Alan Heathcock

You think some are bad or evil or whatnot, but somewhere along the way they were someone's baby, suckling the teat like anybody. Then something puts a volt in 'em and they ain't the same no more.

Maybe awful things is how God speaks to us, Vernon thought, trudging up the lightless tunnel. Maybe folks don__ trust in good things no more. Maybe awful things is all God__ got to remind us he__ alive. Maybe war is God come to life in men. Vernon pushed on toward the light of day. He stepped out onto the ledge and into the heat, and it felt like leaving a theater after the matinee had shown a sad film, the glare of sunshine after the darkness far too real to suffer.

I wish I could take my brain and put it inside your head,_ Winslow said. __ust for a moment. Then you__ know what all I can__ find how to say.

No matter what you say, or how much you talk, someone isn__ really forgiven until you can stand beside them without wanting to slap them in the face.

The projector's beam lay warm on Walt's neck, and he knew they'd all been plucked from danger and love, from another time, another place, and set back into this dark, sticky-floored theater, in the heart of nothing much that mattered.

Sometimes I wish I was in the movies...Not to be famous or nothing. I just wish I was made of light. Then nobody__ know me except for what they saw up on that screen. I__ just be light up on the silver screen, and not at all a man.

Laws on killing, even God's demands, didn't allow for peace. Not always. There'd still be pain; missing that child would break her parents' hearts. But what Helen knew, what she'd seen in those woods, would be too much for them, for everybody.

...Helen sipped peppermint schnapps and considered the world made of her design. My religion is keeping peace, she thought. It hadn't begun that way, was nothing she'd planned, but now she saw that's how it was. I just ran a grocery, she thought. I don't want this. I ain't the one to make the world right.