Elevation

by Stephen King

life is what we make it and acceptance is the key to all our affairs.”

“But we also change the things we can, don’t we?

The high schoolers went in costume to the annual Halloween dance in the gym, for which a local garage band, Big Top, renamed themselves Pennywise and the Clowns.

Sometimes he thought of a saying Nora had brought home from her AA meetings: the past is history, the future’s a mystery.

He was afraid—it would have been foolish not to be—but he was also curious. And something else. Happy? Was that it? Yes. Probably crazy, but definitely yes. Certainly he felt singled out somehow. Doctor Bob might think that was crazy, but Scott thought it was sane. Why feel bad about what you couldn’t change? Why not embrace it?

She wanted to stick it to them. Of course she does, he thought. She wants to beat them all—the men, the women, the kids, and the blind man with his German shepherd. She wants the whole town to watch a lesbean, and a married lesbean at that, throw the switch on their Christmas tree.

Not a wind, not even a high, exactly, but an elevation. A sense that you had gone beyond yourself and could go farther still.

Here, as he explored the farthest limits of his stamina, was a new world. Everything leads to this, he thought. To this elevation. If it’s how dying feels, everyone should be glad to go.

Gravity is the anchor that pulls us down into our graves. There would be no grave for this man, and no more gravity, either. He had been given a special dispensation.

Everyone should have this, he thought, and perhaps, at the end, everyone does. Perhaps in their time of dying, everyone rises.