Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

My heart pounded in my chest with what I wanted to call fear but what I know now was actually hope.

If you can delay pain, you delay it, don’t you? Even when it’s inevitable.

It’s the injury that opens the door, I knew. The corruption.

“I’m all right,” I told her. This is the lie, when you’re twelve. And all the other years, too. You never tell your mom anything that might worry her. Moms have enough to worry about already.

Indians, we don’t have guardian angels—if we did, they’d have been whispering to us pretty hard when some certain ships bobbed up on the horizon—but we do have helpers. I think usually it’s supposed to be an animal.

Those stories were all a long time ago, though. That was before we all grew up.

In movies, after you beat the bad guy, the monster, then all the injuries it inflicted, they heal right up. That’s not how it works in the real world.