Donnelley was lifting his shirt away from the torn flesh in his side. He was cranked around, trying to assess the damage in the muck-spotted mirror. To Vero, he looked like an expressionist painting in which all the objects were the same color of too-vivid red: the shirt, the hands holding the shirt, the belt bassing through pant loops. At the center of it all was the thing that corrupted its surroundings with its own gruesome color – a wound.

He lowered his eyes to his dad’s face. There was fear there. Fear. When your dad was frightened, there was something to be frightened about.

Hope is a merciless tormentor. It’s the sound of trickling water to parched lips. The prospect of love to the unlovable. A miracle cure to the parents of a dying child. It holds up victory over the inevitable and beckons us to crawl further over slicing shards, all the while pulling back, remaining just out of reach. It makes agony out of mere pain by pretending a different outcome could have been. It laughs at mankind’s embrace of it after millennia of disappointment.

It’d be like a combination lock. Every new portal would make the number of possible worlds she could have gone to increase exponentially.

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The old man said, ” The house is talking to us.” “What’s it saying?” David said. Jesse said, “It’s hungry.

He loved his job, which allowed time to do it without comparing his performance to others’. He loved the economics of death: hastening a person’s passage into the afterlife not only provided him with a good living: it gave work to coroners, beat cops, detectives, crime scene technicians, the people who made fingerprint powder and luminal and other sundry chemicals and devices – not to mention firearm, ammunition, coffin, and tissue manufacturers – obituary writers, crime reporters, novelists.

If I guess your secret, will you tell me if I’m right?” His father laughed but didn’t answer.

Death does not simply end life. It steals away the sunsets you’ll never see, the children you’ll ever hold, the wife you’ll never love. It’s frightening to almost lose your future and it’s heartbreaking to witness death snuff out other people’s tomorrows.

Knowledge was like candy: you never turned it down, especially if you didn’t have to work too hard to get it.