The Whisper Man

by Alex North

This casual destruction was much like the increasing aggression the boy showed in school. It was an attempt to make an impact on a world that seemed so oblivious to his existence. It stemmed from a desire to be seen. To be noticed. To be loved. Because that was all any child wanted, deep down.

It didn’t feel like there was enough left of me to fill all those hours, and while I despised myself for failing to be the father he needed, the truth was that sometimes I needed time to myself. To forget about the gulf between us. To ignore my growing inability to cope. To be able to collapse and cry for a while, knowing he wouldn’t walk in and find me.

Like some kind of witch’s familiar, the Packet rarely left his side, and except for a few things, I didn’t know what was in there. I wouldn’t have looked even if I’d been able to. They were his Special Things, after all, and he was entitled to them.

He’d always been a solitary child; there was something so closed away and introspective about him that it seemed to push other children away. On good days, I could pretend that it was because he was self-contained and happy in his own head, and tell myself that was fine. Most of the time I just worried.

Why couldn’t Jake be more like the other children? More normal? It was an ugly thought, I knew, but it was only because I wanted to protect him. The world can be brutal when you’re as quiet and solitary as he was, and I didn’t want him to go through what I had at his age.

The devil finds work for idle hands. Bad thoughts find empty heads. So he kept his hands busy and his mind occupied.

Excitement was not only rare in police work, it was a bad thing; usually it meant someone’s life had been damaged. Wishing for excitement was wishing for hurt,

When you go after something as hard as he had, there were few things as irritating as someone who could have had it more easily but never seemed to want it.

Both the image and the text had faded under the incessant beat of the summer sun, so that, as he drove past it now, it reminded him of wrinkled flowers left at the scene of an old accident. A little boy who had disappeared was beginning to disappear for a second time.

That’s what things do. Even in the toughest of circumstances, they keep living.

That was really your job at school—to do what you were told and fill in the answers to the blanks, and not cause any problems by thinking up too many questions of your own.

None of that was her fault, of course, but grief is a stew with a thousand ingredients, and not all of them are palatable.

While it might be true that we still loved each other when we argued, it didn’t mean that we loved ourselves.

He had loved her as deeply as she loved him, but the gift and receipt of love was a language with foreign grammar to him. And because he believed he was undeserving of such love, he had slowly drunk himself into a man who was. As with his memories of his father, distance had helped him understand all that. Battles often make more sense from the sky.

woman with a million things to do, determined to do each of them herself.

When the compulsion to drink was at its strongest, everything bolstered it. Any event or observation, good or bad, could be turned around and made to fit.

The Whisper Man. I’ve always hated that name.” She waited. “Because I wanted him to be forgotten, you see? I didn’t want him to have a title.

he was a person in his own right, not some accomplishment of mine—

How long does it take, and how much does a person have to change, before the person you hated is gone, replaced by someone new?

she had seen plenty of people emerge from horrific, abusive childhoods and grow into decent adults. There were as many paths out of hell as there were people, and the vast majority of them ascended. She was also familiar enough with the original investigation

She didn’t want to believe that the things you missed—the things you never even had the opportunity to hit—could weigh you down so much that they threatened to drown you.

He’d always been so stern and serious—so dark, like a house in which the owner stubbornly refused to turn on any lights. Right now, though, a single room seemed to be illuminated.

That was the thing about going to sleep. It kind of scrubbed things. Arguments, worries, whatever. You could be scared or upset about something, and you might think sleep was impossible, but at some point it happened, and when you woke up in the morning the feeling was gone for a while, like a storm that had passed during the night.

he wondered if maybe this was a nightmare after all, just not the kind you got to wake up from. The world was full of bad men. Full of bad dreams that didn’t always happen when you were asleep.

Outside the kitchen window the day was already brightening. A new morning. I listened half-heartedly to whatever program was playing in the other room, amazed by how life was carrying on. How it always does. You only notice how astonishing that is when a part of you gets left behind.

some things only made sense in hindsight. Pictures and imaginary friends. Monsters whispering outside windows. Adults didn’t always listen hard enough to children.