So Far Gone

by Jess Walter

All cruelty springs from weakness. Seneca said that, along with: Ignorance is the cause of fear. Kinnick had always believed these adages to be true, but now, bleeding on the ground, watching Dean Burris stand over his dead son-in-law, Rhys wondered if Seneca might have been a little silly to believe in the causal roots of evil. He wondered if cruelty and its bride, fear, didn’t just exist spontaneously, forces as elemental and eternal as gravity.

We all have to live through a dark season now and then.