Pearl

by Josh Malerman

Killed, Susan? the voice said. Does a slave kill its master? Or does it simply learn to unlock the gate?

A man understanding too late that there was no retrieval of promise so long as you detonated into a thousand pieces before rectifying the past.

You couldn’t just act on the farmer. You had to make the farmer want to act on himself.

Just like every farmer in America had driven every pig in their pen insane.

A bum who got angry was an asshole who deserved his lot in life, but a president who did the same? They called that a “temper.”

“Can it, Darlene. We don’t need the woman’s voice right now, and you wouldn’t even mean what you’d say. You know you agree with me.

Because waiting forever was the same as not waiting at all. It made a caricature of you. Can’t Wait Man. Waits Forever Man.

It wasn’t the loss that bothered her, scared her…it was the blossoming fear within, the idea that man and law could make decisions in the dark, and sometimes someone just didn’t like the looks of you.

But that was okay, Susan said, that was all right because hospitals must be built in purgatory, a middle ground, an airport between Heaven and Hell, and a lot of people actually took the escalator up or down from this very edifice.

For anything that lets its slip show also lets you know which thread to try pulling first.

We’ve been through something, and that means we got through it.

you could make people do things as long as you made them want to do them, as long as you made them believe they were the ones who wanted to do them.