The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

More from Something Wicked This Way Comes

• Dad’s voice was a midnight school, teaching deep fathom hours, and the subject was life.
• His wife smiled in her sleep. Why? She's immortal. She has a son.
• “I know it. I know everything.” She waited a moment. “What do you know?” “No use making more people. People die.” His voice was very calm and quiet and almost sad. “That’s everything.”
• Mr. Dark nodded, pleased. "What's your name, boy?" Don't tell him! thought Will, and stopped. Why not? he wondered, why? Jim's lips hardly twitched. "Simon," he said. He smiled to show it was a lie. Mr. Dark smiled to show he knew it.
• That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.
• Those trains and their grieving sounds were lost forever between stations, not remembering where they had been, not guessing where they might go, exhaling their last pale breaths over the horizon, gone. So it was with all trains, ever.