Make Something Up

Filling the movie screen would be some two-lane rural highway scattered with the mangled bodies of children.

These were his people. Failed artists. Rejected musicians and writers. Part-time idealists and closet visionaries. As a young man, he’d been an idealist in a corrupt world. It was no surprise that he’d turned out equally as corrupt, just a new and different form of corrupt.

He wanted to be—and not to be—but at the same time. That’s what a pioneering genius he was.

Rachel feels a respect for her daughter that she’s never felt for her husband.

A Mad Max future grafted onto a cowboy past.

Every notch scratched in the kitchen door frame marked the growing up of someone now long dead.

The other worst thing Randall had seen was at a barbershop, where they used to keep a stack of true crime magazines under the Playboys. Page after page of sex crime photos. Atrocities.

Where the horrors of actual human suffering fell short, his own imagination provided the more-extreme elements, transforming the merely shocking into the truly appalling. No depth had he not plumbed. From no horror had he averted his eyes.

Loving an animal, a horse, cat, or dog, was always a romantic tragedy. It meant loving something that would die before you.