Best of Luck

by Jason Mott

“A good joke is just a small story, you know. Only difference is the delivery.”

Sweat and toil and blisters and a bent back from one sunrise to the next,

It was earthy and horrible . . . and it was the smell of rot. Of something living and dying at the same time.

“Did you know that cancer patients are told to name their tumor?” “What?” “Yeah,” Will said. “They name their tumor. I learned that with Hayden. I think the idea is that it makes it less scary. You can make it less scary if you think of this horrible thing as just a person that you’re trying to send away, instead of thinking of it as death itself living inside your body.

“A father is supposed to protect his children from the world, you know? How come we have a word for a child that loses their parents but no word for a parent that loses their children?

Nothing about this universe is fair, and the only people who believe that are the people who haven’t lived long enough to have their stupidity corrected by life.”

The feeling of knowing something but not wanting it to be true, and so you just sorta pretend that, well, that everything isn’t the way you know it