Misery

by Stephen King

She said she had hardly been able to believe that her patient was really that Paul Sheldon even after checking the ID in his wallet.

Listening to Annie was like listening to a song played in the wrong key.

He would come to know that her grasp of time was not good.

An awful memory bloomed there in the dark: his mother had taken him to the Boston Zoo, and he had been looking at a great big bird. It had the most beautiful feathers—red and purple and royal blue—that he had ever seen… and the saddest eyes. He had asked his mother where the bird came from and when she said Africa he had understood it was doomed to die in the cage where it lived,

Alone in Annie Wilkes’s house, locked in this room. Locked in this bed. The distance between here and Denver was like… well, like the distance between the Boston Zoo and Africa.

When she came back there were ten groups of five and one extra. The little groups, neat at first, grew increasingly jagged as his hands began to tremble.

The roller was dusty, its hard rubber scarred and pitted. The letters ROYAL ran across the front of the machine in a semicircle.

“It has a missing n.”

“I don’t think, I know! You’re going to use this typewriter to write a new novel! Your best novel! Misery’s Return!”

he saw her bringing her fist down on the remains of his knee with all the force of an angry drunk

she was pointing a shotgun at him.

It was as the door swung open that he looked down and saw that by looking for individual tracks with such agonized concentration, he had ignored a whole buffalo run: the boxes of Novril were still in his lap.