The Fisherman

by John Langan

Some things are so bad that just to have been near them taints you, leaves a spot of badness in your soul like a bare patch in the forest where nothing will grow.

Can a story haunt you? Possess you? There are times I think recounting the events of that Saturday in June is just an excuse for those more distant events to make their way out into the world once more.

Up close, when you’re driving among them with the early morning light breaking over their round peaks, they seem incredibly present, more real than real, these huge solid heaps of rock that wear their trees like mile-long scarves. You glance at them, trying to keep your eyes on the road, which is already pretty busy with people driving up for a weekend getaway, and somehow you wouldn’t be surprised if the mountain closest to you were to cast off its trees in one titanic shrug and start to lumber away, a vast, unimaginable beast. When you turn off onto whatever secondary road you need to take, and you’re following its twists and turns back into the mountains, and the ground is steep to either side of you, opening every now and then on a meadow, or an old house, you think, Here, there are secret places.

It’s hard to hold onto any tragedies that aren’t your own for very long.

But there are some things, no matter if they’re true, you can’t live with them. You have to refuse them. You turn your eyes away from whatever’s squatting right there in front of you and not only pretend it isn’t there now, but that you never saw it in the first place. You do so because your soul is a frail thing that can’t stand the blast-furnace heat of revelation, and truth be damned. What else can a body do?

His grief had taken him far into a country whose borders are all most folks ever see, and from where he was, caught up in that dark land’s customs and concerns, what I was worrying over sounded so foreign I might as well have been speaking another language.

She lost him to light the color of the full moon, of the froth on top of a wave, of a burial shroud.

I felt oddly disoriented, disconnected from the diner’s chrome and glass, the way you do after you’ve finished a book or movie in which you’ve been absorbed and which hasn’t loosened its hold on you.