Child of God

by Cormac McCarthy

A ferriswheel stood against the sky like a gaudy bracelet and little hawkwinged goatsuckers shuttled among the upflung strobes of light with gape mouths and weird cries.

Ferris wheel

He’d long been wearing the underclothes of his female victims but now he took to appearing in their outerwear as well. A gothic doll in illfit clothes, its carmine mouth floating detached and bright in the white landscape.

Ballard in a nutshell.

He was in fast water to his chest, struggling along on tiptoe gingerly and leaning upstream when a log came steaming into the flat. He saw it coming and began to curse. It spun broadside to him and it came on with something of animate ill will. Git, he screamed at it, a hoarse croak in the roar of the water. It came on bobbing and bearing in its perimeter a meniscus of pale brown froth in which floated walnuts, twigs, a slender bottle neck erect and tilting like a metronome.

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