Read the excerpt from a short story.
The Sonoran Desert route was his favorite. His friends were surprised he could endure the solitude of it, but he cherished the barren miles. Today he’d passed a mile of verbena in full bloom, followed by ten miles with nothing but sagebrush. The next leg promised cliffs, and he loved to imagine scaling them as he traversed the desolate highway. In fact, one was rising in the distance, and the highway would bear right around it. He looked down to cool the temperature, looked up again, and stared. The grill of a tractor trailer, in his lane, was bearing down upon him.
How does the excerpt exemplify the ideas King describes in "Danse Macabre"?

Hamlet: ] it will but skin and film the ulcerous place, whiles rank corruption, mining all within, infects unseen. confess yourself to heaven; repent what’s past; avoid what is to come; and do not spread the compost on the weeds to make them ranker. —hamlet, william shakespeare what is the central motif in the passage? the passage of time madness disease and decay gardening

The pilgrims are at in the beginning of the prologue.

The courage that my mother had went with her, and is with her still: rock from new england quarried; now granite in a granite hill. the golden brooch my mother wore she left behind for me to wear; i have no thing i treasure more: yet, it is something i could spare. oh, if instead she'd left to me the thing she took into the grave! - that courage like a rock, which she has no more need of, and i have. based on the 2nd stanza, how does the speaker feel about the golden brooch that was passed down from the mother to child? question 2 options: a: the speaker thinks it was a waste of money b: the speaker places a high value on the item c: the speaker never wears the brooch d: the speaker feels it could be easily replaced