LustingforNightmares

tumbleweed
2016-08-04 14:39:50 (UTC)

The Point

Have you ever read "The Point"? It's by Charles D'Ambrosio and I think it might be my favorite short story ever. So I'm going to write down some quotes okay. Just as a note, the story is about this thirteen year old kid named Kurt. His mother is basically an alcoholic (because her husband/Kurt's dad killed himself a couple years previous) who throws a bunch of parties and it's Kurt's job to get the really drunk middle-aged people back to their houses in one piece.

As a warning, it gets pretty graphic. Also, spoilers. I highly recommend the story, though. It's not very long.


"The party was still going full blast, and now with the door ajar and my eyes adjusting I glimpsed the silver smoke swirling in the light and all the people suspended in it, hovering around as if they were angels in Heaven– some kind of Heaven where the host serves highballs and the men smoke cigars and the women all smell like rotting fruit."

"'Let's go out the back way,' I said. It would only take longer if we had to navigate our way through the party, offering excuses and making those ridiculous promises adults always make to one another when the party's over. 'Hey, we'll do it again,' they assure each other, as if that needed to be said. And I'd noticed how, with the summer ending, and Labor Day approaching, all the adults would acquire a sort of desperate, clinging manner, as if this were all going to end forever, and the good times would never be seen again."

"It was that night, the night I took Mr. Crutchfield home, as I walked back to our house, that I developed the theory of the black hole, and it helped me immeasurably in conducting this business of steering drunks around the Point. The idea was this – that at a certain age, a black hole emerged in the middle of your life, and everything got sucked into it, and you knew, forever afterward, that it was there, this dense negative space, and yet you went on, you struggled, you made your money, you had some babies, you got wasted, and you pretended it wasn't there and never looked directly at it, if you could manage the trick. I imagined that this black hole existed somewhere just behind you and also somewhere just in front of you, so that you were always leaving it behind and entering it at the same time. I hadn't worked out the spatial thing too carefully, but that's what I imagined. Sometimes the hole was only a pinprick in the mind, often it was vast, frequently it fluctuated, beating like a heart, but it was always there, and when you got drunk, thinking to escape, you only noticed it more. Anyway, when I discovered this, much like an astronomer gazing out at the universe, I thought I had the key – and it became a policy with me never to let one of my drunks think too much and fall backward or forward into the black hole. We're going home, I would say to them – we're just going home.
I wondered how old Mrs. Gurney was, and guessed thirty-seven. I imagined her black hole was about the size of a sewer cap."

"It was one of those nights on the Point when the blowing wind, the waves breaking in crushed white lines against the shore, the grinding sand, the moonwashed silhouettes of the huddled houses, the slap of buoys offshore – when all of this seems to have been going on for a long, long time, and you feel eternity looking down on you."

"I thought of my nightmare, of Father's balloon tied to a stringbean. I looked up at the sky, and it was black, with some light. There were stars, millions of them like tiny holes in something, and the moon, like a bigger hole in the same thing. White holes. I thought of Mrs. Gurney and her blank eyes and the black pouring out of them."

"It was me who found Father, that morning [after he shot himself in the head].. there he was, sitting in the car. I opened the passenger door. At first my eyes kind of separated from my brain, and I saw everything, real slow, like you might see in a movie, or something far away that wasn't happening to you. Some of his face was gone. One of his eyes was staring out. He was still breathing, but his lungs worked like he'd swallowed a yard of chunk gravel or sand. He was twitching. I touched his hand and the fingers curled around mine, gripping, but it was just nerves, an old reaction or something, because he was brain-dead already..."

"You understand, I miss Father... but I also have to say, never again do I want to see anything like what I saw that morning. I never, as long as I live, want to find another dead person. He wasn't even a person then, just a blown-up thing, just crushed-up garbage. Part of his head was blasted away, and there was blood and hair and bone splattered on the windshield. It looked like he'd just driven the car through something awful, like he needed to use the windshield wipers, needed to switch the blades on high and clear the way, except that the wipers wouldn't do him any good, because the mess was all on the inside."

Oops, that's like half the story haha... I just really like the part about the black hole. It reminds me of why I love writers so much????

Because they describe shit you never even thought twice about. Or something you could never find the words for. And it feels so good when you read your own feelings with like... actual clarity. God damn it writers are amazing.

And, okay, the gore – holy shit, the mailman scared me. The mailman was real life. He just walked up my porch to, y'know. Deliver stuff.

But no, the gore – was so well-done. God. There's something about that bloody stuff that I need. It's not that I like violence or death or anything, but I can't seem to ever really stop thinking about it either (maybe I just don't understand it), and this is just like. Relief.

GOod, okay. I liked this story very much.




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