What Remained Unsaid
A novella by Peter S. Dubois
When his cat disappears, a solitary man's search leads him to an abandoned slate mine. What he brings home unsettles the boundaries between grief, memory and the lives his family never spoke about.
He has buried his parents and lost his closest friend. What is left of the household is an old cat, and then one day she is gone too. Looking for her gives him something to do, and it takes him further than the routes he has used to keep his days manageable: into the forest, and down into the mine his family once worked.
Underground he meets an old Russian man who seems to belong to his great-grandfather’s war. He cannot establish whether the meeting happened, whether he imagined it, or whether he was briefly in the company of the dead. The book does not decide for him.
A short, quiet story told in the first person, about family silence and the places where the boundary between this world and another seems to wear thin.
Forthcoming.