The Long Walk

by Richard Bachman

I just zipped along, bullshitting in good order, you know, and I come to this essay about why I feel qualified to participate. I couldn’t think of a thing. So finally some bastard in an army coat strolls by and says, ‘Five minutes. Will everyone finish up, please?’ So I just put down, ‘I feel qualified to participate in the Long Walk because I am one useless S.O.B. and the world would be better off without me, unless I happened to win and get rich in which case I would buy a Van Gogh to put in every room of my manshun and order up sixty high-class horrs and not bother anybody.’ I thought about that for about a minute, and then I put in parenthesis: ‘(I would give all my sixty high-class horrs old-age pensions, too.)’ I thought that would really screw ’em up. So a month later—I’d forgotten all about the whole thing—I get a letter saying I qualified. I damn near creamed my jeans.”