Bad Man

by Dathan Auerbach

given long enough, Time makes you aware of itself.

Ben winced and tried to bury the thought, but the ground wasn’t deep enough for that. Ben had already buried too much.

And that’s what hope really is, after all. An anesthetic. Something that takes the sharp edges of reality out of focus just enough that we can keep looking at it, keep moving forward with steps that are guided by the assurance that every inch of ground can’t possibly be covered in broken glass. And then when it is—when your feet are left as coiled ribbons of wet skin—you forget what guided you there in the first place. It’s a kind of sneaky narcotic, one produced by thoughts and words and refined by time. It doesn’t fix anything. It just numbs and reassures, until it can consume the desperate for the sake of its own brilliant incandescence. And as hope comforts us, it becomes easier and easier to forget that it too was in the jar that Pandora carried. It’s the one horror of the world that wasn’t loosed when she opened the lid. It’s the one horror that lives in us.

Made sense in my head all the way up until I just said it.”

“I’ll tell you this, though. As hard as this has all been, we’ve handled it. Right way or not, I don’t know, but we’ve handled it.