Western Lane

Now she was gone, our capacity to hurt her seemed infinite.

He said this, but with his eyes and his body – his shoulders, his throat, the white bones visible under his skin – he was telling us that in one day we had exposed him, left him behind, left him wide open to whatever was coming for him.

You had to be quiet and let him get his words out and, sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, there would be nothing, and it might only be for a moment, but you could feel him trying, and it seemed like you were drifting closer to him in the silence, when you hadn’t moved at all.

The world seemed big and luminous with some secret that would soon be known to me.

That was when Uncle Pavan’s voice rose into the silence. It was slow and firm.