[BigV]

Originally Posted by Sundae Girl

snip--

I have to say, shin injuries are nasty, but nothing clouds the vision like a good old whang on the knee. The temporary pain from even a minor collision is completely out of proportion to the actual injury and literally blinding. The whole body shrieks in sympathy.

--snip

**ALERT**

Highlight at your peril:


"No, Paul." She moved to the door and then turned, looking at him with that stony face. Only her eyes, those tarnished dimes, were fully alive under the shelf of her brow. "There is one thought I would like to leave you with. You may think you can fool me, or trick me; I know I look slow and stupid. But I am not stupid, Paul, and I am not slow." Suddenly her face broke apart. The stony obduracy shattered and what shone through was the countenance of an insanely angry child. For a moment Paul thought the extremity of his terror might kill him. Had he thought he had gained the upper hand? Had he? Could one possibly play Scheherazade when one's captor was insane? She rushed across the room at him, thick legs pumping, knees flexing, elbows chopping back and forth in the stale sickroom air like pistons. Her hair bounced and joggled around her face as it came loose from the bobby-pins that held it up. Now her passage was not silent; it was like the tread of Goliath striding into the Valley of Bones. The picture of the Arc de Triomphe cracked affrightedly on the wall. "Geeeee-yahhh!" she screamed, and brought her fist down on the bunched salt-dome that had been Paul Sheldon's left knee. He threw his head back and howled, veins standing out in his neck and on his forehead. Pain burst out from his knee and shrouded him, whitely radiant, in the center of a nova. She tore the typewriter off the board and slammed it down on the mantel, lifting its weight of dead metal as he might have lifted an empty cardboard box. "So you just sit there," she said, lips pulled back in that grinning rictus, "and you think about who is in charge here, and all the things I can do to hurt you if you behave badly or try to trick me. You sit there and you scream if you want to, because no one can hear you. No one stops here because they all know Annie Wilkes is crazy, they all know what she did, even if they did find me innocent." She walked back to the door and turned again, and he screamed again when she did, in anticipation of another bull-like charge, and that made her grin more widely. "I'll tell you something else," she said softly. "They think I got away with it, and they are right. Think about that, Paul, while I'm in town getting your cockadoodie paper." She left, slamming the bedroom door hard enough to shake the house. Then there was the click of the lock. He leaned back in the chair, shaking all over, trying not to shake because it hurt, not able to help it. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Again and again he saw her flying across the room, again and again he saw her bringing her fist down on the remains of his knee with all the force of an angry drunk hammering on an oak bar, again and again he was swallowed in that terrible blue-white nova of pain. "Please, God, please," he moaned as the Cherokee started outside with a bang and a roar. "Please, God, please - let me out of this or kill me . . . let me out of this or kill me." The roar of the engine faded off down the road and God did neither and he was left with his tears and the pain, which was now fully awake and raving through his body.

-- Misery, Stephen King

I had to put the book down, walk around the room and breathe deeply for several minutes after reading this passage. Even now, years later, I get the heebie jeebies from this chilling, nauseating memory.