The wise man knows when to keep silent. Only the fool tells all he knows.

There's definitely a feeling with a short story that it's pure story telling. You're not really worried about theme. You're not going to stay with the characters long enough to live your life with them. And you have different kinds of relationships with them.

A typical National World Weekly would tell the world how Jesus' face was seen on a Big Mac bun bought by someone from Des Moines, with an artist's impression of the bun; how Elvis Presley was recently sighted working in a Burger Lord in Des Moines; how listening to Elvis records cured a Des Moines housewife's cancer; how the spate of werewolves infesting the Midwest are the offspring of noble pioneer women raped by Bigfoot; and that Elvis was taken by Space Aliens in 1976 because he was too good for this world. Remarkably, one of these stories is indeed true.

The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before.

Also, in my bedroom, nobody minded if I kept the hall door half-open, allowing in enough light that I was not scared of the dark, and, just as important, allowing me to read secretly, after my bedtime, using the dim hallway light to read by, if I needed to. I always needed to.

Names come and names go.

Something told him that something was coming to an end. Not the world, exactly. Just the summer. There would be other summers, but there would never be one like this. Ever again.