End of Story

by A.J. Finn

there is only sadness, deep and dark. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

“I should like to say that all thy vexations were but my trials of thy love, and thou hast strangely stood the test. I should like—”

“We hate those we hurt, my child,” Sebastian Trapp tells me. “We hurt those we hate, and we hate them still more. It’s a drain we spiral. It sucks us under. I learned that too late.”

I breathed in mint and earth, listened to the sea growling unseen, felt wind strip my cheeks dry. And, frozen in my gut, the horror that I’d been wrong—we’d been wrong, together.

She studies the sea. The sun on the water breaks like glass in my eyes,

She scrubs her eyes, and I scrub mine. Let me take your hand, I will her.

THE DOOR OPENS with a quick gasp, as if I’ve caught the house unawares.

One flight down, I enter the library lightly, like I’m intruding. I move past the sunlit windows toward his desk, toward the cold hearth beyond it. The bookshelves on either wall bend forward—not so far as to disgorge their residents, just enough to watch me, curious, creaking. They mutter and murmur, the sound of turning pages.

Perhaps glass has a memory. Why not? Everything else does.

CHERCHEZ LA FEMME I looked for the woman, all right.

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye. I flip to Chapter 13, look at the final page of Chapter 12, where the last line has been underlined in red ink. There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

Now: it is my experience that everybody wants the truth until they find it. To wait and hope can be preferable.

We hate those we hurt.

I swivel the chair to the hearth. I could burn it. I could keep it. I look at the book. I look at the flames. I lift the page. I begin to read. end of story.