Demon Copperhead: A Novel

you think a mother is a hard rock to run up against, try pushing back on a dead one.

If you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.

I wondered how Mom was doing. She always said drying out was the worst hell imaginable, and I felt sorry for that. Not now. Tell me about hell, I told her in my mind. All you had to do today is your moral goddamn inventory and a lot of lying around. On nice clean sheets.

As long as you haven’t yet asked, you can still have another day with some answer in your head other than “Go fuck yourself.”

A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain. Children, choices. Ruin, that was th

I was born to wish for more than I can have. No little fishing hole for Demon, he wants the whole ocean. And on from there, as regards the man-overboard. I came late to getting my brain around the problem of me, and still yet might not have. The telling of this tale is supposed to make it come clear.

You think you’re giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world. This is not about you.

Loser is a cliff. Once you’ve gone over, you’re over.

Topic sentences, Appomattox Courthouse, life cycle of a plant, what is all that? If all your brain wants to know is, where’s the door out of here and wherever it goes, will you still be starving.