Sublime

The

I

gingerly

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period? “Hello,” he says, without turning his

motallaric

Because I’m a former engineer, let me list the bits constituting those eleven (possibly extraneous, currently under investigation) pages below. And also, I am going to italicize the bits in which meaningful action occurs,