Everything Breaks Read Online Free PDF Page A

and ghostly, were the five white highway markers that warned of that sudden sharp turn. The moon clearly picked out each one of them, but . . . something just wasn’t
right
.
    I pushed closer, then stopped, panting, my hands on my knees and my eyes squinted in disbelief. The white posts had always been as straight and upright as five little soldiers standing at attention, but now they were splayed crazily at strange, uneven angles. They were . . . broken or something. A couple of them might even have gone missing.
    Then suddenly this huge, dark
thing
sailed across the road a few yards in front of me, blocking out the stars for maybe four seconds as it flew from high up in the trees on the left side of the road to land in a patch of darkness between two of those messed-up posts!
    Was it some gigantic bird? A flock of big birds? The quick but loose way the thing had moved through the air was somehow unnatural, like a shadow or a dark mist.
    I fumbled for the small LED flashlight I keep dangling from my belt loop. I focused its intense beam on the place between the two messed-up posts where I’d seen the thing land. At first there was nothing but bare, weedy grass with twinkling stars in the background. And then, as I watched in total disbelief, this . . . this
dog
began to appear. I mean, it just slowly, well,
materialized
there in the grass between those two posts!
    The dog was large and sleek, a black dog about the size of Ringo, our old golden Lab. No, it was actually bigger than Ringo. Much bigger.
    It looked straight at me with its tongue out in that eager way dogs look at you when they’re waiting for you to feed them or walk them or something. It seemed so friendly that I would have tried hard to chalk up all its strange actions to my being wasted. But there was one thing about it that would have been as hard for my aching brain to make up as it was for it to forget. The dog had too many heads. Two too many. Three in all.
    I dropped to my knees, staring in openmouthed disbelief, confused and afraid. The dog took that as a gesture of friendship, grinned a doggy grin—three doggy grins—and began moving toward me in a sort of slow-motion lope.
    It got so close I could see the details of its large, luminous eyes, and I heard myself give a little whimper. Something was swimming inside each of the six of them! I groped with numb fingers for my forgotten flashlight and dared to aim it directly at the right eye in the dog’s closest head. It had no iris. Instead, a tiny spiral was slowly whirling around the eye’s dark pupil.
    This had to be a hallucination or
some
thing. I closed my own eyes tight as I could and hammered my forehead with my knuckles until I could feel those thuds through the numbness in my brain.
    When I dared to open them again, the dog was gone without a trace.
    But the posts hadn’t come back into the straight, even line they had to be in.
    The moon came out from behind a cloud so suddenly that I almost screamed. It gave a blast of light to the white posts and I saw several loose and tangled lengths of the thick, corded steel wire that usually held the posts upright and taut, making them into a safety barrier it would be hard to break through.
    Those pieces of useless, broken wire were now bobbing gently in the night air like the windblown stems of gigantic, flowerless plants.
    I got up, stumbled to the nearest white post, held on to it and looked down.
    Everything in me went electric and I dropped to a sit, pushed off and slip-slid down that nearly vertical limestone bluff. I got hung up two or three times on little trees that grew straight out from the stone. Maybe I felt my flesh ripping along the way, tearing like the denim of my jeans was tearing. Maybe I felt it, or maybe I didn’t. I can’t remember. All I remember is that my eyes stung with the rising smoke of burning gasoline when I was partway down but I couldn’t close them for