Mangle

Mangle - to mutilate, disfigure, or destroy by cutting, crushing, or tearing

With white clouds of exhaust, with the roar of engines, with the odour of burned fuel humanity leaves the mangled, wrecked, dried out planet which once bore the gentle and warm name – Earth. World oceans were used to make hydrogen for the jet engines that took people away from their cradle; mountains were reduced to ashes to supply humans with material to build the rockets; trees, flowers, animals and birds made perfect souvenirs for the leaving children of the not yet destroyed, but already dead mother.

Sift

Sift - to sieve (sand, flour, etc.) in order to remove the coarser particles

After finishing sifting through all the available hypotheses, Mellek was left with such a bazaar idea that he could not believe it was true. But he suddenly remembered that Sherlock Holmes used to say: "When you rejected every possible option, what is left is the answer." Or may these were not Sherlock Homes's words.

Frank stood and cold water was well above his knees. He bent down and plunge cradle into the muddy waters and lifted a heavy burden of wet soil from the bottom of the stream. With a long sigh the man started to sift the content of the cradle intensely looking for the sparkle of gold sand or, if Lady Luck was in a good mood, of a small nugget.

Abstract, accede, apparition

Abstract - to remove or extract

Jeck scratched his head – he didn’t know that the word “abstract” has another meaning and if used as a verb, means “to extract.”

Buggers attacked suddenly. Jumping faster than eyes of men could catch their movements, they fell onto the body of soldiers and with their sharp, slender claws started to abstract supple human flesh from enforced power suites.

Accede - to assent or give one's consent; agree

Finally, the cantankerous old man acceded to unfold secrets of his life before me.

The old king died that morning – no doubt that a bloody fighting between craving to accede to the throne princes would develop immediately after the burial.

Apparition - an appearance, esp of a ghost or ghostlike figure

An apparition of a chained ghost deprives of what was left of Steve’s courage and self-control.

Sitting in his chair, Kevin noticed out of the corner of his eye an apparition of a door on the left wall. He turned – the vision vanished.

Docile

Docile - adj. easy to manage, control, or discipline; submissive

The boy stood docile, or so appeared, waiting punishment.

The blacksmith threw an almost finished sword into a corner of his forge and blurt out to the tall swordsman who wanted a new weapon, “Damn those dwarfs! Their metal gets worse and worse with every year. It’s too docile. You can’t even forge a decent knife today, let alone a sword for a hero. No, you can’t. There ain’t good metal anymore like that my father and the father of my father had worked with. Yeah, I recall the last chunk of sky-iron I’d seen was that one that dropped in our yard when the father’s father died. No, don’t you think, the chunk killed a dog: the father died laughing.”

Spangle

Spangle - to glitter or shine with or like spangles, a small thin piece of metal or other shiny material used as a decoration, esp on clothes; sequin

Myriads of tiny spangling dots scattered across the dark fabric of the night skies that was so close, yet still unreachable. Zak threw back his head and stared into the infinite darkness. The sensation that he was watching out of the well, deep well, overwhelmed him. The boy lifted his hand: the skies came and gently took his hand, not the physical, but his mental hand. The nothingness advanced and even without noticing swallowed the tiny mind who wanted to see these white sparks and to comprehend the whole galaxy.

She started turning her head away, and in that moment a stream of light that fell from a nearest lamppost broke into mass of tiny multicoloured beams reflecting from little spangles embedded in her combed hair. Swift movement and the wonderful vision of numerous fibers of light shooting through cold icy air vanished.

Bough

Bough - a large branch of a tree

A bough bent under its own weight and its point almost touched the ground. Leaves, hanging down from the branch, separated a small space right beneath the bought. It was one step wide and three steps long: big enough that Jurel can comfortably sit his back against an ancient trunk of a tree and legs stretched in relaxation.

A saw squealed and screamed while its teeth chewed into the flesh of a bough. Tree's sap dripped from a split which became deeper with every pass of a blade of the saw. A man stopped, put the saw aside, and kicked the branch higher than the cut – with a wet crack the bough snapped and slowly collapsed under its weight; after hanging a second on a thin shred of bark, it came down followed by a rustle of leaves.

Dandelion

Dandelion - a wild plant which has yellow flowers with lots of thin petals 

He stood in a sea of white and yellow. The field streched itself from a faint north skyline to a little rock beneath his feet, jumped a serpentine of a river and ran towards a black wall of a winter forest. It was a dry time of a hot season and storms would not come for at least two weeks: dandelions popped everywhere where was soil to root in. 

The first part of a day the sun was climbing its usual path in the blue skies. And then came a little boy and hid himself from the birght light under a big tree that grew unchalenged in the middle of a dandelion field. The lay on his back in a tree shade and took a book out of his pocket and, pointing its cover to a green crown of the friendly giant, started to read. He wished that the sun would forget how to climb down from the skies and hang there helplessly for the rest of the week (it was the last week of the summer holidays and he still had five magical books to read.) If someone were living on the tree or just happend to sit on a branch of it, he would easily read the title of the book: "Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury."

Cradle

Cradle - a baby's bed, a place of origin, a part of a telephone

A telephone reciever lay in its cradle. It was little, black, and afraid. John was sitting backward on a chair resting his chin on its back. He waited. He was a hunter, a predator. Eyes fixed on the phone, muscles toughened, hands streched – he was ready.

No one now really remembers Earht – our cradle. People are more conserned with the Big Bang (only backward) that had happened again and was speeding towards human colonies with the speed of nothingness.