karen > Books: live-through-this‎ (115)

Elias didn’t understand how friendship worked. He didn’t understand the forces that would push him out of the car into the claws of monsters rather than let down a boy who almost broke his nose last fall over an argument about a skateboard. Intellectually he knew that whatever random collection of boys had been in his class at school he would have found friends. Robbie was just a roll of the dice. But he was Elias’s roll. This was his life. What had been given to him and what he had taken, and if he were willing to toss it aside because of fear, then what was any of it worth? If their friendship wasn’t special than neither was the life he was trying to protect.

In the deep places there are things older than man, things that cannot be forgotten and so are better left unknown.

Being trapped is bad. The slow discovery that you’re trapped is worse. Having to march your young children through decay and ruin in order to learn that you’re trapped is hell.

"Don't you know the stories? Death birds are said to guide the souls of fallen climbers out of this world. If you believe what the old guides and mountain folk say, at least."

"And do you?"

He smiles. "Did you know mountain rescuers often find fallen climbers without their eyes? By the time they find the bodies, the birds have already gotten to them. Ravens, jackdaws, crows; they pick out the eyes and swallow them up."

"Jeez, really?"

"Ask one of those guides. They say the birds do it so the soul is free to escape. Otherwise it's doomed to stay and haunt the place it was found in. But sometimes the soul doesn't want to leave and it lingers inside the bird for a while. They say that if you listen, you can hear their screams coming from the mountains at night."

Every year, climbers—sometimes entire teams—disappear into deep glacial voids and die in their frozen darkness. If the mountain is merciful, the drop is deep enough to smash them into silence in one go. Most victims, however, are trapped between blue, narrowing walls of ice, and as their body warmth melts the ice, they sink slowly deeper and deeper, until they die very consciously of asphyxiation.

The people in the stairwell are still there.
They're closer now.

He turned to look at me, and, man, chills up and down my spine. On the bandage strips, where his mouth shoulda been, he'd Sharpied a smiley mouth. A black, half-moon curve, crossed at the edges for round Cupid cheeks. Coulda been innocuous, but wasn't. Cuz his head was moving and the smiley wasn't, giving his face the grisliness of a puppet come to life.

But the top half was real, and that was Nick. He made a muffled sound, looked happy to see me.

He typed on his iPad:

Smile!

This way you'll always know it's me and never mistake me for someone else. When I smile, you don't have to be scared of me, okay?

I couldn't tell if he was joking or not. I smiled to be on the safe side and said, "I'm not scared of you."

But I was.

When I looked up, I saw him slowly swing his right arm and put his hand on his Sharpied smiley mouth.

I hadn't even gotten halfway to the village before I wish I'd stayed home. The valley was on the verge of a panic attack. The mountains seemed to have been disjointed. The sky rocked. The cold unhinged. There are November mornings when the cold is clear, crackling, and crisp, but this cold was sticky, syrupy, clung to you. Like it was begging you for help. You, the first organism to have crossed its path, and would you please take it with you and protect it from what's about to happen, because that was much, much worse than the cold itself.

Jesus. The Morose hadn't even got started yet and my metaphors were already going haywire.

I stick my frozen hands under my Gore-Tex coat and in my armpits. The burning pain that takes over my fingers as the blood flows back into them pushes all my thoughts out of my head and I have to scream.

What am I when you strip everything else away?

I'm a motherfucking survivor.

If diamonds are a girl's best friend, then reliable handguns with a lot of stopping power are a final girl's.

She could be mute for hours, but if someone mentions a film title, the words pour out. Maddy had once told her that movies were her version of wine coolers. They really loosen you up.

Charlie knows it's true, which is why asking people about their favorite movies is the only icebreaker she has. It instantly tells her how much time and energy she should spend on a person. If someone mentions Hitchcock or Ford or Altman or even Argento, they're probably worth talking to. On the flip side, if someone brings up The Sound of Music, Charlie knows it's best to just walk away.

Never go out alone at night.
Always walk in pairs.
Always tell someone where you're going.
Never trust a stranger.

...according to the Take Back the Night flyer, she shouldn't even be here at all, alone at the curb with suitcases and a box, clearly looking like someone about to leave and who no one would miss for a few days.

"Instead of what's really happening, I see a heightened version of the scene. Like my brain is playing tricks on me. I hear conversations that aren't happening and see things that aren't really there. It feels like life..."

"Only better?"

Charlie shakes her head. "More manageable."

She had always thought of it as seeing things in wide-screen. Not everything. Just certain moments. Difficult ones. A Steadicam operator gliding through the rough patches of her life. It wasn't until she was forced to see the psychiatrists who prescribed the little orange pills that Charlie realized what the movies in her mind really were.

Hallucinations.

That was what the psychiatrist called them.

She said it was like having a mental circuit breaker, triggered when Charlie's emotions threaten to overwhelm her. In times of grief or stress or fear, a switch flips in Charlie's brain, replacing reality with something more cinematic and easier to handle.

“What do people look for out of a story, Spin? You told enough of them to know.”

I thought a moment, then answered. “They look for it t

“What do people look for out of a story, Spin? You told enough of them to know.”

I thought a moment, then answered. “They look for it to have a good shape and end where it’s supposed to.”

When something big starts to fall, it goes as gentle as thistledown at first. But oh, how it gathers!

Smiling in the face of horrors is a thing you can get better at. It was probably one of the first tricks our mothers' mothers ever learned.

Grief's not a debt we owe. It wells up or it doesn't.

He said it was not so much a thing of flesh and blood for him, what he was, but a thing that was mostly inside. Body is a shadow, he said. When I fall in love, I won't care about my lover's shadow, nor I wouldn't expect them to look overlong at mine.

"They've got that look about them. A bunch of Josephs in search of a manger, as Leonard Cohen would say."

"I don't know what that means."

There ought to be a rule in the telling of stories, my husband complained to me once, after I had brought him some dismay with a sad one. You ought to say before you start whether things will be brought in the end to a good or a bad case. That way them that are listening can gird themselves up somewhat, and be ready when the ending comes.

I told him I was sorry for the hurt to his heart and promised to give him fair warning next time. But I thought more thereafter, and in the end I came to this thinking on the subject. There can’t be any rules in the telling of stories. They’ve got to go where they go, which is not always where you would want them to. And as to the happiness or the sadness of it, that depends on where you’re standing. A happiness for one is sometimes a sadness to another. Or it might only be a happiness when you squint one eye. Or you might not know, even after it’s all done, whether it came out well or badly.

“What a nice night,” she said, her voice barely audible over the shrieking emanating from neighboring houses, “what a…lovely, lovely night. We’re havi

“What a nice night,” she said, her voice barely audible over the shrieking emanating from neighboring houses, “what a…lovely, lovely night. We’re having a good time. We’re okay.”