Fairy Tale

by Stephen King

You never know where the trapdoors are in your life, do you?

remembered reading somewhere that a dog ages seven years for each one of ours. Just a rule of thumb, surely, but at least a way to figure, and what did that mean to a dog, time-wise? If I came back at six to feed her, that would be about twelve hours of my time. Would that be eighty-four hours for her? Three and a half days? If so, no wonder she was so happy to see me. Plus she had to be missing Mr. Bowditch.

“A brave man helps. A coward just gives presents.”

“You can’t take credit for sobering him up, because he did that. And if he starts drinking again, you can’t take the blame, because he’d do that, too.”

Sometimes we look because we have to remember. Sometimes the most horrible things are what give us strength.

“There’s pain in that word, wouldn’t you agree? Such pain in every almost.”

That Hana had a daughter was amazing to me, mostly because I couldn’t begin to imagine who had lain with her to produce offspring. “Is Red Molly a… you know,

kindling if she get a hold on you. Not me. I

“Tempus fugit is a good one,” she said, “but time doesn’t always fly, as everyone who’s ever had to wait around for something knows. I think tempus est umbra in mente is a better one. Roughly translated, it means time is a shadow in the mind.”

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.