Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

So what does it say about me if beating the crap out of myself is one of my better moments?

My artwork isn’t evolving, it’s deconstructing, and I don’t know why.

My shoes are too tight, and my heart two sizes too small.

Sometimes I hear voices from the Home Shopping Network.

I begin to wonder if David was like me. Seeing monsters everywhere and realizing there aren’t enough slingshots in the world to get rid of them.

I feel her wave of worry like a patio heater—faint and ineffective, but constant.

Forget solar energy—if you could harness denial, it would power the world for generations.

Don Quixote—the famous literary madman—fought windmills. People think he saw giants when he looked at them, but those of us who’ve been there know the truth. He saw windmills, just like everyone else—but he believed they were giants. The scariest thing of all is never knowing what you’re suddenly going to believe.

Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.

five seconds the water’s at her waist, then at her neck, and then she drowns, never knowing what the hell happened, or how such a horrific thing is even possible. I mean, think about it: drowning in an elevator in a skyscraper. That’s wrong on sixty-seven different levels, not counting the mezzanine. The weird thing is, hearing stories like this makes me feel a kind of kinship with the Almighty, because it proves that even God has psychotic episodes.

Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear, sent it to the woman he loved, and in the end took his own life. In spite of an artistic vision so startlingly new it took years for the world to appreciate it, his artwork couldn’t save him from the depths of his tortured mind. That’s who he was.