One crack could rupture into a chasm

An excerpt from "The Shrewdness"

Photo,” brown and white rock formation on body of water” by Dave Hoefler

If you’ve been here for a while, you may know that I’ve been writing a novel for four years called The Shrewdness.

The book takes place in a world remade by an invisible malevolence called, you guessed it, The Shrewdness—in which anyone who gets farther away than 12 feet from another person vanishes permanently.

The story follows our hero, Hannah, her partner, Roger, and their small team of Testimony Takers. Working as outsiders in rural Pennsylvania to collect an oral history of the disappeared, they uncover a troubling local mystery that points to a secretive religious sect with outsized power in the community. Investigating could be dangerous but it might be Hannah’s one shot at salvation—finally a way to heal the wounds of her tumultuous past.

Below is a short excerpt where Hannah reflects on her long-vanished daughter, Alma, who was disappeared by The Shrewdness two years ago. (And Amos is her late husband and Alma’s father, who died pre-Shrewdness.) Here, Hannah realizes that a lifetime of frantic worrying had done nothing to prevent the worst and may have been a waste of time.

Excerpt - one crack could rupture into a chasm

Long before I lost Alma, I worried near-constantly that something horrible would happen to her: A fall from a rock, a fierce undertow, a lurking sex-pest waiting to charm his way into our orbit, a rare bacterium in her baby food—everywhere a kaleidoscope of dangers conspiring to rob me of my most beloved person.

For the entire stretch of her abbreviated life, I could never let my mind relax around the fact of Alma, couldn’t understand how she’d actually materialized, survived near-ruin in my belly, and emerged so plump, healthy, expressive, and wide-eyed. So substantial. So fully formed. Here was a tiny being who blinked up at me with wonder, who needed me as much as I needed her, who cried out for me when I left the room and clutched me close with desperate, animal yearning. How could it be possible? Of all the millions of people in the universe, this nascent soul had somehow chosen me to be her mother.  It all seemed like a fluke.

The truth was that I understood Alma to be a miracle, a blessing, and deep down I’d convinced myself I didn’t deserve blessings. So I kept the watch, hypervigilant, waiting for the moment the universe would realize it had made a mistake, had given an unworthy person more than their share of happiness, and would swoop in with thunderous calamity to right the wrong.

This type of fear was familiar to me. I’d often harbored similar angst about Amos, who beheld me with such unflinching tenderness despite all my shortcomings that I felt certain he was playing a practical joke on me, that I’d wake up one day with a note saying he’d left and that our entire relationship had been a dare or a prank. But those insecurities ebbed and flattened over time as I slowly grew to believe his adoration was real (however misguided). Not with Alma. Visions of her impending demise haunted me with unyielding clarity. Most days, I was consumed by panic from morning to night as I scanned for the danger that would take her from me. Even while I slept, I was tortured by nightmares of her falling into a pool or running out in front of a car. There was no reprieve.

And I knew, when the inevitable tragedy did come, that it would be my fault—final proof that I’d never been worthy of her to begin with. So I couldn’t ever relax, not for a second, lest I fail some cosmic test resulting in her removal from my life.

Of course, if you are the type of person who is predisposed to anxiety, it’s easy to say you foretold disaster when it strikes, to take some twisted solace in the confirmation of your world view.

When The Shrewdness came for humanity with equal vigor across geographies and demographics, draping its tragedy over the Earth like an ozone, my first instinct was to find some way to personalize it, to make it about me as the main character of my life, to think, triumphant in spite of my misery, “I knew it, everyone always said I was overly anxious, but I was right to be afraid.”

But I didn’t know it—not the specifics, only the fact of the peril itself. Who could have ever predicted this? Our shared predicament defies comprehension. Never in my most feverish of frantic states, imagining the most outlandish tribulations, did my mind ever touch upon anything close to what actually happened.

Still, it is so easy to re-arrange reality to fit the narrative of our predispositions.

If we are pessimistic, when bad things happen, we can say, smugly, “See? Everything goes to shit eventually, one way or the other.”

If we are optimistic, when things work out favorably, we can say, beaming, “See? Everything works out in the end, one way or another.”

It is a reflex to recast our premonitions about the bearing out of our fortunes, good or bad, as intuition. Retroactively, we contort reality to our long-held perceptions of it. And even though I know my anxieties did not predict or cause what happened, I cannot shake the feeling, the desire to look at the unspooled yarn of my ruined life and say: “See? I always knew something like this would happen.” And as much as this thought is mostly false, it is also a little bit true.

I have felt the pull of tragedy my whole life. Maybe not this specific tragedy but I have been outrunning bedlam. All those days I sensed a proximity to danger, I wasn’t wrong. We were all in jeopardy. We still are, all the time.

I’ve always sensed catastrophe, like an alternate reality, just on the other side of the veil of my perception, lying in wait to wreak havoc. A shadow saga being lived out parallel to mine.

When I survived the plane crash, the other storyline where I’m conked on the head by flaming wreckage played out too, on the other side of the veil. When I survived childbirth and Alma was delivered to me alive, writhing, exultant—the other timeline wherein we both die was lurking a whisper away in this shadow realm of my imagining.

My belief, although I’ve never fully articulated it, is that the ferocity and diligence of my worry kept me safe. I staved off the darkest timelines with my vigilance, with my anticipation of the horrors. A jittered nervous system was my penance, the price I paid to keep us alive.

Forever, I’ve felt my loved ones slipping away. I’ve known that the order of things was tenuous, that one crack could rupture into a chasm and the whole world would fall in. So when the worst did actually happen, I felt two things simultaneously: Vindication that I’d been right all along, and indignation that my unwavering surveillance hadn’t offered any protection when it counted.

If the worry hadn’t been keeping us safe, what had been the point of all those hours fretting, preparing, and staring glassy-eyed at the horizon, waiting for the apocalypse to crest over a distant ridge where I’d be able to see it coming and stop it in time?  I wasted all those years agonizing. And for nothing. In the end, I couldn’t stop the earth from swallowing Alma into the air.

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Substacks I’m Reading Right Now

I’m loving all the great writing being profiled and celebrated on

Auraist: picking the best-written books of the month

—an incredible resource for writers and readers alike.

I’m enjoying smart explorations of some of the most pressing topics that touch our world at

Persuasion

where essays and interviews tend to eschew tribalism in favor of depth and nuance (imagine that)!

Elissa Altman has given us all a gift with her substack

Poor Man's Feast

which marries lyrical personal essays with recipes (sometimes) and nourishing ruminations on food, family, and life. True to its blurb, the newsletter offers sustenance.

And finally, a few recent (or recent-ish posts from Celebration):