The Ocean at the End of the Lane

by Neil Gaiman

Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.

I was sad not to have won thousands of pounds (I already knew what I would buy with it. I would buy a place to go and be alone,

If the face I was looking at wasn’t me, and I knew it wasn’t, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?

Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.

In the school stories I read, misbehavior often resulted in a caning, or the slipper, and then was forgiven and done, and I would sometimes envy those fictional children the cleanness of their lives.

“Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.”

Why do you think she’s scared of anything? She’s a grown-up, isn’t she? Grown-ups and monsters aren’t scared of things.” “Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters.

She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identity to her for the asking, as my father did.

Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.

“I’m hungry, Lettie. And I don’t like this.”