The End of Loneliness

by Benedict Wells

Life is not a zero-sum game. It owes us nothing, and things just happen the way they do. Sometimes they’re fair and everything makes sense; sometimes they’re so unfair we question everything. I pulled the mask off the face of Fate, and all I found beneath it was chance.

And she squeezed my hand again, and then she closed her eyes once more. I could almost feel her thoughts racing through space and time, looking for one last treasure, one last beautiful moment she could hold on to. Perhaps she thought of the children and me, or of her sister and her parents, the past and the future. One last great explosion of thoughts and feelings, tangled fear and trust, and already it was flying away with her, astonishingly fast and strange and immeasurably far away.

All of a sudden I’m ashamed that I fled into my dream world these past few weeks at the hospital, like a child. But it was only there that Alva could still be alive—there, where my parents were also still to be found. Memory, the last refuge of the dead.