"All that you love will be carried away"

When I first saw the above as a title to a story in Stephen King's Short story book called "Everything's Eventual." I didn't read it... not until last night and I've had the book for a few years.

I figured it was about love gone bad and didn't really want to read it, because I had a thirst for blood and read some of the other obvious bloody stories.

But last night, I flipped through the book and it landed on the story... page 69!

And I was surprised by it..the title is actually a piece of graffiti that the salesman in the story, Alfie Zimmerman has been collecting from reststops and rest rooms across the US for 7 years. And as the story unfolds, we find that he's got cancer and is going to kill himself. But the notebook of graffiti keeps distracting him...

I won't say anymore but it's a great story...one of his low-key ones that are often overlooked, like the novel "The Girl who loved Tom Gordon."

But there's some great graffiti in the book. Like:

"My mother made me a whore."

And written underneath is in a different penmanship :

"If I supply the yard will she make me one too?"

Priceless!

In the short story, Alfie has been longing to put his collection in a book and wondered is people would buy it.


I would, Alfie. I would.