The Strange

by Nathan Ballingrud

I wanted to shout at them, call them cowards, ask them why they’d given up so easily, why they couldn’t even muster the courage to go into Dig Town, let alone beyond it; but I knew they’d developed a callus against my opinions. So instead I stared at them and marked them all for failed men.

They didn’t come freighted with misery or regret; they were simply good memories, taken from his pocket like a timepiece, polished and cared for in the waning sunlight.

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.

I was in no mood for the prevarications of the adult world. No one could think up an excuse for their own failure faster than an adult. I resolved never to fall into that trap.

It did not seem such a terrible thing: if all one had was a ghost to talk to, one might as well embrace it.

She kept petting his hair even after it was clear he’d gone to sleep, the smoke from her cigarette curling over her head. Without looking at me, she said, “You got to make some allowances. The Silence messed people up all kinds of ways. Whatever was bad in us just got worse.”

Like the last time I peered into that gulf, I experienced a vertigo beyond a simple physical disorientation; I felt an unbalancing in some fundamental part of me, in my heart or in my soul. I felt the attraction of the abyss, the allurement of extinction. I could imagine every ache and every fear laid to rest. Tears stung my eyes.

“He hated me in the end,” I said. It felt like an open wound. “No, he didn’t. Joe carried a lot of fear in him, that’s all. The only person he hated was hisself.”