The God of Endings

by Jacqueline Holland

Instead, small, shambling family graveyards butted up against barns, or sprung up like pale mushrooms at the edges of pastures, in the yards of church, and school, and meetinghouse—until eventually you could look out across the village, see all those gravestones like crooked teeth in a mouth, and wonder who the place really belonged to, the huddled and transient living or the persistent dead?

Death, to me, was tied inextricably to cherished things: to craftsmanship and poetry, to my father and to the beautiful things he made, and I couldn’t help but feel some tenderness for all of it.

When I remember him, he is working, always working, at his craft.

Stories, after all, have boundaries, and fear needs nothing more desperately than boundaries.

delicate pinks and blues of spring are wan in comparison to the dramatic crimson of the hawthorn berries or the bloody gashes of the buckthorn leaves in late November. Stars blaze pale in their infancy, but in old age they melt and simmer in reds and oranges just as the oaks and maples do. Youth, it seems, is a state of diffuse abundance, while death’s approach concentrates.

I’ve made it so very deliberately, for my own sake as much as for the children’s. After ample acquaintance with this world, I, personally, have found it to be quite a sinister place, a place where, more often than not, the strong crush the weak; sickness, hunger, and poverty prey upon the young and vulnerable; fools rule over the wise; and entropy moves all things ultimately toward disorder and decay. Nothing good I’ve known has been spared destruction. Everything I’ve loved I’ve lost, and not generally with sweet goodbyes and tearful embraces—violently, horrifically, such that it seems that to love is to lose.

Every child I’ve ever known has been afflicted with a desperate mania for ringing doorbells, pressing elevator buttons, and, if they can reach them, flipping light switches on and off.

THE North Atlantic is a lunatic ocean, a raging, howling, hateful, cold beast.

“The seasons are doors. The seasons are windows, opening and shutting one after another,” Vano says. “There is a truth unique to spring, unique to winter, to fall, to summer. No act of spring can occur in fall. Winter is for dying, descending, hiding, forgetting. For being emptied of all we have, in preparation for receiving something new. The ages are this way as well. Only the occurrences of this time are permitted to occur. The events of tomorrow are never early. Nothing comes to pass late.”

We each have our ending.

For that is the way of the world, and I, at least, will not be a teller of false and soothing stories.

The moon is a white kite skimming low over the treetops, its string somehow fastened to the hood of my car, and there are children playing in the woods—I see their fingers at the edges of the tree trunks; their eyes peek around at me—though it is hours past their bedtime, somewhere between midnight and infinity.

There’s too much overlap between dreaming and waking life; it’s hard to know what’s real, and that uncertainty gives the waking world a sinister, dissimulating feel. The moon above me, it’s so pretty and bright—so like that pitiless moon face in my dreams that I can’t be certain, even now, that it’s real. What if I am dreaming, and the chase is just about to begin? An owl hoots somewhere nearby, but even that sound seems to stir some memory from a dream.

But, of course, it is bizarre and alarming, and it’s their very generosity that fills me with misgiving. To be caught abusing the trust of generous people who have shown you great kindness is the most inexcusable betrayal of all. I’m so tired of finding myself in this position: wanting to do good—be good—but simply unable, forced instead to lie and deceive, sneak and steal.

Midsentence, midembrace, at the height of your hopes: that, you see, is when the god of endings likes to do it.

For a moment, we study each other. I look into him and he looks into me. Neither of us like what we see.

To harm yourself, to lose all aversion or resistance to pain, to in fact welcome it, was to take all the power away from those who would hurt you.

What need had years for numbers? Why bother to cut and count the interminable like a loaf of bread? Perhaps I lived in the truth then and have only since returned to the shared delusion of hours, minutes, seconds, past, present, and future.

the taking of anything sets into motion its eventual loss; nothing that is can resist becoming what was; to begin presumes the acceptance of an end.