Hide and Seek

by Jack Ketchum

I know we all are lonely. Locked off from one another in some fundamental secrecy. But some of us declare war and some of us don’t.

When you’re whole and unharmed, no matter how scared you are there’s always the feeling that nobody’s going to touch you, really. It’s only when the pain begins that you realize you’re vulnerable. By then it’s too late. By then it’s a matter of getting out alive, that’s all.

People are idiots, basically. Young people worst of all. Because kids don’t believe in death. They have to be taught in order to believe—and the teacher is always disease or gaping holes in the flesh. Wounds. Pain. That usually comes later in life, but it comes eventually. All the heroes are children.

And you could see why friendships are so easy to come by in combat situations, why the loyalties are fierce ones and why you avoid them if you can, because the trauma runs so deep when shell or bullet shatters them forever. I didn’t worry for Steven. I worried for us.

I knew it was finally clear to her as it was to me that the end of all the useless risk was not thrills but waste and death, a death from within—and that our being in love had finally repudiated all that, and we were strangely happy.