#if a star is one celestial object that can view everything in every direction- a hot cloud of space dust is just trillions of staring eyes

[whatudottu]

Do y'all think object heads have a peculiar vision? Well I certainly do!

If DJSS is actually a supernova then assumption probably brings with it the idea they were a star, and being a star where it sends light in every direction and vision is directly correlated to light, what if that means omnidirectional vision?

[mysticstronomy]

WHAT ARE BINARY BLACK HOLES??

Blog#96

Saturday, June 12th, 2021

Welcome back,

When Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves over one hundred years ago, nobody could foresee what the implications could possibly be – but, as they make the move from predicted theory to proven fact, researchers like Professor Zoltan Haiman, of Columbia University, are devising ways of using them to study binary systems of colliding black holes and the very early universe in completely new ways. As far back as we’ve been able to crane our necks, our civilization has been looking to the stars with a sense of wonder and awe. Our earliest ancestors worshipped the skies with a fierce superstition – and on the darkest of nights in the quiet of the countryside, away from the light pollution that plagues our towns and cities, it’s easy to see why: our heavens hold a beauty that is unparalleled anywhere else in the natural world.

It wasn’t long before our ancestors started applying the rigour of mathematics to the sky – astronomy is, in fact, the oldest of the natural sciences, dating back to prehistoric times. The sun went down and everyone was at it: The Babylonians, the ancient Chinese, the Greek philosophers, the Egyptian Pharaohs – every civilization that was advanced enough to record what they were doing: all standing on the shore of an endless ocean of light, underneath dark skies with bright and starry eyes, meticulously studying the mechanics of celestial bodies far beyond their comprehension; watching with a sense of wonder as points of light danced above them in the night.

Today, our knowledge of the Universe has surpassed the wildest hopes and dreams of those who came before us. We know that some of those points of light are actually giant nuclear fusion reactors called stars, just like our own sun; and some of them are galaxies so far away that our eyes reduce them – a collection of billions of stars – to one single point. We know how stars are born – and how they die – and that if a star is big enough when that time comes, it will collapse in on itself to form a singularity: an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravitational pull. We call these objects black holes. We know that at the center of almost every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole and that galaxies often collide with each other to form even larger galaxies. One thing we’re not entirely clear on, however, is what happens when the black holes from two colliding galaxies meet and form binary systems.

The gravitational waves discovery sweeping through astronomy

For most of our history, astronomers have viewed the stars through the lens of Newtonian physics. Einstein’s theory of relativity changed that: time and space were no longer different entities but two sides of the same coin, interlinked in a system that is almost impossible for us to comprehend (the fact that Einstein did is why he is so famous). It replaces the force of gravity, proposed by Isaac Newton, with a seemingly abstract idea: space and time are a medium in which everything exists. Heavy objects, like planets, warp this medium and change its shape and that’s what we experience as a force pulling us towards the Earth (gravity). Space-time is a difficult idea to grasp but the beauty of Einstein’s theory is that it explains so much of the universe so fully that it is impossible to ignore. That and the mathematics stack up: scientists have been trying – and failing – to prove him wrong for over a hundred years.

An interesting prediction that comes out of Einstein’s theories is the existence of gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of space-time itself. Until recently, a prediction was all that they were but since 2016, scientists have been able to measure them and, as our technology advances, they will be able to further exploit gravitational waves to investigate what happens when two galaxies collide.

We know that black hole binary systems play a fundamental role in shaping the galaxies they belong to – and that their collision would likely be the most energetic phenomena in the known universe – but much like gravitational waves, direct evidence of black hole binary systems has so far been lacking. This is because the black holes are too close to each other to tell apart using our current telescopes. That could be about to change.

LISA

In 2034, the European Space Agency (ESA) plans to launch LISA, a Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which will be able to detect the gravitational waves resulting from the interaction between two colliding black holes. This will provide astronomers with a shiny, new set of tools to probe the farthest reaches of our universe. Until then, researchers like Professor Zoltan Haiman continue to study such binary black hole systems using theoretical calculations and advanced computational simulations.

An astronomical fingerprint for binary black hole systems

In a recent paper, released earlier this year, Professor Haiman predicted what happens when two black holes collide as their host galaxies merge. As the black holes become close to one another, they begin to orbit around a common center of mass – a point somewhere in space analogous to the pivot-point on a seesaw, around which the masses at either end rotate. They move slowly at first and, if the energy contained within their orbit was to remain the same, the system could continue like this forever, with the black holes caught in a never-ending dance. But energy is sucked from the orbit in the form of gravitational waves. They cause the orbit to shrink in size, and the black holes to spiral inward, colliding to form a single black hole.

SOURCE: https://researchoutreach.org

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, June 16th, 2021)

“WHAT IS QUANTUM PHYSICS??”

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 424

THE SUN

SURELY EVERY PERSON AT SOME TIME LOOKS UP AT THE SUN AND MOON AND THE BRILLIANT STARS AND ASKS, WHO POSITIONED ALL THESE SO PERFECTLY ON THE FACE OF THE SKY’?

People have always marvelled at the stars and planets. But they have not always realized that there is a harmony in their positions and movements, a law and order, as indeed in the whole universe. For example, seen from the perspective of the ancient Greek astronomers, celestial bodies in the universe are aimless objects. That seems to be the implication of the term ‘planet’ which means ‘wandering’. The Greeks may have thought the ‘wandering stars’ or ‘planets’ moved in unstable orbits, more or less randomly.

The ancient astronomers’ judgement was not founded upon the Oneness of the Creator Who orders everything in the universe. Inevitably they did not have a clear grasp of the orderliness of the macro-cosmos and did not seek it.

The Qur’an revealed many centuries ago that it is Allah who created the heavenly bodies and put them into their peculiar orbits. There is nothing in the Islamic teachings that argues the view that phenomena or events are random.

Do they not look at the sky above them, how We have built it and adorned , and there are no flaws in it. (50.6)

We have built above you seven strong (heavens) and placed therein a blazing lamp. (78.12)

The ‘blazing lamp’ referred to is the sun.

People have always been fascinated by the thousands of gleaming lights sprinkled across the night sky. Today many enjoy looking into the heavens and learning about the patterns and positions of the stars, and discovering what stars can tell us about our universe as a whole. From our planet, if very high buildings and city lights permit, we can see about 6,000 stars with the naked eye. They change in colour, size, and brilliance.

We are near enough to one particular star, the sun, to find out many details about what these celestial bodies are made of and how they function. A star is composed of gases and other substances compressed together under the force of gravity. The pressure at the core of a forming star is sufficiently intense to initiate nuclear reactions that begin generating energy. During this process, matter is converted into energy, releasing large quantities of heat and light.

The sun may not catch up the moon, nor may the night outstrip the day. Each one is moving smoothly in its own orbit ( 36.40). Here an essential fact is clearly stated, namely the existence of the solar and lunar orbits. At the time of the Revelation, it was generally believed that the sun orbited a motionless earth. This, the geocentric system, had held sway from the early second century (the time of Ptolemy). It continued to do so until the sixteenth century. Fourteen centuries ago, the Qur’an directed the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and, through them, all of mankind, towards the truth. The demonstration of the existence and details of the solar and lunar orbits is one of the recent achievements of modern astronomy.

Those who do not believe in One Creator maintain that everything comes about by chance. They do not realize that every creature in motion, from minute particles to the planets, displays on itself the stamp of the Eternal and of His Unity. Also, by reason of its movement, each of them, in some sense, takes possession of all the places in which it travels in the name of Unity, thus including them in the property of its Owner. As for those creatures not in motion, each of them, from plants to the fixed stars, is like a seal of Unity that shows the place in which it is situated to be the letter of its Maker. That is to say, each flower and fruit is a stamp and seal of unity that demonstrates, in the name of Unity, that its habitat and native place is the letter of its Maker. What all that inter-connectednes means is that one who does not have all the stars within his command does not have command over a single small particle either.

There are two other verses in the Qur’an about the sun and the moon and their usefulness to human beings, not only as light, but also as points of reference for space and time:

Allah subjected the night and the day for you, the sun and the moon. The stars are in subjection to His Command. Verily in this are signs for people who are wise. (16.12)

Allah is the One Who made the sun a lamp and the moon a light and ordained for it mansions, so that you might know the number of years and the reckoning (of the time).

Allah created this in truth. He explains the signs in detail for people who know (10.5)

The solar system comprises the sun and the nine planets that orbit it. The closest to the sun is the planet Mercury, at an average distance of 58 million km; the farthest, Pluto, is 5,900 million km from the sun. The closer a planet is to the sun, the shorter the time taken to complete its orbit. Thus, Mercury takes only 88 earth days to go round it, while Pluto orbits the sun only once in 248 earth years. Absolute time and distance are nowadays both measured in terms of light speed–a metre, for example, can be defined as the distance the light travels in a certain ‘space’ of time, in fact, 0.000000003335640952 seconds.

It is hard to think of the sun as a passing event. Nevertheless, its ‘term’ is fixed–the Qur’an is explicit on this point: And the sun runs its course for a period fixed for it (36.38). So, how long has the sun left to run? Astronomers nowadays calculate about 4.5 billion more years in its present state. It will still have nearly the same surface temperature (6.000 °C) and yellowish colour that it has now but it will appear about twice as bright because it will be about 60 percent bigger. Its next 4.5 billion years will have begun to take their toll on the sun’s nuclear fuel supply. What then? We don’t really know. Any calculations we make can only be made on the basis of theory.

The sun is full of gases composed of two thousand trillion tons (2x103 kg) of matter,

with the remains of other elements. For every million atoms of hydrogen there are about 85,000 helium atoms and only about 1,000 of any other kind. Pressure from all that mass compressing into the centre of the sun is high enough for the hydrogen atoms to fuse in the core to form helium. This simultaneously creates new energy which keeps the sun from collapsing further and provides the energy that allows it to (or makes it) shine. A series of nuclear fusion reactions, whose end result is the conversion of hydrogen to helium, happen on a vast scale and release very great amounts of energy in the form of heat, light, X-rays and so on. A part of this reaction must be the release of so-called neutrinos. Neutrinos are particles that interact so little with other matter that they can probably float through entire galaxies without being affected. They exist but have no mass nor any other physical property, which is like saying that they simultaneously exist and do not exist: we know they must be around by the way the movement of other (‘real’) particles is affected. If the theory about the way that the sun shines is correct, the sun should be producing about 180x1036 neutrinos each second. Obviously, only a small portion of these neutrinos will come in the earth’s direction.

The sun generates magnetic fields deep in its interior. Through mechanisms not yet fully understood, some of these fields erupt periodically through the sun’s surface, the photosphere. The high temperature and structure of the corona are produced by energy pumped from the photosphere up into the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere along these magnetic fields.

The sun has been fusing hydrogen into helium throughout its present lifetime of 4.5 billion years, using up less than half of the available hydrogen in its core. By another 4.5 billion years, 90 percent of the available hydrogen in the core will have been converted into helium. Serious questions about the fusion rate in the sun still remain, but according to one theory, the humans of the future will face a sun that is running out of core hydrogen.

When that happens, the gas temperature and pressure will drop and the interior of the sun will collapse under the weight of the surrounding mass. The pressure in the collapsing gas will build up sufficiently for a rind of hydrogen to start burning around the core, now helium. This fusion will provide an outward force on the outermost layers of the sun, pushing them farther out than they are now. The surface of the sun will expand outward until it reaches the orbit of Venus.

Finally, this hydrogen outside the core will run out. The core of the sun will continue to contract, trying to replace the heat no longer generated by hydrogen burning. When the internal temperatures reach 100 million Kelvins, the helium (generated by the hydrogen burning) will itself start to burn. This will happen quickly, forming a carbon-rich core. Around this burned-out core, helium burning will start, and then the rind of hydrogen also will start to burn. The vast energy released by both rinds will push the sun’s outer layers further out until they reach the orbit of Jupiter. Earth will then be ‘inside’ the sun. The temperature on the surface of earth, around 6.5 billion years from now, will be around 30,000 Kelvins, and everything organic will be burned to a crisp.

Intelligent beings on earth 5 or 6 billion years from now, if any, would face the pressure to leave earth and, indeed, the solar system. They would need to have colonized planets around younger (therefore more stable) stars in order to survive. It is likely that humans in the near future will move off the earth in search of mineralogical and economic gain, whereas the future beings of our speculation will move off in order to save the species. The ageing sun will give future life a focus and a goal. And then, if we may be permitted to use the expression, a sort of Doomsday will have happened: certainly, the sun will have run to the end of its appointed (muslaqarr) time.

[lady-divine-writes]

Trust (Rated NC17)

Summary: After close to a decade of not seeing one another, a box shows up at Aziraphale's bookshop, its contents a reminder of emotional wounds ...

... and a cry for help. (4931 words)

Notes: So yeah, apparently I lied when I said I was finished writing au's based off of @whiteleyfoster's 'Prince of Omens'. This idea hit me quite out of the blue, that by creating the Prince of Omens au, it sort of altered the timeline of the original story, which then led me to imagine filling in the gaps of history with stories starring this version of the characters. This takes place, I would say, sometime between the Blitz and the 60s, which may have fed into some of the decisions taken place by the characters between that time. Plus, I thought it was a very romantic, touching, and hot moment for the two of them, being sniffed out by Hell. Anyway, let me know what you all think <3

Read on AO3.

Please say you trust me.

Those are the only words written on the gold card tucked inside the box that shows up at Aziraphale’s bookshop on Thursday afternoon, packed alongside a few other choice items: a white blindfold, a pair of golden handcuffs, and a hotel room key. There’s no return address on the box, no name on the card, only the initials AJC.

But Aziraphale didn’t need those.

He knew.

Before he opened the box and saw its contents, he knew who’d sent it.

He could sense Crowley’s magical signature all over it.

Aziraphale examines the contents for a long while, his heart pounding in his chest. They’re not a random collection of offerings. Aside from how Crowley means them, each one is symbolic.

The white blindfold harks back to the ribbon that has become so sacred to Crowley - the one Aziraphale tied around the plant he gave the demon back in Egypt.

The meaning behind the cuffs comes from around that same time.

Standing on the banks of the Red Sea, watching Moses tend to his flock of the faithful as they readied themselves for the journey on, Crowley had gazed across the water in the direction they’d come, the bitterest, sweetest expression of sorrow on his handsome face.

“What is it, my dear?” Aziraphale had asked. “Why do you seem so melancholy? All’s well that ends well, don’t you think?”

“How is it,” he’d said, staring at the water, unable to look Aziraphale in the eye, “that I can continue to be such a tremendous failure?”

“How can you say that!? None of these people would have been able to escape Pharaoh if not for you! You’re a hero!”

“But just as many lost their lives because of me! Because I was too arrogant to be specific with my instructions! But that’s just who I am … what I do …”

“No, my dear …” Aziraphale put a hand on his arm “… that’s not true at all. Stop saying that … please …”

Crowley turned to Aziraphale but with eyes shut, unable to take his kindness, accept his sympathy.

“It’s humbling. They showered me with riches, built me a temple. I’d planted myself as a God among them so I could stir up a little mischief, but they tempted me. And like an idiot, I fell for it.” Crowley shook his head. “To be brought to my knees, have that torn away … it makes me realize what I really am. What I’ve been all along.”

“Lesson learned then,” Aziraphale said. Crowley’s eyes snapped open, heartbreak dulling their shimmering gold depths. “Because you are what you should be. And that’s free.”

Crowley’s brow furrowed. “W-what do you mean?”

“The temple, those clothes, the gold - they had strings attached. They kept you beholden to Pharaoh. Turned you into a slave.” Aziraphale shifted Crowley’s gaze away from the water and aimed it towards the land, to the people gathered there. “By doing what you did, helping these people, enduring, suffering … you’re not a slave anymore. Not to Pharaoh. You’re free.”

Aziraphale recalls those words, the smile they’d brought to Crowley’s face, the embrace that followed, the dozen kisses and more … and he frowns.

Because where it’s true that Crowley freed himself from Egypt, he’s still a servant.

As is Aziraphale.

They’re both in the same boat - conscripted to a higher power that commands their moves, often using them as pawns.

Or worse.

As toys.

And they play with them the way spoiled children do.

Roughly.

If they break, Heaven and Hell will consign them to the bottom of the toy box and find new angels and demons to replace them.

Aziraphale has a sinking suspicion that’s part of what’s going on now - Hell commanding its servant, holding his feet to the fire. But to do what, Aziraphale hasn’t a clue.

The words written on the card are a linchpin.

Please say you trust me.

Aziraphale had said something similar to Crowley when they’d made love in his temple and he’d used his precious white ribbon on him as a blindfold.

Crowley repeated the sentiment back to him when God sent Death to reap the first born. Death would have reaped Crowley, too, if not for Aziraphale. Crowley promised he would try to save the innocent but that Aziraphale needed to have faith in him.

Aziraphale said - “Always, my dear.”

Faith.

Trust.

Aziraphale and Crowley had known one another for 2500 years by the time they met up in Egypt, but it was during that time that Aziraphale truly learned to trust Crowley. Crowley had been gifted Aziraphale’s trust during the years they spent watching over Moses. He lost it, but earned it back in spades. Since then, he’s run to Aziraphale’s rescue time and time again, saving him from beheadings, bombings …

… re-assignment.

And despite this cloak-and-dagger, Aziraphale trusts Crowley now.  

Aziraphale didn’t know Crowley was in town. They hadn’t seen one another in close to a decade. Aziraphale knew Crowley would turn up one of these days, but not like this.

He holds out hope the objects in the box are for pleasure, but he’s sure they’re for business. Trust or no, that makes him nervous. He doesn’t like not knowing what’s in store for him. The real torture will be in waiting, guessing.

But, luckily, not too long.

Aziraphale finds out the following night.

He had no idea when Crowley would call for him. He’d hoped Crowley would come for him himself - show up on his doorstep in a smart black suit, all seductive secrets and sly smiles.

A car comes for him instead, driven by a human chauffeur.

A block away from the hotel, he senses them.

Demons.

Lots of them.

Lurking around corners, hiding in the shadows, ducking out of sight.

Watching him arrive.

Even on this main thoroughfare bustling with people, there are more demons around than he’s ever felt in a single place.

His body goes cold.

“Long night?” Aziraphale asks the driver, making small talk to keep his mind off of whatever’s waiting for him ahead. It feels like a trap, every molecule of his celestial form screaming at him to get out of the car and run, that he’s been betrayed. But he can’t think like that. Crowley wouldn’t put him in harm’s way.

He has to believe heart and soul he wouldn’t.

Especially not after that note.

Please say you trust me.

“You could say that.”

“Where are you headed after this, my dear?”

“I’ve been hired on for the night by the blokes who hired me to get you,” the man says, peeking at Aziraphale through the rear view. “Good thing, too. Heaven knows I need the money.”

“Hard times, hmm?”

“It’s my daughter Liza,” the man says with a lump in his throat. “She’s come down sick. The doctors here don’t know what to do for her. We’re hoping to take her to the states. We’ve heard there are doctors there that can help her.”

“I see.” Aziraphale scans the streets around them. Something doesn’t feel right (on top of everything else that already doesn’t feel right). Evil clings to this man, though, in his heart, he is good.

It’s not him, Aziraphale discovers as he reaches out with his angelic senses. It’s the company he keeps. He’s been hired by demons. Not Crowley but others. They’ve promised him a great deal of money to be their errand boy - escort prostitutes around the city and deliver some dangerous packages to some powerful people.

But they have no intention of paying him.

Because he will not survive the night.

He’s disposable. A nobody in the grand scheme. That’s why they hired him. That’s what the demons are counting on - cruel since demons can masquerade as humans and do their own dirty work.

But it’s loads more fun to trick some unsuspecting mortal to do it for them.

In the end, after he’s taken part in some shady deals (unbeknownst to him) they’ll have his soul for Hell. It’s a demonic loophole. (They have enough lawyers to ensure them it’s sound.) And even though Aziraphale wants to maintain a low profile, he can’t let this happen.

The chauffeur pulls up to the curb in front of The Savoy and puts his car into park.

“Here we are,” he says, looking over his shoulder at Aziraphale. “Do you need help up to your room or …?”

“Not at all, young man.” Aziraphale reaches into his pocket and pulls out a rolled-up wad of notes bound together by a rubber band. The driver waits patiently for Aziraphale to count out his tip. His eyes blow wide when Aziraphale hands him the entire thing.

“I … are you serious, sir?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says with a smile. “For a job well done. Best ride I’ve had in ages.”

“I … I can’t accept this!” the man says, an expression of pain passing over his face as a voice in his head - probably his wife’s - screams, ‘Yes, you can, you idiot! Don’t argue!’ “I only drove you twelve city blocks!”

“You can accept it, and you will.” Aziraphale snaps his fingers, using a little angelic magic to cease any more arguing. “And now you’re going to drive straight home, pack your family up, and head to the airport. Get on board TWA flight 530 to Los Angeles, and get your daughter well.”

A second snap of his fingers sees to that. Liza will greet her father at the door to their humble flat completely cancer free. But Aziraphale needs to get him and his family out of town. He knows what will happen when the demons discover this man has skipped out on his duties.

Needless to say, they won’t be happy.

“Thank you, sir! I … I don’t know how I could ever re-pay you!”

“I do. Forget you ever saw me. And forget the men who hired you.” Aziraphale snaps one last time, gets out of the car, and heads for the front door. He pauses when he hears the car pull away from the curb, watching it drive off into the night. If a demon ever does manage to catch up with him, they should be able to tell that his mind has been wiped by an angel. That and the fact that he’s blessed should keep them off his back.

Aziraphale shows his key to the doorman, who directs him to the room he needs. He declines any more offers of help and continues on alone.

For a Friday night, it’s pretty mellow at The Savoy. Most everyone is out on the town, living it up. Which means no one notices the middle-aged man in the cream-colored coat slip down the hallway and take the elevator to the top floor.

No one will notice if he disappears.

He starts out with shoulders squared and head held high, carrying the box Crowley sent him tucked under one arm. But as he walks down the quiet hall, the demonic smell growing stronger and more pungent with every step, the box creeps out from underneath his arm to his chest where he hugs it close.

He stops in front of the door and fits the key in the lock, his hands shaking as he does. He breathes out slowly, counts to three. He hasn’t even unlocked the door but he feels him on the other side.

Crowley.

In this room.

Waiting for him.

Crowley summoned him here and now Aziraphale is about to turn himself over to him.

Him and about a dozen other demons.

His heart double-thumps with excitement.

His head swims with fear.

He unlocks the door, pushes it open.

It opens unto darkness.

“Hello?” he calls inside, reluctant to take a step in but he knows he must.

Please say you trust me.

Those words ring in his ears. They aren’t simple words, not easy. They have weight to them, a history.

They’re a plea.

It’s not until he closes the door behind him that he notices Crowley’s silhouette standing beside the foot of a large bed over by the window.

The door locks behind him without him touching it.

It’s more than a bit unsettling.

Aziraphale walks over to the bed and sets the box down .

“Crowley?” he says, waiting for the demon to acknowledge his arrival in any way. Aziraphale wants to rush into his arms, kiss him on the mouth, whisper words of love against his skin.

But a voice in his mind tells him this isn’t the time for that.

It’s ridiculous. He knows he’s in very real danger of being discorporated but he can’t help noticing … Crowley looks stunning. He’s been growing his hair out. It’s not long yet, but it’s not short either. It’s just long enough for Aziraphale to run his fingers through, wind the strands around and pull him close. He’s dressed for bed - barefoot, black pajama pants, and shirtless, the planes of his chest and his flat stomach on enticing display. Even his scar - that horrible scar from Aziraphale’s flaming sword - looks delicious in this low light.

Positively kissable.

And he’s not wearing his glasses. Not hiding his eyes.

Though he’s never had to hide his eyes from Aziraphale.

Crowley doesn’t look at Aziraphale as the angel inches closer, eyes searching his face for an explanation. Aziraphale gets within touching distance, but Crowley takes a step away.

“Take off your clothes,” he commands.

“Wh-what?”

“What’s wrong, principality? Did I stutter?”

“No,” Aziraphale says, fighting to maintain a composure that’s a feather’s touch away from shattering like a plate glass window, “you didn’t. But I …”

“Then be a good little angel and obey. Maybe you haven’t noticed but you’re not the one in control. You have no power here.”

Snickers travel around the room and from the strangest of locations: in a closet, under the bed, on the ceiling. Aziraphale doesn’t look up to check. If there is a demon hanging from the chandelier above him, he’d rather not see it with his own eyes.

Stunned into silence like Crowley slapped him in the face, Aziraphale slips off his coat and lays it on the bed, then reaches for his shirt. With every button he undoes, his mind reels, searching for a solution. From the smell of this place, there are demons everywhere - in the room, in the hallway, on the street outside. So running is not an option. He could miracle his way out, but that would cause a paper trail he’d have to explain to Gabriel, which would lead to three possible outcomes: one - Gabriel reprimands Aziraphale for the use of a frivolous miracle (because, apparently, saving himself is considered frivolous); two - this incident starts a battle with Hell, which may not end well for Earth as a whole; or three - Gabriel presses Hell for answers and Hell offers up Crowley as a sacrifice.

Aziraphale can’t risk hurting Crowley any more than he could risk hurting Earth. Plus, that would leave Crowley at the mercy of Hell since his mission would have failed.

Aziraphale has no choice but to play along and hope that an explanation comes to light.

He’ll keep you safe. He won’t hurt you. He’ll explain this to you. Trust him.

“Everything,” Crowley says when Aziraphale stops at his pants, his voice undeniably softer when he says, “I want to see everything.”

That softness, more than anything, encourages Aziraphale on.

When Aziraphale has completely undressed, Crowley approaches. His eyes - a serpent’s eyes from rim to rim where they’d normally appear a bit more human - are uncharacteristically unforgiving, but Aziraphale doesn’t miss the subtle once over Crowley gives him, how it causes him to miss a step.

Crowley reaches out a hand. Aziraphale thinks he’s reaching for him, his body starving for his touch. For a second, Crowley seems to consider it. But he grabs the box instead. He opens it, exposing its contents. He reaches inside and pulls out the golden handcuffs. He grabs Aziraphale’s wrists, locking them in front of him.

“C-Crowley? What’s going on?” Aziraphale asks, starting to get nervous, the other demons in the room an ominous presence even though he doesn’t see them. “You’re going a bit fast for me.”

Crowley leads Aziraphale to the bed, maneuvers him like a dog on a leash by the chain of those handcuffs, has him climb up on it and kneel on the mattress. Then he takes Aziraphale by the chin and stares deep into his eyes. “Pay attention, principality, because I won’t tell you again.” Crowley starts to speak, posturing on about how Aziraphale is his prisoner, how he’s there to serve him, please him, bend to his whims. Aziraphale hears him, his words playing in the corner of his mind like a scratchy record on an ancient gramophone, warped and skipping, out of tune.

But what he hears louder than that are the words Crowley projects to the forefront of his brain.

Words that tremble, steeped in fear.

‘I need your help, angel. Please? Do what I say? They’re watching.’

Aziraphale sees Crowley gulp, feels his own throat ache with the bob of his Adam’s apple.

Crowley’s power is fueled by his imagination. That’s one of the things that makes him unique among demons. Aziraphale and Crowley had discovered long ago that he can make Aziraphale hear whatever he wants him to hear, even over long distances.

He’s using that power now to communicate with him.

‘I know you feel them. I can’t explain but I promise, I won’t let them hurt you. I swear it.’

Crowley takes the blindfold out of the box and starts tying it over Aziraphale’s eyes.

‘I … I don’t understand, Crowley,’ Aziraphale thinks, knowing Crowley will hear.

‘I’ll explain later but please … please say you trust me.’

Aziraphale nods. ‘Always, my dear.’

‘And no matter what I say … know that I love you.’

‘I do.’

Crowley knots the blindfold twice - once to secure it, a second time to stall, giving him a moment to gather the courage he needs to say what’s coming next.

‘I need to compel your wings. They want to see them. They want to see me … force you to reveal them.’

Aziraphale shudders, memories of having his wings ripped into existence by other demons flooding his thoughts.

Crowley sees. His hands ball into fists.

Having one’s wings compelled can be an uncomfortable, even painful business.

It’s also the ultimate humiliation.

But for Crowley, Aziraphale would do practically anything.

‘Of course. Just … be careful.’

‘I will,” Crowley promises, his voice thick with curses and a deep hatred of himself that Aziraphale can’t help but feel. He wishes he could put a comforting hand on his shoulder and give him strength.

With any luck, there will be time for that later.

Aziraphale breathes in deep, trying to relax when he sees Crowley raise a hand. Aziraphale closes his eyes, surrenders control of his wings to Crowley, telling himself it will be okay.

He’s with Crowley. His Crowley. The Crowley he’s known and loved for thousands of years. They’ll get past this hurdle, attack the next.

They’ll get through this together.

The pinch in his shoulder blades feels all too familiar and almost sends him into a panic. He recedes deeper into himself, reminds himself of better times he’s had with Crowley in bed. The room goes silent, the demons observing on the edge of their seats, captivated by the events unfolding in front of them. In the midst of that silence, Aziraphale can hear his own heartbeat.

Immediately following, he hears Crowley’s.

Then their breathing mixed together, the mingling of it bringing a wash of calm to Aziraphale’s mind. A blue glow builds beneath his skin, filling the room, casting eerie shadows of the hiding demons across the floor.

Then his wings begin to appear.

With his eyes closed behind the blindfold, Aziraphale doesn’t see the glow, can’t notice the demons. He feels the heat of Crowley’s power sink into his skin, spiral through his body, coaxing his wings out of hiding with the caress of hands born of fire.

Aziraphale gasps when his wings break free and unfurl, a completion in its own right.

An intensely intimate, highly erotic experience.

Aziraphale stretches his wings when Crowley relinquishes control of them. It is part of the dress code for angels on Earth to keep them hidden, but he feels comforted by them. They soothe him, give him a sense of security.

‘Aziraphale …’

Crowley’s voice pierces its way through Aziraphale’s calm. It’s both welcome and a harsh reminder that this isn’t the end of their ordeal. There’s more to come.

‘Yes?’

‘I need to … umm …’

‘Just tell me, my dear. I’ll do whatever it takes to get us out of this.’

Crowley hems and haws, but he can’t find the strength to say. ‘They’ll want it to look like I’m forcing you.’

‘Do what you must.’

Aziraphale could very well choose to see through the blindfold but he decides not to. He stays in the moment with Crowley, let’s the suspense of his next move well up within him, give the demons in the dark the smell of his anticipation to feast on while they mistake it for fear.

He hears a rustle of fabric, feels Crowley’s hand on his head, a whimper rising from the demon’s throat.

He doesn’t want to do this. Aziraphale knows he doesn’t want to do this.

Crowley pushes down, dragging Aziraphale’s head to his crotch. Aziraphale pretends to struggle. But when he feels the head of Crowley’s cock nudge his lips, he forgets to protest, forgets that they’re in anything even close to danger.

Because he loves Crowley. Crowley loves him.

And it’s been too long since they’ve had one another.

Aziraphale opens his mouth and slowly, ever so slowly, slides down over him, licking along the way, the way he knows Crowley likes, doing his part to remind him that they’re in this together, that he’s with him whatever it takes.

Crowley threads trembling fingers through Aziraphale’s hair, bites his tongue to keep from moaning Aziraphale’s name. He thrusts up with his hips, pushes down lightly, his body begging with every twitch for Aziraphale to go faster.

For him to get this over with, put him out of his misery.

Because Crowley has dreamt of this - just this - since the last time they saw one another.

It’s cruel that he should get it now in front of prying eyes.

He rises to his knees, putting his hands on Aziraphale’s head and taking over, assaulting his mouth shallowly, trying to make it appear to the eyes around him that he’s fucking his mouth, violating him, hurting him. He doesn’t do this to his angel. He’s never done this to him. He wouldn’t.

But it’d be too easy.

It feels too good.

Not just the physical sensation of Aziraphale’s mouth around him, but the pushing him.

The forcing him.

The demon inside him rises up with each thrust, whispers in his ears to snap his hips harder, push in farther, hold Aziraphale’s head flush against him till tears leak from his eyes with the strain of his corporal form holding its breath.

But he can’t do that, he repeats to himself. He won’t do that. He won’t give in.

He won’t become like the owners of those coal black eyes watching them.

“Stop,” Crowley mumbles, mostly to himself, slipping out of Aziraphale’s mouth, regretting it the moment the cool air touches his skin. “That’s not how I want to finish. Hands and knees. Now, angel!”

‘Tell me to stop,’ he projects, ‘then beg me not to. Really sell it.’

“You … you can’t do this!” Aziraphale scrambles to obey, rolling onto his hands and knees. And even though this is fake, his nerves scatter, wondering about the origin of the edge in Crowley’s voice.

The fiery yellow simmer in his eyes, the one he’d glimpsed before the blindfold.

“Please, Crowley! I … I’m begging you! Don’t …”

“Sorry, angel. I want this too much. I need this too much.”

Crowley doesn’t give Aziraphale time to get comfortable. He grabs him, shoves his face to the sheets, spreads his cheeks apart, lines his cock with the angel’s entrance, and pushes in. Pushes hard.

It doesn’t hurt, but Aziraphale cries out.

Crowley curls black painted nails into the soft skin of Aziraphale’s hips, leaving bruises that rival the scars on his back. But even through this facade of violence, Aziraphale feels Crowley’s love. He still tries to make this good for Aziraphale. Crowley leans forward, presses the odd kiss against his skin, plays with speed and angles, searching out new spots that will make Aziraphale’s eyes roll, his back arch and his toes curl, make him moan louder despite himself. The thought that others are watching should make Aziraphale burn with embarrassment but he doesn’t care.

It’s been so long.

And he’s missed Crowley so much.

“No …” Aziraphale whispers, the fight fading from his voice. “Don’t … stop … d-don’t stop …”

“I claim you, angel,” Crowley growls. “Soon you’ll feel my fire inside of you. From this day forward, you can never escape me. I’ll be able to find you from here to the ends of the Earth. You’re mine. You belong to me.”

