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I’m afraid.” His words were almost too heavy for him. This
was not how he wanted things to end between us.
“You should have asked me, Vincent,” he said, the holes
of his eyes wet and regretful. “I would have said yes.”
“I know,” was all I could muster.
The view from between the bars brought me into the
gravity of forsaken memories—my sins. Here was irony,
karma, fate, and perhaps, should there be such a thing,
justice. Vincent Alexander Graves, left to the cold and dark
of a small cage, forever. Yet this could not be my ending. I
recalled my mother’s words to me, so long ago. “All that
ever was, or could ever be, whispers its soul into the sound
of silence—and the only thing you will ever need to do, to
know anything at all, is listen to it.”
And so, I listened as never I had, to the silence of it all,
to the spaces between the trees, the rocks, granules of dirt,
atoms, cause and effect. I not only listened, but conjured as
well. And with silence came her sister—shadow. I pulled the
night down all around me, its soundless silks falling across
my shoulders. I became the secret the universe keeps to
itself. The story that dies in the telling. I became freedom.
Before Jack knew how, I was upon him, using a trick I
had learned from a certain magician, the son of a witch. He
tried to melt back into the night, but I had to be faster, just
this once. My sisters were already within him, making merry
with the red, wet toys of his body. Yet, just as they drew
upon the doors to his heart, they were swept away, tumbling
through thickets lit by dead orange smiles.
After his blades disarmed me, they went for my eyes.
Sight is the least potent of my senses, but certainly among
the most valued. Jack had a way with eyes, a practiced
dexterity that could turn them to triangles of bleeding amber
candlelight. I grabbed his wrist and snapped it, the carving
knife falling away just as it grazed my cornea. With his other
knife, he tore my father from my back, sending him spinning

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