Jeff Vandermeer

The Woods of Westermaine

The Amazing Marriage

How into those spaces and the fog and the empty line of the beach thoughts could turn to the uncanny and begin to create a story out of nothing.

What was the harm of a good-luck charm worn on a necklace, or saying a few words in prayer to keep a loved one safe? Interlopers trying to make sense of things, trying to “analyze and survey” as Suzanne had put it, turned people off because it trivialized the tragedies to come.

But like those annoying rats of the sky, the seagulls, you got used to the Light Brigade after a while.

Area X was looking at her through dead eyes. Area X was analyzing her from all sides.

“I’m not an answer,” she said. “I’m a question.”

The skeleton before them had been picked clean. The discolored bones were rotting, the tips of the ribs already turned soft with moisture, most of them broken off, lost in the mud.
Above, the storks still banked and wheeled this way and that in an intricate, synchronized aerial dance more beautiful than anything ever created by human minds.

Suppositions in search of evidence, head on backward or sideways.” Or, maybe even sprouting from his ass.

You return after long days to the house in Bleakersville, which is no refuge. The ghosts follow, sit on the couch or peer in through the windows. Thoughts you don’t want creep in at odd moments—in the middle of status meetings, sitting down for lunch with Grace in the cafeteria, searching idly for Central’s latest bugs in your office—that maybe none of this is worth it, that you’re not getting anywhere.