Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

From where I lay I was able to look out the window at the pale moon shining on the snow. Have you started writing again? No. Other than a rather lengthy essay on how I spent my summer vacation which I may show to IZYRA in some later year, there’s been nothing. I know that Harold is nervous, and sooner or later I suppose I’ll have to call him and tell him what he already guesses: the machine which ran so sweet for so long has stopped. It isn’t broken—this memoir came out with nary a gasp or missed heartbeat—but the machine has stopped, just the same. There’s gas in the tank, the sparkplugs spark and the battery bats, but the wordygurdy stands there quiet in the middle of my head. I’ve put a tarp over it. It’s served me well, you see, and I don’t like to think of it getting dusty. Some of it has to do with the way Mattie died. It occurred to me at some point this fall that I had written similar deaths in at least two of my books, and popular fiction is heaped with other examples of the same thing. Have you set up a moral dilemma you don’t know how to solve? Is the protagonist sexually attracted to a woman who is much too young for him, shall we say? Need a quick fix? Easiest thing in the world. “When the story starts going sour, bring on the man with the gun.” Raymond Chandler said that, or something like it—close enough for government work, kemo sabe.

Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme. I believe that even make-believe murders should be taken seriously; maybe that’s another idea I got last summer.

Perhaps I got it while Mattie was struggling in my arms, gushing blood from her smashed head and dying blind, still crying out for her daughter as she left this earth. To think I might have written such a hellishly convenient death in a book, ever, sickens me.

Or maybe I just wish there’d been a little more time.

I remember telling Ki it’s best not to leave love letters around; what Ithought but didn’t say was that they can come back to haunt you. I am haunted anyway… but I will not willingly haunt myself, and when I closed my book of dreams I did so of my own free will. I think I could have poured lye over those dreams as well, but from that I stayed my hand.

I’ve seen things I never expected to see and felt things I never expected to feel—not the least of them what I felt and still feel for the child sleeping down the hall from me. She’s my little guy now, I’m her big guy, and that’s the important thing. Nothing else seems to matter half so much.