The Witnesses Are Gone

by Joel Lane

‘It’s the potential for darkness that makes him so attractive,’ she told me. ‘Without that, he’d just be another pretty face. And if the darkness took over, you wouldn’t go near him.

There should have been a presence down here, a guiding spirit. But there was nothing.

If all the people killed by cost-effectiveness were killed by terrorism, the country would be in a permanent state of emergency.

My grief was slow and cold and relentless. Sleep wasn’t a retreat anymore, it was a trap.

As anyone who’s lived long enough will tell you, the human mind can only take so much reality before it shuts down. Ghosts are a form of censorship. We block out the night with ghosts, because the darkness is worse.