The Strange

by Nathan Ballingrud

Whatever help was being offered, I wished that Father had taken it. It’s a peculiarity in some men that they cannot accept help without feeling compromised by it. It’s better to die alone, it would seem, than to live in the debt of another human being.

That was my first lesson in how tenuous our grasp on civilization really was. It made me wonder if the Silence, too, was all down to some catastrophic bungling, some calamity born of simple, garden-variety incompetence.