The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies

by John Langan

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, and not with a whimper, but with the bleak gusto of a low-budget horror movie.

Suppose that the real—what we take to be the real—imagine that world outside the self, all this out here, is like a kind of writing. We write it together; we’re continuously writing it together, onto the surface of things, the paper, as it were.

For an instant, she’s there, holding out her hand to him with that simple grace she’s displayed as long as he’s known her—and then she’s gone, replaced by a figure whose black eyes have seen the silent halls of the dead, whose ruined mouth has tasted delicacies unknown this side of the grave.

“Matt used to say to me, Who wants to stay in the shallows their whole life? It was his little dig at his mother and me, at the life we’d chosen. Most of the time, I left his question rhetorical, but when he asked it that afternoon, I answered him; I said, There are sharks in the shallows, too. He didn’t know what to make of that. Neither did I.”