The Gathering

by C.J. Tudor

Your eyes could only tell you so much. And they could deceive you. To really get the measure of a place you needed to live it, smell it, feel it. Get your hands dirty.

“These are boys. They don’t stick to each other like girls do.” “Well, girls wouldn’t have to do that if it wasn’t for boys, sir.”

But it was more that they were stubborn, digging in their heels while progress tried to drag them forward.

But just because a fear was foolish didn’t make it any less real. And it wasn’t an irrational fear. It was primal. Darkness meant you couldn’t see the predators coming.

She could see the white tips of the Denali mountains in the distance, illuminated by a shy sliver of moon, and hear the call of moose and the wind rustling in the spruce. A reminder that whatever small space humans carved out upon this planet, nature, in all its callous ferocity, was never far away.

Humans are always afraid of what they can’t understand.”

It’s not that hard to convince yourself of a lie,

You could tell them, give them all the warnings, but you couldn’t protect kids from themselves.

Still, sometimes a cliché was a cliché for a reason.

The good old white settler, Barbara thought. Crashes the party, steals all the booze, kicks out the owners and then trashes the house.

although she was now at an age where she realized that a lot of stuff her dad said—about blacks and whores and Jews—was cruel, a lie and offensive.

Yeah, such a good father he was banging a girl not much older than his son.

Everyone should be able to live their life comfortable in their own skin.

“History is history for a reason.” “But if we don’t learn from it, we repeat it.”

Humans were like a plague. They infected everywhere.

“Seems to me that devils really do walk among us…only they’re not vampyr.”