Blake Crouch

The first handkerchief was tied to a second, yellow handkerchief. He fed both through the window and kept pulling. Attached to it was a red one. Then a green one. __o away, you goddamn clown!_ Jenny ordered. But Benny the Clown continued to pull out handkerchief after handkerchief. Five_ten_fifteen_then_ That__ not a handkerchief.

I pass a construction site, abandoned for the night, and a few blocks later, the playground of the elementary school my son attended, the metal sliding board gleaming under a streetlamp and the swings stirring in the breeze. There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead o me. It's the beautiful thing about youth.There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential. I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.

It's a troubling paradox - I have total control, but only to the extent I have control over myself.

I cannot separate the man you are now from the boy you were then, and it's killing me. I wanted everything for you, son.I still do.

When you were a child, I didn't tell you about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait.

I stare down into her eyes, smoky and glistening in the light stealing through the window. Eyes you can fall into and keep falling.She isn't the mother of my son, she isn't my wife, we haven't made a life together, but I love her all the same, and not jsut the version of Daniela that exists in my head, in my history. I love the physical woman underneath me in this bed here and now, wherever this is, because it's the same arrangement of matter--same eyes, same voice, same smell, same taste...It isn't married-people lovemaking that follows. We have fumbling, groping, backseat-of-the-car, unprotected-because-who-gives-a-fuck, protons-smashing-together sex.

The search for meaning was the cornerstone of human disquiet.

The box isn't all that different from life. If you go in with fear, fear is what you'll find.

We leave this life the same way that we enter it, totally alone, bereft.

And we're not lost."We are so fucking lost. Literally adrift in the nothing space between universes.

When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man, drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time I see your face on the news or in the paper- "That man was once someone's little boy.

I've seen so many versions of you. With me. Without me. Artist. Teacher. Graphic designer. But it's all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when you're in it, it's all just day-to-day, right? And isn't that what you have to make your peace with?

Jack, I__ just telling you, if it turns out. . .I want you to shoot me.___ee__"I__ not kidding, not exaggerating, just telling you that I do not have it in me to handle that.___ou have a daughter, too. You don__ have the luxury not to handle shit.

Perfection all the time would drive them mad. For every perfect little town, there's something ugly underneath. No dream without the nightmare.

Suspicion leads to bias, and bias doesn't lead to truth.

Imagine you__e a fish, swimming in a pond. You can move forward and back, side to side, but never up out of the water. If someone were standing beside the pond, watching you, you__ have no idea they were there. To you, that little pond is an entire universe. Now imagine that someone reaches down and lifts you out of the pond. You see that what you thought was the entire world is only a small pool. You see other ponds. Trees. The sky above. You realize you__e a part of a much larger and more mysterious reality than you had ever dreamed of.