“Oh …” Aziraphale squeaks. Crowley’s words sound rehearsed but they feel real.

Like a vow.

“Yes,” Aziraphale moans beyond improvisation. “Yes, I … I belong to you. Claim me, demon …” he continues, his voice dissolving into gasps. “Claim me … I’m yours …”

Crowley shudders at those words.

‘Oh, Aziraphale.’

‘Crowley …’

‘I love you …’

‘I love you, too.’

“Oh,” Aziraphale sighs. “Oh Go---”

Crowley grabs a handful of Aziraphale’s hair, pulls his head back and crashes their mouths together before he can finish. “She’s not here right now,” he says, his voice heavy with anger and regret. “Your words belong to me, angel. Your moans, your whimpers, they’re mine. Say it!”

“They’re … they’re yours. All yours. I …”

Crowley cuts him off with a kiss, his body shaking as he comes inside his angel. Aziraphale follows, his knees giving out, sliding out from under him. He lands on his belly with Crowley on top of him.

His favorite position to be in, all things considered.

Through his orgasmic haze and the utter joy of coming in Crowley’s arms, he hears a mass of uncomfortable whispering, some sinister laughter, and one derisive snort.

Aziraphale feels the demons retreat, slide into the shadows, evaporating into the black.

“They’re … they’re satisfied,” Crowley pants, the relief in his voice seeping through Aziraphale’s skin and winding around his heart. “They’re going back to Hell. Hastur isn’t happy about it but they … they won’t hurt us.”

Hastur.

Aziraphale’s breath hitches.

Hastur was there.

A Duke of Hell.

Aziraphale had convinced himself that the demons in the room were minions. Underlings. He had no reason to believe that, really. No proof. It’s simply something he assumed.

But Hastur?

Who else had been there? Who else had watched?

Beelzebub maybe?

Will they report to Satan?

To the Archangels!?

Aziraphale knows that some of the higher demons do.

Will Michael find out? Uriel?

Will Gabriel?

Too soon, the warm glow of satiation, of being wrapped in Crowley’s arms again, his cock buried inside his body, siphons into the chill around them.

“I … I don’t want to stay here,” Aziraphale says, starting to shiver.

“Neither do I.” Crowley unfurls his own wings. He curls them around Aziraphale, wrapping them both up tight. Then, with a snap of his fingers, angel and demon disappear.

***

“It was a test,” Crowley explains, lying side by side with his angel in a different bed, a different room, grooming Aziraphale’s wings with careful fingers. “I wasn’t performing up to par for Hastur. I failed my performance review.” He chuckles. “First time in history. So I had to come up with something big. Something that would get them off my back for a few centuries.” From behind, arms wrapped around him, his chest pressed to Aziraphale’s back, Aziraphale feels Crowley swallow hard. “Hastur was adamant it was your fault. My associations with you, no matter how few and far between, were making me soft. They were planning on coming after you to get to me. I had to do something to get us both off their radar. Corrupting an angel …” Another hard swallow “… was the worst thing I could think of.”

Aziraphale smirks. “Little do they know I corrupted you a long time ago, my dear.”

“It was selfish, a-and it was wrong,” Crowley stumbles. “And I’m …”

Aziraphale tilts his head back, kisses Crowley gently on the lips. “I didn’t despise it, my love. I quite like role-playing with you. Maybe, someday, we could do it again. When it’s just you and me.”

“I didn’t want to turn you into a spectacle,” Crowley says, refusing to let Aziraphale absolve him so easily. “That wasn’t my intention. I didn’t want to humiliate you. I just … I didn’t know what else to do. I …”

Aziraphale kisses Crowley again when he feels tears roll down his cheeks that aren’t his own.

“You kept me safe,” Aziraphale whispers. “The way you promised. And I’m not going to lose you. We won’t lose each other. It was worth it.”

[schraubd]

The Good Place: Final Thoughts

*MAJOR SPOILERS*

At the conclusion of season three, I registered my prediction of how The Good Place would end:

The abolition of the afterlife in its entirety (no more good or bad places); a re-emphasis on doing as best you can when it matters (i.e., during one's actual life); the core quartet is sent back to Earth to live out the rest of their natural lives as friends.

I would say that, like most religions, I got about 5% right. The afterlife, as we knew it, is abolished. And the series does end with all of the human characters passing on. But in between, The Good Place takes a much more audacious swing: a genuine attempt to reform the afterlife. And -- and I think this is perhaps even more profound -- an essential acknowledgment that this attempt fell short. A perfect paradise was not created, and in fact the final conclusion of The Good Place seems to be that such a paradise is impossible even in concept. After all, cut away the underbrush and the heroes' solution to the problem afflicting The Good Place was to offer the choice of suicide. And while the penultimate episode suggests that perhaps just having the option will suffice to stave off the ennui of eternal bliss, the finale refuses to accept that out. Every human character, eventually, kills themselves. Their happy ending is that they are content to die. The best possible paradise is one where people can and do eventually choose to erase themselves from existence. Skip over the beatific forest setting and the stipulation of emotional contentment, and that's a rather melancholic, if not outright grim, conclusion. It's easy to draw a parallel between the last episode and the need for fans to accept the voluntarily-chosen end of a great show like The Good Place (it's even easier to draw it to the need to accept our own mortality). But another recurrent theme in The Good Place is the failure of systems. Over and over again, the systems the characters find themselves in are revealed to be either malfunctioning or outright designed to immiserate them. From the very beginning, Eleanor and Chidi confront the brutal harshness of the points system, which results in nearly all people being horrifically tortured for eternity (incidentally, that Chidi isn't immediately repelled by -- and suspicious of -- this set-up is a rare miscue in terms of characterization, if not plotting). They resolve to try and improve Eleanor, only to find out that they're actually in a perpetual torture chamber which will literally reset every time they come close to escaping it. At this point, the series becomes a repeated effort to find ever-higher levers in the celestial bureaucracy that can be appealed to. They find a judge, who is at best indifferent to their predicament and not particularly interested in helping them. Upon returning to earth, they discover first that they can't ever improve enough to enter The Good Place (because -- knowing the stakes -- their motivations are corrupt) and then that nobody can successfully enter The Good Place because existence has become too interwoven and morally interdependent for anyone to satisfy the standard of admission. They meet the actual Good Place committee, who are worse than useless and content to let everyone suffer forever because taking any concrete action risks violating some procedural norm. And when they finally enter The Good Place, they discover it's as dysfunctional as everywhere else -- gradually sucking the life out of its residents who, given eternity, eventually tire of everything. All the systems fail. All of them are doomed to fail. They can't not. Hence, the suicide gate (and sidenote: If The Good Place ever has a spin-off series -- and lord knows it shouldn't -- it should definitely involve exploring the first murder in the Good Place when someone gets involuntarily shoved through that archway). By the time it reaches its conclusion, The Good Place is one of the few depictions of the afterlife to take the concept of eternity seriously. Some other venues glance in this direction. Agent Smith in The Matrix tells Neo that humans reject a simulation of paradise -- the implication is because we're diseased, but perhaps also indicating that perfect, eternal happiness ... isn't. Maya Rudolph's other afterlife vehicle, Forever, certainly touches on this theme. The Order of the Stick has an afterlife where people can eat all the food and have all the sex and otherwise satisfy all the "messed-up urges you people have leftover after having your soul stuck in a glorified sausage all your life". But this is only the "first tier" of heaven: once you're bored, you can "climb the mountain" to search for a higher level of spiritual satisfaction. And while what this entails is left vague, it is not death -- those who ascend can, if they wish, descend back down to the lowlier pleasures (OOTS also introduces the very neat concept of "Postmortum Time Disassociation Disorder"). But the story which provides perhaps the most powerful foil to The Good Place's view of eternity and immortality is (and of the approximately 143,000 Good Place retrospectives being written right now, I bet I'm the only one to make this comparison) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The ultimate adversary in HPMOR is not Snape, or Malfoy, or Voldemort. It is death, and Harry is committed to the "absolute rejection of death as the natural order." The message on the Potters' gravestone is, after all, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (and it's a sign of my cloistered Jewish upbringing that I thought this was a Rowling original -- it is in fact a quote from I Corinthians). Harry Potter wants people to live forever. And the story anticipates the objection, placed in the mouth of Dumbledore, "What would you do with eternity, Harry?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."

The last few episodes of The Good Place are, in a sense, a calling of this bluff. Even if you play out the string all the way to extinguishment of the sun or the heat death of the universe -- well, forever is a long time. It can wait. Harry argues that the only reason we accept death is because we're used to it, and if you took someone who lived in a world where there was no death and asked them if they'd prefer to live in a universe where eventually people ceased to exist, they'd look at you like you're crazy. The Good Place provocatively argues the precise opposite -- that if death didn't exist, people would have to invent it. Or they would go crazy, with infinite time on their hands. And so we are, perhaps, back to where we started. The paradise the heroes create is certainly better than that which they replaced. But it still is deeply, tragically flawed -- and The Good Place seems to believe that these flaws are fundamentally inescapable. The suicide option is the clearest manifestation of how cracked paradise must be, but there is another issue that the show alludes to: paradise depends on other people, and on their choices. Way back in the first season, "Real Eleanor" raises this precise point: if her soulmate doesn't love her, "this will never truly be my Good Place." Sure it's actually a contrivance to torture Chidi, but it's easy to imagine it as real. What if your paradise is to live blissfully with a certain special someone and ... that person doesn't love you back? Both Simone and Tahani seem okay with Chidi and Jason respectively choosing someone other than them (Eleanor and Janet). But that's in harmony with the audience's happy ending. It's not hard to imagine a different world where they were less sanguine about it. Or take a far more direct problem: If paradise comes with a suicide option, what happens if your loved one takes it? Harry's excited declaration of all the things he'd do with infinite time is not fundamentally, the reason why he desires immortality. When push comes to shove, he's motivated by a far more basic yearning: to make it so "people won't have to say goodbye any more." Eleanor's utter panic at the thought of losing Chidi forever was, for me at least, the most visceral emotional gut-punch of the entire series -- even more than the finale of season three (at least there, we could be reasonably assured their separation was temporary). She eventually comes to terms with it. But sit on it a little more: imagine a "paradise" where your soulmate has left you forever. People fantasize about heaven to be reunited with their loved ones, yet we end up looping right back into eternal separation. What kind of paradise is this, where people still have to say goodbye? So we have two problems that seem to threaten even the conceptual coherency of a paradise:

First, if paradise is forever, eventually everything will become tired. That suicide is presented as a good solution to this problem shows just how serious it is (and, for what it's worth, I'm not sure the suicide "option" would necessarily bring relief. It could easily generate crippling anxiety -- a sense of trappedness between the irrevocable permanence of death and the unbearable ennui of existence). 

Second, if paradise depends on the choices other people make, how can we be sure they'll make choices compatible with your happy ending?

The Good Place presents the first problem as unavoidable and skates past the second entirely. But could they be overcome? Maybe. In the penultimate episode of The Good Place, one solution proposed to the problem of eternal ennui is to reset people's memories, so the things that bored them become fresh again. This is swiftly rejected as a repetition of how the quartet was tortured in The Bad Place. Too swiftly, in my view. Neighborhoods were also used to torture -- should those be jettisoned too? The problem with eternity is that eventually, everything gets repetitive. Go-Kart Racing against monkeys may be a blast the first time, but it loses its luster after a million reiterations. The wistfulness comes from wishing one could go back to that initial burst of discovery and experience -- before one had the memory of doing it all over again. This was my immediate solution to the ennui problem -- not that some demon should periodically reset you, but that you should be able to choose when, where, and how to reset yourself. It's not just about going back in time. It's reoccupying any memory state you've ever possessed. Go back to before you ever raced against monkeys -- then zoom forward to when you've already experienced all the monkey-races you could handle. It's like a load/save system for your mind. Hell, you can even adjust the "difficulty" level. It's true that, for many, a "paradise" where one simply automatically gets whatever one wants will feel unsatisfying. But one needn't set the parameters of paradise to guarantee success. It can be as hard or easy as one wants; people can be as pliant or obstinate as one likes (not for nothing is one of the afterlife attractions in OOTS -- a fantasy roleplaying-based setting -- "The Dungeon of Monsters That Are Just Strong Enough to Really Challenge You"). Or dream bigger. If one has infinite ability to reverse and remake memory as one wishes, then one could at any point adapt any set of memories one ever could have had. Don't just live a different life, remember a different life. Then jump forward and remember all the different lives you lived -- each of which (when you lived them) you had erased the memories of all the others. Every single possible timeline is lived -- and can be relived in all its glory, as many times as one wants. For me, at least, this dissolves the problem of others' choices as well. If anyone can make not just any possible choice, but live through any possible timeline, what does it mean to ask which one is "real"? If your paradise involves loving and being loved by a particular someone, will in your paradise, the person you need to love you, loves you, and stays with you as long as you need. In their paradise, they might love someone else. You enjoy a timeline where people choose exactly the choices that would make you most happy; they live in a timeline which is the same for them. Of course, the sorts of philosophical questions that would raise (among others: What does it mean for the "same" person to simultaneously exist across multiple timelines? Who, exactly, is "choosing" which version they occupy? And if the one that does choose doesn't choose a timeline that involves them loving you back, is the version that does love you really "them"?) are even more esoteric and less accessible to a network audience than the moral philosophy questions The Good Place did try to introduce. So I don't blame them for skipping by it.

* * *

The last enemy to be defeated may not, after all, be death. It may be time.  Time ruins all things. Eventually you run out of it. And even if you never ran out of it -- you had infinite time -- it would defeat you in a different way: via boredom, repetition, and ennui. We can, perhaps, imagine a world where we vanquish death. But can we imagine one where (forgot about possibility, and just think conceptually) we defeat time? I can. Barely, but I can. Of course, it's in many ways a moot point, since I'm profoundly skeptical that humanity ever will master time in this way -- or even if it's practically possible (that it won't happen in my lifetime is actually less material, given that if it ever did happen we'd probably be at Omega Point anyway). But at least it holds out the possibility of an actual happy ending -- where the last enemy is truly vanquished, and nobody has to say goodbye. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2GK19Yo

[tessatechaitea]

Scarab #8

Scarab fucking Eleanor.

It's hard to admit that I believe a toilet paper commercial was written better than this psycho-blather.

John Smith may have over-corrected on the balancing act between Vertigo phrasing and techno-gobbledygook used to explain plot advancements. When the Vertigo phrasing is used simply to show a character is fucking weird so it says stuff like, "Ergonomic celestial tampons bloated from the cosmic rays to staunch a black hole," you can let it go. But when it's used to explain what the fuck is happening, it just becomes another shitty episode of Star Trek. Although "Ergonomic celestial tampons bloated from the cosmic rays to staunch a black hole" makes for better plot explanation than "Agnostic angels of the quantum mesh safeguarding the integrity of the world-mind." Just as Scarab begins suspecting these two guys aren't what they seem (although what they are seeming to be is too confusing for me to even bother with contemplating that it's an obfuscation of their true selves), Eleanor begins to wake and he flies off to make sure he doesn't help out at all. Maybe everything that has gone wrong so far is because of Scarab's blue balls. It'll all right itself when he and Eleanor finally fuck (as depicted, grossly, on the cover).

Is he suggesting these feelings are similar? I'm going to throw up now.

Eleanor has transformed into some sort of ectoplasmic vagina which must be what Louis is into because he rushes into her room naked.

That's what a vagina looks like, right?

I'd really like to say that the last few pages of the series are just Louis fucking that thing. But even non-Comics Code Authority approved Vertigo probably couldn't get away with that! Also, the rabbit wasn't around to witness it, so it wouldn't fit the title.

Okay, so he's fucking it on panel. But I wasn't wrong! This doesn't continue until the end of the comic book! Also, Harvest was definitely meant to be vampire Tim Drake from the future!

I just scanned three panels in relatively quick succession so I'm going to pass on the panel I really wanted to scan: another raccoon! Scot Eaton is quickly becoming my favorite artist from the 90s! While the entire world begins its end in Iceland, Louis and Eleanor fuck. They fuck and they fuck and they fuck. And it's fucking gross. I can't believe my caption on the cover was correct. It was supposed to be a joke, John Smith! A FUCKING JOKE! I did not want to see Scarab fuck his greasy ectoplasmic bubbling oil slick of a lover! While Scarab and Eleanor fuck, the rabbit goes mad, Bobby Dazzler dies, and the portly guy with the hands for wings passes out. When he awakens, the chrono-storm has subsided and their sea horse drones begin to fix the collective unconscious of everybody in Reykjavik to make it seem like nothing happened. Much like the rest of this comic book. The Cosmic Plumbers were from the Labyrinth (which they called the Gyre) which is why Scarab sort of recognized them. So I guess the Labyrinth is sort of like where The Endless live but for Time Soldiers? Eleanor tells Scarab that he's the Minotaur, so I guess he's the main Time Soldier. He just doesn't know it yet. And he never will because this series never went any further than eight issues. Scarab #8 Rating: C-. Scarab achieved nothing in this series. He merely sat around waiting for Eleanor to get better and she eventually did. Then they fucked. The end!

[thepaperpanda]

Under The Setting Sun || Chapter I

Words: 1705

Warnings: none

SUMMARY: When the world is falling apart, the only thing that humanity needs are heroes. Namely the united heroes. In an uneven fight against the forces of evil, they will have to lay down their fate on the edge of the providence. Which of sides will suffer a defeat and which will plunder in glory after a delightful victory?

Author: Manaick

A/N: This is our interpretation of Avengers: Infinity War {We based our story on the trailer and our own premonitions regarding an upcoming movie}. Hope you will enjoy it.

This was their only home. The spaceship was simply constructed of something iridescent. Straight lines were forming the walls, a large window at the front was allowing to navigate properly. The frame around the surroundings was filled with ominous brittle silence, for there was no gravity to hold them firmly nor was there gravity to supervise their zeal and minds. They somehow knew that something was around.

The blackness engulfed their thoughts. Stretching out in front of them, the unknown studied their fears, courage and  knowledge. There was no life here. That was simple, no thriving population, no signs of past living. The darkness had overcome any sense of purity, consumed all hope of cleanliness and had wiped out all desire. "Do you really think it's a good idea to go back to Earth?" Loki said without conviction in his voice, looking at the dark emptiness of space in front of him. Thor looked at his brother with a soft frown. "Yes, of course, people there love me. I am very popular." He explained, gazing at his brother from time to time. "Let me rephrase that. Do you really think it's a good idea to bring ME back to Earth?" Loki repeated himself a bit worried. "Probably not, to be honest." Thor said. "I wouldn't be worried, brother... I feel like everything's gonna work out fine..." After these words something has happened. Suddenly, both brothers saw a huge spaceship, emerging out from the darkness of space, right in front of their ship. Both men were looking up in disbelief of the view. "I think you spoke a bit too early, dear brother..." Loki spoke with a bit of irony in his voice. "What is that?!" Thor asked out loudly. "No idea, brother... But I have a bad feelings about this..." Loki muttered, watching the ship carefully and taking a little step backwards.

A wry smile crushed on his lips as he watched the ship in front of his one. "Kill 'em all. No hostages." His voice echoed from the walls of the great hall of his ship. Sitting in his spacious chair, he rose his huge hand, calling a specific person by this gesture. "Yes, my master?" a tall woman stood in front of him, her figure tensed but her eyes never left his. "I want to have this gem now. I've been chasing it for too long. Find it." Blue-haired woman gave a slight nod and turned around to leave the hall. "I count on you, Proxima." A formidable voice could be heard. She stopped for a second, however she didn't turn around. She tightened the grip on the spear she was holding in her hand. "I won't let you down, master." After these words, woman left leaving the Titan alone.

It didn't take aggressors long to crush the main gate of Asgardian ship, which were separating passengers from the vacuum. Titan's warriors entered the other ship quickly, they didn't leave too much of a maneuvering field for others to defend. Valkyrie was ready to fight with Hulk and volunteers that offered themselves. "We can't let them win! Fight, brothers and sisters! Fight, Asgardians!" Woman yelled and everyone started to attack. Hulk, using his superhuman strength smashed several aliens easily. Valkyrie did same, killing few of the Titan's warriors. "Thor! We ain't gonna push back this attack, there's too many of them!" dark haired woman yelled looking around for the God of Thunders. Thor, hearing this, threw a gaze at his brother. "We have to stop them!" Loki's heart was pounding hardly inside his chest. "Any ideas, brother? I just hope it's not gonna include the GET HELP action, isn't this?!" Loki growled darkly finishing one of the enemies off.

 Everyone who was able to fight was doing that. Man. Woman. No exceptions. Asgardians have united to defend aliens. To protect their last piece of something that once was their home.

 Some men tried to take all children to safe place, namely to the bridge chamber of their ship, unfortunately they failed. Others could only hear loud screams and howls of their compatriots when Thanos’ aliens broke to the room.

A string of screams unraveled from Thor's tongue, like yarn unfurling, as one of the creatures advanced. It's slick skin shimmered with hot anger along with it's dark, cold eyes. Every step it took rattled his bones and struck his heart. Thor tried to dodge a swing from its massive claws, but it struck his side and he tumbled into the floor. He could hear nothing, all was silenced, the yells of the Asgardians, the hisses of the creature, all inaudible. All he could do is feel. Feel the cold ground pressed against his form, the heat from the pain, and the rhythm of his terrified heart. He looked upward through the huge window in the front part of their ship, into the stars. Thor closed his eyes as he felt a searing pain.

"Brother!" Loki knocked another enemy down and rushed to Thor.

With few agile movements he killed the huge creature.

Black haired man knelt down next to Thor and pressed hands to his wound.

"Hold on. Just don't decide to faint, okay?" Loki tried to sound as calm as it was only possible, but he knew how faltering his voice was at that point.

Thor involuntarily pushed Loki's hand off.

"I am alright.. People.. Save as many as you can. I'll be fine.." with a loud hiss Thor got back onto his feet.

Loki nodded and once again he threw himself into a combat.

The fight against the enemies was continued.

The battlefield lay quiet, for it was now a graveyard of the unburied. Mad Titan's army was much stronger than people of Asgard. A lot of blood was shed before the fight has ended. Many people died devoting their lives in the fight against the invaders. Their eyes were as immobile as their limbs. Their souls had long departed to the celestial places to walk with the ancestors. The battle was lost, the enemy had won. Thor was laying in the second chamber of the Asgardian ship, being beared up by Valkyrie and Banner. Suddenly, the violent sound of crushing metal rented the air with a shower of sparks. The bulkhead has been destroyed. A tall purple person has entered the main chamber without hesitation.

"Proxima!" tall man yelled aloud.

Midnight came out of the shadow, her hands were covered in clotted blood. "I've looked everywhere. No signs of Space Stone, my mas...." Titan put his large hand up in the air silencing her. "I feel it. I can smell it" he said deeply and a mischievous smile crawled on his lips. He took few huge steps ahead and he entered another chamber. "Oh! Look at that!" chap stood in the middle of the room looking around until his eyes fell on the Valkyrie, Bruce and Thor. "Space Stone. Where's it?" Valkyrie slowly dropped her head down closing her eyes shot and squeezing Thor's hand hardly. "Who're you?" Banner asked simply getting up of the floor. "I've asked you a question, mortal!" Titan vociferated audibly. It didn't take long for Banner to get frenzied by emotions and within seconds he has changed into his green version. As he turned into Hulk, he attacked the purple tall man, unfortunately unsuccessfully. With one hit, Titan has sent Hulk to the floor so easily. "Anyone else?" he laughed wryly. "And now. Where's the Space Stone?" The silence was inscrutable. "Aa I can see, none of you will be useful. You're all gonna die." Proxima approached her master and she prepared her spear aiming at Thor with a rude smile on her lips. "STOP!" Titan and Midnight both turned around. Loki was standing in the passage, his dark hair were put behind his ears. "Well, well, well. The God of Mischief himself" Titan laughed grossly. "I thought you're dead. But they kept you alive. Great." Loki raised his mouth corners in a grimace and he slowly entered into the chamber, stepping above dead bodies of his fellows. "Could I interest you in negotiations?" Loki asked carefully going into Titan's direction. "I'm in possession of something which might be precious to you." Thanos narrowed his forehead. "Continue." Loki threw a brief glance at his brother and rest of the team. He reached his hand ahead. A blue light of Tesseract glowed around.

Thanos didn't say a word, he only nodded at Proxima. She once again aimed her spear at Thor. "Give it back to me, Loki. And in my generosity I'll let you all free" Thanos reached his large hand towards Loki. "If you won't cooperate, I'll make you all suffer. Do you really want to have them on your conscience?" Titan pointed at three people behind him. "Decision is up to you."

 “No! Loki, no! You can't!” Thor leant his weight on his elbow. “Don't do this, brother! It's too powerful to be entrusted into his hands!!!”

 Proxima made few long steps and slapped Thor’s face with her spear. Loki looked briefly at Thor and turned Tesseract in his hand few times observing delightful cold light of the object. With a deep sigh, man made few more steps and handled Tesseract to Thanos, bowing his head a bit. "I'm doing this with a pain in my heart. It would be more useful in my hands.. Now, let us free." Thanos took Tesseract in his hands and within a second, in a coruscation of light, he pull the little blue stone out of it. Smiling proudly, Thanos put the stone at the one of free places on his glove. The smile didn't get off his disgusting lips. He looked at Proxima above his shoulder and uttered. "Kill them and destroy the ship." Loki paled more after those words. "You promised.." Thanos giggled darkly. "Don't trust anyone but yourself. And you'll come with me." Titan left the chamber and went back on his own ship while two of the aliens pulled Loki behind them leading him in the same direction. "NO!!! NO!!!" The last thing Loki heard was screams of Thor and sounds of scuffle. "I'll come back for you, brother" Loki whispered under his breath.

Gifs by Cass

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[the-science-of-our-times]

What are some of your favourite celestial bodies and why? x

Hello there, thanks for asking!!I have always been a bit of a basic bitch when it comes to my favorite celestial bodies so how could I look past some of the classics.First of all we have the big ol thing Jupiter. Just one of those bodies in the sky that you really can't look past when we are talking favourites, when I use to stargaze more, that is when I lived in the countryside, I could spend hours tracking Jupiter across the sky, so many moons makes for such an exciting viewing experience, sadly the one time I tried to photograph Jupiter and the nifty ass moons it was a really hot summer's evening and the air was really dusty but if you are really keen I am sure it's in my astrophotography tag. Of course what could follow Jupiter but another planet which happens to be right next to it, the planet that if you are a famous astronomer you might be easily fooled into thinking this planet has ears; of course it's Saturn! The rings have had me slain every single time I have peered in it's direction and to be honest it is just so surreal to think that even though the scale of solar system the rings themselves are many orders of magnitude smaller in one dimensions. And holy heck when we are talking about Saturn we couldn't possibly omit Enceladus, with it's water geysers constantly spouting ice out into the abyss, one of the many things in the solar system that even a skilled writer probably wouldn't think to write about.I think the third of the bodies I would like to share is M42 or everyone's favourite The Orion Nebula. For those playing along at home if you look up at Orion, scan down to his sword, the middle 'star' is what we are talking about, whilst it is visible with the naked eye it is best appreciated with binoculars or a small telescope. Coloration is stunning, structure is stunning, its dominance over the sky is stunning. I love everything about it and would probably say it is my top pick for any night of the year. Though it might not be as large or as majestic as the Magellanic Clouds or have remarkable similarities to earthly objects like The Horsehead Nebulae it will forever hold a special place in my heart as a bearing for which I can always look up and admire, it has always been there and it is attached to my earliest stargazing memories, my earliest astrophotography memories (check the tag again, but I feel you probably already have...), it has a far greater impact on my life than any other celestial body so I have to say that it is my favorite.Thank you for asking, we should talk more xx

[vizkopa]

Celestial (FallenAngel!Doflamingo x Reader) CHAPTER 1

Chapter 1: To Fall from Grace ~

The sound of the bell signalling the end of the school week—and the beginning of the much anticipated weekend—rang through the corridors. You shouted to be heard over the clamour of your students rushing to be first out the door. “Don’t forget, the Lyrid meteor shower will be at its peak tonight! Before dawn is the best time for viewing!” You received a few looks of horror at the thought of getting up before dawn on a Saturday and you chuckled. Being a high school Physics teacher meant you received those looks on a regular basis, but you wouldn’t trade your job for the world. The room was cleared within minutes, everyone eager for the weekend and you were no exception. You had planned your whole weekend around the meteor shower and damned if you were going to miss a second of it. So you sped through your preparations for the next week and hurried out the door, already calculating the best position in which to set up your telescope for optimal viewing pleasure. “Where are you off to in such a hurry, [Name]-ya?”

