Skeleton Crew

by Stephen King

The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing compared to the fates your mind can imagine for your loved ones.

“That was in Casco,” his wife contradicted immediately. She spoke in the unmistakable tones of a veteran contradictor.

It was a funny color of brown and I ast her one time what you called that color and she said it was Champagne. Ain’t that good, I says, and she laughs fit to split. I like a woman who will laugh when you don’t have to point her right at the joke, you know.”

He give me a hug around the neck with his forearm, which is all men can do since the world don’t let them kiss but only women, and laughed, and got up.

and her beauty was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although part of me died at her feet.

Some fat girls have pathetically pretty faces, but Scollay’s sis didn’t even have that.

Leaving for the night, it came to me. What I should have told her. Life goes on—that’s what I should have said. That’s what you say to people when a loved one dies. But, thinking it over, I was glad I didn’t. Because maybe that was what she was afraid of.

I’m old enough to know there’s no such thing as love at first sight. It’s just something Rodgers and Hammerstein thought up one day to rhyme with moon and June. It’s for kids holding hands at the Prom, right?

All I knew was I didn’t have what she needed and it tore me up.

The girl was there; her beautiful features were lit with triumph. She raised one fist to shoulder height in salute like the one those black guys gave at the Olympics that time.

I tried to get her back and almost made it once, but she had something she hadn’t had before—perspective.

Most of you reading this memoir will not believe that, not unless something like it has happened to you. I find that the matter of your belief and my relief are mutually exclusive, however, and so I will gladly tell the tale anyway. Believe what you want.

Rocky and Leo, both drunk as the last lords of creation, cruised slowly down Culver Street

“Bunk.” This interesting word had risen lately to the top forty of Leo’s vocabulary.

Leo was a rodent-featured young man of twenty-two who looked as if he might have quite a lot of jail-time in his future.

On his cluttered workbench was a chrome ornament from some old car. He began to play with it, and soon he was crying cheap tears for the old days. Later, some time after three in the morning, he strangled his wife and then burned down the house to make it look like an accident.

And then she spoke with a sudden, vicious bitterness that was like acid squirting out between her front teeth—he felt that her words were so hot they would have burned his face if he hadn’t recoiled.