The Elementals

by Michael McDowell

There’s no point in advertising a circus when everybody hates the clown.”

But Dauphin’s genuine love for his hardhearted, bristling mother was a trailing whisper at the end of every sentence he spoke.

The Alabama panhandle, which consists only of Mobile and Baldwin counties, is shaped rather like a heavily abscessed tooth. Mobile Bay represents the large element of decay that separates the halves, and at their northern extremities the counties are further divided by a complex system of meandering rivers and marsh.

Anyone could understand night terror, but what could one say of a man whose fears persisted through the dawn?

but I told him to drop dead in a shed, Fred.”

There were no sudden or shrill noises, for the surf never left off its masking roar.

time divided itself into brief arbitrary runs of hot days and rainy days.

The words yesterday and tomorrow might have been excised from their vocabulary: for yesterday had entertained nothing that was worth today’s speech, and tomorrow could promise no change from today.

anyone who could perform menial tasks in a menial’s capacity without loss of dignity was someone to be admired and wondered at.

He wished that he remembered more about this business; he hadn’t set fire to a house in more than twenty years.

“Remember, I can see what Odessa saw. And those babies aren’t McCrays—they’re Savages.”