Hangsaman

by Shirley Jackson

Perhaps—and the thought was nauseating—senselessly afflicted with children of her own.

There would be no further fears for Natalie, no possibility of walking wrong when you were no more than a skull in a strange man’s hands.

If she got out of bed it would be true;

Could it be, she wondered tiredly, that a mask is no protection at all?”

Are two people regarding the same thing not looking at each other?

Elizabeth Langdon, her own door closed behind her, had changed, as a bird stepping again inside its cage is no longer a creature of circle and parabola, but a hopping thing;

She moved respectfully into the room, thinking that she was the kind of woman who knows when to keep quiet,

“You’ve changed things around,” Arthur said to Anne, thus committing with a grand unconsciousness his first magnificent blunder of the afternoon.

It has always been my opinion, you know, that princesses are confined in towers only because they choose to stay confined, and the only dragon required to keep them there was their own desire to be kept.

“I used to think,” Natalie said, “when I was a child, that I had only a limited stock of ‘yeses’ and ‘nos,’ and that when they were used up I couldn’t get any more and then I wouldn’t be able to answer most of the questions silly people asked me.”

When there was again no answer, she felt suddenly the elemental fear of some other person who will not speak when spoken to, and denies thus the similiarity of sanities between one person and another, some other person who, waiting and laughing, determines secretly and giggling to feast upon his own kind.