Sublime

An old Irish cable-knit cardigan with leather buttons hung in the downstairs coat closet, which smelled of hot farts and smoke. If anyone ever needed a sweater, they could go and put on the warming sweater, which was its name, as if other sweaters were merely decorative. My mother kept the house just cold enough for me to need to wear the warming s

trenchant,

propriety.

Beneath these giants, way down in the understory, her own body seems freakishly small, like one of those acorn-people she made in childhood.

a sticky summer evening, for example, as new renters attempted to settle into the sepulchral apartment downstairs—a young couple, arranging themselves in their first shared home, arguing over whose desk should go where in the office off the kitchen, which suddenly seemed drafty, didn’t it? Should they contact the landlord? Or? Tape the windows? Or?

All around her spreads one single male whose genetically identical trunks cover more than a hundred acres. The thing is outlandish, beyond her ability to wrap her head around. But

“Sweet keys of sun in the dusk of the toaster,” Anna said one morning at breakfast. I looked up at her, briefly, but made nothing of it, distracted as I was with the morning paper. The day continued quietly as we went about our routines, and other things she said didn’t cause concern. But in the afternoon, as she came in from the garden and wiped h