The Second Sentence

“My muscles are clenched tight against the cold.”

Over the middle of the largest ocean, they ran into a terrible storm whose high winds battered and separated them.

Last night I couldn't sleep.

Yet it began like one thousand and one days before: the wink of the sun and my cry of alarm, late again, the spring from my bed and the flight through the windowless rooms of my father's house, my wooden play-sword in my hand, my bare feet slapping the cool stone floor, I'm late I'm late I'm late.

That most famous Cassandra, the monk Savonarola of Florence, says that God is especially outraged by the blatant sexual crimes of Pope Alexander VI, who brought his sixteen-year-old mistress and his illegitimate children to live with him in the Vatican.

All through the first watch pale crests surged out of the darkness, lifted in ghostly rumblings, them boomed against the forward quarter, staggering the ship.

The smells of camphor and death hung in the air

She was hungry, and exhausted, and more tired than a body could stand, and each successive door was proving harder to open.

The canals, gleaming in the sun, dappled the ancient brickwork with gold.

It was April, but spring wasn't much in evidence yet save for the wildly blooming heather that poked through the patches of fog to dazzle the eye with a rainbow of vivid purples.

Do you really think you're going to die?

The dry heat of the day cools after midnight, and those of us who sleep on the rooftops wake with the early sun on our faces and fresh air in our lungs.

He pictures her with her back turned, one arm covering her head like a beaten child.

Though everything was the color of fresh snow, the room's walls, ceiling, floor, and linens seemed tainted--as if the stains of misery and death had been scrubbed from them too many times.

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

The currency of the day was hopelessness, and monstrosities roamed the earth unbound by borders and unmatched in their cruelty...until...dawn rose upon the back of a lone rider who seemed to have galloped from the yellowed pages of some forgotten tale into the world.

She tells lies.