Del who had asked us to take care of Mr. Jingles, to make sure the bad 'un wouldn't hurt him anymore. Except the bad 'un hurts us all in the end, doesn't he?

The first morning passed, and the first afternoon, then the first shift back at work. time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.

We cried in each other’s arms and I thought that was the end, that we had finished the job of burying him with those late tears. But who knows who long a grief may last? Isn’t it possible that, even thirty or forty years after the death of child or a brother or a sister, one may half-waken, thinking of that person with that same lost emptiness, that feeling of places which may never be filled… perhaps not even in death?

And he had begun to feel then what he was feeling now: the complex and awful mental and physical interaction that is the beginning of acceptance, and the only counterpart to that feeling is rape.

Go on, Bill,” his father said. His voice was muffled and shaking. His back went up and down. Bill badly wanted to touch his father’s back, to see if perhaps his hand might be able to still that restless heaving. He did not quite dare. “Go on, buzz off.”He left and went creeping along the upstairs hall, hearing his mother doing her own crying down in the kitchen. The sound was shrill and helpless. Bill thought, Why are they crying so far apart? and then he shoved the though away.

Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.

Of course it's heavier, he thought. It's got my grief in it. I pull it along with me everywhere I go, so I do.