Into the Fall

by Tamara L. Miller

Sarah felt only resentment and anger from the lake and woods, as if they were calling up a storm to rid themselves of humanity once and for all.

Great personification.

There are moments when a choice must be made: trust a stranger and follow where they lead or stand firm against an unseeable current.

Memory was a misplaced faith; we believed in our pasts only as far as we remembered them.

It was like that, grief. Dormant, but always ravenous, waking in its own time to steal away moments of contentment.

How do you process an unknowable loss? Grief was a mutable feast, she supposed, filled with every horrid flavor that the human mind could conceive. Who could even say where the line of normal ended? Certainly, anger was a reasonable response.

There are lies that can be forgiven in a marriage—a white lie to bolster a lover’s confidence or hide a minor mistake—and there are lies that tear at the very fabric of a couple’s identity.

Sarah would not have called herself superstitious, but she did believe there were signs: moments where if you chose to listen, you could hear the universe whispering toward an expectation.

“The wilderness is probably the purest expression of beauty there is in the world. There’s no right, no wrong, no good, no bad. The wild deals in life and death just as easily as we breathe. It’s primal and true. We can walk within it, even fool ourselves into believing we’ve tamed it, but disrespect it and it will swallow us.”

In those moments, her mind did a passable job at dodging and weaving, like a demented Ms. Pac-Man avoiding the ghosts of infidelity as she barreled through the maze.

Amazing Analogy

Sometimes the butterfly effect went with you, sometimes against.

“I don’t know that the universe cares enough about us. Way I see it, we’re nothing more than fleas on the back of a bear when it comes to the universe. Nature don’t care about right or wrong. There’s no cosmic retribution. Good people make mistakes; bad people do good. It’s randomness and chance in my mind. Call it the universe, call it the hand of God, call it dust sprites, it’s all the same. Life does what it does, and there isn’t always a reason.”