Universal Harvester

by John Darnielle

So his radar’d stayed clear long enough for the memory to recede painlessly into the past, where unanswered questions starved quietly to death.

It’s not that nobody ever gets away: that’s not true. It’s that you carry it with you. It doesn’t matter that the days roll on like hills too low to give names to; they might be of use later, so you keep them. You replay them to keep their memory alive. It feels worthwhile because it is.

That’s what pictures are for, after all: to stand in place of the things that weren’t left behind, to bear witness to people and places and things that might otherwise go unnoticed.