words

He is smiling with every tooth

For the hyphenated

I cannot escape the feeling that, below the surface, something is breaking.

“I feel like I could eat the world raw.”

He was utterly still, the type of quiet that I had thought could not belong to humans, a stilling of everything but breath and pulse—like a deer, listening for the hunter’s bow.

“Do not let what you gained this day be so easily lost.”

Zeus’ thunderbolts still smell of singed flesh and patricide.

In that instant, kneeling there, everything came clear to him. It was not just Danny the Overlook was working on. It was working on him, too. It wasn’t Danny who was the weak link, it was him. He was the vulnerable one, the one who could be bent and twisted until something snapped.

Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.