Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

Dead people put on weight, it seems to me; both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight.

When you make your daily bread in the land of make-believe, the line between what is and what seems to be is much finer.

I would find myself thinking Manderley, I have dreamt again of Manderley. There was something creepy about this (there’s something creepy about any repeating dream, I think, about knowing your subconscious is digging obsessively at some object that won’t be dislodged), but I would be lying if I didn’t add that some part of me enjoyed the breathless summer calm in which the dream always wrapped me, and that part also enjoyed the sadness and foreboding I felt when I awoke.

When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing.

It was a sense that reality was thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

But in places like Lane Forty-two, you find that all the smoke and mirrors have been removed. What’s left is the sound of crickets and the sight of green leaves darkening toward black; branches that make shapes like faces; the sound of your heart in your chest, the beat of the blood against the backs of your eyes, and the look of the sky as the day’s blue blood runs out of its cheek.

I walked to the sign, feeling the mystery of this place at twilight.

What if death drives us insane? What if we survive, but it drives us insane? What then?

how dare you come to Manderley again, and now that you’re here, how will you ever get away? Into the mystery with you, you silly little man. Into the mystery with you.

any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.

suppose it was the last of my mourning, but that made it no easier to bear.

So what? I asked myself. Even if it should be true, so what? Ghosts can’t hurt anyone. That’s what I thought then.

walked back to the fridge and looked at the magnets. They were still scattered hell to breakfast, and that was sort of a relief. Even the spirits must have to rest sometimes.

“You can’t hurry stories with magic in them, Ki.” “Well go as fast as you can.” “Okay.”

This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things—fish and unicorns and men on horseback—but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.

If anything confirms the idea that we’re just another species of animal, one with a slightly bigger brain and a much bigger idea of our own importance in the scheme of things, it’s how much we can convey by gesture when we absolutely have to.

The writing had burned off all thoughts of the real world, at least temporarily. I think that, in the end, that’s what it’s for. Good or bad, it passes the time.

Three sunflowers like the three weird sisters in Macbeth, three sunflowers with faces like searchlights. I had come back to Sara Laughs; I was in the zone; I had returned to my dream and this time it had possessed me.