The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych, #1)

by John Joseph Adams

Ask people to worship you? They call you a megalomaniac. Ask them to worship your kid? They call that good parenting.

They say you can’t remember pain—the fact of it, yes, but the truth of it, the physical texture of agony? Gone and forgotten. Which makes it easy to forget that pain hurts, that the wounded life isn’t always worth living.

When they call me in, the kids have crossed a line that maybe they can’t cross the other way. Either they’re so lost they can’t find it, or they’re so lost they don’t think there ever was a line. All they can see is the narrow piece of ground on which they’re standing in that moment. Everything else is chaos. They don’t want to move because who would step off of solid ground into chaos?