The Body

by Stephen King

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.

Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were going. It was grand.

Your dad doesn’t beat on you, but maybe that’s even worse.

“Your friends do. They’re like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You can’t save them. You can only drown with them.”

The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality; that’s why all the verbs in stories have -ed endings, Keith my good man, even the ones that sell millions of paperbacks. The only two useful artforms are religion and stories.

I was pretty drunk that night, as you may have guessed. What I did tell him was: “I was thinking of something else, that’s all.” The most important things are the hardest things to say.

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.

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.