So much of the literature we had to read for high school English class was filled with victimized, tragic, symbolic women who spurred the plot forward with their inevitable shunning/death/shunning-followed-by-pregnancy-followed-by-death timelines.

She holds up a finger. "I'm getting to it. Don't rush a girl in the middle of her exposition.

A guy's gotta live, you know, gotta make his way and find his meaning in life and love, and to do that he needs coffee, he needs coffee and coffee and coffee.

I hear they feed you in Sing Sing,” Evie muttered. “Three squares a day.” “Evangeline,” Will said with a sigh. “Charity begins at home.” “So does mental illness.

What Hamlet suffers from is a lack of zombies. Let us say Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up—Ho-HO! Now you’ve got something that stirs the, um, something that stirs things that are stirrable. BOOM! A pack of ravenous flesh-eaters breaks open their heads and sucks out their eyeballs. No need for iambic pentameter because they are grunting, groaning annihilators of humanity with no time for meter. You’re not asleep in the back of English class anymore, are you? This is what I’m talking about. Zombies. Learn it, live it, love it.

We sit and listen and are enthralled anew, for good stories, it seems, never lose their magic.

Goodbye," I whisper at last, when it no longer matters and there is no one to hear it but the window.