26 Quotes by S.R. Hughes

No single week seemed so different from any other week, and yet the years did.

She wondered what stories wrote themselves across the bedsheets in so many rooms, how many of them ended in jittery pacing up and down an unlit hall.

Virgil stepped back from the front door and drew a non-standard-issued sidearm—a large-mouthed weapon of history. A hand-me-down from an officer in one of those wars that were supposed to end all those other wars.

US Highway 1. A gray snake of concrete writhed past her. The Oceanrest exit let off onto an artery road, two lanes on either side of a double yellow line, a dying pulse bloodletting into the sea. Before the iron lung economy, there’d been a trailer park by the highway, and an ice creamshop, and a very large church. Their razed bodies curled in shallow graves, their bones hidden in underbrush. A monster licked the skulls empty, scavenged the flesh.

Paul knew from experience that the dead did not have futures, only pasts that repeated until madness.

New names cost. They’d sacrificed things in their transfigurations. Tyrell Meeks. Imani Greene. Razz. Deirdre. They’d carved open their histories and offered up their guts.

The restless dead crowded the back of his mind. They strained to be heard, clawing through graves at the back of his skull. hear us, they pled. please, hear us.And some of them merely chorused giddily you, too, soon.

Paul scrambled across the war torn lot to the rear of the car and snatched the dead boy’s rifle from the moonlight. Wet blood kissed his palm along its grip. He wiped the gore on his pantleg and pressed his back to the tire well at the rear of the vehicle. Another bullet yawped against the reinforced frame.From the tree line, the chorus of dead rasped, you too, soon.

She leaned back from the ebb and flow of the sigils’ glimmer and clasped her hands. Prayer, they called it in some circles. The truth was more complicated. Words and meaning, context and history, all arranged in rhythm, in certain order. Magic took many forms.