Coming,” he cried when the rapping began again, on the…

““Coming,” he cried when the rapping began again, on the heels of a distant roll of thunder, and in the instant before he reached for the doorknob, he felt with utter certainty, as if all of this were indeed merely something revisited, rehearsed, recalled, that he would not return—not to the living room behind him or the narrow stairs or the small rooms where his wife and his children slept. This was the culmination, then, this odd darkness, this familiar dream, of the day that had begun with the tugging of the wind at his eaves; this was the simple and terrible meaning, after all, of the pain in his arm, the weight on his heart. Here now and at last, and too soon—as it had come to his brother’s heart too soon—the utter darkness, the black street, wind rain and sea and some glimpse, in his final fall, of the damp room (odor of salt, odor of peat) where in another darkness he had been conceived. An instant so close—in its familiarity, in its blackness, in the cry of the wind—to everything he had been told as a child would attend his last moment (he would hear the banshee, he would open the door, he would see the black coach, wet with rain), that he felt both amused and terrified.””

— Alice McDermott