The Body

by Stephen King

The most important things are the hardest things to say.

But it’s more than that, isn’ t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

Chris didn’t talk much about his dad, but we all knew he hated him like poison.

Mr. Halliburton,

Lol

He could never hit a happy medium. But he didn’t talk about it often. He’d lost a son in April and a garden in August.

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.

eat the pies with their hands tied behind their backs. So, dig it, they come up onto the platform…”

Leading into the actual writing?? Genius.

“I wish to fuck I was your father!” he said angrily. “You wouldn’t go around talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was! It’s like God gave you something, all those stories you can make up, and He said: This is what we got for you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it then maybe I ought to.”

Crying.

If something wanted to eat on him, it would. His mother wasn’t here to stop that from happening, and neither was his father, nor Jesus Christ in the company of all the saints. He was dead and he was all alone, flung off the railroad tracks and into the ditch, and I realized that if I didn’t stop thinking about it I was going to cry.

was on the tip of my tongue to tell them about the deer, but I ended up not doing it. That was one thing I kept to myself. I’ve never spoken or written of it until just now, today. And I have to tell you that it seems a lesser thing written down, damn near inconsequential. But for me it was the best part of that trip, the cleanest part, and it was a moment I found myself returning to,

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.

The most important things are the hardest things to say.

They’ll lose some sleep over it, and there’s gonna be times this fall when it’s right on the tips of their tongues to tell somebody, but I don’t think they will. And then… you know what? It sounds fucking crazy, but… I think they’ll almost forget it ever happened.” He was nodding slowly. “I didn’t think of it just like that. You see through people, Gordie.” “Man, I wish I did.” “You do, though.” We walked another block in silence.

“Gimme some skin, man,” he said, sounding tired. “Chris—” “Skin.” I gave him some skin. “I’ll see you.” He grinned—that same sweet, sunny grin. “Not if I see you first, fuckface.”

Even if I’d known the right thing to say, I probably couldn’t have said it. Speech destroys the functions of love, I think—that’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is the harm. Love isn’t what these asshole poets like McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close those lovebites. It’s the other way around, that’s the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them. Take it from me. I’ve made my life from the words, and I know that is so.

Teddy and Vern slowly became just two more faces in the halls or in three-thirty detention. We nodded and said hi. That was all. It happens. Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that? But when I think of that dream, the corpses under the water pulling implacably at my legs, it seems right that it should be that way. Some people drown, that’s all. It’s not fair, but it happens. Some people drown.

seemed to me to be my best part, and I could not just leave him to sink or swim on his own. If he had drowned, that part of me would have drowned with him, I think.

Sometimes I get headaches, bad ones, and then I have to go into a dim room and lie down until they go away. The doctors say they aren’t true migraines; he called them “stressaches” and told me to slow down. I worry about myself sometimes. What a stupid habit that is… and yet I can’t quite seem to stop it. And I wonder if there is really any point to what I’m doing,