The Road

Carrying the fire is just deciding, daily, not to become the dark.

Are we the good guys? We're the good guys. The book's entire moral system, restated nightly.

No commas, no chapter names, ash on every noun. McCarthy wrote grief's grammar.

The man gave the thief everything including the clothes. Mercy at gunpoint, argued at gunpoint.

Coca-Cola from a vending machine, warm. The most emotional can of sugar ever written.

They found the bunker and ate peach halves. Salvation smells like a cellar.

The baby roasted on a spit, one sentence, and the genre's real horror clock started.

The father's cough getting louder page by page. The villain is oxygen debt.

The family at the end took them in. Goodness exists offstage; you just have to keep walking.

Carried out of it: if you're carrying fire, someone behind you is following the light. Keep it lit.