Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

by Neil Gaiman

What we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: enter at your own risk. We need to find out what fiction is, what it means, to us, an experience that is going to be unlike anyone else’s experience of the story.

I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?

Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you.

Secure your own mask again after you read these stories, but do not forget to help others.

I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time.

It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.

“Not a fool. No. For I have met fools and idiots, and they are happy in their idiocy, even with straw in their hair. You are too wise for foolishness. You seek only misery and you bring misery with you and you call down misery on all you touch.”

I hope your world is kind. By which I mean, I’ve heard we see the world not as it is but as we are. A saint sees a world of saints, a killer sees only murderers and victims.

And it is impossible, he had found, if you rule, to do only good, for you cannot build anything without tearing something down, and even he could not care about every life, every dream, every population of every world.

with all pleasures available freely (but what we attain with no effort we cannot value),

“A wren made a nest inside the skull of a gibbeted corpse, flying in and out of the jaw to feed its young. In the midst of death, as it were, life just keeps on happening.”