“That is not important”

“That is not important” is a repeated answer that does not simply dismiss a subject; it redirects the conversation and contests who gets to decide what deserves attention. Spoken by David in response to Amanda’s questions, and echoed in his efforts to steer her away from particular lines of inquiry, the phrase links a striking change in his speech to the story’s central struggle over what matters and what must be remembered.

A reply that redirects attention

The phrase first appears as a blunt assessment of Amanda’s skepticism about the story Carla has told her. Amanda wants to call the account nonsense and asks when anger would be appropriate; the answer is that this is her opinion, and it is not important. The response does not resolve her doubt. Instead, it denies that her reaction is the subject the conversation should pursue, while Carla’s story continues to supply the information Amanda is trying to assess.

That conversational function becomes more pronounced as Amanda searches for the decisive moment behind what has happened. When she points to the person who saved David from the poison, the answer is that this is not important; when she insists that the rescuer is essential to understanding the story, the reply insists that this is not the story and warns her not to get distracted. The repeated wording turns a disagreement about relevance into an instruction about narrative attention: Amanda is urged to leave one compelling question aside and concentrate on the exact moment the discussion is seeking.

An inherited phrase with an unsettling history

Carla’s recollection gives the words a history before they become a tool for directing Amanda. After David’s fever passed, he took a long time to speak again and began with only a few words. Carla describes his speech as strange, not because the phrase itself is inherently extraordinary, but because David had never answered her that way before. She recalls asking whether he was eating, whether he was cold, or whether it was time for bed, and receiving the same clipped response. The repeated answer makes ordinary exchanges newly alarming: its meaning lies in the break between the son Carla knew and the voice she hears now.

Amanda proposes that David might have heard the woman in the Green House use the expression, or that the fever’s aftermath might explain it. The evidence records her suggestion, not a resolution of its cause. Carla’s account establishes the change in David’s speech and the fear it provokes; it does not settle whether the phrase was learned, caused by illness, or connected to the other explanations in their conversation.

Who decides what is important

The phrase also appears in the exchanges between Amanda and David, where Amanda brings up her questions and David refuses to follow them. She wonders how different he is from the David of six years earlier and what could have led Carla no longer to accept him as her son; he tells her that these are not the important things. Her thoughts are tied to Nina, whose energetic movement makes Amanda anxious and intensifies her sense of connection to her daughter. Yet that emotional and familial concern is pushed aside in favor of the story’s supposedly more urgent question: the moment when the worms come into being.

The same contest shapes Amanda’s question about her mother. She asks whether her mother is important, and the answer is again no; she is told to go on. In the remembered saying that follows, her mother had wanted them to remain within rescue distance because something bad would sooner or later happen. The exchange sets that inherited language of closeness and danger against David’s insistence that the mother is beside the point. The phrase thus narrows the conversation even as Amanda’s account keeps bringing relationships and their consequences into view.

Repetition, memory, and the story’s focus

Amanda’s attempt to stay with the worms and the exact moment they appear meets resistance from a different direction when David insists that the discussion has already covered the poison and contamination, and that she has told him four times how she got there. Amanda says this is not true; he says it is. Here the struggle over importance is also a struggle over repetition and recollection: David treats the established account as something to move past, while Amanda disputes whether it has been told at all.

Across these scenes, the phrase works as a compact form of narrative control. It can disqualify Amanda’s interpretation, redirect her away from the rescuer or her mother, and identify the repeated answer in Carla’s memory as the mark of David’s changed speech. Its force comes from that contrast: for David, the answer closes topics; for Carla, the words reopen the frightening recognition that her son no longer responds as he once did. The phrase’s recurrence makes the question of importance inseparable from the story’s questions about poisoning, memory, and whether the person speaking is still the same.