A History of Fear

by Luke Dumas

filler track of my once beloved Five for Fighting album—

paroxysms

why in the Book of Kings the weeping woman ate her baby [2 Kings 6:28-29:

scabrous

captious

Sophie possessed a natural facility for filling uncomfortable silences, often with questions I wouldn’t have thought to ask in a million years. They seemed to flow from some deep infinite source, like whatever the opposite of a black hole was: a never-ending stream of apparently genuine curiosity.

mordant

restive

washing himself in the burn

Auld Clootie

each new development adding a block of ice to the cold soup of anxiety that sloshed around my vital organs.

I put the phone in airplane mode, returned it to my pocket, and leaned my head against the headrest in a poor imitation of relaxation.

There is very little here that the American eye does not recognize, and yet nothing at all that is truly familiar—a million insignificant points of differentiation that add up to a feeling of total alienation.

lengthy debates about the theory of evolution and its inability to reconcile the notion of adaptation with the immutability of the human condition: how, as a result of natural selection, the body of man was constantly changing, and yet the appetites and desperations that drove him—hunger, sexual desire, violence, social acceptance—kept him in a state of arrested development.

we carried our fathers’ burdens as if they were our own, even when they did not fit the present moment. How they imprisoned us from birth until we drew our last breath.