Rage

"You stink," I said. "You fucked up your marriage and you fucked up your only child. You come on and try to take me if you think you can. I'm out of school. Your wife's turning into a pinhead. You're nothing but a booze-hound." I was crying. "You come on and try it, you dumb fuck. "
"You better stop it, Charlie," he said. "Before I stop just wanting to punish you and start wanting to kill you. "
"Go ahead and try," I said, crying harder. "I've wanted to kill you for thirteen years. I hate your guts. You suck. "

e paused, the belt half out of the loops. "What?"
"If you come at me with that thing, I'm going to take it away from you," I said. My voice was trembling and uneven. "I'm going to do it for the time you threw me on the ground when I was little and then lied about it to Mom. I'm going to do it for every time you belted me across the face for doing something wrong, without giving me a second chance. I'm going to do it for that hunting trip when you said you'd slit her nose open if you ever caught her with another man."

I was suddenly reminded of that Beatles song that starts off: "I read the news today, oh boy… "

"But by letting you help me, I would be helping you." I said it as if the idea had just occurred to me. "Don't want to do that."
"Why, Charlie?"
"Mr. Grace?"
"Yes, Charlie?"
"The next time you ask me a question, I'm going to kill somebody down here. "

A mind-fucker, a head-stud. That's what a shrink is for, my friends and neighbors; their job is to fuck the mentally disturbed and make them pregnant with sanity

When you're five and you hurt, you make a big noise unto the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain.

Maybe he had forgotten or never knew that little boys grow up remembering every blow and word of scorn, that they grow up and want to eat their fathers alive.

There must be a line in all of us, a very clear one, just like the line that divides the light side of a planet from the dark. I think they call that line the terminator. That's a very good word for it. Because at one moment I was freak-ing out, and at the next I was as cool as a cucumber.

"Silence gives consent,"

For a moment I thought about the inner caves of my body, the living machines that run on and on in the endless dark.