Speaking of pleasure… The smooth voice stopped you in your tracks and you fought to control the blush rising in your cheeks. Trafalgar Law never failed to leave you flustered. He was relatively new to the school, assuming the position of Human Biology teacher after the previous one had retired. And you had wanted a lesson in ‘anatomy’ from him since the day he’d introduced himself with that sleek, velvet voice. You turned to face him, smiling pleasantly. “Mr. Trafalgar! I could say the same to you. You’re heading out early.” He smiled—more of a smirk, really. One that made you weak at the knees. “Please, I’ve told you to call me Law. And I was hoping to catch you on your way out, actually.” “What can I help you with?” “Are you free tonight?” You hadn’t been expecting that. “Oh… Actually, I already made plans…” “I should have guessed,” he chuckled, but you could see the disappointment in his eyes. “The way you were rushing just now, you could only have a date tonight, am I right?” “You could say that,” you said with a laugh. “The Lyrid meteor shower peaks tonight. I’ll be observing the whole thing from home for my paper.” He laughed and god you could get used to that sound. “Of course, another time perhaps. In that case, I’ll remember to look to the sky tonight and think of you.” He winked and you felt your face flush red. “See you on Monday, [Name]-ya.” With one last smile he said his goodbyes, leaving a tingling warmth where his arm had brushed yours as he passed. And you were left standing in the empty corridor a blushing mess. You hadn’t even been able to bring yourself to say goodbye, you were so afraid of tripping over your own tongue. You had almost invited him over to watch the shower with you, but it had been a long time since you’d had a guy over and, as much as you wanted it to happen, you weren’t sure that was the message you wanted to send. You shook your head, clearing your thoughts. That man was a walking distraction and you couldn’t afford to fall all over him like a blushing school girl. You had a celestial event to catch. On your way out, you dropped by the school library to return a stack of books you had borrowed. Robin, the school librarian and History teacher, and Nami the Geography teacher were chatting as they sorted through the returns to be placed back on the shelves. You dropped your stack of books loudly on the table in front of them. “Trafalgar Law just asked me out.” They both stopped talking abruptly and turned to you, Robin with a look of smug amusement on her face, while Nami looked like she had just won the lottery. “And what did you say!?” she squealed. You scrunched up your face at her. “I told him I was busy this weekend.” Nami’s face fell. “[Naaaame], why would you do that? You’ve been looking all lovey-dovey at each other for weeks. This was your chance!” “The Lyrid meteor showers peaks tonight and—” “Oh my god, the meteor shower happens every year. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity!” “I’m sure I’ll have other chances,” you muttered, absently playing with the cover of a book. “He said he’d be thinking of me tonight.” “Oh my,” Robin chuckled. Nami rolled her eyes. “Would you rather him be thinking about you, or making love to you niiice and slow like you’ve been—” You blushed furiously. “Woah, woah, woah! That’s not—” Nami raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t it?” Your blush deepened. “An office romance would only be a distraction.” “Good. ‘Cause you sure need one.” “You work too much, [Name],” Robin agreed. Nami grasped your shoulders, forcing you to look her in the eye. “You two are meant to be, [Name], I just know it.” She let go and sighed. “Just promise me you’ll at least call him? Let him know you’re still interested. Hell, maybe you can watch your damn meteor shower together and make love under the stars—” “OKAY!” you interrupted before Nami could go into too much detail about your non-existent sex life. “Nami, you know I don’t believe in all that destiny crap.” You caved under her disapproving look. “But I’ll call him tomorrow. Promise. Now, I gotta go.” Robin waved you off as you hurried out of the library, Nami calling after you. “I’ll hold you to that!” You shook your head, knowing she was dead serious, and made a mental note to call Law the next day. The drive home was uneventful and by the time you reached your house on the outskirts of town, the sun had already begun to set. You made yourself a quick dinner of leftovers, and put on a pot of coffee for the long night ahead. The night was quiet as you set up your telescope in the highest window in the attic, a steaming cup of coffee close at hand. The window faced west, offering a spectacular view of the setting sun and allowing you to look out over your generous backyard and the forest beyond. The trees stretched away for miles, which is why you had chosen the attic as your viewing position. The rest of the town lay in the opposite direction, so the forest meant no light pollution to dampen the effects of the shower. Unfortunately, this year the peak of the shower happened to coincide with the full moon, which would mean your viewing would be limited to before moonrise and a small window before dawn, but you weren’t about to let that dissuade you. As you were lining the scope up with the stretch of clear sky above the forest, a streak of light crossed your vision—there and gone again in a moment. You pulled back and frowned. That was odd. You shouldn’t be able to even see any meteors for another few hours yet at least. You stuck your head out of the window and looked up. To your surprise, a bright object was hurtling across the sky, far too close to be one of the smaller meteors you had been expecting. Most were so small that they burned up in the upper atmosphere before they could even reach the ground. But not this one. It blazed brighter and swept overhead, leaving behind it a streak of smoke against the darkening sky. You weren’t sure, but at its current trajectory and the speed it was travelling… It’s going to crash in the forest! With a flash of light and a low rumble that shook the foundations of your house, it impacted and you were left stunned, staring out into the dark trees. What the hell was that?! Without a second though, you snatched up your coat as you raced out the back door and through the yard. You switched on the flashlight app on your phone and made your way under the cover of the trees. You shuddered as the shadow of the forest enveloped you. You had practically grown up in these woods and you knew its many trails and hidden tracks like the back of your hand, but you still held your father’s warning clear in your mind. ”Never go into the woods alone after dark!” Once when you were younger, you had been playing in the woods and lost track of time. Before you knew it, the sun had started to set and in your panic to get home, you’d lost sight of the path. You recalled the way the shadows had lengthened in the rapidly fading light, making the trees appear to be closing in around you. For a few, terrifying moments, you though the forest would swallow you whole, until your father had heard your crying and come to the rescue. You cast off the uneasiness that began to creep up now and forged on ahead, following the well beaten path into the heart of the woods. You could smell a faint aroma of smoke in the air and all you needed to do was follow your nose to its source. It wasn’t long before the trail you were following became overgrown and difficult to see by the light of your phone. The light bounced off the tree trunks, making everything appear oddly flat to your eyes, and messed with your depth perception. You felt the seeds of a panic begin to take root in your mind, but pushed your doubts aside. You had a good sense of direction. You were certain you could make it back out again. Besides, from the smell of it, you had almost reached the site of impact. Up ahead, you saw the yellow flickering of fire. The acrid smell of burning was now almost overwhelming in your nostrils. Smoke stung your eyes and you pulled a handkerchief out of your pocket to hold over your mouth and nose as you entered the clearing. The first thing you noticed was the crater: the earth in the clearing was scorched black and smoking, and small spot fires burned where patches of grass had once been. You kicked dirt over them and stamped them out as you made your way through the clearing, halting the flames in their tracks before you had a wildfire on your hands. The second thing you noticed were the feathers—some the length of your forearm and longer, blackened with soot and smouldering at the edges. Your first thought was that the meteor (or whatever it was) had hit a bird’s nest as it crashed through the canopy, but the feathers were far too large for any bird native to the area. Or any bird ever for that matter. You watched them smoulder in the dirt, curling in on themselves before disintegrating into ash. The third thing you noticed was the object at the centre of the crater as you peered over the edge. It wasn’t deep, but it was wide, and at it’s very centre lay something half buried in the earth. You screwed your eyes shut and opened them again. It was a man. The largest man you had ever seen. You pinched yourself for you could only have been dreaming, but instead of waking up in your cosy bed at home, you were still there, the impossible right in front of you. You looked closer, peering through the smoke. He was definitely a man. Standing he must have been over ten feet tall. And he was very much naked. You turned away, eyes wide and face reddening. Never mind the fact you had just found a human being in a crater in your backyard, but he was naked as the day he was born too. You took a deep breath, almost choking as you breathed a lungful of smoke, and turned back to face him. His eyes were closed. From this distance, you could not tell if he was alive or dead. Surely he couldn’t have survived a fall like that? There was only one way to find out. You jumped over the edge of the crater, charred earth sizzling beneath the soles of your trainers as you approached the stranger warily. He didn’t move. When you reached him, you kneeled down beside him, determinedly keeping your gaze above the waist as you searched for signs of life. He was covered head to toe in soot, but he seemed, for the most part, unharmed. He didn’t appear to be breathing. You hovered your ear close to his chest and breathed a sigh of relief when you heard a steady heartbeat. You pulled back. Now you had determined you didn’t have a dead body to deal with (much to your relief; you didn’t much fancy trying to explain this to the police) you debated what to do. You could call the authorities, but again, how were you going to explain that a giant naked man fell out of the sky and crash landed in the forest behind your house? No, you couldn’t call anyone. They’d only think you were crazy. That left only one option: you had to get him back to your house. Which was a feat in and of itself. A man of his size must weigh near half a ton. As you were debating what to do, a movement caught your eye. Thinking that the man might be waking up (which posed a whole lot of other questions and dilemmas over what you should do) you fell back slightly, heart pounding as you waited to see what happened. But instead of waking up, right before your very eyes, he began to shrink. You blinked. Surely you were imagining things? But after a few seconds, there before you was a man of normal size (and by ‘normal’ you meant still well over six foot), still very much unconscious and naked in the middle of your forest. But at least now you thought you might have a chance of getting him home. You contemplated how you should best approach the task. There was no way in hell you’d be able to carry him all by yourself. Perhaps you could drag him? Yes, that could work. If you could hook your arms beneath his armpits, you could probably manage the distance back to your house. You paused, considering his current state and cringed. Maybe dragging him over scorched ground and through a forest was not the best of ideas. You thought of the tarp you kept stored in the garden shed at the back of the yard. But you weren’t confident you could find your way back to the clearing again without the flames to guide you. Perhaps you could fashion some sort of sled out of branches? Well, it was worth a try. It took you the better part of an hour to gather the materials you needed, and all that time, the man slept on. He remained disturbingly unmoving and you felt the need to check to ensure his heart was beating every so often, but it was always there, slow and steady and completely at odds with the rest of his appearance. When you had finished your work, you had a sled of questionable durability, but it was the best you could do. Now came the question of how the hell you were supposed to complete the next task. Wiping the sweat from your brow, you looked to the man in the crater below. You had since discarded your jacket and placed it over his waist to preserve his modesty (hey, it was hard to work with that staring right at you). “Well, nothing to do about it,” you muttered. Hesitantly, you rolled him onto his side and gasped at what you saw. You had previously thought him to be unharmed, but you had been wrong. His back was caked in drying blood and two long, jagged wounds ran parallel from his shoulder blades almost to his hips. You could see the white edges of bone peeking out from between the ragged edges. You frowned. It almost looked like… wings? You could still see tufts of bloodied feathers clinging to the wounds. No way. Nope. You refused to believe it. Clearly there was a logical, sensible reason for all of this, you just couldn’t see it in your dazed and disoriented state. This was a matter to debate in the morning when you’d had a good night’s rest and a cup of coffee. The bleeding seemed to have mostly stopped, so you put the thought out of your mind for the time being and focused on getting him home. Getting the man onto the sled was perhaps not one of your finest moments (you weren’t quite sure where you should put your hands) but you made it work, and soon you were on your way back to the house. You were exhausted, and you were certain you had missed the start of the meteor shower, but right now you couldn’t care less. You just wanted to take a long shower and go straight to bed—if sleep was even a possibility with a naked stranger in your house. You still hadn’t decided what to do about that. You figured you’d let him sleep and when he woke up, he would explain everything and return to his life just as you would return to yours. You prayed he wasn’t some sort of criminal on the run from the authorities. Although you had no idea what kind of criminal would be lying naked at the bottom of a crater in the middle of the woods. Maybe he was some kind of pervert? Were you making a mistake bringing this man into your house? You shook your head. These were all problems for when he woke up. He couldn’t possibly be a threat to anyone right now. As you left the cover of the trees, you looked up to the sky. The full moon was at its peak, flooding the yard with cold, white light. The stars winked at you from where they hung amongst the thousands, every so often a faint streak of light passing between them as the Earth hurtled through the cloud of comet rubble on its path around the sun. Could it even be possible that a man could have fallen from those stars? Every fibre of your being said it shouldn’t be possible. Couldn’t be possible. And yet… You made up the bed in the spare room on the ground floor for him, ensuring you cleaned him up and bandaged his wounds as best you could before laying him down beneath the crisp white sheets. Now that his face was free of soot and dirt, you could see that he was quite handsome, with sharp features and pale, platinum blonde hair. By the time you had finished, your hands were shaking violently—from exhaustion or shock, you couldn’t be sure. You took a shower as hot as you could stand it and watched the ash and grime and blood that caked your hands be washed away by the scalding stream of water. The strange man’s blood was red like yours, but something told you he was not what he seemed. Before you retired for the night, you took your father’s pistol from the locked drawer in his old office and loaded it, placing it on the night stand by your bed. You hoped you would never need to use it.

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

[mystacoceti]

longish excerpt of John Barth’s “On with the Story”

She (I mean our distraught “Freeze Frame protagonist) happens to be gridlocked in actual sight of that river: There’s the symbolic catenary arch of the “Gateway to the West,” and beyond it are the sightseeing boats along the parkfront and out among the freight-barge strings. As She tries to divert and calm herself by regarding the nearest of those tourist boats — an ornate replica of a Mark Twain-vintage sternwheeler, just leaving its pier to nose upstream — her attention is caught by an odd phenomenon that, come to think of it, has fascinated her since small-girlhood (happier days!) whenever she has happened to see it: The river is, as ever, flowing south, New Orleansward; the paddle-steamer is headed north, gaining slow upstream momentum (standard procedure for sightseeing boats, in order to abbreviate the anticlimactic return leg of their tour), and as it begins to make headway, a deckhand ambles aft in process of casting off the vessel’s docklines, with the effect that he appears to be walking in place, with respect to the shore and Her angle of view, while the boat moves under him. It is the same disconcerting illusion, She guess, as that sometimes experienced when two trains stand side by side in the station and a passenger on one thinks momentarily that the other has begun to move, when in fact the movement is his own — an illusion compoundable if the observer on Train A (this has happened to Her at least once) happens to be strolling down the car’s aisle like that crewman on the sternwheeler’s deck, at approximately equal speed in the opposite direction as the train pulls out. Dear-present-reader Alice suddenly remembers one such occasion, somewhere or other, when for a giddy moment it appeared to her that she herself, aisle-walking was standing still, while Train A, Train B, and Boston’s South Street Station platform (it now comes back to her) all seemed in various motion.

As in fact they were, the “Freeze Frame” narrator declares in italics at this point, his end-of-paragraph language having echoed mine above, or vice verse — and here the narrative, after a space-break, takes a curious turn. Instead of proceeding with the story of Her several concentric plights — how She extricates or fails to extricate herself from the traffic jam; whether She misses the interview appointment or, making it despite all, nevertheless fails to get the university job; whether or not in either case She and the twins slip even farther down the middle-class scale (right now, alarmingly, if Bill really “cuts her odd” as threatened, She’s literally about two months away from the public-assistance rolls, unless her aging parents bail her out: she who once seriously considered Ph.D.hood and professorship); and whether in either of those cases anything really satisfying, not to say fulfilling, lies ahead for her in the second half of her life, comparable to the early joys of her marriage and motherhood — instead of going on with these nested stories, in which our Alice understandably takes a more than literary interest, the author here suspends the action and launches into an elaborate digression upon, of all things, the physics of relative motion in the universe as currently understood, together with the spatiotemporal nature of written narrative and — Ready? —  Zeno’s Seventh Paradox, which three phenomena he attempts to interconnect more or less as follows: Seat-belted in her gridlocked and overheating Subaru, the protagonist of “Freeze Frame” is moving from St. Louis’s Gateway Arch toward University City at a velocity, alas, of zero miles per hour. Likewise (although her nerves are twinging, her hazel eyes brimming, her pulse and respiration pulsing and respiring, and her thoughts returning already from tourist boats to the life-problems that have her by the throat) her movement from the recentest even in her troubled story to whatever next: zero narrative mph, so to speak, as the station wagon idles and the author digresses. Even as the clock of Her life is running, however, so are time in general and the physical universe. The city of St. Louis and its temporarily stalled downtown traffic, together with our now-sobbing protagonist, the state of Missouri, and variously troubled America, all spin eastward on Earth’s axis at roughly a thousand miles per hour. The rotating planet itself careens through its solar orbit at a dizzying 66,662 miles per hour (with the incidental effect that even “stationary” objects on its surface, like Her Subaru, for half of every daily rotation are “strolling aft” with respect to orbital direction, though at nothing approaching orbital velocity). Our entire whirling system, meanwhile, is rushing in its own orbit through our Milky Way Galaxy at the stupendous rate of nearly half a million miles per hour: lots of compounded South Street Station effects going on within that overall motion! What’s more, although our galaxy appears to have no relative motion within its Local Group of celestial companions, that whole Local group — plus the great Virgo Cluster of which it’s a member, plus other, neighboring multigalactic clusters — is apparently rushing en bloc at a staggering near-million miles per hour (950,724) toward some point in interclusteral space known as the Great Attractor. And moreover yet — who’s to say finally? — that Attractor and everything thereto so ardently attracted would seem to be speeding at an only slightly less staggering 805,319 mph toward another supercluster, as yet ill-mapped, called the Shapley Concentration, or, to put it mildly, the Even Greater Attractor. All these several motions-within-motions, mind, over and above the grand general expansion of the universe, wherein even as the present reader reads this present sentence, the galaxies all flee on another’s company at speeds proportional to their respective distances (specifically, in scientific metrics, at the rate of fifty to eighty kilometers per second — let’s say 150,000 miles per hour — per “megaparsec” from the observer, a megaparsec being one thousand parsecs and each parsec 3.26 light-years). Don’t think about this last too closely, advises the author of “Freeze Frame,” but in fact out Alice — who has always had a head for figures, and who once upon a time maintained a lively curiosity about such impersonal matters as the constellations, at least, if not the overall structure of the universe — is at this point stopped quite as still by vertiginous reflection as is the unnamed Mrs. William Alfred Barns by traffic down there in her gridlocked Subaru, and this for several reasons. Apart from the similarities between Her situation vis-à-vis “Bill” and Alice’s vis-à-vis Howard — unsettling, but not extraordinary in a time and place where half of all marriages end in separation or divorce — is the coincidence of Alice’s happening upon “Freeze Frame” during a caesura in her own life-story and reading through the narratives of Her nonplusment up to the author’s digression-in-progress just as, lap-belted in a DC-10 at thirty-two thousand feet, she’s crossing the Mississippi River in virtual sight of St. Louis not long past midday (Central Daylight Savings Time), flying westward at an airspeed of six hundred eight miles per hour (so the captain has announced), against a contrary prevailing jet stream of maybe a hundred mph, for a net speed-over-ground of let’s say five hundred, while Earth and its atmosphere spin eastward under her, carrying the DC-10 backward (though not relatively) at maybe double its forward airspeed, while simultaneously the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, and so forth all tear along in their various directions at their various clips — and just now two flight attendants emerge from the forward galley and stroll aft down the parallel aisles like that deckhand on the tourist stern-wheeler, taking the passengers’ drink orders before the meal service. Alice stares awhile, transfixed, almost literally dizzied, remembering from her happier schooldays (and from trying to explain relative motion to Sam and Jessica one evening as the family camped out under the stars) that any point or object in the universe can be considered to be at rest, the unmoving center of it all, while everything else is in complex motion with respect to it. The arrow, released, may be said to stand still while the earth rushes under, the target toward, the archer away from it, et cetera.

[. . .]

Back, rather, she goes, to that extended digression, wherein by one more coincidence (she having just imaged the arrow in “stationary” flight — but not impossibly she glanced ahead in “Freeze Frame” before those flight attendants caught her eye) the author now invokes two other arrows: the celebrated Arrow of Time, along whose irreversible trajectory the universe has expanded ever since Big Bang, generating and carrying with it not only all those internal relative celestial motions but also the story of Mr. and Mrs. W. A. Barnes from wedlock through deadlock to gridlock (and of Alice and Howard likewise, up to her reading of these sentences); and the arrow in Zeno’s Seventh Paradox, which Alice may long ago have heard of but can’t recollect until the author now reminds her. If an arrow in flight can be said to traverse every point in its path from bow to target, Zeno teases, and if at any given moment it can be said to be at and only at some on of those points, then it must be at rest for the moment it’s there (otherwise it’s not “there”); therefore it’s at rest at every moment of its flight, and its apparent motion is illusory. To the author’s way of thinking, Zeno’s Seventh Paradox oddly anticipates not only motion pictures (whose motion truly is illusory in a different sense, our brain’s reconstruction of the serial “freeze-frames” on the film) but also Werner Heisenberg’s celebrated Uncertainty Principle, which maintains in effect that the more we know about a particle’s position, the less we know about its momentum, and vice versa — although how that principle relates to Mrs. Barne’s sore predicament, Alice herself is uncertain. In her own mind, the paradox recalls that arrow “at rest” in mid-flight aforeposited as the center of the exploding universe . . . like Her herself down there at this moment of Her story; like Alice herself at this moment of hers, reading about Hers and from time to time pausing to reflect as she reads; like very one of us — fired from the bow of our mother’s loins and arcing toward the target of our grave — at any and every moment of our interim life-stories.

[. . .]

[. . .]then returns, glass in hand, to the freeze-framed “Freeze Frame,” whose point she think she’s beginning to see, out of practice though she is in reading “serious” fiction. To the extent that anything is where it is [the author therein now declares], it has no momentum. To the extent that it moves, it isn’t “where it is.” Likewise made-up characters in made-up stories; likewise ourselves in the more-or-less made-up stories of our lives. All freeze-frames [he concludes (concludes this elaborate digression, that is, with another space-break, after which the text, perhaps even the story, resumes)] are blurred at the edges.

An arresting passage, Alice acknowledges to herself.

[shipsbcshesdiabetic]

Chapter 28

Tuesday, June First, Thirty Thousand Seventeen, 9pm- Space, I Guess

Our bright, blue home planet melts into obscurity as The Commander and I venture out into the endless horizon of the universe. It’s silent, save for the clicking and whistling of the buttons plastered on the interior walls. There’s nothing to do out here except observe the beautiful star-laden cosmos, each electrified dot gleaming brightly and brilliantly. The ship propels us farther and farther from our base and our people with each passing second, thereby inflating the painful loneliness shared by us two space cadets. We’re smaller than ever before, a mere quark in the presence of all that exists. We are alone, but there is glory in insignificance. We are in control of nothing and are nothing, yet we are the sole masters of time and space.

Adventure is laced in our gasoline, propelling us through the airless blackness. The fundamental laws of physics that rule over Earth no longer rule over us. The concept of time stretches into an ever-thinning straight line, the passage of each moment no longer having to find its way through the bend of gravity. Entire lifetimes on Earth pass in the time it takes to blink my eyes. Everyone I love is dead. And I don’t care. Their bodies and memories will all fade out into nothingness and revert back to stardust, but we’ll still be here, dying on our own time.

It’s hard to believe that death will ever come for a person living in a science-fiction thriller. I feel immortal, like a character in a story. Space never ends; it goes on forever. I’ll never run out of stars, even as the particle accelerator kicks into full gear and propels the rocket forward as the g-force turns my flesh into a blanket of lead and my organs into stone. I unzip my space suit and float out to the back window. The solar system is nothing but a speck, the planets moving around the sun like electrons revolving around the nucleus of Bohr’s model of the atom.

Back home, everything revolves around something else due to gravity, or perhaps due to stubbornness. The moon orbits the earth. The Earth orbits the Sun. The Sun orbits the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The Milky Way orbits the Local Group. The Local Group orbits the Virgo Supercluster. The Virgo Supercluster is a thought swirling within the Mind of God. The adults revolve around stress, the sad revolve around sadness, the depressed revolve around their vices, and the idiots revolve around the more powerful idiots. Girls revolve around girls, boys revolve around boys, boys and girls revolve around each other, and it’s all very stupid and very lame.

A field of stars dies before our very eyes, exploding into bundles of color and energy. The supernovas let out sprouts of light that form bouquets of flowers laid out in an endless grave. Vermillion poppies and purple painted daisies bloom and explode within and around the bright streaks of the goldenrods. Cherry-red hydrangeas adorn the space below the fiery, burnt orange chrysanthemums and the pastel pink carnations. The colors of the orchids’ petals ebb and flow from the inside out, melting the milk chocolate and the honey and the bubblegum flavors into one candied bundle. The irises expand and contract with the light in the midst of the blush-colored pansies and the hot pink lipstick of the tulips. Soon, our ship makes it through the field, and we coast along another patch of nothing.

Specks of colored pollen drift out from the blasts and watercolor the blank starry sky. The electric neon nebulas hold in glittering pennies and smoke and seafoam. The dust blows into nothingness as The Commander presses the accelerator.

The cartoon rocket’s autopilot jolts us forward at a million miles a minute into a crazy collage of constellations. The Big Dipper points us to where we want to go, allowing us to navigate through the celestial soup. We dive deeper into the sea of the sky, exploring the world beyond our own world. We take a left at Polaris, then a right at Ursa Major. The bear’s claws scrape the window as we escape its sudden wrath. Canis Major barks loudly and kicks around our spaceship with its paws. We fly out and land in the circuit of Orion’s belt, spinning around in it twice before escaping once again.

The territory of the zodiacs comes into view next. The stars seem to have fallen out of line. A disrupting energy has been cast over their dominion, preventing them from properly ruling over the hearts of humankind. Where there should be love and peace, there is conflict and discord. The crab and the scorpion antagonize the twins until they have no choice but to climb into the cradle of the scale’s cups. As the lion nips at the archer’s heels, he fires arrows at the bull and the ram just when the two of them interlock horns in a battle. The maiden and the water-bearer mercilessly take away the life-giving fluid, letting the fish and the sea-goat flop around and choke.

We nosedive to avoid Halley’s Comet, the force lifting me out of my seat a little. Unfortunately, we zoom straight toward the asteroid belt. An assault of flying boulders heads right for us. Miraculously, the first ten or twenty rocks miss us by a hair. But when the first one hits the underside of our ship, my throat tightens. The Commander overrides the autopilot and takes control over our direction, but it’s still not enough to save us. For a while she manages to weave in and out the path of impact, until a large one takes her by surprise and shatters the front windshield.

Everything immediately goes into slow motion as we prepare to die. In the midst of my shock, I lose the ability to hear. The blunt force of the impact rattles my insides, giving wake to a sudden wave of humility and listlessness. We are not in control. We are at the mercy of fate. The factor separating our life from our death is completely out of our hands. The universe will decide the outcome of our trial as everything implodes at a snail’s pace. White shards of glass lick our exposed skin, slowly falling into our laps like fresh snow. I try to shut my eyes, but all the glass is gone by the time I manage it. I hold my breath to conserve oxygen as the frigid cold crystalizes under my skin. My fingers are turning blue. A plume of flame explodes to my side. The raging fire quickly consumes the rest of the shoddily-drawn up ship around us, eventually reaching the fuel tank.

The rubble spits me out, sending me spinning in every direction at once. In an instant, my lungs go flat and I grow even colder. I desperately flail my arms around, grabbing for support that doesn’t exist. The momentum eventually begins to lessen as I continue to slowly roll through space head first, my headache near unbearable. When I come to a complete stop, my vision clouds, and there’s nothing left to do except suffocate in the stillness. The stars turn into streaks of muted light in the distortion of my tears.

           My last heartbeat reverberates into itself, my blood painfully searching for any remaining oxygen, but to no avail. Little red dots evaporate out of my skin, leaving behind a pale corpse-like figure. A quick hotness stamps itself onto my stomach, and I look down to find a pancake of liquid silver slowly spreading from that point. The strange fluid runs over my clothes and my skin, eating away through both and replacing them with itself. The last little bit flows down over my fingers, completing the transformation. Tendrils of air reach my lungs and knock the life back into my body. My mechanical eyes click themselves open. I breathe in easily, the manufactured life turning the cogs in my new system.

           The scope of the darkness expanding in every direction for an infinite number of miles hurts my head. It’s all so intensely blue it’s back and so intensely black it’s blue. I swim up, kicking my legs and moving my arms for a while, forever. There’s no way to know how far I’ve traveled, because there are no landmarks, and I have no clear destination. And in the vastness of the universe, what is the significance of the distance I have gone? I may as well be travelling by treadmill.

           I stop and stand where I am, surprised to find that the bottoms of my feet touch a made-up surface, as if someone laid out an invisible floor for me. The corner of my eye catches a spot of gray in the distance. It looks different from the all the stars freckled across space. A feeling catching in my throat, I start to run as fast as I can toward it. The thundering sound of metal clanking against metal pushes silence out of the way. After cresting a hill, I happen upon my old home: the solar system. The unfiltered, blinding sunlight hits my glittering silver skin.

           I immediately see her a short ways away. The Commander. Relief sends an electric shock through my programming. I’m not alone anymore. I am a part of something other than myself once again. I sit down and let myself revolve around the sun, like I’m on a carousel. The planets, once too large to comprehend, seem to be small enough to hold in my hand.

Just when I begin to relax, a golf ball-sized object hits the back of my head. I quickly get up and turn around to find The Commander looking at me with a smug look on her face. I lean over and pick up Pluto, the closest one to me, squeezing the foam ball in my hand before launching it at my opponent. I miss and hit the sun. A brown plume of dust bursts out from where it entered.

A war of planets sends dodgeballs flying through the field one after another. I run for it and catch Mars in my hand, steadying myself so I don’t fall. Some of the blood red dust rains into the void of space before I toss it back. She ducks behind the sun, letting the planet roll out into obscurity. The Commander then, with great effort, manages to throw Jupiter back to me, the side of it grazing my leg. I fall to the ground, laughing due to the sudden, fresh adrenaline.

I chase after her, and she retreats into the distance. We speed away from home again, likely moving at a pace of a thousand miles per step, reality trailing along behind us. Giant plumes of new nebulas of every shape and shade appear to either side of our path as we skate across the universe. The variety and kind of the vibrant colors surpasses the magnificence of every work of art I’ve ever seen before, putting even the Renaissance to shame. Out of energy, The Commander stops and turns around, and I do the same once I catch up.

           We humbly lay our eyes on the disks of white and gold littering the dark with hurricanes of stars. I open my mouth a little without meaning to, allowing a breath that doesn’t exist to escape. Our own Milky Way Galaxy blends right in with the rest of them, a small pool of pure milk amongst others just like it. It’s weird how the universe wouldn’t notice or care if our galaxy disappeared, but we sure would. It’s everything to the insignificant nothings, and nothing to the significant everything.  

           The Commander carefully steps onto the Andromeda Galaxy, letting it hold her weight. She leaps for the Triangulum Galaxy next, careful to land where she wants, and not into the nothingness. Farther into the beyond, ten or so white whirlpools ahead, I spot a fissure in the fabric of space glimmering like a fresh gash. I tag along now, using the stepping stones as a makeshift path to another plane of existence, a portal to anywhere, a guide to new realms of existence.

           The wormhole sucks us into its woven tapestry of pastels and neon lights, gently and swiftly passing us from one end to the other like we’re liquid in a straw. The plasma surrounding and enveloping my metal casing grows hot, smelting me into a single bullet-shaped capsule. Time doesn’t exist anymore. Numerically calculable movement has ceased. Instead, everything occurs in a singularity of motion, a mere blast of Now. The Big Bang happens as man lands on the moon as dinosaurs rule the Earth as I walk into Alcorn High School for the first time as hot liquid rock spins out and forms spheres of baby planets as the Civil Rights Movement begins as the Civil War ends as Beatrice kisses me as everything and everyone dies. A wrenching headache pulls my mind out of the present just when the forces in charge flatten my being until I’m only one atom thick. We’re flat paper planes fluttering by on flimsy paper wings. As we finally near the exit, we’re compressed once again, this time into a single, so-small-it’s-imaginary dot. This is the epitome of not mattering.

I wake up in a small room with harsh lighting. I’m back in my pink dress and boxers. Despite how hollowed and atrophied my body feels, the weightlessness allows me the strength to fly to the door and open the latch. I drift from room to room in the International Space Station, being careful to not disturb the white wires and machines on all sides of me. I reach the airlock room and open the door without thinking over it.

I slide out of the hatch and swim into the open nothingness directly above the vast Earth. I look at the space station one last time, and I spot an astronaut working on the exterior wiring. He looks back at me and releases his grip on his wrench. It stays afloat right next to him. I stare at my reflection in his helmet as I finally allow Earth’s gravity to take hold of me.

I’m falling. The moon shrinks like a white balloon that someone let the air out of. Everything becomes smaller and smaller with each microsecond, but I feel as though I am still in space. Everything that exists is space. I spread out my limbs, but the added wind resistance does little to stop me. I involuntarily flip over stomach-first, looking down on North and South America. I fall through the clouds, and I’m able to see a residential area with big houses and gardens. I can feel the clocks in every one of those buildings ticking faster and faster as I return to the surface of the earth. I hit the hard dirt next to the road at the same time that a black truck speeds past on it.

I wake up to the sound of a struggling motor and Kirsten yammering on about something. It’s completely dark outside now. I yawn. Still too exhausted to think or move, I watch the yellow lines flow into and out of the glint of the vehicle’s old headlights. A cloud of unsuspecting gnats hits my half of the window, a few of them sticking to the stains of random crud. I feel heavy. And exhausted.

“Lily,” Kirsten says, snapping her fingers. “Lily!”

“Huh?”

“We’re at Jacob’s house now.” She swerves into his driveway. The bright lights from the massive house’s windows shine on the freshly power-washed brick driveway.

I’m not going to ask her why we’re visiting him. I’m too tired and heartbroken to talk about anything at this point. Besides, I daresay I’ll find out what kind of fucked-up adventure we’re on now sooner than I’d want to anyway.

I prepare to unbuckle my seatbelt. Just two seconds before the wheels stop rolling, the truck jolts upwards as a terrible, animalistic sound twists around in my ears. My throat goes dry and I stop breathing. For a moment, neither of us wants to move. Still shaking, I open my door cautiously. Then Kirsten does the same.

She extracts her phone from her jacket pocket and turns on the flashlight, pointing the beam at the front tire. My breathing stops again. I hear hers hitch too. The exposed mass of orange fur slowly soaks up the blood running out of the crushed veins of the animal. All four paws look unharmed, which only makes it all worse somehow. Two white triangles, which I suppose are the ears, peek out from the front of the tire. It’s an awful sight.

“How are we going to tell Jacob that we ran over his cat?” I blurt out.

“We don’t.”

“But… isn’t he going to wonder what happened to it?”

“That’s not our issue. We’re not telling him.”

“Well, Kirsten…” I begin, breathless still. “He’s going to find out. It’s bleeding out in the middle of his front driveway, for fuck’s sake. How did you not see it? You had your headlights on, right? And…”

“Shut up,” she says curtly. “What’s done is done. You have to clean this up so he never finds it. We need to forget it ever happened. Otherwise… we’re just done. We’d be so screwed. I have a plastic bag in the back that you can use to pick the thing up.”

“Me?” I respond angrily. “Why should it be me? You’re the one that ran the damned thing over!”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that I’ve moved enough dead bodies to last me a lifetime. I just need a break from cleaning up bodily fluids, you know?”

I think it’s shitty of her to use her sister’s suicide as a way to guilt-trip me, but if I call her out for it, I’ll definitely be the one in the wrong.

“…well, I still think you should clean it up,” I insist, though I’m less sure of it.

“You’re doing this, or I’m going to call your parents and tell them to pick you up, and you can explain everything to them and drown in your own self-loathing on the long car ride home. Then you can spend the entire summer with no friends and nothing to do, so all you do is cry and think about why Beatrice left you as your parents try to distance themselves from you. So unless you’d like for that to happen, I’ll drive the truck back a few feet so you can clean it up.”

           “You’re a complete piece of shit, Kirsten. You know that, right?” I seethe, talking through my teeth.

Kirsten smiles sarcastically. She throws a box of tissues and a plastic bag at me and shuts the passenger side door. “Have fun,” she deadpans as she walks away.

I pull out a generous amount of tissues from the box and divide them up into both of my hands. The lighting from the front windows of the house provides just enough light for me to get this done without casting too much detail onto the corpse. I put my nose in the crook of my arm for a moment to filter out the sickening smell of fresh blood. Cursing all the choices that brought me to this point, I bend down and get to work.

Chunks of cat debris fall out of my tissue-hands as I scoop the bloodied fur pile into the bag. A few handfuls later, I reach the bowels. I spring backwards immediately at the smell, retching. I throw my fluid-soaked tissues onto the ground so I can reach around and unzip my dress a bit. Quickly, I pull the loosened fabric in the front up and over my nose and mouth. My nose doesn’t want to smell. My eyes do not want to see. My brain does not want to think. Losing my mind, I rip a bunch of tissues out and then pace around quickly, trying to keep it together. My consciousness cuts in and out as I force myself through the grueling process. I don’t feel like I’m crying, but tears are relentlessly streaming down my face as evidence that I am.  

Jacob’s recliner is really soft. I slowly sip the iced tea that Jacob’s mom gave me. He and Kirsten are here with me in the living room, sitting on the couch in front of me, playing a video game together. Kirsten legitimately seems to be largely unbothered with the events that just transpired. There are times when I think that she doesn’t actually care about anyone or anything but herself unless it’s convenient for her to do so. It’s like she has the demo version of empathy. Jacob’s mom looks up from her computer and notices me staring down the back of Kirsten’s head. I give her a quick, nervous smile to make myself seem less on-edge. She says something that I don’t focus on, and I give an automatic response. She shuts her computer and goes into the other room.

Jacob keeps looking at me about every ten seconds, and I don’t know what that means. Sometimes I think he’s creepy on purpose just to make people uncomfortable. But at the moment, all I can think about is how his acne seems to have gotten a whole lot worse. The large red circles in combination with his greasy skin give him the exact appearance of a fresh pepperoni pizza. His skin even has a sickly tinge of yellow, just like the melted cheese. He never goes outside, so his only light comes from the glow of his TV when he plays video games or when he watches, I’m assuming, tentacle porn.

“Why the hell are we here, anyway?” I ask Kirsten as Jacob turns around for the tenth time. I get up and stand between them and the TV.

“Oh, right.” She puts down the controller for a moment. “Jacob, I’m going to have to borrow a lot of money,” she says bluntly.

           He doesn’t even question it. “How much do you need?”

           “I don’t know. As much as you can give me, I guess. I’m willing to do something to earn it, if you have any suggestions.”

           He looks at me as if he wants me to disappear, then whispers something into her ear. I find this strange, since Jacob’s generally an open book with everyone about everything. I analyze Kirsten’s face to try to make a guess at what he’s saying to her, but she’s not reacting in any way.

“No thanks. As much as I love dick in my mouth, I’ve had more than enough of it in one 24-hour period.” I squint at her. Kirsten seriously concerns me sometimes. “On a related note, do you have any mouthwash?”

“Alright, well…” I begin, uncomfortable. “I’ll be… in another room.”

“Did you not hear what I said? I’m not sucking his dick.”

