Heart-Shaped Box

by Joe Hill

Sounds could suggest shapes, painted a picture of the pocket of air in which they’d been given form.

People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn’t happen more often.

He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places.

Jude teetered then on the edge of an uncomfortable thought, that he had, over time, become a little too willing to take what he was offered, without wondering at the possible consequences.

That was one thing you found out when you were stoned, or wasted, or feverish: that the world was always turning and that only a healthy mind could block out the sickening whirl of it.

lot of his songs, when they started out, sounded like old music. They arrived on his doorstep, wandering orphans, the lost children of large and venerable musical families. They came to him in the form of Tin Pan Alley sing-alongs, honky-tonk blues, Dust Bowl plaints, lost Chuck Berry riffs. Jude dressed them in black and taught them to scream.

Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.

If hell was anything, it was talk radio—and family.

The dead win when you quit singing and let them take you on down the road with them.”

Horror was rooted in sympathy, after all, in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.