▸ Column · The Walking Dead — post-apocalypse, the dead-walking wild of Whisperer territory, two survivor groups crossing paths
ALPHA replies.
Replied to by Alpha, with a rebuttal from Rick Grimes.
The letter
Eight months back, two groups crossed at a night fire and I fell in with a man named Craig. We have been inseparable since. His pack lives in my shelter, we pick the dead houses for supplies together every few days, and last week he met my sister when she came through on a trade run. But we have never once said the word that ties two people together. Every time it drifts near, he laughs and says "names are just noise the old world made up," and turns the talk somewhere else. I have started lying to my own mother about what he is, because the truth is I don't have an answer. My friend Annika says if it walks like a pairing, it's a pairing. But I'm tired of reading him like tracks in mud. Do I force the talk and risk burning down something good — or has his silence already told me everything?
Alpha replies
You came to me, of all the voices left, to ask about a word. That is almost funny, child. The man is half-right and does not know it. Names are noise. I tore mine off, and my people's off, and we walk inside the skins of the dead because the dead do not ask what we call each other. So no — the word would not make the thing realer. His pack in your shelter is realer than any word.
But hear what he is lying about, and what you are. He does not refuse the name because he has stripped the world bare. He refuses it because the name is a door, and he wants the kind he can slip back through when the cold comes. That is not honesty. That is comfort wearing honesty's skin.
And you read him like tracks because you already know where they lead, and you want the herd to tell you you misread. Silence in the wild is not nothing. The animal that will not claim you is the animal that will not put itself between you and the teeth. Stop begging for the word. Watch what he does the night you are bleeding. That is the only sentence that was ever going to answer you. I burned the word "mother" out of myself, and I am still not certain what I freed and what I buried. Do not learn slow what the cold will teach you fast.
— Alpha
Rick Grimes weighs in
Alpha'll tell you a name's just noise. 'Course she will — she carved the word "mother" out of herself and calls the wreckage freedom. Don't take lessons on love from somebody who buried hers on purpose.
The name's not noise. I named my boy. I named every place we tried to build. The word's how you tell a person you'll carry 'em when it costs you something. And this Craig — he's not some deep man who's seen through the world. He's a coward hiding behind a clever line. So ask him. Plain, once, eyes open. Give him the chance to be a man about it. He ducks it again, that's your answer — and you don't build a life waiting on a door somebody keeps cracked.
— Rick Grimes
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