Jessica’s Reviews > Demon Copperhead > Status Update

If you think a person that's lost everything knows what to say to another one, I didn't. But I pulled a chair over and sat, and she gripped my hand so hard it hurt. Not even looking at me, just holding on.

The whole idea of the sermon was how people connect up in various ways, seen and unseen, and that Mr. Peg had tied a lot of knots in the big minnow seine that keeps us all together. Dead but still here, in other words. That's what killed me the worst.

Their last words amounted to inviting one another to go to hell. He said half of him was sorry over it, and the other half wasn't, so now he would stay cut in two forever. I might have gotten him up those stairs, if I'd known it was the last chance. I could have tried harder. Mr. Peg was the best part of Maggot's piss-poor lot in life. Both our lives.

Pain is water, of a drowning kind. You waterboard a while,, up for air, go back down. You're afraid you'll die, and then you're afraid you won't. That's where I was, at the time of dock, Watts showing up in the morning.

Every minute of those days had sucked. But with another person knowing it was hell, you had something.

She liked to ease me that if we lived to a hundred, she would still be the one to get there first. Which was true. No credit given for all the extra miles that take you nowhere.

I wondered what it would take to stop me feeling like I had rotten fruit down in me instead of a heart.

To start over someplace from scratch, as nobody and nothing? I hated the thought. I was only just now starting to exist.

Even the bad felt good. Pushing myself in the weight room till every string in my arms was on fire, my chest clenched like a heart attack, the guy spotting me saying Jesus, man, your face looks like a damn hemorrhoid. Laughing because it's so fucking good to hurt that bad. Most people never get anywhere close to being that much alive.

Everybody warns about bad influences, but it's these things already inside you that are going to take you down . The restlessness in your gut,[...]. The hopeless wishes that won't quit stalking you: some perfect words you think you could say to somebody to make them see you, and love you, and stay. Or could say to your mirror, same reason.