Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

You know how the air feels before a thunderstorm, how everything gets still and colors seem to stand out with the brilliance of things seen during a high fever?

Bookreaders are just as willing as anyone else to start out with the weather, but as a general rule they can actually go on from there.

The soft lap of water against the shore. A breeze that patted my face and rattled the bushes. A loon cried out on the lake; moths battered the stoop light.

She was a brilliant scatterbrain, and her desk had always reflected that.

Johanna painted (although not very well), she took photographs (very good ones indeed) and sometimes sold them, she knitted, she crocheted, she wove and dyed cloth, she could play eight or ten basic chords on the guitar. She could write, of course; most English majors can, which is why they become English majors. Did she demonstrate any blazing degree of literary creativity? No. After a few experiments with poetry as an undergrad, she gave up that particular branch of the arts as a bad job. You write for both of us, Mike, she had said once. That’s all yours; I’ll just take a little taste of everything else. Given the quality of her poems as opposed to the quality of her silks, photographs, and knitted art, I thought that was probably wise.

That was my summer for knowing things I had no business knowing.

The books were different enough to qualify as schizoid. One, with a playing-card bookmark about three quarters of the way through, was the paperback edition of Richard North Patterson’s Silent Witness. I applauded her taste; Patterson and DeMille are probably the best of the current popular novelists. The other, a hardcover tome of some weight, was The Collected Short Works of Herman Melville. About as far from Richard North Patterson as you could get.

Couldn’t they, though? There is such a thing as town consciousness—anyone who doubts it has never been to a New England town meeting.