Hailstorm’s Reviews > The Road > Status Update

“He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold…. The salitter drying from the earth” (261)

“I wasn’t going to kill him, he said. But the boy didn’t answer. They rolled themselves in the blankets and lay there in the dark. He thought he could hear the sea but perhaps it was just the wind. He could tell by his breathing that the boy was awake and after a while the boy said: But we did kill him” (260)

“perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart in another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun” (219)

“The world soon to be largely populated by men who who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell” (181)

“Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory” (13)

“This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon.” (13)

“He watched the boy and he looked out through the trees toward the road. This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi Papa, he said.
I’m right here.
I know.” (5)