Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

Usually at Friday-night dinners we talk nonstop about books and the world. Last week we started with George. She’d read 1984 by George Orwell and The One Safe Place by Tania Unsworth. She’d started The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The first rule of our family book discussions is you can’t spend forever explaining the plot. You get twenty-five words or less for that but endless time for what you thought about it. ‘Orwell – a world controlled by the state. Unsworth – set in a world after global warming. McCarthy – father and son surviving in a post-apocalyptic world.’

says, ‘If we all gave up on the things we love when it gets hard, it’d be a terrible world.’

Shit nights roll into shit mornings that roll into shit afternoons and back into shit, starless midnights. Shitness, my sister says, has a momentum that good luck just doesn’t have.

There’s something in it that I need to find. An answer, maybe, to how it’s done. How a person starts living again.

because I don’t have the energy for another day without Cal in it.

We are the books we read and the things we love. Cal is the ocean and the letters he left. Our ghosts hide in the things we leave behind.

Because a record on a computer doesn’t show the way people have underlined.