words

Here he was, slapping him five, grabbing his shoulder, and talking too loud in a performance of gregariousness. A walking flinch.

That would be like the lamb handing a knife to the butcher.

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

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.

Zeus’ thunderbolts still smell of singed flesh and patricide.

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.

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

I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.

For the hyphenated