The Deep

by Nick Cutter

If this was the apocalypse, it was to be an orderly and complacent one.

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.

He was anxious, and during such times his mind would stalk the walled-off corners of his memory relentlessly, chasing a handful of dire recollections like a terrier down a rat-hole.

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

Clayton’s face reminded Luke of a blanket pulled over a nest of scorpions: seemingly tranquil, but with all manner of thoughts and instincts twisting beneath it.

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