“Yeah, I know.” I feel their eyes on me. I quickly dab. Kirsten grabs her forehead in disgust.

Whenever something awkward happens, I usually dab to try to make it go away. My philosophy is, the best way to make someone forget something cringey and stupid you did is to do something even cringier and stupider. It usually stuns everyone around me enough to where it actually works.

I leave anyway, because I have to use the bathroom. For some reason saying that in front of Jacob would make me feel unsettled in a deeply unexplainable way.

Somehow, I forget to pee and end up standing at the sink for ten minutes, staring into the middle distance as water rushes down the drain. I wish I could flush myself down the toilet and escape into the ocean. I start to half-heartedly tear up. I’m too tired to even cry properly. It’s the kind of pitiful, lazy cry that comes from simply forgetting to blink out the warm water. I would just hang out in Jacob’s bedroom instead of in here, but I’m really afraid of what I might find in there. You only make a mistake like that once.

Jacob has an unhealthy obsession with Hitler and all things Hitler related. I really don’t think that he’s a neo-Nazi, or even agrees with anything that Hitler stands for, especially since he and his family are incredibly Jewish. But for whatever reason, he’s completely, undeniably in love with his image. His room is covered top to bottom in various articles of Hitler paraphernalia. His white carpeting has hundreds of tiny Hitler pictures on it. I have no idea where he bought something like that, or any of it, for that matter. Like, where the fuck do you get Hitler pillows? Or a Hitler bedspread? Or a life-sized Hitler doll?

It doesn’t stop there. Every single day at lunch, he watches a Hitler-centric Taiwanese amine series that loosely translates into “Hitler My Love”. The language is in Portuguese, and the subtitles are in Spanish. Don’t ask me how that makes any sense. Based on what he’s forced me to watch of it, it seems to be centered on a crack ship pairing of Hitler and the Buddha. And honestly, it’s not that bad.

Jacob also likes painting, even though he isn’t that good at it. He has about a thousand pieces of his work in this bathroom. It’s mostly random landscapes, different animals, or, of course, Hitler. However, a single painting of a yellow car on the wall catches my eye as I sit on the toilet. A twinge of pain hits me in the chest. A flash of headlights breezes through my mind’s eye, and an imaginary gust of wind moves past my face. And then, all at once, I’m gone.

 ------------------------------------

           FOUR MONTHS AGO- 1am

The rapping at my window makes me drop my phone onto my face. My stomach drops and I stop breathing until I realize what’s really happening. My hands scramble to pick the glowing phone back up as I look at the window. Beatrice smiles at me and waves. I glance down at the time on my phone. A little mad, I unlatch the window and open it so I can talk to her.

“What are you doing here? It’s past 1.”

“I texted you ten minutes ago, saying that I wanted to hang out, and you said sure.”

“Yeah, but I thought you meant, like, tomorrow.”

“I even told you I was on my way.”

“I thought you were kidding.”

“I wasn’t. But that isn’t the point. Are you going to come with me or not?”

I shift my weight onto my other foot. I don’t know what to do. “Uh… I don’t know. I want to hang out with you and everything, but… it’s really late at night, and… I’m tired, and…”

“Come on. I have something I want to show you. I think you’re going to have a good time tonight, Lily. Just go with me.”

“I really want to get some sleep…” I begin.

“Oh, come on. Please?” she begs, folding her hands and batting her eyes.

I force myself to not smile in awe of her. She doesn’t need to know how cute she’s being, because she’d have complete control over me if she only knew her effect on me. “Okay, I’ll go with you,” I finally say, unable to resist it.

I put on a jacket over my pajamas and slip on my sneakers. I grip my forehead as my vision clouds. My body isn’t used to moving this late at night. Regardless, I’m glad that this is happening. If I’m being honest, I’d probably spend another ninety minutes or more on my phone if Beatrice wasn’t dragging me out of here. I turn around to see if she’s still watching me. She is. I hurry up and exit my room, go down the hall, and leave my house, careful to slowly rotate the knob so it doesn’t click too loudly. If my parents heard me, that would be the end of me and Beatrice, and, by extension, the end of the most interesting period of my life.

Classic rock softly sounds from the speakers in her car. The second thing I notice is that it smells a lot different in here. I sniff the air and look around to see what’s changed. Beatrice eyes me weirdly. “What is it?” she asks.  

“Nothing. It just smells like…”

“Flowers?” She glances sideways at me as I nod. “Yeah. It’s a rose-scented air freshener that I bought recently. It masks the weed smell.” She turns off the internal lights and starts the engine.

“Oh. Cool.”

“I bet you’ve never snuck out of your house before.”

“Nope... I’m not really that kind of person.”

“I don’t think I could ever live like you do. All you do is go to school, eat, and take naps. You literally never do anything. I love you, but you’re really boring sometimes, and that annoys me.”

“Gee, thanks.” My brain fogs up with regret as I realize that she’s right. “You know… my life really is kind of… flat. I’m fully aware of that, and I’ve always been. I don’t do much of anything. It sucks.”

“I mean, of course it does. You never take any risks, ever. You’re glued to one spot. I think if you did something out of your comfort zone for once, you’d be a lot happier. That’s why I’m taking you out here tonight. For a little while, I’ve had to listen to you complain about how boring your life is, and how much you hate it. About how you do the same boring shit every day, and that you want to break out of it. Here’s your chance.”

“I never said that I hate my life. Just that it’s dull.”

“Still, you need to take a risk sometime. Just do something without thinking twice. I do whatever I want in the moment without thinking about it much. It makes living a lot more interesting. There’s so much more to life than taking naps and playing it safe all the time, you know.”

“Maybe, but I honestly think that if I had your lifestyle, I’d be dead by the end of the week,” I say, thinking about all the stories she’s told me.

“I don’t do things that are unsafe. I’m not an idiot. I just say yes to mostly everything, and do mostly everything I want to do. Any time I make a decision, I ask myself if it will almost certainly kill myself or others, and if it won’t, I do it. I don’t think about it. I do it.”

“You see, I prefer listening to your stories rather than living them out myself. It doesn’t take much for me to not be bored, but you risk everything you have every time you go out to do something fun. That sounds like a terrifying way to live.

“It isn’t, once you get over yourself and think about what really matters. I don’t think many people at all think that way. It’s not like people can punish you for being direct, or for doing things that are out of the ordinary. I just say whatever I think, and it’s not a big deal to me how they respond to it. And almost always, the things I do go well. You’d be surprised by how many people will give you what you want if you just ask for it.”

“I still don’t get how you are the way that you are. I couldn’t imagine just letting it all hang out. I think I’m content with being boring, because I don’t think I could handle the alternative.”

“Do you want to know how I had sex with a girl for the first time?”

“Uh…”

“I was in a park, and I saw a girl, and then I went up to her and said, ‘Hey, do you want to have sex with me?’ and she said yes.”

“…Is it really that easy?”

“Everything is that easy.”

She can’t see the color of my face in the dark, but I look out the window anyway. A slow coolness radiates off the glass and into my skin, my forehead barely a hair away from it. She gets everything she wants from people because she asks for it, and she lives like she doesn’t know she can bleed. It’s so wildly different than how I live.

“Hey,” I say subconsciously, catching myself off-guard. “Where are you taking me, anyway? I just realized that you never told me, and it seems like important information.”

“I’m taking you out to an abandoned warehouse so I can murder you and leave you there without a trace. You’re the first on the list of many killings I will carry out tonight.”

“Ha-ha. You think you’re clever,” I say, even though I half-believe it. We’ve only been dating for a week. I don’t really know her well at all.

I barely make out the basic shape of her facial expression. By the look of it, she knows I got a little scared. “Of course I’m not killing you, you idiot. I’ll tell you that, at least.”

After a good bit of driving, Beatrice goes off the road and into a seemingly random field of overgrown grass. It’s the kind of place that you would never think about or recognize, even if you went past it every day of your life. For a couple of minutes, she doesn’t get out. She sits there, her eyes closed, motionless. She’d never admit it, but she’s just as exhausted as I am.

The night sky here is endless. There’s no major source of light pollution around for miles. The black is solid black, and the white is solid white. No barrier lies between us and outer space. The natural light of the cosmos throws a faint, blueish pallor onto the dead stalks of grass. It’s simply perfect out here. I want to say something to her about how pretty the stars are tonight, but that seems like it would be stupid somehow.

My eyes lazily open as I hear her door pop open and slam shut. She opens my door, allowing the slightly chilly air into the car. I stretch my limbs and get out.

“Okay. Don’t turn around just yet.” She puts her hands over my eyes. “Okay, turn around 180 degrees and walk forward a little.” It’s a bit awkward to walk like this, but we make it work somehow. “Behold,” she shouts enthusiastically. She quickly removes her hands from my face. The lights at the top edge of the billboard faintly illuminate the message below.

  Marriage =

1 man + 1 woman

Sponsored by the Fordville Baptist Church

 “I like my dad, and I usually like what he preaches, but this was stupid of him. I’ll make him pay for this eventually, somehow. ”

It’s too dark to make out what face she’s making. “How so?”

“I haven’t decided yet. I want it to be something big, something that will make him reconsider what kinds of messages he decides to put on display. And unless he wakes up one morning with an insatiable urge for dick, it doesn’t seem like he’ll come to that sort of conclusion on his own.”

“Does this sudden thirst for revenge have anything to do with the church dance class he made you sign up for recently?”

A look of mild terror washes over her face. “That dance group is so fucking gay. It makes me want to backflip into a pool of acid.” She sighs. “If a genie gave me three wishes, all three of them would be used to take my face off of that ‘Dabbing for Jesus’ album we made.”

I laugh. “This is the first time you’ve told me about that. You need to show it to me.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you still like me somehow, and I don’t want you to stop,” she jokes.

“Well… I won’t.”

The moon and the halo of stars above her head cast a bright, heavenly glow on her face, allowing me to see a smile creep onto it. The night sky is on full-blast at this dark, quiet hour, but my eyes have completely adjusted to it in this moment. I stare at her; the darkened, blue figure that I suppose is Beatrice. She stares back with the same amount of intensity.

“You’re so cute,” she says, getting a little closer to me. Before I can even process her statement, she walks past me and heads for the billboard.

“Where are you going?” I choke out, flustered.

She turns around and gives me a mischievous sort of grin. “We’re going to the top,” she says matter-of-factly.

 ---------------------------------

The bathroom lights are off. The world is gone. All that exists is the feeling of my pulsing fingertips on my burning face. Every cell of my head is on fire, and the smoke is choking me, and I can’t breathe anymore. I reach up to flick on the switch, done remembering. I messily unravel a wad of toilet paper and wipe my tears and blow my nose in it. I open my legs and drop it into the toilet.

When I’ve least expected it, memories of her have been coming back for the past two hours. Smatterings of details rush in and knock the wind out of me, like someone ripped a carpet out from under my feet, and then kicked me straight in the teeth. Usually, it’s simply a brief glimpse- a single muted Polaroid clipping depicting her touch, her smile, the corner of her face, or simply the emotion of those things. And in the rest of the image, she is lost in abstraction. A swirl of muted color surrounds the most striking details of her essence.

But, on rare occasions such as these, the memories are as strong and life-like as the experience itself. The faded clippings are taped together and digitally enhanced against my will. They all run through a system that orders them, and they’re printed and taped together seamlessly. And then, frame by frame, photo by photo, the memory reel rolls through my mind’s eye, producing a stunning HD motion picture that’s as good as any cringey romantic comedy out there.  

The result is a strong memory unlike any regular memory. Normal memories are made and forgotten. This memory of her transcends flimsy synapses between neurons. The actor in my head that plays Beatrice speaks each act, scene, and line with cruel accuracy. Each element of the story is personified and exaggerated like it would be in big-budget movie. Her Hollywood charm pushes through the human weakness of forgetfulness and allows the film to replay with stark clarity. Every feeling is a knife flying and gleaming in the harsh stage lights. The roses are elegantly sad pools of freshly bled love.

There are so many details about her that I wish I could forget. Her pink lipstick. The smell of her perfume. Her smooth voice. How her face would light up whenever she saw me. The way the endless sparks dancing in her eyes looked exactly like the stars in the sky. The way she does anything. Her soft hugs. Her intoxicating kisses. Her lightning bolt earrings. Her yellow VW bug. Her blonde hair and blue eyes- just like what Hitler would have wanted.

I go back into the living room, trusting that nothing mentally scarring is going on in there. The flat screen TV in the living room displays the results of a video game they just finished playing. I breathe out a sigh of relief and walk in. Jacob has a smug look on his face, signaling that he was the winner. I look at Kirsten’s half of the screen, then at her.

YOU LOST

GAME OVER

Kirsten’s hands are still going strong, quickly flicking and clicking at all the buttons, her mouth half-open as she stares blankly into the screen buzzing with static. She looks dead. The sight of her makes me feel deeply unsettled. It’s like watching someone trying to walk through a wall over and over again.

“Stop it, will you?” I say, trying to yank the controller out of her death-grip. Arms aching, I lift her up out of her seat for a second before she falls back down. It’s like there’s not even a person in there.

“Hey,” Jacob begins, “After this game, I have to let the cats inside,” Jacob mentions, staring intently at the screen, poised and ready for Kirsten’s video game persona to show up.

I watch the remaining broken flicker of light die in Kirsten’s eyes. Her right one twitches. She puts her controller down and covers her mouth with one hand. Jacob swoops in quickly, gunning her character down. Kirsten looks at me with a panicked expression.

“We have to go now,” I say, speaking for her. “It’s getting really late.”

“Oh,” Jacob responds, disappointed. He sets his controller down. Discomfort hits me. I know he wanted us to stay, because he never gets any visitors. He hardly has any friends at all, besides us, maybe Jordan, and his cat.

           The start of the car ride is silent. I know for a fact that Kirsten is thinking about the sack of cat purée sitting in the back as much as I am.

           “How much money did you get?” I ask.

           “Enough.”

           “How much is enough?”

           “Something like… nine hundred or a thousand or something.”

           I choke on my spit. “That’s… that’s a lot of money. Think of what we could do with that. We could go anywhere we wanted. This could actually be good. Great, even,” I suggest, desperate to believe that all of this can be good for me.

           Kirsten says nothing. I look over at her. Her lips are pursed tightly, and her eyes look even more dead than usual. She stiffly reaches for a button on the CD system. The sound of a blender being grinded up in another blender penetrates my eardrums.

“Is… is that, uh… an Anal Cunt album?”

           “Yeah,” she says, turning it up. She accelerates, staying unnaturally still as she does so. Even over the tortured screaming, I can make out her sniffling.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“That’s a stupid question.”

“…sorry.”

Admittedly, Anal Cunt is really good at cutting out invasive thoughts. If I listened to this all the time, I’d be having a better time at blocking things out. As the “music” keeps playing, I really get into it and let the screaming take over my head. However, the brief seconds of bliss are kicked out from under me when Kirsten decides to turn down the volume to finally express her feelings.

“The Earth is still spinning. Society is still functioning. And the world isn’t on fire and burning to the ground. That’s what’s wrong.”

           “…oh.”

“It’s weird to see how the rest of the planet goes on just fine without her. Her death didn’t leave so much as a scorch mark. Nothing fundamental about anything is different, as if she never even existed. It’s strange how insignificant we are, in the scheme of things.” She pauses. “Also, you really suck at talking to people. I hope you know that.”

“I do.”

“Another thing. Other than the smoothie I just had and half a sandwich, I haven’t eaten in three days. I’ve barely even slept in three days…” she mentions.

“Oh. That’s… not good.”

           “I want to eat somewhere. Chin But would be the only place in this area open past 9. Does that sound good to you?” she asks hollowly.

           “Yes,” I agree, only because I’m afraid that she’d run over me and put me in a plastic bag too if I said no to anything.

           Chin But is a Chinese buffet that honestly sucks actual shit. It’s like school cafeteria food that was left in the back of a freezer and became too old and disgusting to feed to students. The congealed mix of pig assholes and duck tongues they call their “mystery meat special” isn’t even the best part about this place. Parts of the sign shorted out at some point, leaving the sign with the letters “Chin--- Bu--et”. Later on, someone decided that it would be funny if the sign read “Chin But”, so they knocked the “e” off by throwing a bottle at it, as made evident by the broken glass littering the space under it. It’s a really classy place.

           The original Chinese buffet that was in this building turned out to be a front for money laundering, so it was shut down. Later, it turned into a Walgreens, but its profit margin wasn’t high enough to justify its location, so it moved to the city. Now it’s a Chinese restaurant again.

           The exterior of the restaurant isn’t super inviting. It’s been repainted over and over again by the staff in a feeble attempt to cover up the graffiti, but it hasn’t worked out for them yet. New vulgar messages spring up on occasion from people who feel the need to confess that they banged my mom. The thick, red paint peels off a lot, especially at the bottom where kids can pick at it. Homeless men scream at sometimes as customers enter the door, sometimes for a reason, and sometimes for no reason. The inside smells like dead fish and undercooked horse meat, and the lights flicker every five minutes.

           “Mac n’ cheese, my favorite,” I say in a monotone, too tired for vocal inflections. I take the cheese-crusted ladle’s handle in my hand and scoop out the sludge, plopping it liberally onto my plate.  

Spaghetti is actually my favorite food. Macaroni and cheese is more like my side hoe.

Kirsten’s already sitting at our table with a plate full of food. Even with the array of pungent foods violating my nose, I can still detect her BO from here. It’s revolting. I aimlessly walk around, looking for something that looks edible, but I’m not in the mood to eat at all, and the crawfish and questionable-looking oysters aren’t doing much to bring my appetite back. However, if we weren’t in this shitty Chinese restaurant right now, I’d be at home, all alone, crying myself to sleep. I guess the fact that I’m not a hysterical mess right now is my one small victory for the day.

           I sit in a seat in front of Kirsten, noticing that the table is oddly sticky. I cringe. I lift my spoon and dig in.

           “You’re not sitting with me,” Kirsten says as I take a mouthful, as if she’s some popular girl in a bad teen movie. “I want to eat alone.”

           “You’re kidding, right?”

           Her eyes slowly move to the left, then to the right, and then back onto me. “No.”

           “Well, fine,” I say, getting a little angry. “I’ll sit over there then.” I point to the table across from the original one.

           She doesn’t even care enough to respond. In a huff, I sit off by myself like I was told. The strip of yellow florescent lighting above me begins to short out. The little taste the mac n’ cheese did have is gone now. I set my plate to the side and go over to get a new plate, dragging my feet.

           I listlessly mix my bowl of egg drop soup around with my spoon as I try to psyche myself up to eat it. I don’t want to do anything. I just want to go to sleep so I can forget about how much I suck. This has been the longest day of my life.

           I jump a little when a homeless man sits down in front of me. A few seconds later, I notice a blow-up doll with yellow hair and large blue eyes stuffed into the space beside him. It slides into the ground and grazes my leg. Stiff and uncomfortable, I wait for him to look up and say something to me, or acknowledge my presence in some small way. When he doesn’t, I get really confused until I eventually realize that he doesn’t even know I’m sitting in here. He must be so far gone that he can’t detect when another human being is in his presence. If no one gave me the time of day for long enough, that’s what would happen to me. He starts to shovel his plate of rice into his mouth with his fingers, spilling it all over the table and his lap. I don’t mind it too much. He seems interesting.

           I’m wondering how long he’s been like this. Judging by his smell and the layer of dirt covering him, probably a while. All homeless people seem to have the same tired face and matted hair, no matter their age. He really could be anywhere from thirty to sixty. From what I can see of his eyes as he’s hunched over like that, they seem to be hollow and vacant. His black leather jacket, riddled with holes and unidentifiable stains, is sliding off his thin, gaunt shoulders. It’s awkward how much he looks like Kirsten.

           My stomach drops to floor. The question of whether or not I’ll end up just like him screams in my head. My breathing slows down as I try to remain calm and gather my thoughts. I slowly take a sip from my cold soup, gagging immediately as my brain registers the new taste as an old person’s ass, and then letting the vile liquid run out of my mouth and back into the bowl. I sit there for a couple of minutes, not moving. I look around at the near-empty restaurant, as if it could distract me from my future image.

This man has fallen out of the social web as I have, and as Kirsten has. This man’s story will forever be a mystery to me. Maybe he’s out here because the ones he used to be close to dropped him, or maybe he’s here because he dropped them. As for me, I know which one I am, and I feel like a shit-rag for it. I can sit and look down at him and feel sorry for him now, but I could very well end up being just as unkempt and pathetic as the meth-scabbed homeless man in front of me.

The weight of what I’ve done hits me fully. It’s evil, sinful. I’ve cut myself off from the entire world. I don’t matter anymore. It’s a selfish thing Kirsten and I have done, to run away from ourselves. I’m now a stain of darkness on the lives of those who know me, now that I’m gone. I’ve ruined the people who love me. The people who sat with me at lunch every day. The people I would have met and affected throughout my life in Fordville had I stayed. My classmates. My parents. My teachers. My friends Trinity and Tyra. And Jacob and Molly and Jordan. I have left my world. I’m not in a web of people anymore; I’m a meaningless dot in the sky. I’m untethered to anything; there is no gravity to save me.

I would be willing to return if Beatrice wanted me, loved me. But she doesn’t, and I’m going to have to learn to live with that. I have to keep on going out into the dark unknown and leave everything behind if I am ever to find myself again. Everyone else can go fuck themselves. Maybe that decision makes me crazy, or even unusual, but I don’t care. It might be fucked up, but I don’t care. I simply can’t be bothered to think about anything but myself today, and I hate myself for that. I feel so guilty about this, but not guilty enough to change anything about how this night is going.

The homeless man glances up at me. A look of vague disgust washes over his face as he finally realizes that I’m there. Grunting, he hobbles away, carrying the sex doll under his arm. I look to my right at Kirsten. She’s smirking at me. I put down my fork and look up at the ceiling. I’m about to file a complaint with God.

“I’m sitting with you, and there isn’t anything you can do about it,” I say, trying to hide the tone of desperation in my voice.

“Okay. I couldn’t give less of a shit, so…”

“I’m going to go ahead and leave the check with you,” the waitress says, setting down our cups of water and then the piece of paper. “We’re closing up soon.”

“You too,” Kirsten says. I raise an eyebrow at her, but then I decide not to question it.

She still doesn’t look at me. Taking the cup in both hands, she takes huge gulps of the water, not stopping until half of it is gone. She slams it down on the table and wipes her mouth.

“Do you even breathe?”

She belches. “I wish I didn’t.”

There are many paths I can choose from where I am right now in this place in time. All of them are bad. Half of them will get me killed. The other half will also get me killed. I’ve got crosshairs on my neck no matter what. Tears start to well up in my eyes, because I never know what the right thing is. It would be crazy of me to return.

The tension inside me builds up as I fight with myself over whether to go home or to go with Kirsten. The closing restaurant’s silence is getting to me. Any remaining sounds are drowned out by the buzzing of the confusion.

“I’m scared that I’m doing the wrong thing here,” I begin, unable to contain it. “My parents are probably so worried. And yet, if I contact them in any way, they’d be so mad. I can’t call them. I can’t go home either… I’d rather die. I’ve badly messed up and I don’t know what to do.”

“Whatever you decide to do is whatever you decide to do. It doesn’t even matter, in the vast scheme of things,” she replies unhelpfully, passively picking a hair out of her noodles with her fork.

“It’s just that I don’t want to disappoint them, you know? They’ve come to expect more than this from me, and-”

“I don’t think you understand how much I don’t care about your problems.”

“- it would hurt if I saw a world where they didn’t think so highly of me. I don’t want to crush them. I can’t stand people being disappointed in me. Maybe it’s dumb, but I’d rather never come home than face that. And besides, after the whole Beatrice situation I mentioned earlier, I don’t have anything to stay for.”

“You can fix what happened between you and your stupid girlfriend. You have no right to feel like this is it. She’s still alive, isn’t she?” she says as if she’s genuinely asking.

“Yeah?”

“Well, then. There you go. Everything can be fixed, and everything can be mended until someone involved in the shit-fest dies. All it would take to fix your problems would be a conversation. As for me, I need a time machine.”

“Still, I just can’t go through with it. I’m not strong enough to crawl to her and beg her to hang out with me, and I’m definitely not strong enough to talk to my parents ever again.”

Kirsten takes out her phone, seemingly in order to actively block me out. She touches the screen a few times, and then quickly looks at me. “I’m calling your parents.”

My insides fill up with knives. “No. You can’t. I swear, Kirsten, if you do that…”

“Then you’ll… what?” We both look at the screen as she flashes it toward me. “It’s ringing.” She gives me a smug look as I try to grab for it. “Do you want to do this, or do you want me to do it? Because it has to happen, one way or another.”

“Give it,” I spit, desperate to end it. “You promised that you wouldn’t call them.”

She places a hand gently over the screen. “This isn’t the end of the world. It doesn’t matter if I tell them everything. It doesn’t matter if I don’t. One day, we’re all going to be dead anyway, and our useless monkey skeletons will evaporate as the sun swallows the earth whole. If you look at the small shit, it just seems so pointless to believe that anything we do matters. So, stop panicking, because it’s really annoying. The universe isn’t going to disappear over this.”

“But…”

Kirsten shushes me and puts the phone to her ear. “Hello, is this Mrs. Sandoval? Yeah. Hi. This is Kirsten Bloom – you might remember me from the book club- and… uh… your daughter’s with me. I just thought you should know that she’s safe, since it’s so late and everything,” she says with an unusual level of calmness. It’s really weird hearing Kirsten speak in a polite tone to someone. It sounds so artificial.

I fold my arms and put my head down, desperate to block it out. My conscious digs itself deeper into the table as I do everything in my power to pretend that this isn’t happening. My fingers somehow find my ears, and I plug them. Nonetheless, pieces of the conversation somehow reach me from miles away, entering me about once every seven seconds. They build up and bounce around in my head, unnerving me with each syllable.

…asked her to be the one to talk to you, but she didn’t want to. I think she’s…

…found her at the gas station, and…

…but she really wants to stay with me. I’m going to keep her with me for…

…I swear I’m not her girlfriend.  I swear I’m not. I barely want to be her friend. Goodbye.

She taps me on the shoulder. My sense of sound slowly comes back. The chatter of the employees closing up the place fills my head.

“Is it all over?” I ask, peeking out from over my arms.

“No, the universe is still here, unfortunately. I checked a few seconds ago.”

“Fuck off. You knew what I meant.” I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand.

She slaps a handful of 1s on the table and stands up. “I’m going out to smoke. Meet me by the truck when you’re done.”

I grab several cookies from the desert bar and rush out the door a few minutes later. The homeless man is sitting outside on the sidewalk, setting up his camp for the night.  Kirsten’s over in the far side of the parking lot. A large plume of smoke billows up every so often, each particle lighting up in the neon Chin But sign. I look up. The sky is a lot darker now, but not dark enough for the stars to show up yet. As I eat the last cookie, I circle around to the back where we parked. I try the passenger’s side door, but it doesn’t open.

Kirsten comes back five minutes later, looking more disheveled than ever before. However, the first thing that catches my eye is the sex doll she’s dragging over here by the ankle. My eyebrows come together as she unlocks the door and throws it into my seat.

“Did you seriously steal that from the homeless dude?”

“Yeah,” she says, like it’s the most obvious and sane thing in the world.

“Why?”

“Because I’m fucking tired, Lily, and I need some fucking sleep. And I didn’t bring a pillow or anything with me. This will have to do. And you’re going to have to hold onto it while we’re driving, because she’ll fly away if we put her in the back.”

I give her a quick nod and get in, forced to let the doll stay in my lap because there’s no room elsewhere. I don’t have the energy to pursue any kind of argument with her. If anything, I just want this day to be over. But above all else, I just want to leave her and go off on my own.

There’s something deeply absurd about running away from the person you’re running away with, but it’s definitely something I should consider. Kirsten is completely unstable, more so than usual. She keeps getting us into horribly complicating situations, and since she’s grieving her sister’s suicide so heavily, there’s a very probable chance that she’s going to end up getting pissed enough to murder me if I don’t get away soon. However, I have a sick feeling that I wouldn’t get too far.

Runaway Teenager Found In Ditch Clutching Heavily-Used Sex Doll

           I blink back that image as I buckle myself in.

           The sex doll’s plastic beach-ball-like material is sticking to my legs from all my nervous sweating. I wrap my arms around her waist because I don’t have another decent place to put my hands. I rest my head on her back and breathe in and out, trying to fall asleep again. A disturbing thought shocks me back to life. My eyes snap open. For a while, this is probably the closest I’ll ever get to the loving caress of a woman.

 “This is my new girlfriend,” I say.

 Kirsten laughs hollowly. “We should name her,” she says flatly. “How about Lexi?”

“Lexi? You mean, like that girl in our second period?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I’ve never met a girl named Lexi that isn’t a total whore. It just seems to fit.”

           I go into a haze as Kirsten begins to accelerate at an unsafe speed. It’s not making much of an impression on me. No adrenaline comes. I may as well be watching Wheel of Fortune at my grandfather’s house. In this moment, I’m speeding on the highway in the middle of the night. I have a sex doll named Lexi sitting in my lap. I should feel like I’m on the top of the world, but I’ve never felt more constrained. I’m past caring. I’m past thinking. I’m so tired that I’ve floated off to the world of dreams without my mind. My brain keeps tuning in and out, but each muscle fiber in my body is painfully tense and very much awake.

The engine shouts out an incessant roar as Kirsten continues to press her foot firmly on the gas. She moves up the gear shift until it won’t go any farther. The windows on either side depict an image of only dark brown. My consciousness is ripped from my body as we reach ninety-five miles per hour.

 -------------------------------------------------

Highway 16 is quiet. There is nothing but chirping bugs and tall, rustling grass for a hundred yards around. The world is so still that one could hear the energy from the stars buzz. Everything is deathly peaceful.

A disturbance comes in from the distance, a little ways away down the road, the vibrations finding their way into the high-tech microphones near the edge. The low rumble of an overworked engine grows from a whisper to a scream as the seconds pass. Headlights blind the darkness as the engine cuts through the silence. From light-years away, beacons of starlight slowly penetrate the hazy gray-blue night sky. Earth and space melt into one once again.

               Tires screech as the driver makes a sudden turn to the left. The camera catches the blur of the worn tires as they zip past, disturbing the sleeping flowers and grasses. The camera then pans over to the front window of the truck. The mics pick up remnants of the sound waves from the Anal Cunt song blaring from the speakers. Through the foggy, messy window, two girls are detected, and the lenses quickly focus on them. Both of them look tense, yet blank, with their mouths slightly agape. The shorter one is holding Lexi’s hand. The taller one is smoking a cigarette. And all three of them have the same facial expression.

               The film crew can’t keep up. The director wipes his forehead and ushers everyone to pack up the equipment. The drone comes back and flies into its compartment. They drive back into the city as the truck continues to speed on to nothing and nowhere.

-------------------------------------------

I grab Lexi’s plastic tits so I can move her out of my line of vision. I squint at the road, making sure that I’m really seeing the two yellow lines to my right, and the single white line to my left.

“Oh my God… You’re driving on the wrong side of the road.”

She’s not listening. I shove Lexi’s flaccid body down into the floorboard and lean forward. I passively watch for oncoming traffic with a glazed-over feeling in my eyes. I’m still not fully absorbing the weight of the situation.

A pang of fear does whisper in my chest when I see the faint glint of lights of the 18-wheeler headed right for us, at about two football-field lengths ahead. I quickly look at the driver. She isn’t changing her speed or her direction. If anything, she’s going even faster than ever before.

I mindlessly grab the steering wheel and jerk it to the side. My neck nearly separates itself from my head as the vehicle spins out of control. Kirsten takes her foot off the accelerator, but the momentum still has us going. The front tire hits a rock, deflecting the vehicle, making us spin around a few times. The tires eventually stop running away from our control. Kirsten gets out immediately, completely unfazed.

It takes me a few more seconds to recover. I sit there stiffly, staring at nothing but the fuzz in my tired eyes, my back as straight as a perfect line. I get out, dizzy, but I walk it off and pretend that none of that even happened.

I help Kirsten fix our bed in the back of the truck, which is basically just carelessly shoving boxes and trash onto the ground and putting layers of blankets on top of the rest of the mess. Kirsten gets Lexi out of the front and tosses her where our heads are going to go. I climb in, my bones filling with lead. A crippling wave of exhaustion overtakes my body as I touch the soft blankets draped in the back of the pickup. It bowls me over, and I have to fight to not collapse and die from how badly I suddenly need sleep. It’s like not knowing you’re hungry until you smell food.

There are still random articles of clothes and garbage surrounding me where I lie, but I’m in no place to complain. My breath stops when I see The Bag. It’s still here. Neither Kirsten nor I ever got rid of it. I pluck it from beside me and set it back down again immediately. I can’t do it.

           “Kirsten… can you dispose of the cat, please? I don’t want to stand.”

           She sighs. “Sure.”

She stands and takes the tied ears of the bag and grips it firmly in her hand. She carelessly swings it until it gains momentum, allowing it to make three full rounds before she lets it go. I lift my head to watch. The carcass lands a good distance away from us, making a sickening rustling sound as it hits the ground.

           “Christ…” I mutter.

I slowly flip myself over and lie down. My body joins with the softness underneath me, and my heat begins to recycle itself in the best way. I lie there motionless for a moment, taking in the feeling, and looking at the empty land around me. I glance in the direction of the road.

My throat constricts, and I gasp for air. My heart starts to pump too quickly, thumping and thrashing and trying to get out. I shut my eyes and try to get the pictures to stop swirling, but they don’t. Of all the vast, empty fields we could have crash-landed on, why did it have to be the one with our billboard? My eyes widen, and the memories swarm them, sending me to the past.

 ---------------------------------------------------

“C’mon,” Beatrice says gently, slowly letting go of my arm. Sparks fly out from the trail of her fingertips. She smiles at me.

“Okay,” I say without thinking twice.

