The Deep

by Nick Cutter

That’s how it went with the ’Gets: you forgot the little things first, then the not-so-little things, then the big ones. Next, the critical ones. In time, your heart forgot how to beat, your lungs how to breathe. You die knowing nothing at all.

Your child doesn’t owe you loyalty or obedience. You owe your child love and understanding, owe it unconditionally, and if you love them strongly enough, eventually that love may be returned. Luke’s own mother had never seen it that way. She thought Luke and Clay owed her love regardless of how she treated them.

In time, Luke believed his mother only said the nice things so that the barbs would sting even more.

Not smart, just cunning. Animals were cunning. Animals also ate their own shit and chewed live electrical wires.

Memories degrade. You remember parts of people, but you surrender their wholes.

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

“We are just skin.” My second wife said this in one of her fouler moods, when I had the bad timing to comment on her lovely figure. “Me and you and everyone, we’re all just skin and fat wrapped around bones.” Yes, I’d told her, but I happen to fancy the way you’re wrapped.

But you can’t run. It will find you. Hunt you down and find you. It will lay a trap in the basement of the world and bait it with the sweetest fruit and it will wait. It’s been waiting a long time. It has waited long enough.

The world did not hold to any standard of fairness that Luke could comprehend. All his life stood testament to that. Good men die in wretched agony and bad men die happily in their beds. Creatures live and die never knowing love.

It’s about the trying. The not-giving-up. We’re all going to lose. So it’s about losing and going on, keep going on, even though you may lose again and again. You may never win, buddy, not at some things. So it’s about working as hard as you can, every day, to find your spot on the mountain. And then it’s about being okay with where you are so that you can get some enjoyment out of that, and out of the things in life that are more important than whatever place you end up on that silly old mountain, anyway.

Being a father was an imperfect science, and its test subjects, that man’s sons and daughters, had to accept their father’s imperfections just as each father must eventually accept those same imperfections within himself.

The Challenger surfaced. The heavens flinched. The hatch swung open. Moonlight fell upon its darkest cargo. What shambled forth was unspeakable.