Insomnia

by Stephen King

“I wasn’t thinking about you at all,” Ralph said. “I was thinking about how Carolyn used to say practically the same thing—that getting old was like getting a bad dessert at the end of a really fine meal.”

“Are you seeing the colors yet?” Ed asked. His voice had become calm again. At the same instant, the red glow around the telephone wire popped out of existence.

Pedersen raised his fists in an exaggerated John L. Sullivan pose.

an enormous tower constructed of dark and sooty stone, standing in a field of red roses. Slit windows twisted up its sides in a brooding spiral.

“I can’t quite remember,” Ralph said, “but I don’t think we sounded quite so much like shitheads.”

As he did, he saw the reason Pickering hadn’t heard his approach: the man was wearing shooter’s plugs. Before Ralph had time to reflect upon the irony of a man on a suicide mission taking pains to protect his hearing, the bottle shattered against Pickering’s temple, dousing him with amber liquid and green glass.

Like a tight fuck on a summer afternoon, that’s how.

He supposed it was this same sort of distancing which allowed women to have lots of babies, forgetting the stark physical pain and effort of delivery each time the act was successfully accomplished.

the middle of the poster-sheet, a tower of dark, soot-colored stone rose into a blue sky dotted with fat white clouds. Surrounding it was a field of roses so red they almost seemed to clamor aloud. Standing off to one side was a man dressed in faded bluejeans. A pair of gunbelts crossed his flat middle; a holster hung below each hip. At the very top of the tower, a man in a red robe was looking down at the gunfighter with an expression of mingled hate and fear. His hands, which were curled over the parapet, also appeared to be red.

Him’s name is Roland, Mama. I dream about him, sometimes. Him’s a King, too.