Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

by Neil Gaiman

They troubled me and haunted my nightmares and my daydreams, worried and upset me on profound levels, but they also taught me that, if I was going to read fiction, sometimes I would only know what my comfort zone was by leaving it; and now, as an adult, I would not erase the experience of having read them if I could.

They never get easier, never stop my heart from trip-trapping, never let me escape, this time, unscathed. But they teach me things, and they open my eyes, and if they hurt, they hurt in ways that make me think and grow and change.

We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting. These are stories about those masks, and the people we are underneath them. We authors, who trade in fictions for a living, are a continuum of all that we have seen and heard, and most importantly, all that we have read.

“Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything,” Ray said once, in an interview.

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.

“Not one way or the other. We called it a labyrinth, but I guess it’s just a maze . . .” “Just amazed,” I repeated.

He was an old man, who walked with a stick and talked to strangers. Nobody would ever miss him.

“Run,” said a voice that was almost a growl. I ran like a lamb to his laughter.

“Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.”

“You are wrong. The truth is a cave in the black mountains. There is one way there, and one only, and that way is treacherous and hard, and if you choose the wrong path you will die alone, on the mountainside.”

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.