If It Bleeds

by Stephen King

‘Youth is a wonderful thing,’ said Mr Harrigan. ‘What a shame it’s wasted on children.’

If ghosts exist, Ms Hargensen had said, I’ll bet not all of them are holy.

In the twenty-first century, I think our phones are how we are wedded to the world. If so, it’s probably a bad marriage.

‘The human brain is finite – no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone – but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin – the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo – billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.’

I’ll be early to my own funeral, she thinks, and opens her iPad to find the nearest Uber.

It’s liking that got lost, and love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end.