|
17e26da
|
Dee Colclough lay watching it all on a flatscreen from a ninth-floor hotel room ten minutes from home, a sheet twisted between her legs, the air-conditioning cool against the film of sweat on her skin. She looked over at Kiernan, said, "Even the anchors look scared." Kiernan stubbed out his cigarette and blew a river of smoke at the television. "I got called up," he said." --
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
19704e9
|
everything seems scarier at night. It's just an illusion. A trick the darkness plays on us.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
a1c91c1
|
The three most important people in her life are gone, and she will never see them again. The stark loneliness of that knowledge cuts her to the bone. She is forty-nine, and she wonders if this is what feeling old really means -- not just a physical deterioration, but an interpersonal. A growing silence caused by the people you most love, who have shaped you and defined your world, going on ahead into whatever comes after.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
6674431
|
Can't do this." There were tears in her voice now, her throat clogged with emotion."
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
9ee731f
|
AMOR TOWLES,
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
4e7bb36
|
Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. --RAY CUMMINGS
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
0778948
|
Is this what you want? To drop yourself into a still-life painting of a memory because life has broken your heart?
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
e9b7e4c
|
Each day is a revelation, every moment a gift. The simple act of sitting across the dinner table from his daughter and listening to her talk about her day feels like a pardon. How could he ever have taken even one second of it for granted?
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
5a090d0
|
But I'll tell you what I do wish. Wish we could live twice, take a different path each time. That at the end of all this, when I finished serving God in the West, I could go back to that day on the beach, put a ring on Eleanor's finger instead.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
52c9463
|
It will be destructive at first, like all progress. Just as the industrial age ushered in two world wars. Just as Homo sapiens supplanted the Neanderthal. But would you turn back the clock on all that comes with it? Could you? Progress is inevitable. And it's a force for good.
|
|
inevitable
progress
|
Blake Crouch |
|
08ca3e0
|
There is no decent place to stand in a massacre. Leonard Cohen
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
67e14c8
|
You made me in your image, and now I will remake you in mine.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
b1e8f12
|
Is deja vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?
|
|
memories
reality
science-fictionce
time
time-travel
timelines
|
Blake Crouch |
|
81bf4d4
|
Her therapist, Christian, would tell her to challenge the thought to use. To stop, take a moment, and analyze the error in it.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
715d79e
|
Inside, the air-conditioning was set to blizzard.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
33d56b8
|
Given for me to confirm I had removed the chip. The first at 1400 on Day 5312. The next at 1500 on Day 5313. If I failed to remove the chip by Day 5313, we would have no further interaction.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
e0d0f4c
|
She could envision a lifetime spent trying to create such flashes of connection.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
dee4911
|
I ask, "You think you'd ever forget it entirely? Your world?" "I don't know. I could see it getting to the point where it didn't feel real anymore. Because it isn't. The only thing that's real in this moment is this city. This room. This bed. You and me."
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
3e447fc
|
There are similarities between you and Van Gogh, Letisha. Both fiery redheads, with a nasty predilection for self-injury. Suffering from what the psychoanalysts would best describe as 'daddy issues.' And, perhaps most pityingly, both masters of a trade you would never be appreciated for. At least, not in life.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
acc33bb
|
Crazy hungry. Didn't even come up for air until she was halfway through and nearly choked when she did. Because that man was sitting across from her, smiling. It was a beautiful smile. Broad and bright. But there was something malicious and knowing in it that she couldn't quite put her finger on. Like the man wasn't smiling at her, but rather at something he knew about her.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
a598b67
|
No, what do you call that?" "I call that you-ain't-gotta-do-shit-ever-again money. I call that living-right-for-the-rest-of-your-life money. Don't tell me some part of you hasn't always dreamed of robbing a casino."
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
147d046
|
Do you have any concept of what I've already sacrificed for you?
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
064fe51
|
Fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
73b1bab
|
Life is too hard and too short not to be with the one you love. So choose me.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
1afdee1
|
What about the truth?" Ethan asked. "In some environments, safety and truth are natural born enemies. I would think a former employee of the federal government could grasp that concept."
