Keys Show Up When You Reconcile Yourself

Well," Peter Van Houten Said, Extending His Hand To Me. "it Is At Any Rate A Pleasure To Meet Such Ontologically Improbable Creatures." I Shook His Swollen Hand, And Then He Shook Hands With Augustus. I Was Wondering What Ontologically Meant. Regardless, I Liked It. Augustus And I Were Together In The Improbable Creatures Club: Us And Duck-billed Platypuses.

I Couldn’t Help But Think About School And Everything Else Ending. I Liked Standing Just Outside The Couches And Watching Them—it Was A Kind Of Sad I Didn’t Mind, And So I Just Listened, Letting All The Happiness And The Sadness Of This Ending Swirl Around In Me, Each Sharpening The Other. For The Longest Time, It Felt Kind Of Like My Chest Was Cracking Open, But Not Precisely In An Unpleasant Way.

What Is An "instant" Death Anyway? How Long Is An Instant? Is It One Second? Ten? The Pain Of Those Seconds Must Have Been Awful As Her Heart Burst And Her Lungs Collapsed And There Was No Air And No Blood To Her Brain And Only Raw Panic. What The Hell Is Instant? Nothing Is Instant. Instant Rice Takes Five Minutes, Instant Pudding An Hour. I Doubt That An Instant Of Blinding Pain Feels Particularly Instantaneous.

We're Professional Worriers. You're Constantly Imagining Things That Could Go Wrong And Then Writing About Them.

This Squirrel Is Inadequately Afraid Of Humans! Squirrel, I Am A Threat To You! We Are Enemies! Please Get Off My Bench! Oh, God! Oh, God! Don't Touch Me—oh, God!