Sublime

We weren’t inclined to flatten beetles dotted or otherwise were we. No, generally not. Or ants. No. Nor spiders even. Vessels. Vessels. And in a way we couldn’t tell could we whether the little beetle was from now or from then. No, not really. Not even when it tipped off the cover and beetled back into the grass.

I wouldn’t be like Yvette Vickers, the B-movie actress and star of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, who was found completely mummified in her Los Angeles home more than a year after her death. She had been a recluse while alive; no one had bothered to check on her. Instead of worrying that my own cat would end up eating my dead body to survive, I

The two images fused, were inseparable, their meanings conjoined too, and I couldn’t recollect one without seeing the other. It was all the same. From time to time it occurred to me that probably my story hadn’t been very good anyway, probably wasn’t something worth showing to anyone else, was merely a thing I’d conjured up to amuse myself and pass

Prior to that, the notes are chicken scratch, scrawled down by a girl too young to understand the weight of her parents’ legacy, too deep in a state of shock and denial to even confront her emotions.

“Dear Jude,” Harold wrote, “thank you for your beautiful (if unnecessary) note. I appreciate everything in it. You’re right; that mug means a lot to me. But you mean more. So please stop torturing yourself. “If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes

rotting tumor seemed an invader in the fleshy peach convolutions of the brain,

VERA IS GROWING UP SO CREATIVE AND SO SMART. SHE IS STILL JUST A KID BUT I’VE NEVER LIKED ANYONE SO MUCH AS I LIKE HER. SHE IS GOOD AT MATH AND AT SCIENCE BUT NOT SO HOT ON READING. JUST LIKE ME. I KNOW THAT SHE WILL STAY GOOD SO LONG AS I REMEMBER TO KEEP BAD THINGS AWAY FROM HER. DAPHNE DOESN’T AGREE BUT WE DON’T HAVE TO ARGUE ABOUT IT. I HOPE