Outer Dark

by Cormac McCarthy

As if their maker had met in this forest some dark other self in chemistry with whom he had been fused traceless from the earth.

they appeared furtive, clandestine, stepping softly and soft their voices over the sandy road in shadows so foreshortened they seemed sprung and frenzied with a violence in which their creators moved with dreamy disconcern.

He looked away. His hands lay palmupward on his thighs and he sat watching them as if they were somehow unaccountable.

On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.

Emaciate and blinking and with the wind among her rags she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight.

Sorry. Don’t need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

Seems like everthing I get around runs off in the ground somewheres and I got to go after it.

Hard people makes hard times. I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away.

The flowers in the dooryard have curled and drawn as if poisoned by dark and there is a mockingbird to tell what he knows of night.

And she waited again at the front door with it open, poised between the maw of the dead and loveless house and the outer dark like a frail thief.

It wasn’t his to name. Besides names dies with the namers. A dead man’s dog ain’t got a name.

Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth’s curve.

He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.