Neil Gaiman

Spider said, “They do a really nice sort of noodly-stew thing here, by the way.”

“Are you sure we’re in Italy?”

“Not really.”

“I tell him how he can contact his brother.”

“Ahh,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. She could disapprove with just that one syllable.

“Maeve, love. You need to put the flesh behind you.”

“Well, obviously, dear. And I will. I promise I will. As soon as I’m ready.”

“Maeve, you’re dead. How much more ready can you be?”

She sighed. “I’ve still got a few things to sort out at this end.”

Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it. They know. Spider could tell her to be happy about the situation, and she would be happy, but it would be as real as painting a smile on her face—a smile that she would truly believe, in every way that mattered, was her own.

Spider: Things came up.

Fat Charlie: What kind of things?

Spider: Things. They came up. That's what things do. They come up. I can't be expected to keep track of them all.

"You aren’t scared of limes, are you?" asked Charlie, before remembering that he’d given the lime to Daisy.

The creature laughed, scornfully. "I," it said, "am frightened of nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing," it said.

Charlie said "Are you extremely frightened of nothing?"

"Absolutely terrified of it," admitted the Dragon.

"You know," said Charlie "I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?"

"No," said the Dragon uncomfortably, "I most definitely would not."

There was a flapping of wings like sails, and Charlie was alone on the beach. "That," he said "was much too easy."

Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all—except possibly on an organic level—had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night.

“Grahame Coats. He wants me to pop in tomorrow.”

Spider said, “He’s a bastard.”

“So? You’re a bastard.”

“Different kind of bastard.”

It would be an astonishingly undignified way to go, crushed by birds, and not even particularly intelligent birds.

Think, he told himself. They’re flamingos. Bird-brains. You’re Spider.

So? he thought back at himself, irritated. Tell me something I don’t know.

Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbott and Costello meet the Wolfman...

“It’s all right for you, you’re dead. You don't have to worry about these things.”

“You’re dead, too, love.”

“That is quite beside the point,” she said.

Ah well, she thought. Being dead is probably just like everything else in life: you pick some of it up as you go along, and you just make up the rest.