A Novel Seemed The Easiest

Stories Are In One Way Or Another Mirrors. We Use Them To Explain To Ourselves How The World Works Or How It Doesn’t Work. Like Mirrors Stories Prepare Us For The Day To Come. They Distract Us From The Things In Darkness.

We Do Not Always Remember The Things That Do No Credit To Us. We Justify Them, Cover Them In Bright Lies Or With The Thick Dust Of Forgetfulness. All Of The Things That Shadow Had Done In His Life Of Which He Was Not Proud, All The Things He Wished He Had Done Otherwise Or Left Undone, Came At Him Then In A Swirling Storm Of Guilt And Regret And Shame, And He Had Nowhere To Hide From Them. He Was As Naked And As Open As A Corpse On A Table, And Dark Anubis The Jackal God Was His Prosector And His Prosecutor And His Persecutor.

There Was A Hysteria In There, Certainly, But There Was Also The Exhaustion Of Someone Who Had Managed, Somehow, To Believe Several Dozen Impossible Things In The Last Twenty-four Hours, Without Ever Getting A Proper Breakfast.

Peas Baffled Me. I Could Not Understand Why Grown-ups Would Take Things That Tasted So Good Raw, And Then Put Them In Tins, And Make Them Revolting.

I Wondered If That Was True: If They Were All Really Children Wrapped Up In Adult Bodies, Like Children's Books Hidden In The Middle Of Dull, Long Adult Books, The Kind With No Pictures Or Conversations.