The Lesser Dead

by Christopher Buehlman

You know that guy who never takes a good picture? Ask yourself if you only see that guy at night. If the answer is yes, maybe don’t spend any time alone with him, you know what I’m saying? Maybe only hang out in big groups.

“There comes a time when loneliness is stronger than fear.”

Margaret looked like a dishrag-pretty thirty-five, sassy in that using-a-rolling-pin-as-a-weapon way, big blue eyes made for being bloodshot, made for anger, the kind of woman who would stab a drunk husband in the gut with a meat fork and never interrupt her lecture.

I guess God was giving me a hint. He does that. God or whatever’s sitting where God ought to be.

He played his steel guitar like something he stole from angels and he was going to wring one more song out of it before they came to confiscate it.

Both of us young and healthy and full of possibilities, before she was a corpse and I was a monster.

“A mundane lie hiding an exotic truth is deception; an exotic lie hiding a mundane truth is storytelling. Deception may be necessary to preserve life, but storytelling makes life worth living. So make my life worth living.”

New York cops always impressed me by looking bored and dangerous at the same time, like big, sleepy crocodiles who probably wouldn’t notice you, but could really fuck up your evening if they did. Big asshole crocodiles in their chalky blue shirts and stop-sign black hats, silver badges shining like a lie only kids believed.

If you’re in a neighborhood where pets start to go missing, you got either a psychopath working his way up to people or a vampire working his way down from them.

“Of course they let me go, they’re just little kids.” “I should loan you a book about ‘just little kids’ on a desert island.”

“What’s that got to do with anything? I’m talking about our neighborhood.” “It is only a question of scale. Why did not the brave American army march into Budapest and save the Hungarian resistance who begged Mr. Eisenhower, in the name of democracy and freedom, to take their side? Why did we sit by while the Soviet tanks rolled in and hammered the beautiful old city?” “That happened?” “You have just written the epitaph of America.

Happiness is the province of those who ask few questions.

Under every face lies a skull, under the skull, nothing.