Sublime

happy

Flourishing seemed wrong in a man so disheartened as he was.

tacit

ad infinitum,

there was a bliss about him when he worked and when he prayed that made Fatima wonder whether he knew what it felt like to have one’s faith in the goodness of things removed.

He told her, “When your beloved goes away, they take the keys of happiness with them and throw them into that deep pit known as the grave.” His wife hadn’t left him any happiness, he said, but had taken everything with her: sleep, the secrets of cooking, their morning coffees together and evening walks through the town.

carob

we seemed to be frozen in some way; preserved, as if in ice.

He brimmed with that most conventional and embarrassing of qualities—“taste.”