Aseel’s Reviews > Something Wicked This Way Comes > Status Update

“Pa,” he said, “don’t sound so sad.”
“Me? I’m the original sad man. I read a book and it makes me sad. See a film: sad. Plays? they really work me over.”
“Is there anything,” said Will, “doesn’t make you sad?”
“One thing. Death.”
“Boy!” Will started. “I should think that would!”

“It was the ‘Funeral March’! Played backwards!”
“Which ‘Funeral March’?”
“Which! Jim, Chopin only wrote one tune! The ‘Funeral March’!”
“But why played backward?”
“Mr. Cooger was marching away from the grave, not toward it, wasn’t he, getting younger, smaller, instead of older and dropping dead?”
“Willy, you’re terrific!”

Something important—” Jim breathed soft fire—“made him forget. So he just walked off and left this here.”
“What? What’s so important you forget everything?”

Sometimes you see a kite so high, so wise it almost knows the wind. It travels, then chooses to land in one spot and no other and no matter how you yank, run this way or that, it will simply break its cord, seek its resting place and bring you, blood-mouthed, running.
“Jim! Wait for me!”

Jim doesn’t know with his mind. But his body knows. And while Will’s putting a bandage on his latest scratch, Jim’s ducking, waving, bouncing away from the knockout blow which must inevitably come

He knew what the wind was doing to them where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away