Word: poofs
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Guns have a sort of irresistible black magic about them. A good gun has such lovely heft, a densely sinister weight in the hand. The brain is wired to the trigger finger and fires on impulse. The finger twitches, and -- blam! -- the life across a distance -- poof! -- disintegrates: an existence powdered. The finger did it on a whim. The desacralization of life, a society of emotional disconnection: killing is a kind of dream-sequence video. Conscience is disconnected from trigger finger. Child is disconnected from future. Bullet is ; disconnected from gun muzzle and, once fired, can never be recalled...
...poof! There you go: all the spontaneity vanishes straight out of your relationship...
Brian Hunter's two-run homer capped a three-run first inning, and that was all Smoltz and the Braves needed. The Pirates' big hitters again went poof, and Pittsburgh was shut out for the second straight game...
...makan: the Arabic language is capable of magical effects. On a squalid Cairo street early on a cold, foul day, people greet each other with small bouquets of words: "Morning of blessings! Morning of light!" They have conjured a moment, and smiled, and passed, and then, poof! they are back on a miserable street among the pariah dogs. If people are poor and live in the desert, language may be their richest possession: Why not? It opens miraculously onto other worlds. The Koran, with its bursts of sonority and light, describes a paradise that has everything the desert does...
...xenophobia of a regime that had to lock its people in lest they be tempted by another, freer life -- the Berlin Wall, that hideous, 28-mile-long scar through the heart of a once proud European capital, not to mention the soul of a people. And then -- poof! -- it was gone. Not physically, at least yet, but gone as an effective barrier between East and West, opened in one unthinkable, stunning stroke to people it had kept apart for more than a generation. It was one of those rare times when the tectonic plates of history shift beneath...