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The oldest, “The Reaper’s Image,” was written when I was eighteen, in the summer before I started college.
The most recent, “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” was finished in November of 1983.
We had one child and another was on the way.
The story paid me by letting me get back to sleep when I felt as if I couldn’t. I paid the story back by getting it concrete, which it wanted to be.
Candles are funny things, you know. You lay them by every spring, knowing that a summer storm may knock out the power. And when the time comes, they hide.
Murphy's Law!
Taiwan
cellophane.
I don’t know if he was angry, scared, or both. His face was nearly purple. Veins stood out on his neck, looking almost as thick as battery cables.
Jim something.
beer belly.
Her black eyes glanced arrogantly around, as sharp and balefully sparkling as a magpie’s.
I looked over at Amanda. I was developing an uncomfortably strong feeling for her—uncomfortable but not exactly unpleasant. Her eyes were an incredible, brilliant green . . . for a while I had kept an eye on her to see if she was going to take out a pair of contact lenses, but apparently the color was true. I wanted to make love to her. My wife was at home, maybe alive, more probably dead, alone either way, and I loved her; I wanted to get Billy and me back to her more than anything, but I also wanted to screw this lady named Amanda Dumfries. I tried to tell myself it was just the situation we
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I looked at it and began to get an extremely useless and uncomfortable erection.
If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Of if you can paint, maybe you think—I did—that God put you on earth to blow your father away.
Gault pointed out that in the forties Weird Tales had only been able to pay a pittance, and that in the fifties it went broke. When the machines fail, he had said
when the technologies fail, when the conventional religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assault of a million fluorocarbon spray cans of deodorant.
“Easier said than done.”
a down-the-rabbit-hole sort of door
Taiwan,
You either ate the world or the world ate you and it was okay either way.
for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although part of me died at her feet.
“A lot of people have been laughing at me while my back was turned.
Do you know what it feels like to eat and eat and hate yourself for it and then eat more? Do you know what it feels like to kill your own brother because you are fat?”
almost surely for the first time in her life, and indubitably for the last.
Pulling Deke was like trying to pull a big tree out of the ground by the roots.
plugged the word processor in
TAIWAN.
Was it strange, maybe even sick, to be jealous of another man’s son?
“One hell of a big beach. Something like this could go on forever. You could walk a hundred miles with your surfboard under your arm and still be where you started, almost, with nothing behind you but six or seven footprints. And if you stood in the same place for five minutes, the last six or seven would be gone, too.”
android.
as love at first sight.
work-study job
He was something of a sentimentalist, but he was not a man to let sentiment stand in the way of making a dollar.
abalone.
rearview mirror.
sunwashed
broke out in gooseflesh.
laugh right out loud.
had a sweet tooth.
going-away party
