I am dying, you see, and in that act of dying, I am realizing that death itself is an impatient schoolmaster.
Maybe a physical shadow – skin cells left that have combined their DNA with the tendriled confusion of the clovered outfield...
Crum went on about this place, lingering on its smells and secret footprint and whispers of rodentine residents as if it was a temple set in the lush forests of some distant land. Or maybe he saw it as a kind of Terabithia where dreams rose and fell like a restless tide from the sleep of the dead.
More than that, though, the trees grew up like the earth’s own thick hairs – unkempt, unfettered. Cattails like whiskers filled in the low areas. And from every direction, the rot of the earth’s flesh puckered his nostrils.
...no need to cause any trouble, no need to watch her only child wander off and whisper strange things with a strange woman.
The thing that watches keeps chewing the air. The sound of its voice is like the husky clatter of corn stalks in the late fall – hungry. Hungry and damned.
...the paper itself will come apart, will dis-integrate, will allow itself to let go of itself, each piece becoming a new entity apart from the whole.
He would sit there, with his tight frown, his pent-up bowels, his shoulders narrow again like a boy’s, his paper-thin skin shaking and he’d wait.
