NOS4A2

by Joe Hill

resented the way little boys disappeared into the glowing screen, ditching the real world for some province of the imagination where fun replaced thought and inventing creative new kills was an art form.

Ellen could have her theories about what was healthy for boys and what wasn’t. That didn’t mean Santa had to share them.

Bradbury Park—but

she was perhaps twenty—with a fedora tipped back on her fluorescent purple hair.

“You found yourself a librarian! I can help with the figuring-out thing and point you toward some good poetry while I’m at it. It’s what I do.”

“Everyone lives in two worlds,”

But then it was a terrible thing to search your daughter’s room, read her diary, take things she had paid for herself.

was light-years smarter than both her parents,

Christmas was almost three months in the rearview mirror, and there was something awful about Christmas music when it was nearly summer. It was like a clown in the rain, with his makeup running.

If she ran, she would not just be leaving a sick and abducted child behind. She would be abandoning her own best self, too.

What had her mother screamed at her father? But you’re not raising her, Chris! I am! I’m doing it all by myself! It was awful to find yourself in a hole, all by yourself.

What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.

trying to figure out how in the hell she had wound up with sore tits and no job, two thousand miles from home.

The problem with that plan was, she liked guys better than girls, and she liked Lou better than most guys; he smelled good and he moved slow and he was roughly as difficult to anger as a character from the Hundred Acre Wood.

Her body was constantly working against her, toward its own unhelpful ends.

She could not quite work out how she had found her way here.

if you were a woman and you had a child, you lost everything, you would be held hostage by love: a terrorist who would only be satisfied when you surrendered your entire future.

She drove back to the garage, singing along to Kurt Cobain. Kurt Cobain understood what it tasted like to lose your magic bridge, the transport to the things you needed. It tasted like a gunbarrel—like Gunbarrel, Colorado, perhaps.

He wanted to tell her he wasn’t scared of her being a woman—if he had any true anxiety, it had been about himself getting old and being lonely without her,

She was a cartoonist, not an engineer; reality could get stuffed.

She spent a while drawing covered bridges for a gallery show that no one went to.

Was there any human urge more pitiful—or more intense—than wanting another chance at something?

Serious conversations always gave Lou the stomach flutters. He preferred casual banter about the Green Lantern.

even when you seemed completely overpowered, you could still show your teeth.

Water that tasted like rust, like old pipes.

It is like one of these vehicles they have now that they call hybrids. Do you know about the hybrids? They run half on gasoline, half on good intentions.

If you’re going to be mad, she heard her father say, then use it, and don’t be used by it.

The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.

“Jesus. Go back to the fifties, dude.”

Book burners! I’ll cut off your balls and rape your women!

Maggie saw a copy of Fahrenheit 451 shriveling and blackening.

It wasn’t that he was ugly. It was that he was stupid.

It was like being asked to multiply fractions while suffering from a head cold—too much work, too baffling.

You know, I can just tell you went to six years of college and majored in neuroscience or something, because only a truly gifted mind could talk himself into such utter horseshit. It’s dark out, you autistic fuck.” “Cundy,” Hutter said, before Cundy could come around in his chair and start some kind of male dick-measuring contest.

I don’t know, maybe you’d be more interested in me if I were a book.”

even if that particular boyfriend had been a book, he would’ve been one from the Business & Finance aisle and she would’ve passed him by and looked for something in SF & Fantasy.

Men, she thought, were one of the world’s few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in slippers.

Hutter thought, not for the first time, that she hated a lot of cops. Ugly, mean drunks who believed the worst of everyone.

He had long accepted that everyone had his own world inside, each as real as the communal world shared by all but impossible for others to access.

It sounded like delusion until you remembered that people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

Lou believed with all his heart in God, had believed since he was a kid and saw George Burns in Oh, God! on video.

In that gesture Vic understood everything. Whatever the children had become, whatever he had done to them, he had done to make them safe, to keep them from being run down by the world. He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.

It collapsed in toward the middle, either end rising, as if the bridge were trying to close itself like a book, a novel that had reached its ending, a story that reader and author alike were about to set aside.

Twitter is a hive buzzing with thought, argument, and geekpassion, and I’m grateful to every single person who has ever traded a tweet with me. As a world of shared ideas, Twitter is a kind of Inscape in and of itself, and a good one.