Desperation

by Stephen King

The sun was a declining ball of dusty furnace-fire, and the landscape had a kind of clear daylight darkness about it that struck her as apocalyptic. It wasn’t so much a question of where she was, she realized, as who she was. She couldn’t believe she was the same Ellen Carver who was on the PTA and had been considering a run for school board this fall, the same Ellen Carver who sometimes went out to lunch with friends at China Happiness, where they would all get silly over mai-tais and talk about clothes and kids and marriages—whose was shaky and whose was not. Was she the Ellen Carver who picked her nicest clothes out of the Boston Proper catalogue and wore Red perfume when she was feeling amorous and had a funny rhinestone tee-shirt that said QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE? The Ellen Carver who had raised two lovely children and had kept her man when those all about her were losing theirs? The one who examined her breasts for lumps once every six weeks or so, the one who liked to curl up in the living room on weekend nights with a cup of hot tea and a few chocolates and paperbacks with titles like Misery in Paradise? Really? Oh really? Well, yes, probably; she was those Ellens and a thousand others: Ellen in silk and Ellen in denim and Ellen sitting on the commode and peeing with a recipe for Brown Betty in one hand; she was, she supposed, both her parts and more than her parts, when summed, could account for . . . but could that possibly mean she was also the Ellen Carver whose ...