Sublime

Hollis Davis,

In his book The Crofter and the Laird, the American author John McPhee journeys to Colonsay, the tiny Hebridean island that was the home of his ancestors. Here, he discovers, ‘almost every rise of ground, every beach, field, cliff, gully, cave, and skerry has a name’. The island has only 138 inhabitants, but 1,600 place names.

To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

Stacy

“You’ve destroyed him,” he says, and she finds the word destroyed curious. Has she really? No. She has destroyed nothing; nothing was left to destroy. But she has made a mess. “Magos.” He says her name, as if it could summon an explanation. “Joseph.” She returns his name to let him know that she sees him standing there, gaunt and pale green.

Now Billy and the rest were being marched into the ruins by their guards. I was there. O’Hare was there.

Kurt.