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
42347eb
|
When Daniela drinks, three things happen: her native accent begins to bleed through, she becomes belligerently kind, and she tends toward hyperbole.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
7188a4c
|
Everywhere Ethan looks, lights are coming on inside houses, the air becoming fragrant with the smell of suppers cooking. Through cracked windows, he hears clanging dishes, indistinct conversations, ovens opening, closing. Everyone he passes smiles and says hello. Like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
55ca8cc
|
By four o'clock in the morning they were tearing through a landscape that looked ready-made for missile testing. Scorched earth. Joyless mountains. No trees. Snakeskin country.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
769de50
|
His hair was curly and black, and he didn't boast the intimidating build of either Isaiah or Jerrod. But his eyes were as hard as any she'd ever met.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
7ef76b3
|
She had come twenty minutes early, but he was already there. He sat in a corner booth with a view of the street and the entrance. Watching her. She forced a smile and walked unsteadily down the aisle beside the counter. The points of her heels clicked on the nicotine-stained linoleum. Sliding into the booth across from Javier, she nodded hello. He had short black hair and flawless brown skin. Every time they'd met, Letty thought of that say..
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
e00aa11
|
She cursed loud enough to attract the attention of an older man who'd dolled himself up for the evening, his eyes glaring at her over the top of the Asheville Citizen-Times. She slashed him with a sardonic smile and got up, enraged at herself over this swell of weakness. She took two steps. Everything changed. The anger melted. Exhilaration flooding in to take its place. In the emotion and fear of the moment, it had completely escaped her.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
b5f8cb4
|
Bartender." And though the word hadn't been shouted, something in its tone implied a command that ought not be ignored. Clearly the barkeep picked up on it, too, because he was standing in front of Arnold almost instantaneously, like he'd been summoned."
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
f2041bd
|
Always puts me in mind of that F. Scott Fitzgerald line: Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
729763b
|
Careful. Like shooting-heroin-into-your-femoral-artery careful. There's a razor blade hidden in the bottom of your handbag under a piece of black electrical tape.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
1ec6e45
|
This is Daniela with an energy like the first time we met fifteen years ago, before years of life-the normalcy, the elation, the depression, the compromise-transformed her into the woman who now shares my bed: amazing mother, amazing wife, but fighting always against the whispers of what might have been.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
1ef8feb
|
Letty had barely touched her food. Javier stared down at her through a pair of aviator sunglasses. "You forgot something," she said. "What's that?" "My name. Who will they be expecting?" "Selena Kitt. S-E-L-E-N-A K-I-T-T. But you won't be carrying any identification."
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
ef18d05
|
She studied the document. "Looks like a bunch of legalese." "Pretty much." "You wanna give me the CliffsNotes since I didn't go to law school?"
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
1b7b067
|
He watched its heart beating. He watched it blinking. "You are one ugly motherfucker."
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
1c6bd75
|
It has altered," Leven says, "but only slightly. Nitrogen and oxygen, thank God, are still the main components. But the makeup is now one percent more oxygen, one percent less nitrogen. Greenhouse gases have returned to pre-Industrial Age levels."
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
ff33402
|
The day wears on. The light fades. It snows harder with each passing hour. Up and down Main, Christmas lights wink on.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
6e4b039
|
Jessica's smile makes Ron slide his hand over the console, let it work down between her blue-jeaned thighs.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
136c755
|
She stopped at the foot of the trio of beach chairs and smiled down at Richter and his men. Richter was in the middle. The one on the left was a hairy beast of a man with the fat-over-muscle build of someone who'd earned their conditioning from life experience, not a gym bike. Someone who possessed the brute core strength to physically break you. The man on the right was younger and leaner, but still carried plenty of brawn. It squared with..
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
22a1c27
|
That's a perfect clone of Richter's phone. Has all his voice mails, text history, contacts, data usage, apps. More importantly, every call or text that comes to Richter will first hit us. We'll have the option to intercept, pass along, or kill it. You'll see the incoming texts and calls on that phone. I'll see them on my laptop. If it's okay with you, I'll just set up my base of operations here.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |
|
d96f3a8
|
I make a phone call, and you spend the rest of your life in prison, possibly death row.
|
|
|
Blake Crouch |