from
Trigger Warning
Short Fictions and Disturbances
by

Neil Gaiman

Copyright © 2015 by Neil Gaiman
[in addition to copyrights on individual works, cited below]

Neil Gaiman

This page:
Introduction
“The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains . . .”
My Last Landlady
Adventure Story
A Calendar of Tales
The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury
“And Weep, Like Alexander”
The Return of the Thin White Duke
The Sleeper and the Spindle
Black Dog

Category:

Fantasy

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Introduction

Copyright © 2014 by Neil Gaiman

What we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: enter at your own risk. We need to find out what fiction is, what it means, to us, an experience that is going to be unlike anyone else's experience of the story.

We build the stories in our heads. We take words, and we give them power, and we look out through other eyes, and we see, and experience, what others see. I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places? There are stories I read as a child I wished, once I had read them, that I had never encountered, because I was not ready for them and they upset me: stories which contained helplessness, in which people were embarrassed, or mutilated, in which adults were made vulnerable and parents could be of no assistance. They troubled me and haunted my nightmares and my daydreams, worried and upset me on profound levels, but they also taught me that, if I was going to read fiction, sometimes I would only know what my comfort zone was by leaving it; and now, as an adult, I would not erase the experience of having read them if I could.

Topic:

Stories

My favorite collections would not just give me short stories but they would also tell me things I didn’t know, about the stories in the book and the craft of writing. I would respect authors who did not write an introduction, but I could not truly love them as I loved the authors who made me realize that each of the stories in the anthology was written, actually made up word by word and written down, by someone human, who thought and breathed and walked and probably even sang in the shower, like me.

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“The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains . . .”

Copyright © 2010 by Neil Gaiman

“Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city; there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.”

Calum MacInnes looked down at me and said nothing. Then, “You are wrong. The truth is a cave in the black mountains. There is one way there, and one only, and that way is treacherous and hard, and if you choose the wrong path you will die alone, on the mountainside.”

Topic:

Truth

I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died. It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.

Topic:

Age

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My Last Landlady

Copyright © 2010 by Neil Gaiman

You strike me as a kind person. I hope your world is kind.

By which I mean, I’ve heard we see the world not as it is

but as we are. A saint sees a world of saints, a killer

sees only murderers and victims. I see the dead.

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Adventure Story

Copyright © 2012 by Neil Gaiman

In my family “adventure” tends to be used to mean “any minor disaster we survived” or even “any break from routine.” Except by my mother, who still uses it to mean “what she did that morning.” Going to the wrong part of a supermarket parking lot and, while looking for her car, getting into a conversation with someone whose sister, it turns out, she knew in the 1970s would qualify, for my mother, as a full-blown adventure.

Topic:

Adventure

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A Calendar of Tales

Copyright © 2013 by Neil Gaiman

May Tale

In March I received three pieces of junk mail, the first telling me I might have already won a million dollars, the second telling me that I might already have been elected to the Académie Française, and the last telling me I might already have been installed as the titular head of the Holy Roman Empire.

In April I found a note on my bedside table apologizing for the problems in service, and assuring me that henceforward all faults in the universe had now been remedied forever. WE APOLOGIZE OF THE INCONVENIENTS, it concluded.

November Tale

There are things you cannot throw away, things you cannot leave for your loved ones to find when you are gone. Things you have to burn.

December Tale

Summer on the streets is hard, but you can sleep in a park in the summer without dying from the cold. Winter is different. Winter can be lethal. And even if it isn’t, the cold still takes you as its special homeless friend, and it insinuates itself into every part of your life.

Topic:

Winter

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The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury

Copyright © 2012 by Neil Gaiman

I am forgetting things, which scares me.

I am losing words, although I am not losing concepts. I hope that I am not losing concepts. If I am losing concepts, I am not aware of it. If I am losing concepts, how would I know?

A poor man found himself in a forest as night fell, and he had no prayer book to say his evening prayers. So he said, “God who knows all things, I have no prayer book and I do not know any prayers by heart. But you know all the prayers. You are God. So this is what I am going to do. I am going to say the alphabet, and I will let you put the words together.”

Topic:

Prayer

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“And Weep, Like Alexander”

Copyright © 2011 by Neil Gaiman

“Can you hear it?”

“What?” I said.

“A sort of background whispering white noise that actually becomes whatever song you wish to hear when you sort of half-concentrate upon it?”

I listened. “No,” I said.

“Exactly,” said the man, extraordinarily pleased with himself. “Isn’t it wonderful? Only yesterday, everybody in the Fountain was complaining about the Wispamuzak.”

“You see, it’s almost impossible not to invent the flying car, as soon as you’ve invented the Lumenbubble. So eventually I had to uninvent them too. And I miss the individual Lumenbubble: a massless portable light source that floated half a meter above your head and went on when you wanted it to. Such a wonderful invention. Still, no use crying over unspilt milk, and you can’t mend an omelette without unbreaking a few eggs.”

“No, I have uninvented everything that was on my list. I shall go home,” said Obediah Polkinghorn, bravely, “and weep, like Alexander, because there are no more worlds to unconquer.”

“Phones. Internet. Camera. Music. But it’s the apps. I mean, do you know, there are over a thousand fart sound-effect apps on the iPhone alone?“

Topic:

Technology

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The Return of the Thin White Duke

Copyright © 2004 and 2014 by Neil Gaiman

He had tried for so long to rule wisely, and well, and to be a good monarch, but it is hard to rule, and wisdom can be painful. And it is impossible, he had found, if you rule, to do only good, for you cannot build anything without tearing something down, and even he could not care about every life, every dream, every population of every world.

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The Sleeper and the Spindle

Copyright © 2013 by Neil Gaiman

The stone was a ruby, rough-hewn from the rock and the size of a hen’s egg. It would be worth a kingdom when cut and set, and would be easily exchanged for the finest silks of Dorimar.

It would not have occurred to the dwarfs to give the young queen anything they had dug for themselves from beneath the earth. That would have been too easy, too routine. It’s the distance that makes a gift magical, so the dwarfs believed.

“A week from today,” she said aloud. “A week from today, I shall be married.”

It seemed both unlikely and extremely final. She wondered how she would feel to be a married woman. It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices. In a week from now she would have no choices. She would reign over her people. She would have children. Perhaps she would die in childbirth, perhaps she would die as an old woman, or in battle. But the path to her death, heartbeat by heartbeat, would be inevitable.

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Black Dog

Copyright © 2015 by Neil Gaiman

I

“Ask me, all mongrels are better than pedigree anything,” said the woman. “It’s why America is such an interesting country. Filled with mongrels.” Shadow was not certain how old she was. Her hair was white, but she seemed younger than her hair.

“Actually, darling,” said the man with the muttonchops, in his gentle voice, “I think you’ll find that the Americans are keener on pedigree dogs than the British. I met a woman from the American Kennel Club, and honestly, she scared me. I was scared.”

“I wasn’t talking about dogs, Ollie,” said the woman. “I was talking about . . . Oh, never mind.”

There was a handwritten piece of paper taped to the wall by the bar telling customers not to order a lager “as a punch in the face often offends.”

Topic:

Drink

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