When Things Get Dark

by Ellen Datlow

The worlds of children are low to the ground, terrifying and confusing, filled with dangers adult minds have forgotten, truths adult hurts have forsaken.

Dr. Krämer asked her to think back—relax her mind, come to the moment cautiously, like you’d approach a dog that bites. Brave girl. Wise, brave girl. “I wouldn’t approach a dog that bites,” Lucy said. Dr. Krämer held up her pen like a switchblade. “Then how do you know it’s a dog at all?”

Some of the younger people joked about agrestic paganism and how memory could be held in the marrow, how bucolic practices were often scaffolded on grisly traditions, and wasn’t it true that everything Christian has its beginnings in blood?

“Actually, it says they were something like living creatures. How is something like a living creature?”

“Are we sure that they are who we think they are?” He nodded. “Or the reverse. I sometimes wonder if I am who I think I am.”

Warm and fuzzy outside, cold tapioca on the inside.”

“Humans are genetically encoded to fear things that look almost like us, but aren’t us.”

Sons and fathers have differences. Nonetheless, I’d always felt safe around mine. Sure, he was awkward and socially off-putting. Sure, he ran hot and cold. Sure, he made lame jokes and could be painfully distant. People joke that engineers are socially maladjusted; there’s some truth to that cliché. Foibles notwithstanding, I didn’t doubt his love or intentions. Yet, in that moment, I became hyper aware of the size of his hand—of him, in general—and the chirping birds, and that we were alone here in the trees on the opposite shore of the lake. Awareness of his physical grotesqueness hit me in a wave of revulsion. From my child’s unvarnished perspective, his features transcended mere homeliness. Since he’d stretched, his stance and expression had altered. Spade-faced and gangling, toothy and hunched, yet tall and deceptively agile. A carnivore had slipped on Dad’s sporting goods department ensemble and lured me into the woods.

“Charles Addams said—” “Who’s that?” “A cartoonist. He said, ‘What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.’ He was correct. The world is divided between spiders and flies.” He studied me intently, searching for something, then shook himself and straightened. His hand dropped away from my shoulder. Such a large hand, such a long arm.