Holly starts to cry. Jerome hugs her clumsily. He’s black and she’s white, he’s seventeen and she’s in her forties, but to Hodges Jerome looks like a father comforting his daughter after she came home from school and said no one invited her to the Spring Dance.
She saw clearly a boy and a man fighting for control of the same face.
I think the Gulf of Mexico has something else going for it. Just looking into that mild flat sunlit calm is healing.
The guy was tall, and possessed one of those earnest faces Henry associated with middle management.
Movies, after all, are only an illusion of motion comprised of thousands of still photographs.
Jack stood by his shoulder, very much aware of the scent of Ullman’s cologne. All my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all came into his mind for no reason at all, and he had to clamp his tongue between his teeth to keep in a bray of laughter.
I was tired of just letting things happen to me and then feeling bad about them.
I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash. Horror movies, science fiction movies, movies about losers on motorcycles- this was the stuff that turned my dials up to ten.
But I still think that’s a pretty fine age. Maybe the best age. You can rock and roll all night, but when the music dies out and the beer wears off, you’re able to think. And dream big dreams. The mean Patrol Boy cuts you down to size eventually, and if you start out small, why, there’s almost nothing left but the cuffs of your pants when he’s done with you.
I suspect that fright, like pain, is one of those things that slip our minds once they have passed.
Hello?” he asked as he went... just so that anyone intent on killing him would know exactly where to look.
He spoke in the hoarse, cadenced tones of a lifelong teller of tales – one of those divine fools born to merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs string with drops of dew.
But they would have been amazed if he had the words to describe it – how delicate it had been, how it reached almost three quarters of the way from the top of the desk to the ceiling, a lacy construct of jacks and deuces and kings and tens and Big Akers, a red and black configuration of paper diamonds standing in defiance of a world spinning through a universe of incoherent motions and forces; a tower that seemed to ‘Cimi’s amazed eyes to be a ringing denial of all the unfair paradoxes of life.
The part of me that creates the stories exists only in solitude. The one who shows up to share anecdotes and answer questions is a poor substitute for the story-maker.
The van’s driver hung halfway out of the cab window, head down, arms dangling. There was a fan of dried blood and puke sprayed out below him on the door.
Like the White Rabbit in Alice, I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date. They’re following me, you see, but I needed to double back and talk to you. Busy-busy-busy!
How the ambulance didn’t come and didn’t come and you thought of that Gordon Lightfoot song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the one that asks if anyone knows where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?
She felt a swollen green sac of poison pulsing somewhere inside her – bitter stuff, hateful as hemlock. She was afraid that if that sac burst, she would choke on her own frustrated rage.
It’s going to be all right, Gold had said, and that was what Terry hung onto. But of course it wasn’t.
Life would go on as it had. All of it, in a kind of endless summer.