Strange Weather

by Joe Hill

I don’t know how much he’s taken away with his camera, but he can’t have any more.”

“Invent a way not to ged old,” he said. “It is a terrible goddem trick to play on someone. Gedding old is no way to stop being young.”

(and never mind that 13 is a pretty cool number, not just a prime or a Fibonacci but also an emirp, which means it stays prime if you reverse the digits and make it 31).

I knew I liked it for a reason!

She had loved me, even if I’d been too witless to know it or value it.

“When she is asleep, she look like her olt self. Sometimes I thingg in her dreams she gets it all back. The path to her old self is overgrown, lost in the briars. But her sleeping mind . . . you thingg, Michael, the sleeping mind has paths of its own? Trails the waking self has never walked?”

Even after you lost someone, it turned out you still had a relationship with that person, one you needed to tend to as you would tend to a relationship with any living friend or relative.

“To fuck with him and see what happens. You can find out a lot about someone by fucking with them.”

Was anything in all the world more heartrending than being found out by someone you wanted to love you?

All good preachers have a little of the devil in them.

It is odd how much we want to be in love when you think about how much anxiety comes with it, like a tax on money you won in the lottery.

It was reassuring to know our national leaders were using all the resources at their disposal to help the desperate: social media and Jesus.

Too fucking real...

Grief is hard work.

If I’d known that night what we were all going to have to live through, I’m not sure I could’ve lived through it.

Any pattern repeated over and over is bound to turn into wallpaper eventually, whether it’s flowers or corpses.

But humans are pack animals by nature and most will accept whatever they have to accept—wholly, enthusiastically—to keep an honored place in their tribe. Give a man a choice between reality and loneliness or fantasy and community, he’ll pick having friends every time.

Short novels are all killer, no filler. They offer the economy of the short story but the depth of characterization we associate with longer works. Little novels aren’t leisurely, meandering journeys. They’re drag races. You put the pedal to the floor and run your narrative right off the edge of the cliff. Live fast and leave a pretty corpse is a shitty objective for a human being but a pretty good plan for a story.

But if epic-length works are all you ever write, you risk becoming the bore at the dinner party.