Little Heaven

Fear finds a home in you. It finds the softest spots imaginable and sets up residence.

It’s all so goddamn fragile. Your life and the thread you carry it on. And the more love you carry, the more stress you put on that thread, the better chance it will snap. But what choice do any of us have? You take on that love because to live without it is to exist as half a person. You give that love away because it is in you to give, not out of a desire for recompense. And you keep loving even when the world cracks open and reveals a black hole where all that love can get swallowed.

An expression crossed its face that in the embalmed moonlight could have passed for sorrow. The thing was revolted at itself for what it was—what it couldn’t help but be. But aren’t we all prisoners of our natures, deep down?

Have you ever heard a newborn cry as it awakes from a nightmare?” the Long Walker asked. Petty was too stunned by its question to reply. “A newborn, only a few days old,” it went on. “They have nightmares, but not as you would understand. Their minds are unformed, as was your own at that age. A newborn baby can still see the world behind the world, you see? The world where my daddy lives, and me and a few others like us. They can still see us. That’s why they scream as they do.

He would wonder at their fates. Such a strange path to chart. The heart pulls, the mind resists. The heart wins. It wins. Nobody can chart the shape of his or her life before that shape emerges. There is hardly any rhyme to that shape and almost no reason. And that is the grandest, the most irreducible mystery of all.

Fear will make you abandon those you care for, even those you claim to love—the people you tell yourself you’d save, sacrificing your body for theirs, if it ever came to that. And hypothetically, yes, you would . . . at least in those dream scenarios we all concoct. The burning houses, the crazed gunmen. You’d risk that heat or take that bullet. In a man’s fantasies, he always does the right thing.

They wanted answers. Which was all people like them ever wanted. Any answers at all, so they didn’t have to think on their own.

You know what my sister said to me once? She said that maybe the best thing about having a child, especially a young one, was that you could love that child shamelessly. She said that you could put everything into that kid, love crazily, give everything in your heart and mind and soul over to that other person. You can’t do that for a husband or a wife, not really. The only other entity you could love that way would be God, if you’re a believer.

Amos Flesher struck her as many men of the cloth had done over the years: a bully who had learned to fight with scripture rather than his fists.

Life was too damn tough on its own terms to go depriving yourself further.

Ebenezer was unsure that human minds were built to cope with any of . . . of what happened down there. He felt no shame thinking that, either, as he did not believe humans were built to come to grips with anything that existed beyond their conventional means of reckoning. When humans experience something that challenges their fundamental belief of the world—its reasonableness, its fixed parameters—well, their minds crimp just a bit.

MICAH HENRY SHUGHRUE awoke into a darkness so thick it was like all nights folded together. He

You tell yourself it’s just a caterpillar. The world’s full of them. Which is true. But the world is full of us, too. And any of us can be lost—or taken—at any minute.

Partner, it is happening,

He could die here. In a second, a minute, or anytime between. That fact bestowed an eerie calm within him. This was the world as he’d found it. His only option was to deal with its new parameters.

But what Micah recalled powerfully was a personal dryness: his own fear leeched the moisture out of his eyes and nose and mouth, his veins running thick as if his blood had been mixed with flour.

She wished she could see this situation the way Micah surely did. He wasn’t inclined to consider how things came to be. His mind was tuned toward dealing with things the way they were. To him, the creatures in the woods existed, somehow, and had to be reckoned with. Which was the best way of seeing it right now, trapped in the heart of it. Minerva knew Micah was scared—the man was tough, but he wasn’t insane—but his fear inspired a direct levelheadedness. Those awful things were an equation to be solved. Micah didn’t need to explain or understand them. He only had to act. She wished she had that particular nerve, or bone, or part of her brain that allowed her to do the same.

Oh, there’s only one answer to that—it’s L’eggs control-top panty hose! L’eggs slims and trims but doesn’t bind, so you get comfort and control!

loped off to investigate. It was wary but unafraid.

So when you finally see that badness, Micah, you’re kind of wed to it. That badness doesn’t want to let you go. And it gets angrier and angrier that you won’t bend to it the way it thinks you should. It’s pissed that you aren’t scared of it anymore. So it tries to make you scared again. Any old way it can.

You don’t know how bad someone is sometimes,” she said. “Because at first, none of that badness is evident. It’s all goodness—or, if not outright goodness, then at least nothing especially cruel.

A man never can tell which side of the line he lives on. He will exist forever ignorant until that moment—ruinous and unflinching—when he is forced to confront his hidden inner self.

People can eat whatever they want, she’d said, but they better not show up on my doorstep asking if I want a bite of their apple—

Dirty stick. That’s what Sister Muriel, one of the nuns at the San Francisco Catholic Orphanage, used to call the male penis. She always made that distinction - the ‘male’ penis, as if it was necessary.

Then a delegation of blow-dried American scientists arrived.

It spun and capered behind her golden irises, which seemed to tick clockwise, snipping off each second.