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1 " She looks out at the woods through the screen of limbs. Watching in the same way he is, for the same terrible things he is, with the same expectation, with equally haunted, hollow eyes. She’s still gripping the butcher’s cleaver tightly and her knuckles show through the skin. He puts a hand gently on hers. I think we’re good, he says to her. It’s gone. We’re good. She doesn’t say anything. She just stares awhile. Clutching that glinting meat hatchet in a tight, mudded fist. The whites of her teeth and eyes in the dark. There is no good, she tells him. Not for us. There’s only being ready for the next bad thing coming. "
― Jonathan R. Miller , The Mortis
2 " Park is faster, but their pursuit seems almost ideological—a matter of committed belief. It’s as though they were appointed to the task of laying hands on him, of bringing him back into the gentle fold, of taking him home. They follow him all the way down to the ground floor. He bursts through the stairwell door, sprints down the hall, and ducks into an alcove where two vending machines stand gutted, their weighty doors cracked opened with a prybar. He wedges his body between them, pulls the knife and crouches down. His pulse is throbbing. He struggles to regain his breath, to silence himself. "
3 " They lie in bed and recount everything they’ve experienced over the course of the past forty-eight hours. Debating the meaning of it all, if there is one. They try to determine whether this series of events is just a result of temporary bad fortune—an anomaly—or whether it’s a sign of a truly bad thing coming, something catastrophic. As is often the case, they find themselves arguing opposite sides: he says it’s going to be okay, and she says it’s not, that nothing will ever be the same again. They defend their positions for a while and then they switch. "
