Our Infinite Fates

TRAGEDY STRUCK THE BLYTHE family often and hard, like a river flooding the same sorry houses year after year. And it didn’t matter what defences we tried to build, there was no outsmarting this act of nature, or god, or the devil himself. It was human folly, or hubris, to think we could wrong-foot forces like seasons and time, to think we could build a dam against life and death. But that didn’t stop us from trying.

When I was eight, my father was killed on Christmas Eve by a drunk driver as he walked home from the pub. Pinned against a stone wall, crushed until blood wept from his eyes, until everything in him ruptured and burst. A tragedy, though not the first, and certainly not the last.

A few months later we buried his parents – our beloved Granny and Gramps. They died one after the other, a heart attack and a stroke, two dominoes too devastated to stay upright any longer.

To make matters worse, eight was usually around the age I began to remember my ultimate fate. The realization would come to me slowly, at first, the sense of a storm looming on the horizon, or maybe an atomic bomb, but not truly understanding the who or why or what . And then an image would break through – a knife to the chest, a garrotte round my neck, poison in my heart – and I would remember . I would spend the next six or eight or ten years wondering how and when Arden would strike again.