I awkwardly trail along behind her, trying to tread and move through the tall grass. I can’t help but feel like I’m catching a bunch of gnats and crickets in my clothes. My skin grows hotter as I keep running after her, my lungs getting tighter and tighter with each pathetic gasp.

We finally get to the circle directly under the billboard that has been recently mowed. Without saying anything to me, or even looking at me, Beatrice starts to effortlessly, thoughtlessly scale the weak-looking ladder, like it’s nothing. I swear exasperatedly under my breath. My vision clouds with fear, and I consider yelling up at her that I’ll be waiting in the car. I grab a bar with one hand, and it is frozen cold to the touch. Looking up, I realize that the ladder is straight up, with no incline whatsoever. There’s no way my clumsy ass could get up there without falling and breaking my back.

I do it anyway. I force myself to breathe out and climb the ladder without thinking. My eyes are closed, but my head is still spinning anyway. Some deep part of me knows that I’m doing this, no matter how much I try to not care about it. I decide to open my eyes despite the wind-chill. My hands are sweating, but my death grip is more than enough to keep me anchored as I keep going. The nerves in my hands are jumping around, waiting for me to let go and fall backwards in a moment of carelessness. Every time I lose my grip and my hand slips even a tiny fraction of an inch, avalanches of nerves rumble and cascade through every spot of skin on me, supplying me with bursts of adrenaline and power. I’m not afraid of falling anymore; I could swear I could fly.

I crest the top and climb onto the wooden platform, breathing heavily as my muscles buzz and ache. I feel alive, crazily alive, and more awake than I’ve ever been in my life. Weakly, I stand, and look down at the ground. Fighting off the weirdly instinctual urge to jump off, I back away slowly from the edge. I walk toward Beatrice, and I sit down next to her, both our legs dangling off the edge. We silently look at the vast swath of land below, knowing that nothing down there matters at all. This is purely exhilarating, and nothing less.

“You know…” I begin, reluctant to break the perfect silence. “Before tonight, I was scared of heights.”  

“I’ve never been.”

“Well, you’re different. You’re not actually scared of anything, and then you do things like this, and drag normal people like me along. And to be honest, that alone about you is slightly terrifying.”

“You should take notes from me. Life is better when you live recklessly.” She looks up at the stars. I do the same. They’re a little more prominent, now that we’re so high up in the air. It’s a black ceiling covered in Christmas lights, and we could touch the wires and tear it all down, if only we jumped just high enough.

“Do you ever wonder what’s out there?” I ask.

“You mean, in space?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I guess so. You know, I’ve always kind of wanted to be an astronaut. I think I’d like to experience what it’s like to be completely weightless.” She looks out into the world. “I’d like to be the first person ever to do something uniquely groundbreaking, like figure out once and for all what dark matter is made of, make contact with intelligent aliens, or visit an alternate universe. The last thing is especially interesting to me. The idea that everything and every situation that can exist does exist somewhere, out there, is just… neat.”

“That is cool, actually. Like, in one alternate universe, everything is the same as it is in this universe, except I’m wearing blue pajamas instead of green ones.”

“In another alternate universe, you don’t exist at all, and neither do I.”

“And in another alternate universe, we exist, but we exist at different time periods. And we are, like, immortal and famous. Imagine getting to meet every single president ever. Imagine all the things we could change about the world. That would be cool.”

“And in another, I’m fucking your mom.”

“She’s straight.”

“Not in that dimension, she isn’t.” She pauses. “And in another dimension, at this very moment, I’m getting gangbanged by all the presidents at once. That’d be great.”

I laugh, because it’s just so ridiculous. “So, you want to go to space just so you can fuck every single president?”

“Don’t judge my fetishes. It’s rude,” she says, pretending to be deeply offended.

I squint. “What even made you come to that idea randomly? That’s so weird. And, like…”

She smiles shyly and plugs her ears. “Sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of Abraham Lincoln’s balls slapping against my ass.”

We wildly laugh again because there’s no one around to judge us for our sheer cringey stupidity.

“I just realized something,” I say.

“And what would that be?” she asks.

“Nothing is awkward with you. Well, okay. That was a lie. I still feel awkward around you. But I don’t feel as high-strung around you as I do with other people. I feel comfortable talking to you about things I’d never talk about with anyone else.”

“I’m glad.” She pauses. “In an alternate universe, everything is the same, except you’re cool and not awkward,” she says just to tease me.

“In an alternate universe, you’re normal.”

“That’s fair.”

As the night turns, we connect and flow together as we enjoy the high of being young and dumb. It’s a calmness that reaches the sub-atomic level. Each beyond-microscopic string of particles and waves in our beings are vibrating at just the right frequency as we delve into the throes of cosmic love. This newfound power allows us to defy the known laws of quantum mechanics and to defy time itself. She is the only place where hours feel like seconds and seconds feel like hours.

Time is my enemy, and I must defeat it somehow. If I don’t, I will have to return to my regular life and leave this feeling. If I can stop the rotation and revolution of the Earth, I might have a chance. Perhaps if someone, anyone, stopped the moon’s gravity from pulling the tides of the ocean, time itself will stop. If the wind stopped blowing through the tall, blond grass, if our blood stopped pumping heat into our connected hands, if the conductor of movement stopped waving his baton, then this might last forever. If my breath and blood in my body halted for only a moment, perhaps I could catch and savor a new high vertex of the happiness in me, hold onto that single photograph and in some small way, become timeless. But even if all these things could be achieved, there is still the wind blowing cool, soft air into our faces. It is relentless. The wind carries feelings, and the wind carries time.

“I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to come back down to Earth, ever. But morning will come eventually and ruin this perfect night. I like hanging out with you, and I wish this could last longer,” I say quickly, interrupting her and the natural flow of our conversation.  

“Maybe it can,” she says slowly, looking down at her swinging feet.

“And how would that work?”

“We could just run away. We could just get in my car and leave this shithole town.” She looks at me. “I’ve always kind of wanted to go off on some kind of adventure with someone.”

“I can’t,” I say, my voice cracking a little. “I can’t just uproot my life and everything. I’m sorry. I think I’d like that too, but I just can’t,” I ramble, trying to explain myself.

“No- you don’t have to say anything else. I get it,” she says quickly, looking down again. “I’m sorry for asking. It’s just been at the back of my mind for a while. Let’s talk about something else now.”

  ----------------------------------------------

The sound of the wind blowing atop the world ceases abruptly. Literal crickets fill the silence. Fireflies dance around in the blackness, blurring the barrier between the sky and the ground. Everything is serene, and so still that it seems as though I’d break the landscape like glass if I so much as breathed too heavily or thought a single negative thought. It is too sacred a place, with the chirping of the crickets and the twinkling of the bugs and the stars, to ruin it with anything other than exhaustion.  

My throat suddenly becomes raw with a fresh wave of regret. I look around and find a can of whipped cream near my head. I’m not hungry or anything, but I figure that maybe the sound of whipped cream jizzing out of the can will drown out the sound of my imminent ugly-crying.  

“I wouldn’t eat that. It’s been sitting out for nearly a week,” Kirsten says.

I let it roll out of my hand and clink against the bed of the truck. “Oh.”

“Tomorrow, I’ll go to the grocery store and get some more food. And then we’ll get out of here.”

There’s some kind of itch deep inside myself that I can’t scratch. Looking up at the stars isn’t cute or whatever when you’re in a terrible mood. It blinds you from the fun version of thinking about space, which involves wondering what’s out there, and having the desire to wander through its eternalness in order to find out. The depressing version of space is the one I can’t get out of my head now. In the vastness of the universe, why do I, a particle, matter in it? When I think about the stars, this reinforces this view. They’re the only break in between the dark nothingness expanding in every direction for an infinite number of miles. Each one is pure and beautiful. It’s strange how I wouldn’t notice one star missing, but I would definitely notice if every star was missing. Everything is insignificant, especially when you’re alone. I’m swirling in the toilet of Not Mattering, staying awake instead of going to sleep.

Honestly, if there are any aliens out there who are willing to abduct me, I’d be open to it.

“Lily, I need you to promise me something.”

“I’m scared, but continue.”

“Don’t ever die.”

“…okay.”

“I mean it. You have to be immortal.”

“Okay.”

This insanely impossible promise is the only thing that is making me hold on.

This universe alone is bigger than the human mind can comprehend. To think that everything that exists is so big that it goes beyond the infiniteness of our own home is mind-boggling. Our world is just one bit of water in an infinite hall of glowing raindrops. Every situation conceivable is playing out somewhere, no matter how impossible it would seem to us. For example, somewhere, out there, there’s an alternate universe where Beatrice gives a shit about something.  

She was the only thing that made the usual melancholic, mundane life I live worth it. Everything was inherently interesting. The mere act of waking up became an event. I’d wake up every morning, thrilled to go to school just so I could talk to her in class. Even on stretches of days where I couldn’t see her or talk to her, every color was a more vibrant shade. Every second, no matter what I was doing, no matter what was happening, I was happy. I was on a constant, delirious high, whether I was doing my homework or climbing to the top of a billboard.

Today, I went to space. I helped my friend steal from a homeless man. I hid in a gas station trashcan, naked. I’ve almost been shot. Twice. I nearly died in a head-on collision at a hundred miles an hour. I scraped a dead cat off a Jewish Neo-Nazi’s driveway. I ran away from my home and the only life I’ve ever known.

And it all felt like nothing.

A low hiss screams out from our makeshift pillow. I guess she couldn’t hold our weight anymore. Kirsten and I glance at each other, neither of us knowing what to do. Wordlessly, we let our heads slowly lower themselves as the sex doll beneath us farts out its hobo breath.

“Well, goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Kirsten.”

[joyfulfartwombat]

http://www.recitequran.com/es/tafsir/en.ibn-kathir/13:1

LEER

Tafsir

13

Ar Rad

El Trueno

Ibn Kathir – Inglés

CAPÍTULO

SÍGANOS

Versículo

1

Página 249

Which was revealed in Makkah

﴿ بِسۡمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ ﴾

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

﴿ الٓمٓر‌ۚ تِلۡكَ ءَايَـٰتُ ٱلۡكِتَـٰبِ‌ۗ وَٱلَّذِىٓ أُنزِلَ إِلَيۡكَ مِن رَّبِّكَ ٱلۡحَقُّ وَلَـٰكِنَّ أَڪۡثَرَ ٱلنَّاسِ لَا يُؤۡمِنُونَ ﴾

(1. Alif Lam-Mim Ra. These are the verses of the Book (the Qur’an), and that which has been revealed unto you from your Lord is the truth, but most men believe not.)

The Qur’an is Allah’s Kalam (Speech)

We talked before, in the beginning of Surat Al-Baqarah (chapter 2) about the meaning of the letters that appear in the beginnings of some chapters in the Qur’an. We stated that every Surah that starts with separate letters, affirms that the Qur’an is miraculous and is an evidence that it is a revelation from Allah, and that there is no doubt or denying in this fact. This is why Allah said next,

﴿ تِلۡكَ ءَايَـٰتُ ٱلۡكِتَـٰبِ‌ۗ ﴾

(These are the verses of the Book), the Qur’an, which Allah described afterwards,

﴿ وَٱلَّذِىٓ أُنزِلَ إِلَيۡكَ ﴾

(and that which has been revealed unto you), O Muhammad,

﴿ مِن رَّبِّكَ ٱلۡحَقُّ ﴾

(from your Lord is the truth,) Allah said next,

﴿ وَلَـٰكِنَّ أَڪۡثَرَ ٱلنَّاسِ لَا يُؤۡمِنُونَ ﴾

(but most men believe not.) just as He said in another Ayah,

﴿ وَمَآ أَڪۡثَرُ ٱلنَّاسِ وَلَوۡ حَرَصۡتَ بِمُؤۡمِنِينَ ﴾

(And most of mankind will not believe even if you desire it eagerly.) (12:103) Allah declares that even after this clear, plain and unequivocal explanation (the Qur’an), most men will still not believe, due to their rebellion, stubbornness and hypocrisy.

﴿ ٱللَّهُ ٱلَّذِى رَفَعَ ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٲتِ بِغَيۡرِ عَمَدٍ۬ تَرَوۡنَہَا‌ۖ ثُمَّ ٱسۡتَوَىٰ عَلَى ٱلۡعَرۡشِ‌ۖ وَسَخَّرَ ٱلشَّمۡسَ وَٱلۡقَمَرَ‌ۖ كُلٌّ۬ يَجۡرِى لِأَجَلٍ۬ مُّسَمًّ۬ى‌ۚ يُدَبِّرُ ٱلۡأَمۡرَ يُفَصِّلُ ٱلۡأَيَـٰتِ لَعَلَّكُم بِلِقَآءِ رَبِّكُمۡ تُوقِنُونَ ﴾

(2. Allah is He Who raised the heavens without any pillars that you can see. Then, He rose above (Istawa) the `Arsh (Throne). He has subjected the sun and the moon, each running (its course) for a term appointed. He manages and regulates all affairs; He explains the Ayat in detail, that you may believe with certainty in the meeting with your Lord.)

Clarifying Allah’s Perfect Ability

Allah mentions His perfect ability and infinite authority, since it is He Who has raised the heavens without pillars by His permission and order. He, by His leave, order and power, has elevated the heavens high above the earth, distant and far away from reach. The heaven nearest to the present world encompasses the earth from all directions, and is also high above it from every direction. The distance between the first heaven and the earth is five hundred years from every direction, and its thickness is also five hundred years. The second heaven surrounds the first heaven from every direction, encompassing everything that the latter carries, with a thickness also of five hundred years and a distance between them of five hundred years. The same is also true about the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth and the seventh heavens. Allah said,

﴿ ٱللَّهُ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ سَبۡعَ سَمَـٰوَٲتٍ۬ وَمِنَ ٱلۡأَرۡضِ مِثۡلَهُنَّ ﴾

(It is Allah who has created seven heavens and of the earth the like thereof.) (65:12) Allah said next,

﴿ بِغَيۡرِ عَمَدٍ۬ تَرَوۡنَہَا‌ۖ ﴾

(…without any pillars that you can see.) meaning, `there are pillars, but you cannot see them,’ according to Ibn `Abbas, Mujahid, Al-Hasan, Qatadah, and several other scholars. Iyas bin Mu`awiyah said, “The heaven is like a dome over the earth,” meaning, without pillars. Similar was reported from Qatadah, and this meaning is better for this part of the Ayah, especially since Allah said in another Ayah,

﴿ وَيُمۡسِكُ ٱلسَّمَآءَ أَن تَقَعَ عَلَى ٱلۡأَرۡضِ إِلَّا بِإِذۡنِهِۦۤ‌ۗ ﴾

(He withholds the heaven from falling on the earth except by His permission. ) (22:65) Therefore, Allah’s statement,

﴿ تَرَوۡنَهَا ﴾

(..that you can see), affirms that there are no pillars. Rather, the heaven is elevated (above the earth) without pillars, as you see. This meaning best affirms Allah’s ability and power.

Al-Istawa’, Rising above the Throne

Allah said next,

﴿ ثُمَّ ٱسۡتَوَىٰ عَلَى ٱلۡعَرۡشِ‌ۖ ﴾

(Then, He rose above (Istawa) the Throne.) We explained the meaning of the Istawa’ in Surat Al-A`raf (7:54), and stated that it should be accepted as it is without altering, equating, annulling its meaning, or attempts to explain its true nature. Allah is glorified and praised from all that they attribute to Him.

Allah subjected the Sun and the Moon to rotate continuously

Allah said,

﴿ وَسَخَّرَ ٱلشَّمۡسَ وَٱلۡقَمَرَ‌ۖ كُلٌّ۬ يَجۡرِى لِأَجَلٍ۬ مُّسَمًّ۬ى‌ۚ ﴾

(He has subjected the sun and the moon, each running (its course) for a term appointed.) It was said that the sun and the moon continue their course until they cease doing so upon the commencement of the Final Hour, as Allah stated,

﴿ وَٱلشَّمۡسُ تَجۡرِى لِمُسۡتَقَرٍّ۬ لَّهَا‌ۚ ﴾

(And the sun runs on its fixed course for a term (appointed).) (36:38) It was also said that the meaning is: until they settle under the Throne of Allah after passing the other side of the earth. So when they, and the rest of the planetary bodies reach there, they are at the furthest distance from the Throne. Because according to the correct view, which the texts prove, it is shaped like a domb, under which is all of the creation. It is not circular like the celestial bodies, because it has pillars by which it is carried. This fact is clear to those who correctly understand the Ayat and authentic Hadiths. All the (praise is due to) Allah and all the favors are from Him. Allah mentioned the sun and the moon here because they are among the brightest seven heavenly objects. Therefore, if Allah subjected these to His power, then it is clear that He has also subjected all other heavenly objects. Allah said in other Ayat,

﴿ لَا تَسۡجُدُواْ لِلشَّمۡسِ وَلَا لِلۡقَمَرِ وَٱسۡجُدُواْ لِلَّهِ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَهُنَّ إِن ڪُنتُمۡ إِيَّاهُ تَعۡبُدُونَ ﴾

(Prostrate yourselves not to the sun nor to the moon, but prostrate yourselves to Allah Who created them, if you (really) worship Him.) (41:37) and,

﴿ وَٱلشَّمۡسَ وَٱلۡقَمَرَ وَٱلنُّجُومَ مُسَخَّرَٲتِۭ بِأَمۡرِهِۦۤ‌ۗ أَلَا لَهُ ٱلۡخَلۡقُ وَٱلۡأَمۡرُ‌ۗ تَبَارَكَ ٱللَّهُ رَبُّ ٱلۡعَـٰلَمِينَ ﴾

(And (He created) the sun, the moon, the stars subjected to His command. Surely, His is the creation and commandment. Blessed is Allah, the Lord of all that exists!) (7:54) Allah’s statement next,

﴿ يُفَصِّلُ ٱلۡأَيَـٰتِ لَعَلَّكُم بِلِقَآءِ رَبِّكُمۡ تُوقِنُونَ ﴾

(He explains the Ayat in detail, that you may believe with certainty in the Meeting with your Lord.) means, He explains the signs and clear evidences that testify that there is no deity worthy of worship except Him. These evidences prove that He will resurrect creation if He wills, just as He started it.

﴿ وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِى مَدَّ ٱلۡأَرۡضَ وَجَعَلَ فِيہَا رَوَٲسِىَ وَأَنۡہَـٰرً۬ا‌ۖ وَمِن كُلِّ ٱلثَّمَرَٲتِ جَعَلَ فِيہَا زَوۡجَيۡنِ ٱثۡنَيۡنِ‌ۖ يُغۡشِى ٱلَّيۡلَ ٱلنَّہَارَ‌ۚ إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ • وَفِى ٱلۡأَرۡضِ قِطَعٌ۬ مُّتَجَـٰوِرَٲتٌ۬ وَجَنَّـٰتٌ۬ مِّنۡ أَعۡنَـٰبٍ۬ وَزَرۡعٌ۬ وَنَخِيلٌ۬ صِنۡوَانٌ۬ وَغَيۡرُ صِنۡوَانٍ۬ يُسۡقَىٰ بِمَآءٍ۬ وَٲحِدٍ۬ وَنُفَضِّلُ بَعۡضَہَا عَلَىٰ بَعۡضٍ۬ فِى ٱلۡأُڪُلِ‌ۚ إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَعۡقِلُونَ ﴾

(3. And it is He Who spread out the earth, and placed therein firm mountains and rivers and of every kind of fruit He made Zawjayn Ithnayn (two in pairs). He brings the night as a cover over the day. Verily, in these things, there are Ayat (signs) for people who reflect. ) (4. And in the earth are neighboring tracts, and gardens of vines, and green crops (fields), and date palms, growing into two or three from a single stem root, or otherwise, watered with the same water; yet some of them We make more excellent than others to eat. Verily, in these things there are Ayat (signs) for the people who understand.)

Allah’s Signs on the Earth

After Allah mentioned the higher worlds, He started asserting His power, wisdom and control over the lower parts of the world. Allah said,

﴿ وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِى مَدَّ ٱلۡأَرۡضَ ﴾

(And it is He Who spread out the earth) made it spacious in length and width. Allah has placed on the earth firm mountains and made rivers, springs and water streams run through it, so that the various kinds of fruits and plants of every color, shape, taste and scent are watered with this water,

﴿ مِن ڪُلٍّ۬ زَوۡجَيۡنِ ٱثۡنَيۡنِ ﴾

(and of every kind of fruit He made Zawjayn Ithnayn.), two types from every kind of fruit,

﴿ يُغۡشِى ٱلَّيۡلَ ٱلنَّہَارَ‌ۚ ﴾

(He brings the night as a cover over the day.) Allah made the day and night pursue each other, when one is about to depart, the other overcomes it, and vice versa. Allah controls time just as He controls space and matter,

﴿ إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ ﴾

(Verily, in these things, there are Ayat for people who reflect.) who reflect on Allah’s signs and the evidences of His wisdom. Allah said,

﴿ وَفِى ٱلۡأَرۡضِ قِطَعٌ۬ مُّتَجَـٰوِرَٲتٌ۬ ﴾

(And in the earth are neighboring tracts,) Meaning, next to each other, some of them are fertile and produce what benefits people, while others are dead, salty and do not produce anything. This meaning was collected from Ibn `Abbas, Mujahid, Sa`id bin Jubayr, Ad-Dahhak and several others. This also covers the various colors and types of diverse areas on the earth; some red, some white, or yellow, or black, some are stony, or flat, or sandy, or thick, or thin, all made to neighbor each other while preserving their own qualities. All this indicates the existence of the Creator Who does what He wills, there is no deity or lord except Him. Allah said next,

﴿ وَجَنَّـٰتٌ۬ مِّنۡ أَعۡنَـٰبٍ۬ وَزَرۡعٌ۬ وَنَخِيلٌ۬ ﴾

(and gardens of vines, and green crops (fields), and date palms…) Allah’s statement, next,

﴿ صِنۡوَانٌ۬ وَغَيۡرُ صِنۡوَانٍ۬ ﴾

(Sinwanun wa (or) Ghayru Sinwan.) `Sinwan’ means, growing into two or three from a single stem, such as figs, pomegranate and dates. `Ghayru Sinwan’ means, having one stem for every tree, as is the case with most plants. From this meaning, the paternal uncle is called one’s `Sinw’ of his father. There is an authentic Hadith that states that the Messenger of Allah said to `Umar bin Al-Khattab,

« أَمَا شَعَرْتَ أَنَّ عَمَّ الرَّجُلِ صِنْوُ أَبِيه »

(Do you not know that man’s paternal uncle is the Sinw of his father) Allah said next,

﴿ وَٲحِدٍ۬ وَنُفَضِّلُ بَعۡضَہَا عَلَىٰ بَعۡضٍ۬ فِى ٱلۡأُڪُلِ‌ۚ ﴾

(watered with the same water; yet some of them We make more excellent than others to eat.) Abu Hurayrah narrated that the Prophet commented on Allah’s statement,

﴿ وَنُفَضِّلُ بَعۡضَہَا عَلَىٰ بَعۡضٍ۬ فِى ٱلۡأُڪُلِ‌ۚ ﴾

(yet some of them We make more excellent than others to eat.)

« الدَّقَلُ، وَالْفَارِسِيُّ، وَالْحُلْوُ، وَالْحَامِض »

(The Dagal, the Persian, the sweet, the bitter…”) At-Tirmidhi collected this Hadith and said, “Hasan Gharib.” Therefore, there are differences between plants and fruits with regards to shape, color, taste, scent, blossoms and the shape of their leaves. There are plants that are very sweet or sour, bitter or mild, fresh; some plants have a combination of these attributes, and the taste then changes and becomes another taste, by Allah’s will. There is also some that are yellow in color, or red, or white, or black, or blue, and the same can be said about their flowers; and all these variances and complex diversities are watered by the same water. Surely, in this there are signs for those who have sound reasoning, and surely, all this indicates the existence of the Creator Who does what He wills and Whose power made distinctions between various things and created them as He wills. So Allah said,

﴿ إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَعۡقِلُونَ ﴾

(Verily, in these things there are Ayat for the people who understand.)

﴿ وَإِن تَعۡجَبۡ فَعَجَبٌ۬ قَوۡلُهُمۡ أَءِذَا كُنَّا تُرَٲبًا أَءِنَّا لَفِى خَلۡقٍ۬ جَدِيدٍ‌ۗ أُوْلَـٰٓٮِٕكَ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُواْ بِرَبِّہِمۡ‌ۖ وَأُوْلَـٰٓٮِٕكَ ٱلۡأَغۡلَـٰلُ فِىٓ أَعۡنَاقِهِمۡ‌ۖ وَأُوْلَـٰٓٮِٕكَ أَصۡحَـٰبُ ٱلنَّارِ‌ۖ هُمۡ فِيہَا خَـٰلِدُونَ ﴾

(5. And if you wonder, then wondrous is their saying: “When we are dust, shall we indeed then be (raised) in a new creation” They are those who disbelieved in their Lord! They are those who will have iron chains linking their hands to their necks. They will be dwellers of the Fire to abide therein forever.)

http://www.recitequran.com/es/tafsir/en.ibn-kathir/13:1 LEER Tafsir 13 Ar Rad El Trueno Ibn Kathir - Inglés CAPÍTULO SÍGANOS Versículo 1…

[fiorekrp]

That’s EVIE IXORIAS —  

She looks a lot like PARK CHAEYOUNG.

GUILD MARK : maroon mark, right below where her collarbones meet and above her chest 

MAGIC : Gravity Change

the ability to alter the direction and force of gravity. since gravity is what keeps people and items to the ground, gravity alteration would cause the opposite. by using her gravity-changing abilities, evie is able to control many mediums and mimic telekinesis through the manipulation of gravity, although there is a huge gap between the two. she mostly makes uses of her arms and her palms to help her alter gravity, manoeuvring them towards the direction she intends for gravity to act upon. 

ADVANTAGES :

gravity change enables her to alter her own weight; this highly enhances her mobility, allowing her to run up against vertical surfaces, move more fluidly and quickly and have abilities of flight. 

she is able to manipulate the movements of people and objects by changing the direction of gravity; she can easily cause them to float away without having any sort of control over their movement, or have them pulled towards the ground and be rendered immobile. 

she is also able to manipulate the gravity, granting her the advantage of being able to decide the acceleration of objects when they rise or fall, depending on the direction and force of the gravity. the stronger the gravitational pull, for example, the faster an object will fall, due to the force towards the ground. 

when using her gravity-changing abilities, she can control and choose who and what will not be affected by her powers. for example, if she chooses to reduce the gravity of a particular falling object, other objects will not be affected.

DISADVANTAGES :

using her abilities to alter her own weight come with their consequences. the digits of her weight after her self-inflicted gravitational change will vary every time, and her body will take on a new figure depending on that new weight (chubbier when her weight is heavier, thinner when her weight is lighter.) her body will take about 15 minutes to bounce back to her original weight.

when using her gravity-changing abilities, she will acquire basic abilities of flight, but she is only able to move upwards and downwards, since gravity does not act sideways. this also applies to her control over the movement of people and objects.

the celestial spirit, libra, and anyone who has weight manipulation or time travel abilities can easily make her gravity-changing techniques useless.

her abilities work only on people and objects within a 15m radius. when using her abilities on such mediums, she can only last up to 3 minutes, shorter if the medium were heavier. 

TRIGGERS : N/A PERSONALITY :

POSITIVE — energetic, faithful, intuitive

NEGATIVE — grudgeful, egocentric, whiny

BIOGRAPHY :

i. the darkness, greeting. you are a mere child. you view the world as vibrant and evergreen. you see the sky as wide and limitless. you flower the hopes of father’s return in prayers in front of the moon every night. you believe in the words mother feeds you every morning after. you are innocent — as you bask in the glow of the golden sunlight, filtering through a painful reality, hidden in plain sights. you are also innocent — as you insist to mother, one wrongful day, that you want to manifest magic in your tiny hands. you paint a canvas of your fantasies for her to see and you had her imagine you as a glorious mage, an eye-catching enchantress that is a splitting image of her. mother’s patience snaps like a thin string. she smears the entire dream with black, and screams for you to forget it. just like how she’s trying to forget father. you question his absence again in between sobs, and mother hastily feeds you another lie, but it doesn’t sit well in your stomach this time. you ponder hard on the truth as the stars come to light the sky that night, and you make another prayer by your bedpost, wishing for answers. ( prayers: they come true. ) a month flies, and it was raining hard when you receive an unexpected visitor. the door is yanked open by force, and fear immediately encapsulates your fragile little being, but relief calms you quickly when you meet with a familiar face, a familiar scent. you dash towards him for an embrace, and he feels very, very warm, just as you had always known. you then struggled from his hold to look for mother, so she can celebrate the good news too. father stops you, and cunning was he to convince you that this was all a game of secrets, and you’re close to winning. all you had to do was leave home and learn magic; his magic. how unfortunate — that your eyes were greedy for the prize. ii. the devils, dancing. mother ceases to exist in your mind. you remember nothing of her except that she left you, and it was father who found you cold and alone, neglected without a guardian that cared. all is a falsified memory crafted by the fingers of a corrupted magician, a friend to father, but you don’t know that. you learn that father is in a dark guild, and they call themselves grimoire heart. it’s a name that sends a tingle down your spine; you don’t know whether this is buzzing excitement or an instinct, telling you to run. but you trust father, so you coax yourself that he knows best, for he is the parent that did not abandon you. you begin to take after his everything. his preferences for food, his little habits, the way he walks with pride holding up his shoulders, and just as he had promised, his magic. you are a witness to your own dreams coming to life, as father takes your small hands and teaches them how to move, urging gravity to sway with the soft bends and twists of your wrists. father’s friends tell you that you are a natural. they also call you a legacy. you laugh with them and cluelessly agree, not knowing what it means. day by day, you absorb yourself into becoming another picture of your father. your gluttony to be far from weak drives you, and leads you to become better than your father. more and more join grimoire heart, and just like them, in you, lives the idea for the return of a world that fits the ideologies of the guild. just like how father taught, you exist to serve the ones who want their goals fulfilled in exchange for what grimoire heart needs for the big incoming change. your purpose is to abide and execute. your failure is your exit out of the guild, though you’d already crossed over your own heart that would never be an option. soon after, your already-written fate unravels. here comes the time you become the legacy they speak of. iii. the girl, regal. the seven kin of purgatory, they call it. father explains about it to you one evening, and you realize that it’s been a while since he’s looked this eager. purgatory: the state of suffering; the state of being sanctified. such power this name brings, that it sends you on an overwhelming thrill just thinking of being a part of it. you couldn’t wait for father to finish talking, as you plead for him to tell stories of her to hades, so his divineness would consider and place you amidst the ranks. you squirm, as you restlessly expect the response you desire. father grins even wider. he looks extremely triumphant. this is the message he sends to hades. she is ready. so hades calls for you; sets the crown for the seven kin upon your head. you sit on the throne, piled above all your ignoble deeds. you know you deserve this. you think this is meant to be. ( but, is it? )

[toptechbank]

Best Apple Watch apps for your smartwatch in 2017

The Apple Watch is onto its third generation now, and the aptly-named Apple Watch 3 is proving pretty popular – so that’s why you’re probably here checking out the new apps (and, let’s be honest, you’ve probably just got it as a new gift).

In fact, it’s one of the best smartwatch options out there, and now we’re at the third generation it’s getting to a particularly accomplished option.

The number one question we hear from new Apple Watch owners is “Well, what apps should I download first?”

To make answering that query easier, we devised a thorough list of the best Apple Watch apps. With the right choices, your new digital timepiece will become so much more.

Before you get into that though, remember to head into the Apple Watch main app on your iPhone – that’s where you’ll see a list of the apps already installed on your phone that can be transferred to your new Watch. (If you see any you like the look of here, you’ll need to download them to your iPhone first).

Make sure you tag the apps you want on your watch – and disable the ones you don’t, as that will take up valuable space you can use to add music onto – especially great if you have the Apple Watch 3 LTE version, and an Apple Music subscription.

See our review of the Apple Watch Series 3 below.

New this week: Transit

Transit

Free

Transit is mainly for American users, but its city coverage extends to more than 50 non-US cities including London and Paris too. It’s a public transport app, and it works on a simple and largely accurate assumption: when you use the app, you’re in a hurry.

That means instant information for departures on nearby routes and a Take Me Home button that tells you how to get home as quickly and simply as possible. In a single screen it offers directions, details of the station, the next three departures and the number of the service.

Public transport tends to bring out the best in designers – think the simple genius of the London Underground map or the colorful signage on the New York subway – and that’s definitely the case here.

Transit makes excellent use of color and typography to provide all the information you need in a very effective way.

It may only shave a few seconds off your travel time, but if you’ve ever harbored dark thoughts when someone at the gate in front of you is wasting time you’ll know that for commuters, every single second counts. If you spend a lot of time traveling, you’ll save a lot of time with Transit.

OneNote

Free

If there’s one thing the App Store isn’t short of, it’s note-taking apps. But it’s worth taking a look at OneNote, especially if you work across a range of Mac and PC devices, because as it syncs via Microsoft’s cloud, it’s a very good cross-platform app with particularly well-designed iPhone, iPad and Mac apps to organize pretty much everything.

We use it for shopping lists, to-do lists, random scribbled ideas in the wee small hours and anything else we think we might need to refer to later, and unlike some rival cross-platform services it’s completely free. Microsoft hopes you’ll like it so much you’ll embrace Office, which is available for a very low price as part of a premium OneDrive plan.

Microsoft has become rather good at keeping its Watch apps simple, and OneNote is no exception: tap the cross icon to dictate a new note, or tap a notebook or note to see its contents.

And that’s pretty much all it does – and that’s all it needs to do, because any watch screen is poorly suited to complex tasks. We’d much rather have speed and simplicity than any ill-conceived bells and whistles.

