Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

The police had judged these cases “Death by Misadventure,” or “Auto-assassination”—by which they meant that the victims had been so reckless that an ordinary, sensible person would expect to die as a result of their actions.

Standing there in the doorway, gaping at the television, spooning ice cream into my mouth, I felt more than ever that I was not one person.

No doubt this must happen to everyone at a certain age: You look up for a moment and you’re not sure which life is real. You’ve split yourself into so many honeycombed parts that they barely notice each other—all of them pacing, concurrently, parallel streams of thought, and each one thinks of its self as me.

The future is fixed The past ever-changing— —LYNDA BARRY

that kind of emoting. The thing about Mike Mention: He had a certain kind of tall body that got on my nerves. The long arms that hung down floppy like tentacles, and the thin legs that seemed like the femurs must be abnormal, a long narrow skull that was almost horse-like, and so I just sat there stiffly as he wept. I didn’t say anything.

It was like that one period when Rabbit and I were doing Adderall, that sort of hunter’s focus, that tingling in the front of your brain, knowing that there’s something you’re chasing, even if you’re not quite sure what it

It’s not your plan, but there’s more than one person running the good ship Aaron, and several of them are pretty fucking feckless. Some parts of yourself don’t care if you die. They are just in this for a good time, and they’ll evacuate when it goes bad.