Devil House

by John Darnielle

From an early age, you’d been in love with the world: there was so much in it, a life so full of surprises if you only stayed open to them, ready to receive the transmissions when they came. A devotee of the chance encounter, the found pleasure, the happy accident, your eyes always open, trying to spread some of your inner light around: that was you, the you everyone knew.

a cave you carry around with you like a chair you have to sit in wherever you go, and, to everybody else, it just looks like a normal chair, but to you it’s the top of a slide, and every time you sit down on it you head down into the depths.

I’ll put something on the lip of a bookshelf, or in a dish or on a coffee table, and then I’ll think, or perhaps feel more than think: There, that’s where that thing belongs, it lives there now; and this feeling is invariably so satisfying that it results in half a dozen things always gathering dust on windowsills or end tables around the house, just because, when I last set them down, they seemed to have reached the place where they belonged.