In the Waning Light

by Loreth Anne White

“We are not dispassionate viewers of the world.

Similarly, what we remember depends upon what we believe—the human mind is not an objective recorder of information . . .”

But Sherry didn’t know that sometimes the predator lives right there.

Among us. In that perfectly regulated world. And he looks just like all the other fish in the bowl . .

Once a case has been adjudicated, and the bad guy put away, once they’ve gotten the truth of what happened, they’re finally free to grieve. To allow the old self to die, and to be able to begin again.”

How you made big shiny goals when you were young, and how life turns out misshapen in the end. How people settled. Found a comfort zone. Or a rut that just kept on getting deeper, and harder to climb out of.

But her so-called self-indulgence, her cutting everyone out of her life, had been an act of survival, not the act of a victim. It took courage. Not cowardice.

The fog thickened as the clock ticked inexorably down toward 4:00 a.m., a time when the biorhythmic ebb of the human cycle dipped to its

lowest, a time of night when it was most likely for a death to occur in the very old, or very ill. A time when temperatures fell to their lowest, just before dawn, and currents of air stirred across the earth, and it became easy for the grim reaper to reach through that fragile membrane that separates life from death, and crook a finger to softly summon a soul.

Mostly I take the Jungian view that we create the idea of monsters in order

to externalize the bad that potentially lurks within us all, and we call this monster a devil, or beast, so we can examine it objectively, without having to see the beast in our own eyes when we look into the mirror.”