Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

by Neil Gaiman

And what we learn about ourselves in those moments, where the trigger has been squeezed, is this: the past is not dead. There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way.

What we read as adults should be read, I think, with no warnings or alerts beyond, perhaps: enter at your own risk. We need to find out what fiction is, what it means, to us, an experience that is going to be unlike anyone else’s experience of the story.

We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting. These are stories about those masks, and the people we are underneath them. We authors, who trade in fictions for a living, are a continuum of all that we have seen and heard, and most importantly, all that we have read.

“Looking back over a lifetime, you see that love was the answer to everything,” Ray said once, in an interview.

Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you.

“Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.”

“You are wrong. The truth is a cave in the black mountains. There is one way there, and one only, and that way is treacherous and hard, and if you choose the wrong path you will die alone, on the mountainside.”

I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time.

It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.