Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

The second kid, he hears that John Donne quote—We’re scarce our fathers’ shadows cast at noon—and nods and thinks, Ah, shit, ain’t that the truth? He’s been lucky—terribly, unfairly, stupidly lucky. He’s free to be his own man, because his father was. The father, in truth, doesn’t throw a shadow at all. He becomes instead a source of illumination, a means to see the territory ahead a little more clearly and find one’s own particular path. I

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I remember Aslan dead on the stone and the mice nibbling at the ropes that bound his corpse. I think that provided me with my foundational sense of decency. To live a decent life is to be no more than a mouse nibbling at a rope. One mouse isn’t much, but if enough of us keep chewing, we may set something free that can save us from the worst. Maybe it will even save us from ourselves. I also still believe that books operate along the same principles as enchanted wardrobes.

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his head bashing the road again and again, leaving a series of red punctuation marks on the chalkboard of the pavement.

They led me into things that I regretted in the moment but were later a pleasure to remember. Real sin, I think, produces the same emotions, in the exact opposite order.

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to be eighteen and in love, on a night where it was still seventy degrees at nearly 11:00 P.M.

always loved the Sherlock Holmes stories because they told a comforting lie: that the world made sense and that effect followed cause. In contrast, Vietnam had taught him that the army would napalm naked children to stop a political ideology based on people sharing what they have with one another. He said why they would do such a thing was a mystery that no detective, no matter how brilliant, could fathom.

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“There once was a guy named McSweeny, who spilled some gin on his weenie. Just to be couth, he added vermouth, then slipped his girl a martini.” “Oh, that’s charming,” he

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