in his lap.

"Pathetic," he heard someone say, as they stepped over him to enter the
office. "Some people have no self respect."

Story by DoghouseReilly

Posted by jc1000000