I paused beneath the arched entrance, where the drawbridge had once been, imagining all the people who had passed in and out over the centuries, every one of them carrying a combination of desire, hope, jealousy, despair, grief, love, and every other human emotion; a combination that made each one as unique as a snowflake, yet linked all of them inextricably to every other human being from the dawn of time to the end of it.
The monster – if there was one – never revealed itself to me again. But what I had learned over the past year was that monsters abound, usually in plain sight.
It seems there’s nothing so good or pure it can’t be taken without a moment’s notice. And then in the end, it all gets taken anyway.
Always carry a large flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite, and further, always carry a small snake.
Life. There it was. In all its beautiful, tragic fragility, there was still life, and those of us who’d been lucky enough to survive opened our arms wide and embraced it.
Beneath it was a photograph of Hank alone, standing shirtless on the deck of a sailboat with his hands on his hips.
In all its beautiful, tragic fragility, there was still life.
I stared at him for a long time. If he wanted to end his search for the beast, he need look no further than a mirror.
She blamed the lack of real flowers on both weather and the war, and instead put four or five pieces of coal in glass bowls, added water, salt, and ammonia, before finally pouring a mixture of violet and blue ink over them. It was a complete mystery to me how this alchemy would result in anything resembling flowers, but they were “blooming” within the hour.
One Crow for sorrow, Two Crows for mirth, Three Crows for a wedding, Four Crows for a birth, Five Crows for silver, Six Crows for gold, Seven for a secret, never to be told.
Violet was nothing if not sensible. She didn’t even approve when we pulled entirely harmless pranks, like hiding someone’s yacht in the wrong slip, or turning the racquet club’s pool water purple.
The longer I do this job, the less I like people. The species, of course,” he adds grimly. “There are individuals I like just fine.
In seventy years, I’ve never told a blessed soul.
For the rest of the night, all I could think about was how many heads had lain on those pillows before my own.
I came home poorer by several hundred dollars and richer by more books than I could carry.
It was full of luxurious trappings and shiny baubles, and that had blinded me to the fact that nothing about it was real.
His mother was exacting revenge because he’d dared to marry me, and his father – well, we weren’t exactly sure. Either.
To say that I wished I wasn’t there would be a ludicrous understatement, but I’d only ever had the illusion of choice: We have to do this, Hank had said. It’s for Ellis. To refuse would have been an act of calculated cruelty. And so, because of my husband’s war with his father and their insane obsession with a mythical monster, we’d crossed the Atlantic at the very same time a real madman, a real monster, was attempting to take over the world for his own reasons of ego and pride.
Make yourselves at home, boys. Stay awhile. Oh, sorry – I see you already have. Damn ghosts.
But then this Isabelle turned and laughed and in that instant I saw my wife. This made me weepy and these people whom I didn’t recognize exchanged furtive glances and shortly thereafter announced that it was time to leave because Grandpa needed his rest. They patted my hand and they tucked my blanket in around my knees, and they left. They went out into the world, and they left me here. And to this day I have no idea who they were. I.