The Shadows

by Alex North

When you saw something awful, you had to put it away in a box. The box was something you kept locked in your head, and you only ever opened it to throw something else inside. The work, and the sights it brought you, had to be kept separate from your life at all costs. It had sounded so simple, so neat.

That sounded like a good death. Given there has to be an end, maybe that’s all any of us can hope for—to drift steadily off. Some people believed there were dreams or nightmares to come afterward, but I’ve never really understood why. As I know better than most, those things happen in the shallow stages of sleep, and I’ve always hoped that death would be a much deeper state than that.

Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.

When people think they’ve worked something out for themselves, they become more invested in holding on to it as truth.

I don’t care if you ever think about me at all. I’ll think about you instead. Because that was what parents did, wasn’t it? They wanted to protect their children. They wanted the best lives possible for them. And they expected nothing in return for that. But it was clear from the volume of numbers listed here that my mother had felt the need to talk to someone, and I felt guilty now that it had not been me. That I had not thought about her more than I had.

everything is okay until it isn’t. People are there, large as life and taken for granted, and then they aren’t.

You know how it can feel like you put something away and forget about it, and it’s like it’s gone? But then you realize it’s actually been there the whole time.” “Like a box that won’t stay shut?” she said.

You know you need to let each other go, but it’s so sad and difficult, and so you don’t until you have to. Until the hurt of keeping someone outweighs the hurt of losing them.

“Tradition is important, isn’t it? You’ve got to have lineage. Places are like people. They have to know where they came from—and where they are now—or else they’ll never know where they’re going.”

For my own part, it was nice to see Jenny relax a little. I admired how self-contained she always seemed, but it was also good to see her more relaxed, more at ease. Seeing someone in their sauce, as my mother would say.

My father had been tough and unforgiving, a man who worked the land when the jobs were there, but always seemed more proud of the way the land worked him, as though hardness achieved through suffering were something to covet.

The reality was that I’d never worked hard enough to find out, and I should be honest about that.

“I don’t think time works that way, Paul. As you get older, it all begins to blur into one. You start to think life was never any kind of straight line. It was always more of a … scribble.”

Everywhere I looked in Gritten, I could see traces of the past beneath the details the years had etched on top. Places. People. The past was all still there below the present: not a line, but a scribble. However much you tried to forget it, perhaps without realizing it you were only ever running in place.

That machine was silent now, and the difference was completely profound. I’ve never been a religious man, but some spark of animation had so obviously departed this room that it was difficult not to wonder where it could have gone. It didn’t seem possible for it to have disappeared entirely. That didn’t make any sense.

Why use the word animation and not life?

The boy needed to talk to him, to understand what had happened and why. It was a metaphor for grief and loss, and for the damage done to those left behind in the wake of tragedy.

moments you understand on some level are pivotal. Where everything will change, and you’ll regret it forever if you don’t do something you know you should.