26 Quotes by S.R. Hughes

Time passed. Warehouses shed exoskeletons and became artist lofts. Collapsing Victorians and colonials slouched into their roles as homeless shelters. The suburbs hunched into Squatter City. Malleus Industries International relocated its North American East offices to Oceanrest. Highrises sprouted overnight, a newborn downtown squealing in glass and neon. Oceanrest shivered out from its old skin. Everything became something else, eventually.

You ever notice it’s the things you want to change that never do?” Virgil asked. “And all the shit you want to keep always ends up changing?”Paul hadn’t always seen ghosts.“I don’t know if too much ever really changes,” he said.

Reality unzipped before her eyes, floors and walls melting into some new Dali steelscape. Gravity twisted, shifted, plucked at her from different directions like groping hands. The beaded blood from their opponents rose from the floor and floated mid-air.Somehow, her feet stayed stuck to the ground.

You believe that. People believe all kinds of crazy shit. People think the sky is up. The sky is out though, isn’t it? We just feel more comfortable thinking it’s up ‘cause otherwise you gotta admit the whole world is a little speck of rock floating in the fucking dark.

The thing appeared jointed, osteological, a creature of bone and sinew, but it moved like drooping glue. It stretched out and fell from the ragged hole in the ceiling, a horrific whiteness of teeth and bladed limbs. Too many legs, three arms—one from the top of its spine, if it had a spine, the others from curdled-milk textured shoulders—and a vast jaw lined with rows and rows of jagged fangs. In the center of the serpentine tube of its torso, a red-black hole guttered to its innards.

She pushed herself through the opening, around an ornament that was simultaneously a hanging light bulb and a uvula, and stepped inside. She entered the Mouth, the Throne Room, the Jaws of the Devouring God, or maybe just another in a series of countless double-wides gutted and lashed together with scavenged steel and magic, the bare skeleton of an illusory power. Tongue. The Devourer. God, the Devil, or nobody at all.

Deep, deep down, a truth beneath every tale. Soon, too soon, a monster at the end of every story.

In the receding wake of the engine, night faded into day. Birds twittered in the growing forest. All around her, a sprawl of rotting ex-suburbs roused its wheezing way into sunlight. Vines clung to abandoned houses like lover’s limbs as if saying come back to the earth with us. come backto the earth and sleep.

Consider yourselves innocent.Easier said than done.