The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold, ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny’s, glassy and huge, like marbles. She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Her breasts lolled. Her pubic hair floated. Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws.
The adverb is not your friend.
His own mortality suddenly whispered through his bones like a cold draft under a door.
That’s really all art is about, I think, and not just pictures – it’s the same with books and stories and sculpture and even castles in the sand. Some things call to us, that’s all. It’s as if the people who made them were speaking inside our heads.
In the end we are all caught in devices of our own making.
The doors slam shut behind them, much too loudly and hard enough to shiver in their frames. Executive assistants who drag down eighteen thousand a year to start with close doors a certain way – with respect for money and power – and this isn’t it. This is the way angry drunks and addicts on the jones close doors. Also crazy people, of course. Crazy people are ace doorslammers.
If you want to know what political extremism can lead to, look at the Zapruder film. Take particular note of frame 313, where Kennedy’s head explodes.
Am Ende aller Vernunft steht das Massengrab.
Yeah. Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.
We had a bad summer here, my friend. Local folks keep it as quiet as they can – even the newspaper doesn’t play it up – but there was some nasty work. Murders. Half a dozen at least. Kids. Found one down in the Barrens just recently. Patrick Hockstetter, his name was. All decayed.
Hi, Lloyd,” he said. “A little slow tonight, isn’t it?” Lloyd.
Because it may be fragile, but I think it’s also immortal.
There was a lesson here, he realized, not a shining thing but something that was old and rusty and misshapen. It.
Beings too hideous to comprehend, according to Mr. C., and Mr. C. was a gentleman who dealt death for a living.
And then a frightful red Eye opened in the dark: vulpine, eldritch. The Eye terrified him yet held him. The Eye beckoned him. To the west, where the shadows were even now gathering, in their twilight dance of death.
As I recall, I had my own invisible friend when I was Danny’s age, a talking rooster named Chug-Chug.
Do you see how little it all matters? How quickly and easily I can take it all away, should I choose to do so? Beware, gunslinger! Beware, shaman! The abyss is all around you. You float or fall into it at my whim.
It sounded like the wheel on Wheel of Fortune, do you want to spin or do you want to solve the puzzle? Remember that if you try to solve the puzzle and fail, you will be put out into the snow beside the Connecticut Turnpike and the wolves will eat you.
He has an alibi as strong as the S on Superman’s chest.
Hotels are superstitious places. No thirteenth floor or room thirteen, no mirrors on the back of the door you come in through, stuff like that.