Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

Benji saw it at funerals: a grieving spouse washing the dishes, a child playing on the swing set outside, a brother pausing to turn on the TV to get the score for a game. Some thought it rude, and in some cases, that’s what it was: shitty people being shitty. But a lot of the time, it was a defense mechanism. The act of holding on tight to the staircase railing as a tornado ripped your house apart.

Dreams were not made on the internet; they were killed there. By mean, nasty little shits who were all looking to one-up each other. Like crayfish in a bucket, all trying to climb over one another to get to the top.

Some people are just trash, and they find other trash and start to form a landfill. The internet makes it easier.”

Humankind would not go out so easily, so completely. They would survive, somehow. Like that quote from Jurassic Park: Life finds a way.

a smell that some would describe as having a taste, too, one that lingered in the back of the nose, at the base of the tongue, a taste not unlike licking a very old library book.

Who licks library books?

Here lies Pete Corley. He lived too long, really. Long enough to make it weird. RIFP.