Misfit

Free

The Misfit app is designed to connect to the firm’s various wearable health monitors and third-party devices from the likes of Swarovski and Speedo, but it’s a useful Watch app in its own right too even if you don’t have any other wearable devices.

It can use your Watch’s sensors to track activity, but the USP here is its integrated workouts for people in a hurry. When it was first introduced it was called Misfit Minute, but it’s since been renamed to plain old Misfit.

Inside the app there are workouts designed to last 1, 4 and 7 minutes respectively, covering strength training and cardio. One minute doesn’t sound particularly strenuous but you’ll be surprised: the app appears to be haunted by the ghost of a particularly sadistic circuit training coach, and you’ll definitely feel the seven-minute workout across your body.

The app also tries to motivate you during your workout – “Pain is weakness leaving the body” and that kind of thing – and it promises that no two workouts are alike, although realistically if you get bored during a one-minute workout you might need more motivation than any app can offer.

Epicurious Smart Timer

Free

The food site Epicurious isn’t scared of technology: it attempted to make a recipe app for Google Glass (although that didn’t quite work out). Its Watch efforts are much more successful, with the Watch doing what watches do best: timing. Think of it as an egg timer that can do more than eggs.

Using the app is simple. Choose the kind of food you want to time, such as a roast chicken or a steak, and tell the app how heavy it is and, where appropriate, how well done you want it to be. The timer lets you know when to flip or remove it from the heat.

It then tells you what to do, so for example in the case of your steak you’re urged to let it rest for five minutes and then slice across the grain. You’ll also see photos so you can compare what your food looks like with what it should look like.

It’s not the most comprehensive app around, but it isn’t supposed to be: it’s designed for relatively inexperienced cooks and the 40-odd items it does know about cover all the basics. If you’re unsure of cooking times or just easily distracted, it’s a great app to have.

Night Sky

Free

Night Sky is one of those gee-whiz apps that you use to show off your iPhone, and the introduction of a complication to let you know if the International Space Station was overhead was cute in a geeky way.

But the arrival of watchOS 4 has given the developers plenty of new toys to play with, and that means Night Sky is now one of those gee-whiz apps you use to show off your Apple Watch.

With this version of the app, your Watch now gets the same Sky Tracking features as the iPhone app has: you can now raise your wrist and identify the stars, planets and constellations around you.

There’s a time travel feature too, so you can track how the various heavenly bodies will move. It’s enormously clever and very impressive, and the main iPhone app isn’t bad either, as its Sky View knows of 115,000 celestial objects and enables you to increase or decrease light pollution, explore animated 3D models and customize notifications.

If you sign up for the $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 monthly premium subscription you get access to worldwide sky tours that you can save for future use – for example if you’re planning to visit a particular location in the near future.

V for Wikipedia

Free

We know what you’re thinking: surely it should be W for Wikipedia? V was formerly known as Viki, but had to be renamed due to a trademark issue. No matter what it’s called, it’s a really useful Apple Watch app: it brings relevant Wikipedia content to wherever you are.

For example, you might want to know the history of a public landmark, or to discover what’s nearby. V presents the information in a clear and straightforward manner, it uses dictation and 3D Touch to good effect and it uses Handoff for longer entries that are better suited to your phone’s larger screen.

The developers have clearly thought about how people would actually use the app: you can call up V from a complication, use voice search to find a place, bookmark it with 3D touch and pick it up on the iPhone later. That simplicity means it’s an app you’ll actually use rather than one that’ll gather digital dust in your apps list.

It’s exceptional on the iPhone too, taking the rather dull design of Wikipedia and replacing it with something much more pleasing. No wonder it’s picked up awards including a Gold German Design Award and Apple’s App Store Best of 2016.

Cardiogram

Free

Your Apple Watch monitors your heart rate every five minutes, which is clever. But what do the numbers actually mean, and are they actually useful? Cardiogram wants to explain, and to do something important: help fight one of the most common kinds of heart arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation (AF).

Its Apple Watch app uses an algorithm that can identify the tell-tale signs of AF, something that’s treatable but that often goes undiagnosed.

Cardiogram isn’t just about detecting AF, as important as that is. It wants to make your health data useful, so it can tell you whether you’re sleeping properly (assuming you’re able to wear rather than charge your watch overnight), whether your resting heart rate is low enough, how well your heart recovers after exercise, and what makes your stress levels spike. It’s a workout tracker too.

The data the Watch app generates is best experienced on your iPhone, where the app provides crucial information and trends in the form of clear and colorful graphs. In the future it will know how to recognise more medical conditions too.

The potential is enormous: by combining (anonymous) data from thousands of Apple Watch owners, Cardiogram’s developers hope to use Big Data to help people live better, longer lives. How’s that for ambition?

MySwimPro

Free

This is a tale of two apps, depending on which version of Apple Watch you have. If yours is a first-generation model then it’s a useful but limited way to track your swimming stats: the first-gen watch shouldn’t be submerged, so you shouldn’t wear it while swimming.

However, if you have a second-generation Apple Watch (Apple calls it the Apple Watch Series 2) then you can take it into the pool – and that makes MySwimPro a much more useful application. You can log your workouts while you’re still in the water, and you can also follow the app’s workouts to set goals and monitor your heart rate during your swim.

Once you’ve dried off you can pick up the iPhone or iPad app, which syncs data from your Watch and enables you to see your progress in much more detail: miles swum, hours spent swimming, top times for specific distances and so on.

You can share your triumphs online, or you can just watch videos showing how other swimmers do particular types of workout. It’s probably overkill if you only do the odd couple of laps at the gym swimming pool, but if you’re serious about swimming it’s worth wearing on your wrist.

Just Eat

Free

Proving that you should never underestimate our basic laziness, Just Eat created an app for people who couldn’t be bothered using the telephone to call for a takeaway. Now, it’s added an app for people who can’t be bothered reaching for their iPhone to open the Just Eat app.

One day historians may look back on this as one of the key steps in the downfall of western civilisation. Then again, easy pizza!

The Just Eat app is UK-only – if you’re in the US, try the Domino’s Apple Watch app instead – and it enables you to choose, order and pay for takeaways from the comfort of your wrist thanks to Apple Pay integration.

You can also choose to collect instead of having the meal delivered, but let’s be honest: if you can’t be bothered getting your phone you’re hardly going to want to go outside to collect your food – although if you’re driving it’s handy to order a pickup with a few taps.

The main iPhone/iPad app is much more attractive and informative, but when it comes to ordering regulars from your favorite local takeaways it doesn’t get much easier than having Just Eat on your wrist.

A Tiny Game of Pong

$1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99

Sometimes the titles do all the work for us: yes, A Tiny Game of Pong puts a tiny game of Pong on your Apple Watch.

If you’re not familiar with Pong, perhaps because you aren’t really, really old, it was one of the first video games and was released in November 1972. The fact that it’s still playable – and quickly becomes frustratingly difficult – just demonstrates what a classic game it really is.

If you’re new to Pong, the gameplay is very simple: there are two paddles, one of which you control with the Digital Crown, and there’s a ball, which you try not to miss when the other paddle hits it towards you. The more times you don’t miss, the better your score. And that’s pretty much it.

There’s an in-app purchase that unlocks extra colors, which you can also unlock by posting about the game on social media, and there are high score tables that work via Game Center. But ultimately what you get is exactly what the title describes: a tiny game of Pong.

Yahoo Weather

Free

Dark Sky and CARROT Weather get all the reviews, but Yahoo’s weather app is a lovely thing on the Apple Watch.

It takes the same colorful, minimalist approach as the iPhone/iPad app, with screens showing trend lines for temperature, precipitation and wind speed, along with sunrise and sunset times and where the sun is right now, whether it’s going to rain and what the temperature highs and lows will be.

You don’t get the right-now weather warnings of Dark Sky or the sass of CARROT, just a clear, easy to understand and really well-presented set of predictions.

It’s not all sunshine and flowers, though. The host app is pretty big – 137MB, which is on the large side for a weather app, given that the UK Met Office app is 80MB and Dark Sky 20.8MB – and the accuracy of the weather forecasts seems to depend on where you live.

US users seem very happy with it, but UK users say it’s a little pessimistic: while it rains a lot in Britain, it doesn’t rain quite as often as Yahoo Weather says it will.

Then again, it’s better to warn of rain and be pleasantly surprised than to predict good weather when the skies are about to open.

Workflow

Free

Workflow is an absolutely fascinating app, recently acquired by Apple. If you’re familiar with OS X’s Automator it’s a bit like that but much more user-friendly and focused, and for iOS. And if you’re not, you’re going to like it a lot.

Workflow essentially turns your iPhone or iPad’s features into LEGO. You can take bricks from app X, combine them with bricks from app Y, and have a new toy to play with.

For example, you could create a workflow that takes your most recent photos and saves them to Dropbox, or a workflow that offers one-tap information on where the nearest coffee shop is, or that tweets the song you’re listening to. It’s absolutely brilliant and now it’s available on your Watch.

As you might expect, Workflow on the Watch doesn’t offer any creation tools: it’s purely a launcher in Watch form, allowing you to call up your workflows with a tap.

You might have a workflow to give you directions home from wherever you are, or to calculate a tip in a restaurant, or to read out your messages. It’s the kind of app you can’t imagine using, and then you use it and can’t imagine going without it.

Twitterrific

Free / In-app purchases for full feature set

There are lots of reasons to love Twitter, but there are lots of reasons to find it annoying too. Promoted tweets filling your timeline, people talking about subjects you couldn’t care less about, people retweeting people you couldn’t care less about, Piers Morgan… wouldn’t it be great if you could have a Twitter without all of those things? Don’t look to the official app for that any time soon. Go for Twitterrific instead.

Now in its fifth incarnation, Twitterrific on iOS is a superb Twitter tool. The Watch features require a $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 in-app purchase to work fully, and they’re worth paying for: you can track your stats, be notified about direct messages, favorites, new followers and other action, use Handoff to start replies on your phone, compose tweets via dictation and block idiots instantly.

We’d recommend keeping notifications to an absolute minimum unless you only follow a few people – Twitter can be incredibly noisy when you follow and/or are followed by lots of people – but the Watch app is a great way of staying on top of Twitter while you’re out and about. It also reduces the risk of picking up your phone and thinking “while I’m here I’ll just check…” and losing hours to trivia.

Keynote

Free

If you deliver a lot of presentations tied to a computer or iPad you might watch Apple keynotes with envy. Wouldn’t it be great if you could stride around the room like that, surreptitiously tapping a button to move to the next slide instead of hovering over your hardware?

There are plenty of electronic clickers to do just that, but why get another bit of hardware you’ll probably lose when you can control Keynote from your Apple Watch?

Don’t expect speakers’ notes, views of upcoming slides or other presentation app goodies: the Watch app is designed simply to play presentations and move to the next slide when tapped. Everything else happens on devices more suited to editing: your phone, or your iPad.

And provided there’s decent Wi-Fi or you’re close enough to the presenting iPad or iPhone for Bluetooth it works really well. It’s surprisingly functional-looking for an Apple app – it isn’t remotely pretty, and looks like it was designed in a tea break – but then how much design do you really need when you’re using your Watch as a clicker?

Do you prefer Office to Apple’s apps? Microsoft has a PowerPoint app for the Watch right here.

AeroPress Timer

$4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99

You can’t get much more hipster than this: an Apple Watch app for the AeroPress coffee maker, enabling you to use a gadget costing hundreds of dollars to work out how to make a cup of coffee.

But while it’s easy to mock it’s actually a really useful and well-designed app, assuming of course you have an AeroPress. It’s the kind of thing that watch apps excel at: it does one thing, and it does that thing very well.

AeroPress Timer’s thing is to help you make the perfect cup of coffee. The app features coffee recipes from the 2014 AeroPress world championship, and takes you step by step through the process for each: how much coffee to use, when to stir, when to steep, and when it’s time to take a sip of your masterpiece.

It’s not just about fancy award competitors either: the app also includes the instructions you need to make standard recipes, two cup recipes and to improve your brewing prowess in general.

If you’re the kind of person whose eyeballs are vibrating with caffeine by lunchtime, you’re going to love the convenience of having everything you need to hand. Or rather, on your wrist.

Pennies

$3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99

Pennies was a recent Apple Editor’s Choice, for good reason: it’s a very simple and effective budgeting app that allows you to get on top of your spending without having to spend too much time doing so.

You can set weekly, monthly, bi-weekly, bi-monthly, one-off and custom budgets, track in multiple currencies – great for holidays or business travel – and on the Watch, all you need to do is record how much you’ve spent against a particular budget, so for example if you have a shopping budget you’d tap it, tap Spend, and then enter the total.

The app then recalculates the amount you’ve got left, and if you wish you can have it displayed as a permanent Complication on the Watch face.

Pennies isn’t interested in what you’ve bought; just what budget it should be allocated to. As the developer puts it, “it’s all about keeping things easy and flexible so you can get on with having fun, spending what you want, and saving money at the end of the month.”

If like us you find personal finance a mix of tedium and terror, Pennies might be the app that helps you take control of your cash.

Deliveries

$4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99

Is there anything more annoying than missing a delivery of something you’re really excited about? Yes: there’s missing a delivery of something that you really need to have in a hurry. Deliveries can help ensure that neither of those things happen to you.

It supports stacks of services including UPS, FedEx, US Postal Service, DHL, TNT, Canada Post, City Link and Royal Mail, can track packages, can add delivery dates to your calendar and can record past deliveries in case you need to refer to them later.

It’s unnecessary for the odd package, but it’s useful if you do a lot of online shopping or if you’re in the middle of a project, such as furnishing a flat.

On the Watch the app acts as a ready reminder of what’s in and what’s incoming, so for example it’ll show you if an item has just been delivered as well as the ETA of any other outstanding deliveries.

There’s a Complication too, which works particularly well on the Utility watch face and shows you the most recent delivery. If you have the macOS version of the app too you can automatically sync between Mac and mobile via iCloud or the developer’s own cloud sync service.

Clicker

Free

We’ve described the iPhone as the Very Hungry Caterpillar of tech, munching its way through entire product categories as stand-alone devices become iOS apps. We’re often delighted by the simplest things, and Clicker is one of those things.

It’s a replacement for those hand-held clickers people use to count things, and it’s appropriate for counting people, days, laps, drinks or anything else you might want to quantify.

To use it, just tap on the screen and tap again when you want another click. Haptic feedback means you don’t need to look at the watch, and you don’t need to have the clicker display all day: when you’re ready for a new click you can pull it up from its Complication. You can record up to 2,147,483,647 taps.

And that’s pretty much it: there are only two other options: subtract, to remove a mistaken click, and reset, to start again.

It’s hardly a must-have but it’s actually very handy, so for example we’ve seen users tracking how often they smoke during the day or how many glasses of water they’ve had. We wouldn’t recommend using it for counting sheep, though – or at least, not on the first-generation Apple Watch, whose battery isn’t really up to working nights.

Elevate

Free

We’re not convinced by the supposed science of brain training – it’s a sector that makes bold claims based on very flimsy evidence – but there’s no doubt that spending time learning or practicing useful things is better for you than mindlessly swiping through trivia on Twitter.

Elevate claims that its brain training app will “improve critical cognitive skills that are proven to boost productivity, earning power, and self-confidence”, and it does so by setting little tasks for you: choosing the correct meaning of words, calculating percentages and so on.

Correct answers earn points, and you can track your progress on the main iPhone/iPad app as well as on your Watch. The Watch’s small screen means the games you get are very simple ones, but that works well when you’re on the move.

The app is free and lets you play 4 mini-games. If you want to access the full selection of 40+ Elevate games you’ll need your iPhone or iPad and a subscription to the premium membership package, which is $4.99/£3.99/AU$7.99 per month or $44.99/£34.99/AU$69.99 per year.

If you could do with a boost to specific skills – working out restaurant tips, perhaps, or improving your vocabulary – then you might feel that’s well worth the money.

CARROT Fit

$3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99

You may know CARROT from its weather app, which combines Dark Sky-style weather forecasting with sarcasm and lies. But CARROT wants to make you unhappy in many other ways – and what’s better for a sadistic AI than being in control of a fitness app?

Enter CARROT Fit, which takes a somewhat unusual approach to motivating you to get healthier and lose weight.

CARROT promises to “get you fit – or else”. To achieve that it offers a dozen punishing exercises (more are available via in-app purchases) accompanied by threats, ridicule, bribes and the occasional compliment.

It’s rude, crude and much more entertaining than trying to complete the rings on Apple’s own activity tracker, and we’re pretty sure it’s the only fitness app that rewards progress with cat facts. But there’s a proper fitness tracker in here too: it’ll track your steps and weight loss, remember your workouts and add data to Apple’s health app.

Most of the personality is in the main iPhone app, but the Watch alerts include such cheery prospects as “seven minutes in hell”. If you find getting fit or losing weight a little bit tedious, CARROT might be the, ahem, carrot that you need to get motivated.

Knock

$5.99/£5.99/AU$9.99

Passwords are essential, but they’re also rubbish. The ones you can remember are easy to guess, the ones that are hard to guess are equally hard to remember, and if you do passwords properly it can be a pain to enter complicated strings of text and characters when you’re in a hurry.

Wouldn’t it be better if you could prove your identity to your Mac with your Watch? That’s exactly what Knock does.

Knock is a simple idea brilliantly executed. Provided your Mac is of relatively recent vintage – an Air from 2011 or better, a MacBook Pro or iMac from late 2012, a 2013 or later Mac Pro and so on – you can use Knock to automatically unlock your Mac or Macs by tapping the Apple Watch app.

It’s connecting via Bluetooth Low Energy – hence the reliance on relatively recent Macs; older ones don’t have Bluetooth LE – which uses tiny amounts of energy, so you don’t need to worry about the app killing your Watch’s battery any more than usual, and it works instantly if your Mac isn’t in sleep mode.

It may seem quite pricey for such a simple app, but think about how much time you spend locking and unlocking your Macs in a year.

Note that you may not need this if you have a recent Mac running macOS Sierra, as there’s a similar feature built in, but Knock is compatible with slightly older Macs too.

Buy Me A Pie!

$24.99/£23.99/AU$38.99

When we first got an Apple Watch we thought we’d use it for everything, but years later we’re still using Post-It notes when we go to the supermarket.

That’s mainly because list apps are often overkill for something as straightforward as a shopping list – so can the excellently-named and quite expensive Buy Me A Pie! app finally persuade us to leave the sticky notes at home?

User reviews certainly think so: it’s had nearly 3,000 ratings, averaging four and a half stars.

On the iPhone the app offers flat design and color coding, which by necessity has to be adapted for the Watch: the colored lozenges of the iPhone app are replaced with little colored lines beside items.

But the key feature here isn’t the appearance: it’s synchronization. Buy Me A Pie! syncs across all your iOS devices, so your partner could add an item to your shopping list on their iPad and have it automatically sync to your Watch along with a push notification.

It supports location-based reminders, stores multiple lists and has a learning function that automatically stores unfamiliar items in the app’s dictionary for future use. It’s very good at what it does, although it’s rather pricey if you only do the occasional big shop.

Happier

Free

Mindfulness, the art of focusing on being present and aware in the world instead of being constantly distracted by things and thoughts that don’t matter, isn’t something you’d associate with the Apple Watch. If you aren’t careful with your notification settings your Watch pings away merrily all day, interrupting countless trains of thought.

But the Happier app hopes to use the Watch to make you feel better, not more harassed.

The app itself is free, but it’s designed as a gateway to paid-for mindfulness courses. If you don’t go for them you can still take advantage of the app, though. You can tell the app how you’re feeling – we suspect “meh” is the most-used option – and it then responds with uplifting quotes to help you feel a bit more optimistic.

It can pop up to remind you to take a meditation break, and you can dictate a positive thought to a private journal or to the Happier community. That’s not as daft as it sounds: there’s some evidence that keeping a journal of positive things can boost your mood over time.

Just be careful what and how you share: one iTunes reviewer says that they were able to locate their private journal with Google.

Tamagotchi Classic

$3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99

Readers of a certain age will remember Tamagotchi, the infuriatingly addictive electronic pets that took over the world in the late 1990s with their incessant demands for care and attention.

And now they’re back! Back! BACK! And this time, they’re on your wrist – which is fitting, because Tamagotchi is apparently a portmanteau of the Japanese words for egg and watch. If you’ve never used your watch to raise a virtual pet, here’s your chance.

This app is the Tamagotchi L.i.f.e Gen1, and it uses the Apple Watch in several ways: when your Tamagotchi wants your attention it’ll pop up on your wrist, you can monitor your Tamagotchi’s health, and you can carry out care actions – such as feeding it a meal or making it go to the toilet.

There are two modes to choose from: toy mode, which recreates the originals, and App Mode, which adds special colors. The app also enables you to put multiple Tamagotchi into a gallery, where you can then take pictures of them, and save said digital snaps to your Camera Roll.

It’s spectacularly pointless, of course, but it’s also pretty cute and faithful to the original toys – so it’s an app for rose-tinted spectacle wearers as well as for people who’ve never encountered Tamagotchi before.

VLC Remote

$4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99

As you’ve probably guessed, this app is a remote control for VLC. If you’re not familiar with those initials they belong to one of our very favorite apps, the VLC media player.

It’s a kind of Swiss Army Knife for playing or streaming music and video, and it’s available on iOS and on desktop computers too. We love it for many reasons: it’s fast, it’s free and it can read media formats most of us forgot ever existed.

The remote app solves a simple problem with computer media playback: if you’re on the sofa you probably aren’t anywhere near the computer that’s got all your media files on it.

It works with VLC on Mac, Linux or Windows, automatically finds any running copy of VLC on your local network and enables you to control the on-screen action with your phone.

The Watch app reduces that to bare bones: it gives you volume and transport controls, shows cover art and offers additional options – repeat, shuffle, audio on/off and subtitles on/off – via Force Touch.

If you’ve made VLC the heart of your home entertainment, this app should save you from wearing a path in the carpet between computer and couch.

TripIt

Free / in-app purchases

Whether you’re a road warrior or an occasional holidayer, keeping track of the various aspects of your trip can be a pain. TripIt solves that by pulling all your travel-related documentation together.

All you need to do is send your travel confirmation emails – flights, hotels, car hire – to TripIt and the app will automatically organize them and tell you the information you need when you need it.

If you use Gmail, Outlook.com or Yahoo mail you can get TripIt to monitor your mailbox automatically, which makes things even easier. If you’re in the US, it even tells you when it’s time to head for the airport.

The phone app stores your itinerary and key documents, and the Watch app lets you know what’s important right now – so if you’re about to board a flight you’ll see the flight number and departure time, if you’re checking in you’ll see a booking reference and so on.

Things get really clever with the Pro subscription ($48.99/£38.99/AU$77.99), which adds live flight notifications, seat tracking and alternative flight finding should your plans change.

That’s probably unnecessary for most people, though: the free version of the app includes all the essentials you need for any kind of travel.

Lose It!

Free / in-app purchases

If your Watch strap is feeling a little more snug than it used to, this app may be the answer: it’s designed to help you achieve your weight loss goals “without the unsustainable gimmicks, fad diets, restrictive foods, on-site meetings, or large price tags of other weight-loss companies.”

It tracks the calories you’ve consumed and the goals you’ve set, focuses on nutrition as well as overall calorie intake, works happily with other fitness apps and trackers and provides an online peer group where everybody encourages each other to achieve their ideal weight.

It also enables you to set exercise goals and focus on general wellness, so it’s not just about losing weight.

The Apple Watch app doesn’t replace the phone app completely – for example, you’ll need your phone handy if you want to use the barcode scanner to automatically record what you’re eating, and the team-based features such as group challenges are phone-based – but it’s a great way to focus on your goals, monitor your progress and keep your motivation no matter how sorely tempted you may be.

The program is $39.99/£29.99/AU$62.99 per year but you can explore the app for free without signing up.

Outlook

Free

Microsoft earned well-deserved death stares from many Watch users when it bought and retired the excellent Sunrise Calendar iOS app, but its Outlook app is worth adding to your wrist.

It’s from the new, interesting Microsoft, not the staid bore of old: it works well, looks great and won’t crash your watch.

Outlook is a combined email and calendar app that connects to Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN, Gmail, Yahoo and iCloud, and its main claim to fame is the focused inbox: instead of showing you everything emailed, it shows the most important stuff only and learns by watching your swipes.

It’s particularly good in a corporate environment, where its talents cope admirably with endless meeting requests, time changes and backside-covering email traffic, enabling you to prioritize things that matter and forget about things that don’t.

That doesn’t mean it’s only for corporate types, though. Outlook is a really, really good email app and boasts a useful Complication that enables you to see what’s next on your schedule from the main Apple Watch display. If you have a busy life, a busy inbox or both it’s a very useful app to have on your arm.

Mount Burnmore

Free / in-app purchases

Fitness fanatics look away now: for those that find exercise really boring, and their get up and go often gets up and goes while they stay sedentary. Mount Burnmore could be the answer to that lethargy: it turns fitness into a game.

The concept is quite clever. Mount Burnmore depends on “active energy”, which it pulls from the Health app: the more calories you’ve burned, the more active energy you have in the game.

When you have sufficient energy you can attempt to solve the game’s puzzles, which involve finding routes around the titular mountain, collecting in-game items and smashing things with a pickaxe.

There’s a Complication that enables you to see your progress without launching the full game, and the app makes good use of the Digital Crown to help you navigate around larger levels later in the game. There are also leaderboards to compare with other players and in-game challenges to win freebies.

It’s bright, breezy and a bit brash, and we suspect it’s best suited to older children rather than grown-ups – although if you do give this one to the kids you might want to disable in-app purchases, as they can be used to buy in-game items.

ExxonMobil Speedpass+

Free

This one’s US-only for now. It’s a way to pay for fuel and car washes with your Apple Watch via the magic of Apple Pay, and it syncs with Ford SYNC 3 so you can use voice commands in the car too.

You can use it in 10,000 participating Exxon and Mobil stations across the US, and it’s capable of more than just payment: the app records sales for electronic receipts and enables you to manage your loyalty points as well.

It’s really straightforward to use, assuming you’ve got funds in the bank. Just roll up to the pump or automated car wash, pull up the app and tell it which pump you’re parked at. Use the app to approve payment to that pump and then double-tap your watch’s side button to pay with Apple Pay. As soon as you do that, you’re free to pump all day long.

You’ll see more apps like this over time, as many manufacturers are looking into mobile payments, so – for example – Jaguar and Shell in the UK have an Apple pay app for their customers, and fuel companies are keen too: in addition to ExxonMobil, Chevron’s also experimenting with Apple Pay.

Babbel

Free / in-app purchases

Sometimes the best way to learn new things is to have fun, and that’s particularly true of languages: we can’t remember a taught word of the languages we rote-learned in school, but we can remember all the swear words and rude ones our peers snickered about on the bus home.

Babbel takes a more mature, but no less effective, approach to language learning, using data from the check-in service Foursquare to tell you about nearby words you need to find and translate on its Watch app. For example: you might learn the foreign word for a type of drink when you’re at a coffee shop.

The main iPhone app is more formal but still concentrates on real-world language, so you’re more likely to learn how to ask if somebody’s married or if they want some wine than tell them that your aunt’s pen is in the garden.

It’s proven to be effective and has more than a million subscribers, making it one of the most popular language learning tools around.

Just watch out for those in-app purchases, though: each language pack costs money, but some cost a lot more than others.

Sleep Watch

$4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99

Sleep tracking is an area where the Apple Watch lags due to its charging requirements, and while the second generation Watch does last longer, you can’t keep it on for a week i the vein of some dedicated fitness trackers.

That means any sleep tracking app has to overcome that obstacle, and in the case of Sleep Watch that means making sure you’ve still got 65% battery left at night and Power Reserve off.

You may need to get into the routine of a pre-bed charge if you want to use the app regularly… so decide now if this is an app that could be one of your ‘best’.

Is it worth it? It is if you think your sleep is subpar, as that can make it hard to concentrate and damage your health.

The app is very good at differentiating between deep, restless sleep and cheese-fueled tossing and turning, and version 2’s new trends feature enables you to see if there’s a pattern emerging that suggests a possible cause. The app also tracks your sleeping heart rate, and again you can see if there are trends emerging there.

It’s a clever app but it’s up against the Achilles Heel of the Apple Watch: little smartwatches can’t have big batteries. But if you don’t mind establishing a new charging routine it might just help you sleep a little better more often.

Activity Tracker

Free / In-App Purchases

This is an interesting one: the pitch is that Activity Tracker doesn’t require you to have a wearable device, but it also boasts about the Apple Watch app that enables you to track your progress.

It’s designed for the iPhone 5S onwards and uses that device’s motion coprocessor to track your progress – even if you have a second generation Apple Watch, which has its own GPS tracker. That means it’s an alternative to Apple’s own Activity app, rather than something bringing features Apple doesn’t already offer, and you’ll still need to take your phone with you.

The main iPhone app is pretty and makes it easy to see your key stats, and the Watch app can help motivate you by showing your steps, burnt calories and distance travelled. The parent app also enables you to set weekly goals and track your progress against them.

The main app is free, but there’s also a $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 unlock that adds weekly and monthly activity visualizations and the ability to import data from or export data to another iPhone.

It can also pull in data from Apple’s own Health app, which is useful if you’ve been filing your fitness data in that for some time.

Free

Yes, we know you might have heard of this one and it’s technically not an app… but did you know that Siri in the Apple Watch became a lot more powerful in the March 2017 watchOS 3.2 update?

That’s because Apple has opened Siri up to third-party developers, so instead of asking Siri to send a message and seeing the Messages app open, you’ll be able to ask Siri to send a WhatsApp message instead.

This is important because previously Siri could only work with Apple’s own apps. Now s/he can talk to third party apps too. You’ll be able to ask Siri to call you a cab, to start and stop workouts, to make payments… apps such as Spotify aren’t currently invited to the Siri party, but we’d expect Apple to open its voice assistant up further in the not-too-distant future.

Don’t expect Siri support to appear in everything overnight: the developers need to add it to their apps, but the list of imminently-compatible apps includes a whole host of exercise apps such as Fitso, mySwim Pro, RunGo, Seven, Slopes, Streaks, Zones, Zova and the forthcoming Ace Tennis.

Other apps with Siri support include the aforementioned WhatsApp and Lyft in the US.

Beoplay

Free, requires hardware

This app might be free, but it’s designed to work with some reassuringly expensive hardware: it’s from B&O, makers of high-end speakers and headphones such as the really impressive BeoPlay H4 Bluetooth headphones, and it’s for their hardware and nobody else’s.

If you’re fortunate enough to own the right cans or speakers then there’s lots here to like: good design and usability, really easy wireless pairing, the ability to link two identical speakers in stereo or ambient modes and audio presets for different kinds of content or listening environments.

One of the great features of this phone-based control, though, is what B&O calls Tonetouch, which uses your phone’s touchscreen to control the overall sound and make it warmer or brighter, more relaxed or more exciting, and to customize it according to the particular device you’re listening to.

That control isn’t available on the Beoplay Watch app, but you can access your saved Tonetouch presets from it.

The app works with the BeoPlay A1, A2, S3, H5, H7, H8, H9, M5 and Beolit 15, although you may need to update the software before they’ll play nicely with it. Where appropriate the app will also provide access to headphone settings such as noise cancellation and battery status.

Drafts

$5.99/£5.99/AU$9.99

On the face of it, and by face we mean Apple Watch face, Drafts doesn’t seem to offer much for six quidbucks: it enables you to dictate text and save it for later. But it turns out that it does an awful lot…it just does it in a really simple way.

On the iPhone, Drafts is designed to make it easy to capture ideas, thoughts, to-dos or anything else.

It has an email-style interface for easy navigation and it enables you to send your Drafts to a whole bunch of other apps and services: email, message, apps in your Share sheet, social media and so on.

It supports Markdown for easy formatting, and it hooks into the iMessage app to provide stored “snippets” of text and/or emoji for instant replies.

Bringing Drafts to the Watch makes it even faster. Tap on the microphone icon to capture and it does just that – but it also enables you to add to existing drafts using either your voice or the Scribble input, which means it’s brilliant for those moments when you think of something really clever to write or something you’d missed from your to-do list. It’s the kind of app you’ll quickly learn to love.

Strava

Free / in-app purchases

Strava is one of the most popular running and cycling apps around, but it’s always required you to have your phone or a non-Apple smartwatch to track your travels and record your vital statistics. Not anymore.

If you have an Apple Watch 2, the Strava Apple Watch app can use its GPS to record your run without requiring you to strap a phone to anything. The interface isn’t as pretty as the iPhone app’s interface, but when you’re running or cycling that doesn’t matter: the information you need is presented cleanly enough and the app is simple and straightforward to use.

The main app is free and offers essential features including distance, pace, speed, elevation and burned calories, and there’s a premium service for $5.99/£5.99/AU$9.99 per month or $59.99/£54.99/AU$89.99 per year that offers more detailed post-exercise analysis, live performance feedback and personalized coaching – although not through the Watch.

However, if you’re someone who uses the premium features like Beacon on the main app, you might not find Strava on the Apple Watch to your liking compared to using it on the phone.

Hours

Free / in-app purchases

Many of us need to track the time we spend on specific tasks, but the team behind Hours rightly point out the three big pitfalls of time tracking: we forget to start tracking in the first place, forget to stop when we change tasks, or just forget to stop the timer(s) altogether. Hours hopes to address that by making it really, really easy to start and stop and switch.

The iPhone app is a very beautiful thing, with a visual timeline that makes it easy to see what you’ve been up to. The Watch interface is much simpler, but just as effective: you can see the list of tasks with a timer icon for each, and if you tap on a task you can add a verbal note as well as starting or stopping the timer.

There’s a Complication for instant access, and the app will prompt you from time to time to see if you want to keep the selected timer running.

The standard version is free and ideal for self-employed or freelance types, but the $7.99/£5.99/AU$12.99 upgrade to Pro adds multi-device synchronization, web access, reporting and data visualizations, team creation and management, and online backup, which means it’s a great team tool too.

