Sublime

1 A cramped room in a rundown mountain lodge, and on the desk a manuscript, left open to page one, as if it had been waiting here for ages to be read.

Frank Norris’s ungainly naturalist novel McTeague in the former and to T. S. Eliot’s cryptic “The Waste Land” in the latter.

Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

papered. There was no laundry hanging

vigil

oxblood

they looked like surveillance photos of themselves,