The Last Murder at the End of the World

by Stuart Turton

“Turns out I’m no better at writing plays than I was at making shoes, doing woodwork, or building kites. My only skills seem to be noticing things people don’t want noticed and asking questions people don’t want answered.”

“Some people are born knowing what they’re for, and others take a little longer to work it out. I’m one hundred and seventy-three but I didn’t start teaching until I was past eighty, and after that, I never wanted to do anything else. It could be the same for you if you give it a chance.”

This is the way they revere the dead. They remember what they offered the world and what everybody else has to do to fill the gap. There are no prayers here, no thoughts of an afterlife. The reward for a good life is the living of it.

You run to the things that frighten you and away from the things you love.”

“What’s the use of loving somebody so much they can’t stand being in the same room as you?

Love is simply a matter of what people need and what they lack. It’s two broken things fitting together for a time.

“All those miracles you described, what were they for? Yes, we had all the food and energy we could ever make, but only if you had the money to pay for it. Children were still starving on the streets of those beautiful coral cities. People in poorer countries were still dying of things we’d cured hundreds of years prior. There were still wars being fought. Women still had to worry about walking home by themselves late at night. Children were still snatched off the street. I miss the same things you do, Thea, but I don’t miss who we used to be. I don’t miss the violence that was everywhere. I don’t miss the poverty or the anger or being afraid of every hate-peddling psychopath who might win an election.”

“Why?” Children always ask this question. They’re more perceptive than adults. His curiosity will dim eventually. Adults are allergic to complication.

Sometimes the only way to win a game is to let the pieces think they’re the ones playing it.

She didn’t come here to cry. There’ll be plenty of that in the next few weeks. Her grief will be waiting in the dark and quiet. It will hide behind a dozen ordinary things, ambushing her when her thoughts drift.

I should try to comfort him, but there’s no optimal way of handling extreme emotion in humans, which I’ve come to regard as the greatest of evolution’s failures.

There are moments in history when entire empires, whole branches of the future rest precariously on the words of a single person. Usually, they’re not even aware of it. They don’t have time to plan or consider. They simply open their mouths and speak, and the universe takes on a new pattern.

Purpose is something that must be given, or it will be endlessly sought.

I’ve learned that the only guaranteed defense against grief is not loving at all.

I didn’t realize you could stay with somebody and still abandon them, but that’s what I did.

“I’m not afraid to die, but I’ve always been terrified of other people dying. Your mum, Matis, you two.”

“Why would you die to save a murderer?” “Because otherwise we’d be the ones killing him,”

“Kindness first, always,”

She’d been saying her goodbyes all along. We just didn’t hear them.