Spark

Free

There’s no shortage of apps promising to make email fun again, and Spark is one of our favorites: on our Mac and on our iPhone it does a superb job of showing us what we want and hiding what we don’t.

The Apple Watch app is as well thought-out as its siblings, with the ability to use Messages-style quick replies as well as emoji and dictation. It’s quite possible to reply to most everyday emails without reaching for your iPhone, although the option to Handoff is there if a message is too long to bother scrolling through on your wrist.

The main selling point for Spark is its Smart Inbox, which groups messages from multiple accounts into personal, notification and newsletter categories. It then displays how many unread messages you have for each category in the Watch app’s home screen.

You can pin messages for quick access, and you can snooze them to hide them for a specified period of time. We find ourselves using that last one a lot: messages we can’t process properly on our wrists are quickly snoozed so they’ll resurface when we’re back at our Macs. If you have to handle a lot of email Spark is a massive time saver.

MultiTimer

Free

Your Watch has a pretty good stopwatch app, but what happens when you need to time several things that happen at the same time?

Workouts involving high intensity training are the most obvious application, but you might need to time a marinade here, a slow cook there, a bit of boiling over there and some roasting over there, or time a presentation, test, exercise or video recording.

Whatever the scenario, MultiTimer can handle it without getting complicated, erring firmly on the side of simplicity.

With MultiTimer you can run multiple timers simultaneously, getting reminders when it’s time to do something, and the period can be from seconds to 100 hours, which should be enough for most situations. The app runs continuously in the background and takes up hardly any system resources: it’s just 20MB in size.

The main app displays multiple timers at once and has a Today widget for easy access, but the Watch version takes a more streamlined approach: timers appear in list format, and you tap on the list item to see the timer for it.

Hailo

Free

If you aren’t already familiar with Hailo, it’s a high-tech way to hail a taxi cab. It started in the UK but it’s also available in Ireland, Spain and Singapore, although if you’re in the US you’re out of luck for the time being. For US readers we’d recommend the Uber app, which uses the Watch’s maps to great effect.

In some respects Hailo is the anti-Uber, because it’s designed to put you in touch with taxi drivers rather than self-employed Uber contractors. If you’re in one of the countries that Hailo covers, it’s beautifully simple and feels suitably Dick Tracy-esque: when you want a taxi, you just tap on your location and then tap on the big yellow button to call a cab.

It allows you to pay from the app too, and there’s no need to work out a tip (if you want to leave one): the Watch app can calculate the right amount for you. While you wait for the cab to arrive, you’ll see its ETA in real time.

It’s a good example of developers keeping the Watch features to the absolute minimum: you get everything you need without unnecessary bells and whistles.

Overcast

Free + IAP

If you love to listen to podcasts and you don’t already have Overcast, you’re in for a nice surprise: it’s a superb app, and its Watch integration is particularly well thought out.

In addition to the usual controls and lists of shows and episodes, it gives you quick access to two really useful features: Smart Speed, which can make the podcast play more quickly without turning into Alvin and the Chipmunks; and Voice Boost, which can make indistinct speech noticeably clearer and compensate for podcasters who can’t pick a single spot in front of the mic.

If you’ve ever strained to hear something only for the host to move closer to the mic and nearly blow your eardrums out, you should be rushing to the App Store already

Overcast is free, or $9.99/£8.99/AU$12.99 without the ads. We’d recommend going for the ad-free version, because while the advertising isn’t too invasive this is an app that’s been put together by people who really care about the end user experience, and paying for the full app is a great way to ensure that they’ll keep on caring.

$3.99/£3.49/AU$5.99 monthly subscription

A reliable and secure password manager is a must-have in these days of security breaches and hacks, and 1Password is one of the best. And it turns out that it’s also one of the best password managers you can use on your Apple Watch.

Our favorite apps don’t just port entire iPhone apps across. They think about what you’re actually likely to need on your wrist, and do that instead. In the case of 1Password that means you choose the pieces of information you want available on your Watch, so for example you might want details of a few logins, one credit card and a couple of notes, or perhaps the PIN codes for everyday locks.

If you’ve ever frantically scrolled through an iPhone app or contacts list to try and find the PIN for a bank card you don’t use very often, the appeal should be obvious.

Where 1Password gets particularly clever is in its support for team and family accounts, so you can share sets of information with everybody who needs it. And if a site you use has been compromised, 1Password will alert you to change your password. It’s great stuff, and comes with a glowing recommendation from Apple.

$2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49

Sometimes it’s hard to remember everything, especially when you’re traveling. What level did you park the car on? What’s the hotel room number? What did you change the combination on your locker to this time? Say hello to Cheatsheet, which is designed to remember the things you probably won’t.

It’s important to stress that Cheatsheet is not a secure app: it’s not designed to store any sensitive information. What it does instead is make it really easy to jot down all the little bits of information you might need during the day, from registration plates to flight numbers, bus routes, clothes sizes and bike lock codes.

It has 160 icons you can use to label each bit of information for easier identification, and you can add, edit and delete bits of information without having to open the phone. If you wish, you can use a Complication that shows your top memory-refreshing nugget of information right on the Watch face.

The main app is offered free, but if you want to use it on your Apple Watch you’ll need the Unlock Everything in-app purchase, which is currently $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49. If you’re constantly juggling, looking for or misplacing Post-It notes and scribbled-on scraps of paper, this app might just change your life.

Free

You know you’re living in interesting times when one of the best apps for an Apple device comes from Microsoft. But Translator is superb.

We refer to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy in another entry, and Microsoft Translator is the closest we’ve come to its Babel Fish – a fish you stuck in your ear to translate the universe’s many languages.

Translator sits on your wrist rather than in your ear canal, but it does much the same thing. Speak into your watch and you’ll see the translation, and it remembers recent translations on Watch or phone so you can find them again easily. You can also pin translations for instant access to essential words or phrases.

It gets even better if you use it on your phone, because it can translate in real time as you message somebody. You’ll see your typing with the translation in the same bubble, and it can even handle simplified Chinese and Arabic script.

The amount of thought that’s gone into Translator is obvious. Want to translate a sign? Point your camera at it. Want to have a conversation in a language you don’t speak? The phone display splits with your words facing you and the translation facing them.

Free

If you don’t have a dedicated fitness tracker but fancy being able to track your sleep patterns, Sleep++ can help. It turns your Watch into a sleep monitor, using its motion detection to track your twists and turns as you have that cheese-fueled nightmare again.

Using it is simple: tell the app when you’re going to bed, tell it when you wake up in the morning – and the resultant reports can be eye-opening.

Your sleep is broken into blocks according to quality and movement, so you can see whether you’re restless at particular times.

There is a downside to all of this, and that’s the Watch itself: you can only track your sleep if you keep the Watch on, and clearly you can’t do that and charge it at the same time. That’s a particular issue for the first-generation Apple Watch, which doesn’t have a brilliant battery life – and the newer Apple Watch 2 isn’t a whole lot better.

We found that the answer was to pop the Watch on charge while we breakfasted and showered, but sometimes that didn’t give us enough juice for a full day’s wear.

If your Watch usage means you already struggle to make it through the day before running out of juice then you might want to skip Sleep++, but if you’ve got battery life to spare it’s a fascinating insight into what happens when you’re asleep.

$3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99

We like to personalize our technology: we can’t be the only ones who’ve caught ourselves saying “thanks” to Siri. But while digital assistants can be sassy if you ask them the right questions, apps tend to be rather less interesting.

Except for CARROT Weather, which often appears to be channeling Marvin the Paranoid Android from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

CARROT uses the same weather data as the fantastic Dark Sky app, but presents it rather differently: a typical update might say “It’s a beautiful, sunny day!” and then add “Ha ha, just kidding. It’s raining.”

You’ll either find this highly amusing or intensely annoying. We think it’s funny: who can resist an app that urges you to “bask in the glorious warmth of the partly-obscured sun”?

CARROT doesn’t just have personality, though. It also has radar and satellite weather maps, a time machine with up to 70 years of historical weather data to look at, and forecasts for right now, the next 24 hours and the next 7 days.

The basic app costs $3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99, but to unlock some of the Watch features you’ll need an annual Premium subscription, which is currently $2.49/£2.29/AU$3.49. This unlocks the half-hourly updates and the option to customize the Watch complications.

$4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99

One of the most useful things about the Apple Watch is that it enables you to do things without having to take your phone out of your pocket or bag. Just Press Record brings that handiness to voice recording, enabling you to capture bright ideas, rambling monologues or memos when you’re out and about.

The interface is just a big red button with a picture of a microphone on it, and as you might expect you tap it to start recording. The phone app can transcribe your recording to turn it into text – which means your recordings become searchable by keyword – and it recognises formatting commands such as “new paragraph” and “comma”.

To use it is to feel like you’re living in the future: we remember when dictation and transcription required a powerful PC and endless patience, and now you get much better results with a watch. Isn’t technology brilliant?

In addition to its recording and transcription features, the app syncs automatically via iCloud, so you can access it on all your devices – including macOS, for which there’s a separate app – and it uses the Watch’s own local storage so that you can record even if your phone isn’t currently connected.

Free

The best apps are those which the developers have thought: “what watch-based features would actually be worthwhile?” and TripAdvisor definitely falls into that category: while the iPhone app is a veritable feast of information about absolutely everywhere, the watch app is much more focused.

To take a typical example, imagine you’re hungry. Tap on the app, tap restaurants, and the first thing you’ll see is a list of restaurants within 1km of your current location.

The key data is right there: the star rating, its rank in the local area, and what kind of food it does, so you can see immediately if the place offering easy cuisine is more likely to serve salmonella than smoked salmon.

Tap on the listing and you get a map, individual reviews and a photo gallery from users, not the establishment itself. There’s also a Save button, so if you like it you can add it to your favorite places.

When we say it’s focused we mean it: other than restaurants, the only options are Things To Do and Hotels. TripAdvisor clearly thinks that if you want to use other features, like damning a diner or praising a pie shop, you’ll do that in the iPhone app. And it’s right.

$2.99/£2.29/AU$4.49

Getting Fantastical 2 up and running on your watch can be time consuming, but it’s worth it: one of the very best iPhone calendar apps around develops even more powers when you add its app to your watch.

You can also add it as a complication, which means you’ll see details of your schedule right there in the watch face.

To actually make it work you’ll need to install Fantastical to your watch and then open the iPhone app, not the Apple Watch one. This is where you specify what information should be sent to the watch, and the options are extensive.

You can choose from events, calendars, reminders and lists, include a map of the event location, show end times and specify how reminders should appear, and you can even specify what should happen if you tap on the Fantastical 2 complication on your watch face.

It’s that kind of thought and attention to detail that makes us love the app so much.

The best thing about Fantastical 2, though, is that it understands you. Force Touch the app, tap on Add Event and Siri starts listening.

It knows what you mean by “lunch with Dave”, automatically putting the appointment at 12 noon, and it knows that if you say “to-do get dinner on the way home” you’re adding an item to a to-do list. Siri’s voice recognition performs brilliantly when it’s limited to such a specific set of instructions.

Free

eBay’s a strange old thing these days. What started off as a haven for Pez collectors is full of high street retailers and no-name knock-off factories, professional power sellers and the usual bunch of con artists.

Browsing all of that on a watch would be absolutely horrible, which is why the eBay app doesn’t do that.

What it does do is concentrate on the ways an Apple Watch app can actually be useful in online auctioning. It pings you when an item in your Watch List – as in items you’re watching, not a list on your watch – is coming to a close, it pings if you’re outbid while an auction progresses, and it lets you know when your auction purchases are en-route.

It’s particularly great for those occasions when you don’t want to miss out on a great bargain but you can’t bring out your phone, such as when you’re attending the birth of your child, defusing a fiendishly complicated bomb or hiding from a jealous husband or wife.

Being able to stick your watch into silent mode and surreptitiously update your auctions is an absolute godsend in any situation where poking at your phone would be considered rude.

$3.99/£2.99

Dark Sky is the first app we put on any new Apple device, and the Apple Watch is no exception. In fact, we think Dark Sky is at its most useful when you’re wearing it on your wrist.

What Dark Sky does seems very simple, but is actually very clever. It tells you what the weather’s going to do – not in a vague sense, but as in telling you that it’s going to bucket down in ten minutes and that the storm won’t stop for an hour.

That means it’s the perfect app for anybody who’s thinking about going outside for any reason, or who’s already outside and really ought to be getting inside in a big hurry.

In more dramatic climates it alerts of dangerous weather such as storms, and you can set it to notify you of specific kinds of weather that you select in the companion iPhone app.

We use it to decide if now is a good time to walk the dog, if it’s time to get the kids back to the car or if we really shouldn’t be going out dressed like that; you might use it when you’re hiking or biking, or doing any other activity that could be affected by changes in the weather.

If you used Dark Sky in the early days of the Apple Watch and found it painfully slow and unresponsive, give it another go: the current version runs on the watch, not on the phone, and the difference in performance really is dramatic.

Free

You’ve probably noticed something of a trend in our favorite apps: they tend to approach their mission by asking what useful things the watch can do rather than trying to cram an entire phone app into that tiny screen, irrespective of whether that’s sane or useful. Yelp is a great example of an app that gets it right.

When you open it you’ll see just four icons: Restaurants, Bars, Coffee & Tea, and Hot & New. Tapping on the one you’re interested in then shows you a list sorted by distance, with the all-important star ratings and average cost listed on top of a photograph. Tap again and you’ll get the opening hours and a map, and of course you can read the reviews too – that’s what Yelp is all about.

It’s particularly good for the kind of venues and experiences popular among bright young things in big cities, (the most committed Yelpers), but the database is truly enormous and doesn’t turn into tumbleweed whenever you venture into the countryside. Yelp’s app is very good for finding places in unfamiliar towns, or unfamiliar places in towns you know very well.

Free

“Wouldn’t it be great if you could read an entire newspaper on a screen the size of a postage stamp?” said no-one, ever. That hasn’t stopped people from trying, often with terrible results. So all credit to The Guardian, which has taken a completely different approach that actually works. It’s a news app, but rather than tell you everything it only tells you a little bit.

Rather than deliver a newspaper, The Guardian’s watch app only wants to do one thing: to show you something interesting every time you look at it. In practice that means the app is looking at your preferences in the larger iPhone app and showing you one story that it thinks you’ll be interested in.

You’ll see a headline, a small photo and a synopsis, and you can either Force Touch to save the item to your reading list, or use Handoff to open the full item on your phone.

Trust us, it’s a lot more useful than it sounds. Provided you’ve personalized the main app, the one-shot suggestions do generally fall into the “hmm, that’s interesting” category, and we think it’s a much better approach than some other apps that give you half a headline for a whole bunch of stories.

Free

Some people bought their Apple Watch to track their fitness. Others, like us, hoped we’d be able to control every appliance by shouting at it. That dream hasn’t quite been achieved yet, but in the meantime we can command our Philips Hue lights with the power of Siri, or access pre-installed lighting effects with the tap of the wrist.

Hue is Philips’ HomeKit-compatible bulb system, enabling you to create light recipes that you can save for easy access. It’s based around a hub that connects to your wireless router, allowing control via phone, tablet or watch.

If you plump for the colored bulbs or colored lightstrips you can mix and match the colors and brightness by mood or activity, so you might have warm whites for reading, soft pastels for dining and something spookier for watching horror films.

The Watch bit of the app isn’t the most straightforward to set up – once installed you need to create its widgets using the Hue app on your phone – but once you’ve done that you can then tap on the appropriate icon to call up its settings.

And because the Hue setup is HomeKit compatible, it also integrates with Siri. The novelty of asking Siri to turn the lights on or off or to call up a particular ‘light scene’ never really wears off.

Free

Foursquare’s mission has changed somewhat over the years: what started off based around location check-ins and “king of the castle” bragging had to change when Facebook promptly copied the idea.

Robbed of its raison d’être, these days Foursquare has separated the check-ins from the venue recommendations. Foursquare City Guide’s job is to find decent bars and restaurants wherever you are in the world (if you still want to be the mayor of wherever, that’s the companion app, Foursquare Swarm).

The main interface of City Guide has five tappable areas: Search, Favorites, Food, Coffee and Nightlife.

Tapping on the appropriate option takes you to a list of venues, but instead of just filtering by distance the app also filters by Foursquare user ratings – so a rating of 9.5 that’s 500m away will appear below a 9.7 that’s 100m further.

The list gives you the name, price bracket, average rating and distance for each venue, and if you tap on a venue you’ll see reviews, photos, maps and other key information. The big selling point here is Foursquare’s global reach: it’s a really good app for travellers who don’t want to spend their time in the hotel bar or eating in faceless chain restaurants.

Free / £2.99 to remove adverts

What makes a good watch app? We think it’s one that tells you exactly what you need to know, when you need to know it, without fuss or fluster.

And that’s what UK Bus Checker does. From the no-nonsense name onwards, it’s a fine example of a focused app – and it’s so good we’re adding in here even though it’s only of use to Brits.

Open up the apps and you’ll be staring at four icons and your location, with Favorites showing your saved stops, Nearby the stops around you, Journeys enabling you to plan a trip, and Get Home finding the best way to get you there from here.

We use the Favorites one a lot, because it offers real-time data so you know if the number 60A is running late again or if you’ll need to sprint to the bus stop. It includes mapping and points of interest too, so you can use it to find a coffee shop when you’re on foot.

The only real downside to UK Bus Checker is that it’s only as good as the data supplied to it, and unfortunately if – like us – you live in an area where the buses are operated by the devil himself and driven by his henchmen, that data isn’t always accurate.

But you can say the same about the signs on the bus shelters – that’s the bus company’s fault, not the technology.

Free

Do your colleagues do much thinking outside the box? Do they talk about “going forward” with projects or “surfacing” information? Is the oldest person in the building still in their mid-30s? Then you’re probably all too aware of Slack, the corporate communications system that’s replaced email and instant messaging for more than a 1.7 million daily users.

We’re kidding, but only a little bit: Slack has become the go-to communication platform for tech and media businesses and start-ups. The iOS app provides a fully-featured Slack experience with file sharing, social media integration and powerful search and archiving features, while the Apple Watch app doesn’t.

That’s entirely deliberate, because if your Watch app tried to cover all the different interactions in a typical Slack team it’d be pinging away so often your Watch would run out of power before your second cup of coffee (and do be careful – Slack on the wrist does munch the battery of your smartwatch in our tests).

What the developers have done instead is focus on what you want a watch to do, which is to notify you only of the things you really need to know about. That means the same push notifications you’ve set for your iPhone, direct messaging and incorporating Handoff so you can move from watch to iOS without losing your train of thought.

$9.99/£7.99/AU$14.99

If you aren’t already familiar with Tweetbot 4, it’s the best Mac and iOS Twitter client bar none. This is why it can charge $9.99/£7.99/AU$14.99 for an iOS app and people gladly pay it, and it’s worth checking out on the Apple Watch too.

Tweetbot doesn’t unleash the Twitter firehose onto your wrist – we can’t think of anything guaranteed to kill your battery more quickly – but it does give you exactly the information you need when you aren’t looking at your phone.

The developers have rightly assumed that if you have your phone to hand you won’t be using the watch instead, so they’ve concentrated on making an app for when you can’t or don’t want to pull your phone out of your pocket or purse. And that’s clever.

Its Activity pane shows you what’s happening in your feed, so if somebody’s followed you or replied to you or tweeted you then you’ll see it in Activity. Tapping on the item opens the appropriate tweet or user page, and with tweets you’ll see icons for a quick reply, a retweet or a like.

If you push into the screen using Force Touch you get an offer to create a new tweet, and both it and the reply option use Siri for dictation, because on-watch typing would be frankly horrible – and you can dictate a direct message or follow/unfollow accounts from the app too.

Free

If you’ve tried Twitter or Facebook on the Apple Watch you may well think that social networking doesn’t really work on such a small device, but Instagram begs to differ. The Facebook-owned photo sharing service concentrates on the basics and does them very well.

Like most Watch versions of iPhone/iPad apps the Instagram app is limited compared to its bigger sibling; for example you can’t use it to take photos with your phone camera and upload them from the Watch, with snapping and uploading remaining a job for your iPhone.

What the app does do is show a shortened version of your Instagram feed, offering the most recent posts from people you’ve chosen to receive notifications about. (You can change that list in the iPhone app).

Instagram works surprisingly well on your wrist. You can swipe through photos to view or like them, see recent comments and likes on your own photos, and send emoji replies to people’s posts.

It’s great for a bit of time-wasting when you’re out and about, and it’s compatible with Handoff so you can effortlessly switch from Watch to iPhone when you want to use a feature the Watch app doesn’t have.

$9.99/£7.99/AU$14.99

The apps we tend to love the most are the ones that solve real-world problems, and PCalc falls into that category. Yes, it’s a fantastically useful calculator and scientific calculator, but much more importantly it prevents fisticuffs in restaurants.

That’s because of its handy bill splitter. Simply tell it how much the bill comes to, how many people are paying and how big a tip you want to leave, and the Watch app calculates how much each person should hand over. It supports watchOS 3’s Scribble feature too, so you don’t need to dictate or tap on a tiny keypad if you’ve downed that second bottle of wine. Alternatively you can use the Digital Crown to enter the figure in the tip calculator.

That’s not all the Watch app can do, though. It includes a converter for distances and other measurements, and if you Force Touch the app you’ll see a Send To iPhone icon as well as the clear and undo buttons.

And on the iPhone the main app is a great tool for serious calculating (and quick sums: there’s a mini-calculator if you Force Touch the app icon). It’s not the cheapest calculator app, but it’s worth the money.

$2.99/£2.49/AU$4.99

One of the Apple Watch’s most impressive features is the remote camera option, which enables you to use the Watch’s display as a viewfinder and shutter button for your iPhone.

It’s as useful for looking in awkward places as it is for snapping selfies, but that usefulness only applies if you stick with the default Camera app – or if you use a Camera replacement such as ProCamera, which has its own remote shutter app for the Apple Watch.

The ProCamera Watch app offers more options than the standard Apple one, with easy selection of photo, lowlight mode, HDR or video and the option to set a timer too. But the real draw here is the main iPhone app, which offers a range of image formats, RAW and UHD shooting, filters and effects and easy social media sharing.

Some of its best features require in-app purchases – Lowlight Plus and vividHDR are $2.99/£2.49/AU$4.99 each – but that’s still not much when you consider the kind of money you’d spend on real camera kit.

The app has just been updated for the new iPhone 7 and 7 Plus too, with a clever option to switch between the iPhone 7 Plus’s two lenses and Wide Color Capture on both models.

Free or $6.99/£4.99/AU$10.99 for ad-free version

Shazam was a genuine gee-whizz app when it debuted on the iPhone, and it’s even more impressive when it’s on your wrist. It does one thing and does it brilliantly: it listens to the music around you and lets you know what it is.

Its recognition algorithms are superb, and having it on your Watch means you can probably win pop quizzes without getting caught. Not that we’d recommend such behaviour, of course.

The experience  on the Watch is very well thought out: instead of staring at a progress icon while the song is being recognised, you simply tap the app and then drop your wrist. It’ll then notify you when the song has been identified, at which point you can raise your wrist, see the song and then tap on the lyrics if you want to know the words too. The lyrics even scroll along with the music.

The Watch app uses Handoff, so you can pick up the iPhone to see more about the track, watch videos or buy the download, plus the iOS app also boasts Rdio and Spotify integration and artist recommendations. Jfriel1995scotland reckons it’s “lol best free app ever”, and he or she might have a point.

Now Watch users have a choice of transport apps on their Watch. The built-in Maps app from Apple is still the most versatile thanks to excellent maps, directions and now public transport options in some cities like London. But Google’s answer is straightforward and attractive.

Google Maps gives directions (though not maps) for two destinations, home and work, but will also show routes recently followed on your phone. A Force Press on the Watch screen lets you switch between walking, driving and public transport modes.

The cycle routing that the phone app offers isn’t here, perhaps because you shouldn’t be taking your hand off the handlebars to read your Watch screen as you ride.

You may have missed the built-in Camera Remote feature since the Apple Watch doesn’t have a camera, but you should use it to your advantage every time you take an awkwardly framed photo. It let’s your frame a shot remotely with your Apple Watch by seeing a preview of what’s in the phone viewfinder via the Watch screen.

It also has a shutter button and initiates a countdown. It works with both the front and back cameras and is free. Use this tool wisely to achieve less awkward selfies at a distance.

I sometimes wear my messy Chipotle burritos while scarfing down the healthy-ish Mexican platters, but I’m also purposely wearing Chipotle on my wrist to send order to the store via my Apple Watch.

While it’s not the most groundbreak app, I can create a one-tap order with the Chipotle Apple Watch app and have my meal ready to go while I’m on the treadmill at the gym next door. It’s as efficient as it is calorie rich. The best part is, I get the skip the always massive line.

Facebook Messenger on Apple Watch got a late start, but it finally lets you respond to those pressing messages to friends and family without opening up the sioled-off app on your phone or website on a computer.

You can initiate and reply with a thumbs up (which I see as kind of curt and rude) or dictate a reply. Sending Facebook’s ugly smiley face or your current location can be done with the press of one or two taps too. No, there’s still no WhatsApps for Apple Watch, but this is the next best thing from Facebook.

Calling an Uber isn’t too difficult, unless of course your hands are full or running down last-second tasks. That’s me right before I leave for a flight.

Often times, I’m packing my suitcase with last second gadgets and taking out the trash so it doesn’t take on another lifeform by sitting there for a week. The Apple Watch makes it easier to hail the 21st century taxi.

The Uber Apple Watch app is not only simple to use, it lets you see vital information, like the time the driver will take to get there and the car he or she drives, complete with a picture (when they have one).

Like Citymapper, ETA will help you get somewhere. The title refers to its front-and-centre information. You add a location on the iPhone and save it. Then it’ll give you timings for driving, walking or taking public transport.

Some watch faces allow it as a complication, where it’ll show the time it’ll take to your top saved route. It knows what traffic is like so allows extra time for a drive in rush hour, say. On the Watch app you tap the chosen saved destination and it’ll take you through to Maps for directions.

Similarly, for public transport directions in select cities Maps will provide the directions. Like Dark Sky this is a paid-for app: £2.29/$2.99.

From a team of developers, psychologists and neuroscientists, Peak is a great app for keeping your brain active. The Watch version offers three games, ideal for the smaller screen. Some of these seem simple at first, but they quickly become more challenging.

There are workouts to test memory, focus and problem solving – all of them fun, engaging, and the ideal to while away the daily commute.

Currency converters abound on the iPhone and XE Currency is one of the best. While the Watch version doesn’t have the calculator feature found on the phone, it’s a clear chart of how many euros, Argentine pesos or Australian dollars a British pound buys.

You can add more currencies on the phone version – whatever’s there is replicated on the Watch. A button at the base of the screen lets the iPhone app control the refresh rates, so you can avoid roaming charges.

Headspace is a meditation app with lessons as short as two minutes or as long as an hour. It’s free to learn the basics in 10 beginner sessions, then £9.99 if you want to go further, with sessions divided into packs titled Creativity, Focus or Happiness.

It’s a great app, and becomes increasingly rewarding thanks to its down-to-earth approach and decent design.

On the Watch there’s only one function, but it’s a neat one. Opening the app reveals the SOS button. If you’re feeling stressed, tap this and it plays a two-minute session designed to help with what Headspace calls “meltdown moments.”

This powerful translation app works in 90 languages. It’s free but for full Watch use you’ll need the £3.99/$4.99 in-app purchase which offers voice recognition and unlimited translations.

A Watch complication means you can tap on the screen to start translating straight away and if you’ll let it, iTranslate will use your location to figure out what language it should be translating to or from.

It also responds to Time Travel so by winding the Digital Crown you can see phrases which change such as “Good afternoon” which is replaced by “Good evening” as you scroll forward.

This is the app that aims to give you up-to-date information on upcoming flights. Set up your App in the Air account, enter the flight dates on your iPhone (or your booking reference, though this feature is still in beta) and in the Glances screen on your Watch it’ll show the flight number and time until check-in closes.

Tap through to the app itself and there are more details, including gate number when known.

There’s also a packing list to remind you to check travel insurance and roaming settings on your phone. Added features include gate change and status updates which can be sent by SMS to avoid data charges overseas. That’s £3.99/$4.99 for five flights. Boarding time, departure and gate can be displayed as a complication on the Watch face.

If you use the Boris Bikes, as London’s Santander Cycles bike hire scheme is affectionately called, this is handy. Since Transport for London releases bike and dock data every three minutes, apps are the best way to check availability. And unlike the official app, Cycle Hire has Watch compatibility.

In the Watch’s Glances screen it shows you how many bikes and spaces are available nearby. Then with a tap it’ll reveal more detail either on a map or in list form. The iPhone app offers expanded features such as routes and reminders to return your bike when the 30-minute free hire period is running out.

This is a comprehensive London Tube app, with a journey planner, live departure boards and more. On the Watch, London Tube Tracker shows details for stations you’ve picked as favourites on the iPhone, down to what trains will be arriving when. Meanwhile, on the Glances screen it’ll tell you how long it is until your next or last train home and how long that journey should take.

The cool live Tube map, showing trains shuffling round London is restricted to the iPhone version, sadly. Still, the route planning and line statuses on the Watch are useful.

What are the tasks you really want to achieve? Pick six from the hundreds of icons on the iPhone and they’ll appear in the Watch app or the Streaks complication on the Watch face. So whether you want to read more, practise a musical instrument or walk the dog, there are icons you can invoke and reminders it can offer.

You can even choose to brush your teeth as a goal, though, frankly, I’d have thought that was a given. It works with the Health app to nudge you towards fitness goals and the name refers to the fact that you should aim to hit the targets for a streak of consecutive days.

Of course, bigger screens such as phones and, you know, TVs are best for expansive looks at the news, so the Watch’s little face is reserved for headlines and photos with BBC News. These appear in Glances and tapping on one takes you to a very slightly fuller version, and lets you access the other headlines.

You can create a personalised news list on the iPhone and these show up in the Watch app, too. Ideal for snacking on headlines and letting you follow up with the main story elsewhere.

If you’ve been meaning to get that six-pack tummy but just don’t have time to go to the gym, this iPhone app has high-quality videos of avatars performing crunches, situps, stretches and core twists that you can do in your own time on your bedroom floor, say.

Initial workouts with Runtastic are free, more come as in-app purchases. And if squinting at your precariously perched iPhone isn’t doing it for you, the Watch app means you can see an animation on your watch, with vibrations on your wrist to start and end a set. It’s easy to use and works well. Now you’ll have to find another excuse not to work out.

Clear is a beautifully designed to-do list app that uses gestures and colour to make for a really enjoyable experience – though whether that makes you actually do more of what’s on the list is another matter.

Still, confirming you’ve completed a task is satisfying and you can do that on the Watch as well as the iPhone. You can add tasks to the list on the Watch, thanks to Siri, or set reminders for when you need a nudge. Clear is an exceptional app and the Watch app is neatly realised.

There are plenty of seven-minute workout apps (consisting of 12 30-second exercises with 10-second rests in between) but 7 Minute Workout Challenge appeals because it’s comprehensive and well-designed.

The Watch element includes a simple timer or animations to remind you how to know your lunges from your jumping jacks, and you can choose your workout from the selection available. The pause and restart buttons are also useful.

This app makes working out accessible, attainable, and (importantly) fast.

Organise your life better with Evernote, the brilliant note-taking app which saves photos, text, recipes, bookmarks, voice notes and more. On Apple Watch you can set reminders and check off tasks easily enough.

You can dictate new notes for those brilliant ideas you mustn’t forget just by tapping the Plus button or Force Touching the screen. The Watch app can search existing notes using voice – though this wasn’t as reliable as I’d have liked. Even so, if you’re an Evernote fan it brings an extra level of convenience.

You can use Lark to lose weight or just for general fitness. It mines the information in your iPhone’s Health app to understand how active you’ve been, and you tell it what you’ve eaten in text message conversations. Eat too much bacon and it’ll tell you to find protein elsewhere, for instance.

On the Watch it offers quick pep talks and you can log a meal by dictating what you’ve eaten. Lark can be a bit naggy so won’t suit everyone, but if you like it, the Watch offers simple extra functions that work well.

National Rail Enquiries is a brilliant app that if you’re a regular train user is quickly essential. It’s full of data like live departure boards and notifications if there are service disruptions, all colour-coded (green is on time, red means it’s late).

On the Watch it works in three ways: to show the nearest stations, your favourites (which usually includes your home station) and recent enquiries. A useful adjunct to the great iPhone version.

Check out the Easyjet app on the Glances screens and you’ll see that even if you don’t have a flight booked it’s kind enough to tell you the temperature in Tenerife, Palma or some other warm place!

When you have upcoming bookings, it gives you a countdown to your flight date, and shows you weather for the week ahead at your destination. It even provides you the latest exchange rate.

There’s also flight status info in Glances and more features are arriving, airport by airport to show gate notifications and reminders of when to head from duty-free to the plane.

Practising yoga is easier with clear instructions and guidance, which FitStar Yoga provides alongside high-res video. That’s not on the Watch, though there are useful features for when you’re more familiar with the poses.

You can start and pause sessions and the Watch reminds you what’s up next. And you can let the app know if that last exercise was too hard, just right, or too easy. It integrates with Apple’s Health app so calories burnt are noted in the app.

Information is power and if you’re trying to lose weight, calorie tracking is a good way to stay focused. MyFitnessPal works out a daily calorie allowance based on how much weight you want to shed. Eat a meal and your allowance is spent, take exercise and you earn credit.

The Watch gives you a running total of remaining calories and how that breaks down into protein, carbohydrates and more. It can integrate with your steps total so you don’t have to add those manually. It’s simple but convenient and helpful.

If walking’s your thing, Walkmeter helps track your every step, showing your perambulations on a map and generating detailed graphs. The Watch app has clear data reporting and you can start and stop a walk from your wrist using the Watch’s Force Touch actions.

