Fairy Tale

by Stephen King

I wish I had looked longer, but I don’t blame myself. You never know where the trapdoors are in your life, do you?

“There’s always someone at fault,” Dad said. “Which is not the same as blame.”

You have to keep in mind that high school kids—no matter how big the boys, no matter how beautiful the girls—are still mostly children inside.

I turned to go and then he spoke again, but I don’t think it was to me. “A brave man helps. A coward just gives presents.”

“Something about presents. You said a brave man helps but a coward gives presents.”

Child Roland to the dark tower came, His word was still Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man.

Anything else is water under the bridge.” He thought about that, then said something I haven’t forgotten. Maybe because my mother died on a bridge when I was going to Stevens Elementary myself, maybe just because it seemed important to me, and still does. “Time is the water, Charlie. Life is just the bridge it flows under.”

but I believe dogs sense the inner nature and ignore the outer aspect.

“There is more to life than profit,”

Here is something I learned in Empis: good people shine brighter in dark times.

tempus est umbra in mente is a better one. Roughly translated, it means time is a shadow in the mind.”

learn to listen so you can listen to learn, they say.

There’s a dark well in everyone, I think, and it never goes dry. But you drink from it at your peril. That water is poison.

I owed him a payback, and as we all know, payback’s a bitch.