Suppose when I think about my career—moving from town to town, never staying long enough to grow roots—I guess I was almost nomadic. At least to some people. Compared to a matriarch, I was a shut?in. There are always people with their fingers in every pie; me, I mostly just watch who’s eating them.

  Every mistake I ever made still wakes me from time to time. I picture my old crew: Tommy before he drowned, Chloe, Michael, Georgie, and Nichole. We were just some border?town outfit, keeping the Xu’arch out and the raiders at bay. Nothing glamorous. Nothing heroic. Just survival with a badge pinned to it.

  There are horrors out here they never warn you about. It’s not even the explainable things that keep me up these days. It’s the things that don’t make sense—the shadows that move wrong, the voices that don’t belong to anyone living, the way the land itself seems to remember what happened to it.

  I suppose what you don’t know frightens you more than anything. And like most people, fear of the unknown keeps me awake more nights than not. That, and the thoughts of the family I chose—the ones who chose me back. The ones I couldn’t save. The ones I still carry like ghosts stitched into the lining of my coat.

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  Some nights, when the wind hits the shutters just right, I swear I hear them calling my name. There’s a moment before I wake when I’m reminded that even in dreams, you can feel pain. That’s when I think of Nichole—how we left things before I came back—and of her brother, Tommy. Some scars we carry from childhood never really leave us; they settle in the bones and follow us into every version of ourselves.

  I suppose that’s what it means to be a man who holds a ruin inside him. A cavernous, echoing architecture that swallows the good memories first, leaving the newer ones to twist into something sharp. It’s a strange kind of torment: every time I close my eyes, all I can feel is his disappointment, like a hand on my shoulder reminding me of everything I should have been and wasn’t.

  There’s a part of me that still believes—maybe in another life, or another version of this one—I’ll outrun it.

  — Bryce Talhiem