“Slade just shrugged. His lips folded in, he watched her with the sameexpression a priest might look at a man as he took his long walk to theelectric chair. Bastard.”

“If you look at anotherwoman, I’ll rip your eyes out. Touch one and I’ll cut off your hands. Kissher and I’ll sever your tongue from your mouth.“You don’t want to know what I’ll do if I find out your dick gotanywhere near another woman. So the choice is yours, you can live life as ablind, mute eunuch with stubs at the end of your arms or you can close theclub...”

“We mourn for the dead, but it's a selfish act. It may be a tragedy that so many young lives are lost to us, but it's our tragedy alone because they are at peace.”

“Wait!" he yelled.I didn't turn around, I walked faster. Then I heard him slam his fist on the hood of his car. I almost stopped.Maybe I would have if he'd followed me. But he didn't. He got in his car and he left, just like he said he would.”

“You were created out of love and good.""There is not good in her," he said sharply, lowering his chin, while twisting the steam between his fingers."There has to be somewhere, as there still is in you. I can sense it. You've just buried it.”

“He had had a beautiful and eager young wife and another man had taken her away from him and had fathered his child, and all he had done was to walk away, leaving her in possession of everything he owned, and crawl into a hole in the slums and lie there like a wounded animal and let his intellect bleed away into pious drivel and his strength bleed away into weakness. And he had been good. But his goodness had told me nothing except that I could not live by it. My new father, however, had not been good. He had cuckolded a friend, betrayed a wife, taken a bride, driven a man, though unwittingly, to death. But he had done good.”

“Do you think that sometimes, there are those that are meant to be together?" he asked, not breaking his gaze.I thought for a moment. "I don't know, maybe." I shrugged."What if, there are two parts that were once a whole. Not here on earth, but," he looked skyward, then at me again with those searing golden eyes. A slight, nervous smile crept up my right cheek. He continued, "And those two parts weren't what made them whole, but the parts of them did.""You've lost me now," I said, as I loosened my grip on his embrace, shaking my head."I'm talking about soul mates. Split aparts. It's a theory of Plato's. Except, what if the split aparts were never one, but each split apart was a part of one that was once whole?”