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If brains was black powder he couldn’t blow his own nose. It’s a pity the things you see when you ain’t got a gun.
Across the room was a mirror, and deep down in its silver bubble a single word appeared in green fire and that word was: REDRUM.
She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong.
“You shine on, boy. Harder than anyone I ever met in my life. And I’m sixty years old this January.”
When you unwittingly stuck your hand into the wasps’ nest, you hadn’t made a covenant with the devil to give up your civilized self with its trappings of love and respect and honor. It just happened to you. Passively, with no say, you ceased to be a creature of the mind and became a creature of the nerve endings; from college-educated man to wailing ape in five easy seconds.
It was possible to graduate from passive to active, to take the thing that had once driven you nearly to madness as a neutral prize of no more than occasional academic interest.
Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.
Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster.
Tough old world, baby. If you’re not bolted together tightly, you’re gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty.
There were no hands or numbers on the clockface, only a date written in red: DECEMBER 2. And then, eyes widening in horror, he saw the word REDRUM reflecting dimly from the glass dome, now reflected twice. And he saw that it spelled MURDER.
Behind her that hoarse voice bellowed: “Here I come now! Here I come now, you pig!” It was demolishing the door in a machinelike frenzy.
The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge.
That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.”
