Cujo

his body enthusiastically throwing off ballast from both ends

you can’t have it any more, piss on it so no one else will want it either. Illogical, but ah so satisfying.

what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you. Wasn’t that right?

He held it, turning it over in his hands, feeling a vague thread of disquiet slip into what was a general mood of tired well-being. Far back in his mind, hardly even acknowledged, was a sudden urge to rip the letter into halves, fourths, eighths, and then toss the pieces into the wastebasket.
Instead, he tore it open and pulled out a single sheet of paper.
More block letters.
The simple message—six sentences—hit him like a straight shot just below the heart. He did not so much sit in his chair as collapse into it. A little grunt escaped him, the sound of a man who has suddenly lost all his wind. His mind roared with nothing but white noise for a length of time he didn‘t—couldn’t—understand or comprehend. If Roger had come in just then, he likely would have thought Vic was having a heart attack. In a way, he was. His face was paper-white. His mouth hung open. Bluish half-moons had appeared under his eyes.
He read the message again.
And then again.

She put Brett’s plate of scrambled eggs and bacon in front of him and then sat down next to the boy. Brett glanced up from the book he was reading in mild surprise. After fixing his breakfast, his mother usually started on her round of morning chores. If you spoke to her too much before she got herself around a second cup of coffee, she was apt to show you the rough side of her tongue.
“Can I talk to you a minute, Brett?”
Mild surprise turned to something like amazement Looking at her, he saw something utterly foreign to his mother’s taciturn nature. She was nervous. He closed his book and said, “Sure, Mom.”
“Would you like—” She cleared her throat and began again. “How would you like to go down to Stratford, Connecticut, and see your Aunt Holly and your Uncle Jim? And your cousins?”
Brett grinned. He had only been out of Maine twice in his life, most recently with his father on a trip to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They had gone to a used-car auction where Joe had picked up a ’58 Ford with a hemi engine. “Sure!” he said. “When?”
“I was thinking of Monday,” she said. “After the weekend of the Fourth. We’d be gone a week. Could you do that?”

Tad put his arms around his father, and Vic hugged him tight.
That night, after Tad slept, Vic went quietly into the boy’s room and tacked a sheet of paper to the wall with a pushpin. He put it right next to Tad’s Mighty Marvel Calendar, where the kid couldn’t miss it. Printed in large, clear letters on this sheet of paper was:
THE MONSTER WORDS