Incidents Around the House

by Josh Malerman

there’s one thing I could convey to you, one thing that would take root in you just like the need to eat and sleep, it would be this: try to stay kind as long as you can. For all of your life. Always be mindful of what others are enduring. And whatever you do, most of all, don’t allow someone else’s meanness, someone else’s cruelty, to get inside of you.

A location can be a beacon to someone else, even if they’re only dots on a map to you.

But then I worry: Am I able to remember a time before the closet doors opened at night?

I don’t know a single person who got stuck in the same problem for the rest of their life.

Sometimes when you complain, it’s not because you want to be told how to fix it. You just wanna say it sucks. Because sometimes it just sucks.

When you grow up, you ought to find an interest that serves many purposes at once. It means you’re doing the right thing if the thing you do serves you in more than one way.

You’ll notice, the older you get, that it’s the topics people say you shouldn’t talk about that get all messed up beyond repair. My whole life, people said don’t bring up politics and religion and, well, look at things now. Subjects can become sick just like people can. They need care. They need medicine. They need talk.

There are so many hidden spaces in a house, Bela. And there are so many hidden spaces in your heart. Some of them in plain sight. So what we need to do then, we need to determine what we’ll allow in to our home, what we’ll allow in to our heart.

And the trick of aging, the trick of getting through this life with your sanity, is deciding to let the right feelings exist inside your house and your heart.