The Warm Hands of Ghosts

by Katherine Arden

Armageddon was a fire in the harbor, a box delivered on a cold day. It wasn’t one great tragedy, but ten million tiny ones, and everyone faced theirs alone.

In a way, it’s easier to imagine the world’s going to end. At least there’s a certainty to it. End—bam—done. But change—where does change stop?”

For a moment he yawed right on the edge of madness.

“Because out there you can give up every piece of yourself for nothing, let the mud swallow you, nameless and naked, or you can sell yourself to me, story by story, for all the delights of peace. There are two evils”—his voice turned wry—“and I am the lesser.

Ghosts have warm hands, he kept telling me, as though it were the greatest secret in the world.

It was the poet’s alchemy, to seize the intangible or unspeakable and drag it, real, into the living world.

What is God if not another system?

It is not far from love, Freddie thought somewhere in the embers of a mind that had been a poet’s. The tie of hunter and prey.

It was so much easier to hate a man than a system: vast, inhuman, bloodstained.

“That there’s no such thing as a coward, or a brave man—not out there. There’s no man’s will stronger than the war. He might as well have called you an angel as call you a coward, the—distinction—is just as valuable. That is to say, not at all. And of course the world ended. But it went on too.”

Iven, we were dead together, we were born together. I cannot live without you.” He didn’t sound happy about it. In fact, he sounded much the way Freddie felt, as though he’d been changed against his will, and was marking out the new boundaries of himself.

We won, screamed the people outside. Don’t they know, Laura thought, we all lost?