Apple’s own Workout app does a lot, but this app has more detail and the mapping detail on the iPhone is great. The app is free but for full Watch performance you need to upgrade to the Elite version for £3.99. There’s a lot here, including training plans and announcements as you hit targets or distances.

Withings makes a series of devices to help measure health including bathroom scales and a blood pressure monitor which connect wirelessly to the Withings site or the iPhone to store data.

The Health Mate Watch app shows some of this data including latest weight on the Glances screen plus in the app itself recent changes, BMI and how much of your weight is fat (I know, I know, but it can be important). The iPhone app can be used to track heart rate and count steps, too.

With the right Withings gadgets, this can lead to comprehensive and effective health monitoring.

The British Airways app doesn’t do a great deal until you’re close to travelling, but as soon as you’re within a week of wheels up, everything changes.

The Glance screen shows flight details with departure time and countdown to takeoff with more details in the Watch app itself. There’s also info on the weather at your destination, which obviously becomes more accurate and useful as you get nearer to flight day.

It tells you when to check in and which gate you’re flying from (once that information is available). And of course, once you’ve checked in, Passbook means you can use your Watch as a boarding pass at security and the gate.

The Weather Channel is the world’s most downloaded weather app, apparently. As well as instant weather descriptions for right now and forecasts for the next 15 hours or more, the Watch app shows details of how long until sunset, temperature and cloud cover now.

There’s also the current outlook, wind speed and chance of rain. Most of these details also appear in the app’s Glances screen. Since the arrival of watchOS 2, The Weather Channel is also available as a complication, appearing on some Watch faces as an icon, such as an umbrella when rain is expected. It’s free, or you can remove ads for £2.99/$3.99.

Citymapper is the pre-eminent public transport app, so no wonder it’s an Apple Watch essential. It tells you how to get around selected cities including London, Manchester, Paris, Barcelona and New York.

As well as bus, train and subway times and directions, the Watch app even offers cycling routes and bike hire details such as London’s Boris Bikes. Once you’ve set up the journey on the phone, step-by-step notifications will appear on the Watch screen.

You can start journeys to home or previously saved destinations right from the Watch, and it will even help you find your way to nearby bus stops and train stations. Brilliant, just brilliant.

Dave Phelan also contributed to this feature

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[elkooly]

http://www.recitequran.com/en/tafsir/en.ibn-kathir/13:1

READ

TAFSIR

13

AR-RA’D

THE THUNDER

Ibn Kathir – English

CHAPTER

FOLLOW US

Verse

1

Page 249

WHICH WAS REVEALED IN MAKKAH

﴿ بِسۡمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ ﴾

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

﴿ الٓمٓر‌ۚ تِلۡكَ ءَايَـٰتُ ٱلۡكِتَـٰبِ‌ۗ وَٱلَّذِىٓ أُنزِلَ إِلَيۡكَ مِن رَّبِّكَ ٱلۡحَقُّ وَلَـٰكِنَّ أَڪۡثَرَ ٱلنَّاسِ لَا يُؤۡمِنُونَ ﴾

(1. Alif Lam-Mim Ra. These are the verses of the Book (the Qur’an), and that which has been revealed unto you from your Lord is the truth, but most men believe not.)

THE QUR’AN IS ALLAH’S KALAM (SPEECH)

We talked before, in the beginning of Surat Al-Baqarah (chapter 2) about the meaning of the letters that appear in the beginnings of some chapters in the Qur’an. We stated that every Surah that starts with separate letters, affirms that the Qur’an is miraculous and is an evidence that it is a revelation from Allah, and that there is no doubt or denying in this fact. This is why Allah said next,

﴿ تِلۡكَ ءَايَـٰتُ ٱلۡكِتَـٰبِ‌ۗ ﴾

(These are the verses of the Book), the Qur’an, which Allah described afterwards,

﴿ وَٱلَّذِىٓ أُنزِلَ إِلَيۡكَ ﴾

(and that which has been revealed unto you), O Muhammad,

﴿ مِن رَّبِّكَ ٱلۡحَقُّ ﴾

(from your Lord is the truth,) Allah said next,

﴿ وَلَـٰكِنَّ أَڪۡثَرَ ٱلنَّاسِ لَا يُؤۡمِنُونَ ﴾

(but most men believe not.) just as He said in another Ayah,

﴿ وَمَآ أَڪۡثَرُ ٱلنَّاسِ وَلَوۡ حَرَصۡتَ بِمُؤۡمِنِينَ ﴾

(And most of mankind will not believe even if you desire it eagerly.) (12:103) Allah declares that even after this clear, plain and unequivocal explanation (the Qur’an), most men will still not believe, due to their rebellion, stubbornness and hypocrisy.

﴿ ٱللَّهُ ٱلَّذِى رَفَعَ ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٲتِ بِغَيۡرِ عَمَدٍ۬ تَرَوۡنَہَا‌ۖ ثُمَّ ٱسۡتَوَىٰ عَلَى ٱلۡعَرۡشِ‌ۖ وَسَخَّرَ ٱلشَّمۡسَ وَٱلۡقَمَرَ‌ۖ كُلٌّ۬ يَجۡرِى لِأَجَلٍ۬ مُّسَمًّ۬ى‌ۚ يُدَبِّرُ ٱلۡأَمۡرَ يُفَصِّلُ ٱلۡأَيَـٰتِ لَعَلَّكُم بِلِقَآءِ رَبِّكُمۡ تُوقِنُونَ ﴾

(2. Allah is He Who raised the heavens without any pillars that you can see. Then, He rose above (Istawa) the `Arsh (Throne). He has subjected the sun and the moon, each running (its course) for a term appointed. He manages and regulates all affairs; He explains the Ayat in detail, that you may believe with certainty in the meeting with your Lord.)

CLARIFYING ALLAH’S PERFECT ABILITY

Allah mentions His perfect ability and infinite authority, since it is He Who has raised the heavens without pillars by His permission and order. He, by His leave, order and power, has elevated the heavens high above the earth, distant and far away from reach. The heaven nearest to the present world encompasses the earth from all directions, and is also high above it from every direction. The distance between the first heaven and the earth is five hundred years from every direction, and its thickness is also five hundred years. The second heaven surrounds the first heaven from every direction, encompassing everything that the latter carries, with a thickness also of five hundred years and a distance between them of five hundred years. The same is also true about the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth and the seventh heavens. Allah said,

﴿ ٱللَّهُ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ سَبۡعَ سَمَـٰوَٲتٍ۬ وَمِنَ ٱلۡأَرۡضِ مِثۡلَهُنَّ ﴾

(It is Allah who has created seven heavens and of the earth the like thereof.) (65:12) Allah said next,

﴿ بِغَيۡرِ عَمَدٍ۬ تَرَوۡنَہَا‌ۖ ﴾

(…without any pillars that you can see.) meaning, `there are pillars, but you cannot see them,’ according to Ibn `Abbas, Mujahid, Al-Hasan, Qatadah, and several other scholars. Iyas bin Mu`awiyah said, “The heaven is like a dome over the earth,” meaning, without pillars. Similar was reported from Qatadah, and this meaning is better for this part of the Ayah, especially since Allah said in another Ayah,

﴿ وَيُمۡسِكُ ٱلسَّمَآءَ أَن تَقَعَ عَلَى ٱلۡأَرۡضِ إِلَّا بِإِذۡنِهِۦۤ‌ۗ ﴾

(He withholds the heaven from falling on the earth except by His permission. ) (22:65) Therefore, Allah’s statement,

﴿ تَرَوۡنَهَا ﴾

(..that you can see), affirms that there are no pillars. Rather, the heaven is elevated (above the earth) without pillars, as you see. This meaning best affirms Allah’s ability and power.

AL-ISTAWA’, RISING ABOVE THE THRONE

Allah said next,

﴿ ثُمَّ ٱسۡتَوَىٰ عَلَى ٱلۡعَرۡشِ‌ۖ ﴾

(Then, He rose above (Istawa) the Throne.) We explained the meaning of the Istawa’ in Surat Al-A`raf (7:54), and stated that it should be accepted as it is without altering, equating, annulling its meaning, or attempts to explain its true nature. Allah is glorified and praised from all that they attribute to Him.

ALLAH SUBJECTED THE SUN AND THE MOON TO ROTATE CONTINUOUSLY

Allah said,

﴿ وَسَخَّرَ ٱلشَّمۡسَ وَٱلۡقَمَرَ‌ۖ كُلٌّ۬ يَجۡرِى لِأَجَلٍ۬ مُّسَمًّ۬ى‌ۚ ﴾

(He has subjected the sun and the moon, each running (its course) for a term appointed.) It was said that the sun and the moon continue their course until they cease doing so upon the commencement of the Final Hour, as Allah stated,

﴿ وَٱلشَّمۡسُ تَجۡرِى لِمُسۡتَقَرٍّ۬ لَّهَا‌ۚ ﴾

(And the sun runs on its fixed course for a term (appointed).) (36:38) It was also said that the meaning is: until they settle under the Throne of Allah after passing the other side of the earth. So when they, and the rest of the planetary bodies reach there, they are at the furthest distance from the Throne. Because according to the correct view, which the texts prove, it is shaped like a domb, under which is all of the creation. It is not circular like the celestial bodies, because it has pillars by which it is carried. This fact is clear to those who correctly understand the Ayat and authentic Hadiths. All the (praise is due to) Allah and all the favors are from Him. Allah mentioned the sun and the moon here because they are among the brightest seven heavenly objects. Therefore, if Allah subjected these to His power, then it is clear that He has also subjected all other heavenly objects. Allah said in other Ayat,

﴿ لَا تَسۡجُدُواْ لِلشَّمۡسِ وَلَا لِلۡقَمَرِ وَٱسۡجُدُواْ لِلَّهِ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَهُنَّ إِن ڪُنتُمۡ إِيَّاهُ تَعۡبُدُونَ ﴾

(Prostrate yourselves not to the sun nor to the moon, but prostrate yourselves to Allah Who created them, if you (really) worship Him.) (41:37) and,

﴿ وَٱلشَّمۡسَ وَٱلۡقَمَرَ وَٱلنُّجُومَ مُسَخَّرَٲتِۭ بِأَمۡرِهِۦۤ‌ۗ أَلَا لَهُ ٱلۡخَلۡقُ وَٱلۡأَمۡرُ‌ۗ تَبَارَكَ ٱللَّهُ رَبُّ ٱلۡعَـٰلَمِينَ ﴾

(And (He created) the sun, the moon, the stars subjected to His command. Surely, His is the creation and commandment. Blessed is Allah, the Lord of all that exists!) (7:54) Allah’s statement next,

﴿ يُفَصِّلُ ٱلۡأَيَـٰتِ لَعَلَّكُم بِلِقَآءِ رَبِّكُمۡ تُوقِنُونَ ﴾

(He explains the Ayat in detail, that you may believe with certainty in the Meeting with your Lord.) means, He explains the signs and clear evidences that testify that there is no deity worthy of worship except Him. These evidences prove that He will resurrect creation if He wills, just as He started it.

﴿ وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِى مَدَّ ٱلۡأَرۡضَ وَجَعَلَ فِيہَا رَوَٲسِىَ وَأَنۡہَـٰرً۬ا‌ۖ وَمِن كُلِّ ٱلثَّمَرَٲتِ جَعَلَ فِيہَا زَوۡجَيۡنِ ٱثۡنَيۡنِ‌ۖ يُغۡشِى ٱلَّيۡلَ ٱلنَّہَارَ‌ۚ إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ • وَفِى ٱلۡأَرۡضِ قِطَعٌ۬ مُّتَجَـٰوِرَٲتٌ۬ وَجَنَّـٰتٌ۬ مِّنۡ أَعۡنَـٰبٍ۬ وَزَرۡعٌ۬ وَنَخِيلٌ۬ صِنۡوَانٌ۬ وَغَيۡرُ صِنۡوَانٍ۬ يُسۡقَىٰ بِمَآءٍ۬ وَٲحِدٍ۬ وَنُفَضِّلُ بَعۡضَہَا عَلَىٰ بَعۡضٍ۬ فِى ٱلۡأُڪُلِ‌ۚ إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَعۡقِلُونَ ﴾

(3. And it is He Who spread out the earth, and placed therein firm mountains and rivers and of every kind of fruit He made Zawjayn Ithnayn (two in pairs). He brings the night as a cover over the day. Verily, in these things, there are Ayat (signs) for people who reflect. ) (4. And in the earth are neighboring tracts, and gardens of vines, and green crops (fields), and date palms, growing into two or three from a single stem root, or otherwise, watered with the same water; yet some of them We make more excellent than others to eat. Verily, in these things there are Ayat (signs) for the people who understand.)

ALLAH’S SIGNS ON THE EARTH

After Allah mentioned the higher worlds, He started asserting His power, wisdom and control over the lower parts of the world. Allah said,

﴿ وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِى مَدَّ ٱلۡأَرۡضَ ﴾

(And it is He Who spread out the earth) made it spacious in length and width. Allah has placed on the earth firm mountains and made rivers, springs and water streams run through it, so that the various kinds of fruits and plants of every color, shape, taste and scent are watered with this water,

﴿ مِن ڪُلٍّ۬ زَوۡجَيۡنِ ٱثۡنَيۡنِ ﴾

(and of every kind of fruit He made Zawjayn Ithnayn.), two types from every kind of fruit,

﴿ يُغۡشِى ٱلَّيۡلَ ٱلنَّہَارَ‌ۚ ﴾

(He brings the night as a cover over the day.) Allah made the day and night pursue each other, when one is about to depart, the other overcomes it, and vice versa. Allah controls time just as He controls space and matter,

﴿ إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ ﴾

(Verily, in these things, there are Ayat for people who reflect.) who reflect on Allah’s signs and the evidences of His wisdom. Allah said,

﴿ وَفِى ٱلۡأَرۡضِ قِطَعٌ۬ مُّتَجَـٰوِرَٲتٌ۬ ﴾

(And in the earth are neighboring tracts,) Meaning, next to each other, some of them are fertile and produce what benefits people, while others are dead, salty and do not produce anything. This meaning was collected from Ibn `Abbas, Mujahid, Sa`id bin Jubayr, Ad-Dahhak and several others. This also covers the various colors and types of diverse areas on the earth; some red, some white, or yellow, or black, some are stony, or flat, or sandy, or thick, or thin, all made to neighbor each other while preserving their own qualities. All this indicates the existence of the Creator Who does what He wills, there is no deity or lord except Him. Allah said next,

﴿ وَجَنَّـٰتٌ۬ مِّنۡ أَعۡنَـٰبٍ۬ وَزَرۡعٌ۬ وَنَخِيلٌ۬ ﴾

(and gardens of vines, and green crops (fields), and date palms…) Allah’s statement, next,

﴿ صِنۡوَانٌ۬ وَغَيۡرُ صِنۡوَانٍ۬ ﴾

(Sinwanun wa (or) Ghayru Sinwan.) `Sinwan’ means, growing into two or three from a single stem, such as figs, pomegranate and dates. `Ghayru Sinwan’ means, having one stem for every tree, as is the case with most plants. From this meaning, the paternal uncle is called one’s `Sinw’ of his father. There is an authentic Hadith that states that the Messenger of Allah said to `Umar bin Al-Khattab,

« أَمَا شَعَرْتَ أَنَّ عَمَّ الرَّجُلِ صِنْوُ أَبِيه »

(Do you not know that man’s paternal uncle is the Sinw of his father) Allah said next,

﴿ وَٲحِدٍ۬ وَنُفَضِّلُ بَعۡضَہَا عَلَىٰ بَعۡضٍ۬ فِى ٱلۡأُڪُلِ‌ۚ ﴾

(watered with the same water; yet some of them We make more excellent than others to eat.) Abu Hurayrah narrated that the Prophet commented on Allah’s statement,

﴿ وَنُفَضِّلُ بَعۡضَہَا عَلَىٰ بَعۡضٍ۬ فِى ٱلۡأُڪُلِ‌ۚ ﴾

(yet some of them We make more excellent than others to eat.)

« الدَّقَلُ، وَالْفَارِسِيُّ، وَالْحُلْوُ، وَالْحَامِض »

(The Dagal, the Persian, the sweet, the bitter…”) At-Tirmidhi collected this Hadith and said, “Hasan Gharib.” Therefore, there are differences between plants and fruits with regards to shape, color, taste, scent, blossoms and the shape of their leaves. There are plants that are very sweet or sour, bitter or mild, fresh; some plants have a combination of these attributes, and the taste then changes and becomes another taste, by Allah’s will. There is also some that are yellow in color, or red, or white, or black, or blue, and the same can be said about their flowers; and all these variances and complex diversities are watered by the same water. Surely, in this there are signs for those who have sound reasoning, and surely, all this indicates the existence of the Creator Who does what He wills and Whose power made distinctions between various things and created them as He wills. So Allah said,

﴿ إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَعۡقِلُونَ ﴾

(Verily, in these things there are Ayat for the people who understand.)

﴿ وَإِن تَعۡجَبۡ فَعَجَبٌ۬ قَوۡلُهُمۡ أَءِذَا كُنَّا تُرَٲبًا أَءِنَّا لَفِى خَلۡقٍ۬ جَدِيدٍ‌ۗ أُوْلَـٰٓٮِٕكَ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُواْ بِرَبِّہِمۡ‌ۖ وَأُوْلَـٰٓٮِٕكَ ٱلۡأَغۡلَـٰلُ فِىٓ أَعۡنَاقِهِمۡ‌ۖ وَأُوْلَـٰٓٮِٕكَ أَصۡحَـٰبُ ٱلنَّارِ‌ۖ هُمۡ فِيہَا خَـٰلِدُونَ ﴾

(5. And if you wonder, then wondrous is their saying: “When we are dust, shall we indeed then be (raised) in a new creation” They are those who disbelieved in their Lord! They are those who will have iron chains linking their hands to their necks. They will be dwellers of the Fire to abide therein forever.)

http://www.recitequran.com/en/tafsir/en.ibn-kathir/13:1 READ TAFSIR 13 AR-RA'D THE THUNDER Ibn Kathir - English CHAPTER FOLLOW US Verse 1…

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 http://www.recitequran.com/fr/tafsir/en.ibn-kathir/13:1

13

Ar-Ra’d

Le tonnerre

Ibn Kathir – Anglais

Chapitre

SUIVEZ-NOUS

Verset

1

Page 249

Which was revealed in Makkah

﴿ بِسۡمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ ﴾

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

﴿ الٓمٓر‌ۚ تِلۡكَ ءَايَـٰتُ ٱلۡكِتَـٰبِ‌ۗ وَٱلَّذِىٓ أُنزِلَ إِلَيۡكَ مِن رَّبِّكَ ٱلۡحَقُّ وَلَـٰكِنَّ أَڪۡثَرَ ٱلنَّاسِ لَا يُؤۡمِنُونَ ﴾

(1. Alif Lam-Mim Ra. These are the verses of the Book (the Qur’an), and that which has been revealed unto you from your Lord is the truth, but most men believe not.)

The Qur’an is Allah’s Kalam (Speech)

We talked before, in the beginning of Surat Al-Baqarah (chapter 2) about the meaning of the letters that appear in the beginnings of some chapters in the Qur’an. We stated that every Surah that starts with separate letters, affirms that the Qur’an is miraculous and is an evidence that it is a revelation from Allah, and that there is no doubt or denying in this fact. This is why Allah said next,

﴿ تِلۡكَ ءَايَـٰتُ ٱلۡكِتَـٰبِ‌ۗ ﴾

(These are the verses of the Book), the Qur’an, which Allah described afterwards,

﴿ وَٱلَّذِىٓ أُنزِلَ إِلَيۡكَ ﴾

(and that which has been revealed unto you), O Muhammad,

﴿ مِن رَّبِّكَ ٱلۡحَقُّ ﴾

(from your Lord is the truth,) Allah said next,

﴿ وَلَـٰكِنَّ أَڪۡثَرَ ٱلنَّاسِ لَا يُؤۡمِنُونَ ﴾

(but most men believe not.) just as He said in another Ayah,

﴿ وَمَآ أَڪۡثَرُ ٱلنَّاسِ وَلَوۡ حَرَصۡتَ بِمُؤۡمِنِينَ ﴾

(And most of mankind will not believe even if you desire it eagerly.) (12:103) Allah declares that even after this clear, plain and unequivocal explanation (the Qur’an), most men will still not believe, due to their rebellion, stubbornness and hypocrisy.

﴿ ٱللَّهُ ٱلَّذِى رَفَعَ ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٲتِ بِغَيۡرِ عَمَدٍ۬ تَرَوۡنَہَا‌ۖ ثُمَّ ٱسۡتَوَىٰ عَلَى ٱلۡعَرۡشِ‌ۖ وَسَخَّرَ ٱلشَّمۡسَ وَٱلۡقَمَرَ‌ۖ كُلٌّ۬ يَجۡرِى لِأَجَلٍ۬ مُّسَمًّ۬ى‌ۚ يُدَبِّرُ ٱلۡأَمۡرَ يُفَصِّلُ ٱلۡأَيَـٰتِ لَعَلَّكُم بِلِقَآءِ رَبِّكُمۡ تُوقِنُونَ ﴾

(2. Allah is He Who raised the heavens without any pillars that you can see. Then, He rose above (Istawa) the `Arsh (Throne). He has subjected the sun and the moon, each running (its course) for a term appointed. He manages and regulates all affairs; He explains the Ayat in detail, that you may believe with certainty in the meeting with your Lord.)

Clarifying Allah’s Perfect Ability

Allah mentions His perfect ability and infinite authority, since it is He Who has raised the heavens without pillars by His permission and order. He, by His leave, order and power, has elevated the heavens high above the earth, distant and far away from reach. The heaven nearest to the present world encompasses the earth from all directions, and is also high above it from every direction. The distance between the first heaven and the earth is five hundred years from every direction, and its thickness is also five hundred years. The second heaven surrounds the first heaven from every direction, encompassing everything that the latter carries, with a thickness also of five hundred years and a distance between them of five hundred years. The same is also true about the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth and the seventh heavens. Allah said,

﴿ ٱللَّهُ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ سَبۡعَ سَمَـٰوَٲتٍ۬ وَمِنَ ٱلۡأَرۡضِ مِثۡلَهُنَّ ﴾

(It is Allah who has created seven heavens and of the earth the like thereof.) (65:12) Allah said next,

﴿ بِغَيۡرِ عَمَدٍ۬ تَرَوۡنَہَا‌ۖ ﴾

(…without any pillars that you can see.) meaning, `there are pillars, but you cannot see them,’ according to Ibn `Abbas, Mujahid, Al-Hasan, Qatadah, and several other scholars. Iyas bin Mu`awiyah said, “The heaven is like a dome over the earth,” meaning, without pillars. Similar was reported from Qatadah, and this meaning is better for this part of the Ayah, especially since Allah said in another Ayah,

﴿ وَيُمۡسِكُ ٱلسَّمَآءَ أَن تَقَعَ عَلَى ٱلۡأَرۡضِ إِلَّا بِإِذۡنِهِۦۤ‌ۗ ﴾

(He withholds the heaven from falling on the earth except by His permission. ) (22:65) Therefore, Allah’s statement,

﴿ تَرَوۡنَهَا ﴾

(..that you can see), affirms that there are no pillars. Rather, the heaven is elevated (above the earth) without pillars, as you see. This meaning best affirms Allah’s ability and power.

Al-Istawa’, Rising above the Throne

Allah said next,

﴿ ثُمَّ ٱسۡتَوَىٰ عَلَى ٱلۡعَرۡشِ‌ۖ ﴾

(Then, He rose above (Istawa) the Throne.) We explained the meaning of the Istawa’ in Surat Al-A`raf (7:54), and stated that it should be accepted as it is without altering, equating, annulling its meaning, or attempts to explain its true nature. Allah is glorified and praised from all that they attribute to Him.

Allah subjected the Sun and the Moon to rotate continuously

Allah said,

﴿ وَسَخَّرَ ٱلشَّمۡسَ وَٱلۡقَمَرَ‌ۖ كُلٌّ۬ يَجۡرِى لِأَجَلٍ۬ مُّسَمًّ۬ى‌ۚ ﴾

(He has subjected the sun and the moon, each running (its course) for a term appointed.) It was said that the sun and the moon continue their course until they cease doing so upon the commencement of the Final Hour, as Allah stated,

﴿ وَٱلشَّمۡسُ تَجۡرِى لِمُسۡتَقَرٍّ۬ لَّهَا‌ۚ ﴾

(And the sun runs on its fixed course for a term (appointed).) (36:38) It was also said that the meaning is: until they settle under the Throne of Allah after passing the other side of the earth. So when they, and the rest of the planetary bodies reach there, they are at the furthest distance from the Throne. Because according to the correct view, which the texts prove, it is shaped like a domb, under which is all of the creation. It is not circular like the celestial bodies, because it has pillars by which it is carried. This fact is clear to those who correctly understand the Ayat and authentic Hadiths. All the (praise is due to) Allah and all the favors are from Him. Allah mentioned the sun and the moon here because they are among the brightest seven heavenly objects. Therefore, if Allah subjected these to His power, then it is clear that He has also subjected all other heavenly objects. Allah said in other Ayat,

﴿ لَا تَسۡجُدُواْ لِلشَّمۡسِ وَلَا لِلۡقَمَرِ وَٱسۡجُدُواْ لِلَّهِ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَهُنَّ إِن ڪُنتُمۡ إِيَّاهُ تَعۡبُدُونَ ﴾

(Prostrate yourselves not to the sun nor to the moon, but prostrate yourselves to Allah Who created them, if you (really) worship Him.) (41:37) and,

﴿ وَٱلشَّمۡسَ وَٱلۡقَمَرَ وَٱلنُّجُومَ مُسَخَّرَٲتِۭ بِأَمۡرِهِۦۤ‌ۗ أَلَا لَهُ ٱلۡخَلۡقُ وَٱلۡأَمۡرُ‌ۗ تَبَارَكَ ٱللَّهُ رَبُّ ٱلۡعَـٰلَمِينَ ﴾

(And (He created) the sun, the moon, the stars subjected to His command. Surely, His is the creation and commandment. Blessed is Allah, the Lord of all that exists!) (7:54) Allah’s statement next,

﴿ يُفَصِّلُ ٱلۡأَيَـٰتِ لَعَلَّكُم بِلِقَآءِ رَبِّكُمۡ تُوقِنُونَ ﴾

(He explains the Ayat in detail, that you may believe with certainty in the Meeting with your Lord.) means, He explains the signs and clear evidences that testify that there is no deity worthy of worship except Him. These evidences prove that He will resurrect creation if He wills, just as He started it.

﴿ وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِى مَدَّ ٱلۡأَرۡضَ وَجَعَلَ فِيہَا رَوَٲسِىَ وَأَنۡہَـٰرً۬ا‌ۖ وَمِن كُلِّ ٱلثَّمَرَٲتِ جَعَلَ فِيہَا زَوۡجَيۡنِ ٱثۡنَيۡنِ‌ۖ يُغۡشِى ٱلَّيۡلَ ٱلنَّہَارَ‌ۚ إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ • وَفِى ٱلۡأَرۡضِ قِطَعٌ۬ مُّتَجَـٰوِرَٲتٌ۬ وَجَنَّـٰتٌ۬ مِّنۡ أَعۡنَـٰبٍ۬ وَزَرۡعٌ۬ وَنَخِيلٌ۬ صِنۡوَانٌ۬ وَغَيۡرُ صِنۡوَانٍ۬ يُسۡقَىٰ بِمَآءٍ۬ وَٲحِدٍ۬ وَنُفَضِّلُ بَعۡضَہَا عَلَىٰ بَعۡضٍ۬ فِى ٱلۡأُڪُلِ‌ۚ إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَعۡقِلُونَ ﴾

(3. And it is He Who spread out the earth, and placed therein firm mountains and rivers and of every kind of fruit He made Zawjayn Ithnayn (two in pairs). He brings the night as a cover over the day. Verily, in these things, there are Ayat (signs) for people who reflect. ) (4. And in the earth are neighboring tracts, and gardens of vines, and green crops (fields), and date palms, growing into two or three from a single stem root, or otherwise, watered with the same water; yet some of them We make more excellent than others to eat. Verily, in these things there are Ayat (signs) for the people who understand.)

Allah’s Signs on the Earth

After Allah mentioned the higher worlds, He started asserting His power, wisdom and control over the lower parts of the world. Allah said,

﴿ وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِى مَدَّ ٱلۡأَرۡضَ ﴾

(And it is He Who spread out the earth) made it spacious in length and width. Allah has placed on the earth firm mountains and made rivers, springs and water streams run through it, so that the various kinds of fruits and plants of every color, shape, taste and scent are watered with this water,

﴿ مِن ڪُلٍّ۬ زَوۡجَيۡنِ ٱثۡنَيۡنِ ﴾

(and of every kind of fruit He made Zawjayn Ithnayn.), two types from every kind of fruit,

﴿ يُغۡشِى ٱلَّيۡلَ ٱلنَّہَارَ‌ۚ ﴾

(He brings the night as a cover over the day.) Allah made the day and night pursue each other, when one is about to depart, the other overcomes it, and vice versa. Allah controls time just as He controls space and matter,

﴿ إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ ﴾

(Verily, in these things, there are Ayat for people who reflect.) who reflect on Allah’s signs and the evidences of His wisdom. Allah said,

﴿ وَفِى ٱلۡأَرۡضِ قِطَعٌ۬ مُّتَجَـٰوِرَٲتٌ۬ ﴾

(And in the earth are neighboring tracts,) Meaning, next to each other, some of them are fertile and produce what benefits people, while others are dead, salty and do not produce anything. This meaning was collected from Ibn `Abbas, Mujahid, Sa`id bin Jubayr, Ad-Dahhak and several others. This also covers the various colors and types of diverse areas on the earth; some red, some white, or yellow, or black, some are stony, or flat, or sandy, or thick, or thin, all made to neighbor each other while preserving their own qualities. All this indicates the existence of the Creator Who does what He wills, there is no deity or lord except Him. Allah said next,

﴿ وَجَنَّـٰتٌ۬ مِّنۡ أَعۡنَـٰبٍ۬ وَزَرۡعٌ۬ وَنَخِيلٌ۬ ﴾

(and gardens of vines, and green crops (fields), and date palms…) Allah’s statement, next,

﴿ صِنۡوَانٌ۬ وَغَيۡرُ صِنۡوَانٍ۬ ﴾

(Sinwanun wa (or) Ghayru Sinwan.) `Sinwan’ means, growing into two or three from a single stem, such as figs, pomegranate and dates. `Ghayru Sinwan’ means, having one stem for every tree, as is the case with most plants. From this meaning, the paternal uncle is called one’s `Sinw’ of his father. There is an authentic Hadith that states that the Messenger of Allah said to `Umar bin Al-Khattab,

« أَمَا شَعَرْتَ أَنَّ عَمَّ الرَّجُلِ صِنْوُ أَبِيه »

(Do you not know that man’s paternal uncle is the Sinw of his father) Allah said next,

﴿ وَٲحِدٍ۬ وَنُفَضِّلُ بَعۡضَہَا عَلَىٰ بَعۡضٍ۬ فِى ٱلۡأُڪُلِ‌ۚ ﴾

(watered with the same water; yet some of them We make more excellent than others to eat.) Abu Hurayrah narrated that the Prophet commented on Allah’s statement,

﴿ وَنُفَضِّلُ بَعۡضَہَا عَلَىٰ بَعۡضٍ۬ فِى ٱلۡأُڪُلِ‌ۚ ﴾

(yet some of them We make more excellent than others to eat.)

« الدَّقَلُ، وَالْفَارِسِيُّ، وَالْحُلْوُ، وَالْحَامِض »

(The Dagal, the Persian, the sweet, the bitter…”) At-Tirmidhi collected this Hadith and said, “Hasan Gharib.” Therefore, there are differences between plants and fruits with regards to shape, color, taste, scent, blossoms and the shape of their leaves. There are plants that are very sweet or sour, bitter or mild, fresh; some plants have a combination of these attributes, and the taste then changes and becomes another taste, by Allah’s will. There is also some that are yellow in color, or red, or white, or black, or blue, and the same can be said about their flowers; and all these variances and complex diversities are watered by the same water. Surely, in this there are signs for those who have sound reasoning, and surely, all this indicates the existence of the Creator Who does what He wills and Whose power made distinctions between various things and created them as He wills. So Allah said,

﴿ إِنَّ فِى ذَٲلِكَ لَأَيَـٰتٍ۬ لِّقَوۡمٍ۬ يَعۡقِلُونَ ﴾

(Verily, in these things there are Ayat for the people who understand.)

﴿ وَإِن تَعۡجَبۡ فَعَجَبٌ۬ قَوۡلُهُمۡ أَءِذَا كُنَّا تُرَٲبًا أَءِنَّا لَفِى خَلۡقٍ۬ جَدِيدٍ‌ۗ أُوْلَـٰٓٮِٕكَ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُواْ بِرَبِّہِمۡ‌ۖ وَأُوْلَـٰٓٮِٕكَ ٱلۡأَغۡلَـٰلُ فِىٓ أَعۡنَاقِهِمۡ‌ۖ وَأُوْلَـٰٓٮِٕكَ أَصۡحَـٰبُ ٱلنَّارِ‌ۖ هُمۡ فِيہَا خَـٰلِدُونَ ﴾

(5. And if you wonder, then wondrous is their saying: “When we are dust, shall we indeed then be (raised) in a new creation” They are those who disbelieved in their Lord! They are those who will have iron chains linking their hands to their necks. They will be dwellers of the Fire to abide therein forever.)

http://www.recitequran.com/fr/tafsir/en.ibn-kathir/13:1   13 Ar-Ra'd Le tonnerre Ibn Kathir - Anglais Chapitre SUIVEZ-NOUS Verset 1 Page 249 Which was revealed in Makkah…