Sublime

Easily, he slept; and as he slept, the woman in the photograph took her arm from the pastor’s waist, and crossed the parched lawn towards the camera. Her black skirts, thickly beaded at the hem, obscured the view of Bethesda; then her fine and muddied boots came over the frame, and were first set squarely on the table, then one by one on the floor:

This is also the burial site of Marie Laveau, the mythologized voodoo queen, who was such a shapeshifter that I can hardly imagine how to tell you a story about her that I know is true beyond the fact that she was once a real person. The first mayor of New Orleans, Jean Étienne Boré, is interred there as well. He is the man who first granulated

Adam McAnnis is walking down the silent, empty hall of the clubhouse’s third floor, smoking a joint, pushing open doors as he goes.

Marlowe stands close and lights it for him, smelling of hair cream and something else as well. The faintest whiff of brimstone. Marlowe enjoys a different kind of immortality, achieved by different means. No magic acorns or slumbering under trees. He sold his soul on the dotted line, joined an exclusive members’ club. Eternal life. But not eternal

Not even Albert, who was as stone cold a killer as he’d known.

L. N. FOWLER