The Shadows

by Alex North

Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. The fact that I hadn’t found anything didn’t mean there was nothing to find, only that I would never be sure.

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

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.”

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.”

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.

Perhaps life was just a matter of doing what you thought was best at the time and then living with the consequences as best you could afterward.

Graveyards might have housed the dead below the ground, but what lay above was always

for the living; they were the places where people came to deal with the break between what their lives had once been and what they now were.