Thinner

by Richard Bachman

‘He bought a lot of Connecticut land which is now shopping centers and snapped a lot of bras and drank a lot of Wild Turkey and left me a rich widow and I lived with him through the best years of my life and I’ve had more fucking Blackglama mink coats than I ever had orgasms, so let’s all get out of here and go to a roadhouse somewhere and dance and after a while maybe somebody will get drunk enough to forget I’ve had my fucking chin tied up behind my fucking ears three fucking times, twice in fucking Mexico City and once in fucking Germany and snap my fucking bra.’ Oh, fuck it. Why am I telling you all this? The only things men like you understand are humping, plea-bargaining, and how to bet on pro-football games.”

misery loves company, and I guess we’ve all got a streak of one hundred percent gold-plated bastard in our natures, tangled up so tightly with the good part of us that we can never get free of it.

I mean, he goes a good two-fifty and his ass looks like two dogs fightin’ under a blanket.

Now he lay here and listened to something breathe in the dark—something that looked like a pie but which was really a child he and that old man had created together.

In one of them he heard Ginelli in the trunk of his car, screaming to be let out. But when he opened the trunk it wasn’t Ginelli but a bloody naked boy-child with the ageless eyes of Taduz Lemke and a gold hoop in one earlobe. The boy-child held gore-stained hands out to Billy. It grinned, and its teeth were silver needles.