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Forget walking, right now I could fly."-Marcus

Life, Jersey Girl, sometimes pauses. It stops. Sometimes we don__ even realize how everything around us is moving so quickly while we__e standing in the middle of it, allowing it to pass us by. Most of us, if not all, just lose the why. Some of us never figure it out to begin with. We lose sight of the purpose that wakes us up every morning and pushes our day forward. We lose a sense of hope and the feeling of life in general. We view life as more of a test, one that__ trying to beat us down every day.

We're enveloped in pitch black. "Wait here," I whisper."Are you getting your ax?""Handcuffs.""Kinky. But, okay, I'll try it.

It didn__ feel like the Fates were looking over me that day. When I glanced up, I couldn__ see destiny__ threads tangling in the sky like the silk of a giant spider__ web, woven by three pairs of gnarled, arthritic hands. All I saw was blue _ the timeless blue of an empty sky, and the restless blue of a rough ocean.

... all sorts of wonderful things got washed up on the beach _ crates of clothes and cutlery and children__ toys, boxes of engine parts and television screens and electrical wires like tangled snakes in the water. I found them fascinating, like relics from a distant time, even though I knew it was us who lived in the past.

If you continue to threaten us, I will act upon my threat._ I felt silly using the precise language of bargaining dictators and gangsters, but they seemed to take it seriously. Stickings_ smirk almost completely faded. __he thing is, Effie __ his voice dropped to barely a murmur, __ I don__ believe you.

Even now I ask myself, what would have happened if I had gone to the cove with Tansy that Thursday afternoon, instead of going to the beach? If I had stayed away from the boat at the jetty, hidden from sight? If I had thrown the pearl back in the sea at the first opportunity when I had seen the look in Rammell__ eyes? But then I reason that it probably wouldn__ have made any difference. The Fates had spun my destiny, and I was tight roping along the threads that tangled in the sky, regardless of the drop below.

I had never seen the view at this time before, at the very pinnacle of night when sunset was far behind us and dawn had not yet risen rosy-fingered from the horizon. The night was ashen, tones of granite and iron and heather in the ripples of the waves, which were calmer than earlier in the day. It was as if even the ocean was drowsy _ a pale, weighty moon hung full and pregnant in the sky, its reflection floating lambent on the water.

I come to oil country with a book about radicals who wish for the end of pipelines. But that's not what it's about. It's the friction point of prosperity and concern, ability and disability, the loss of bodily presence and the gain of ghost messages. It's misplaced outrage and well-placed courage. It's banjo song and smoke in your eye. Stories hinge there, swinging this way and that.

The dying bees, the Antarctic melt, the mountains of old tires, the incessant toxic belch of factories that make Batman bobbleheads for Happy Meals. Off-gassing couches! Cancerous tinned tomatoes! Imprisoned killer whales! Our breastmilk is poisoned. We live absurdedly, ridiculously. OUR BREASTMILK IS POISONED. Try and explain even one sliver of it to a kid, just one angle of a thousand, and you'll see the face of the world's most incredulous and urgent WTF.We have little to recommend us, and we know it. We shrug.Rasmus Krook is the Captain of the Griffons. He doesn't shrug.

Maybe they want us to feel uneasy. Maybe they think we__l make a mistake if they__e constantly breathing down our necks._ I shivered violently, as if I really could feel the hot, hungry breath of evil intentions panting just behind me.

_There__ forty-two thousand jobs, near ten thousand of __m got by people like us. Everyone__ gotta eat. Industry feeds __m. They figure Little Bear here__ gonna clean it up." He squeezed his baby, a dimpled plump girl with tufts of jet-black hair."Paa paa ba baaa!" she said. It was time for a nap.Lou sipped from his thermos, and Little Bear__ eyes drooped, and Missy remembered the voice of Rasmus Krook. 'The people will pay with their whole being: physically, mentally, ideologically, spiritually, with their land, their soul. And not just country people. Not just native people. Poison will flow through villages, towns, and cities and not stop. We must rise up. We must disrupt the system. Capitalism is a deception.'"You can help pirates," she said, because that__ the only answer she knew. Lou lifted his coffee in salute, and Missy stood up to jump.

I no longer hated the whining, menacing dragonfly we rode in, but admired its grace as we surged towards the clouds, the lights of Edinburgh twinkling below us like the starry constellations of a world upside down.

If he came back in and ventured just a step too close to me, I would do it. I had been tempered in a furnace of Stickings_ making, and I had come out stronger.

Here was the puppeteer who was pulling strings all over the Empire. Didn__ he know that the Fates were the only ones who could tweak the threads of destiny?

Effie Seabright, we__e been fated to meet you for a long time.

Maybe, if I had lied all those years ago, my life could have followed a very different path. But as it is I faithfully follow the long, long thread the Fates have woven for me.

Sometimes it takes a little madness to fulfill great things.