Edgar and Lucy

Learning kindness late in life was a kind of torture. The pain often came from the past, form kindnesses withheld. The knife was particularly sharp when those who most deserved your kindness were long gone. And unless you wanted to die of sorrow, you had to give this unspent kindness to those you loved less.

Even those who loved you best were bound to find the flaws if they stared long enough.

Words weren't a solace, but they focused one's emotions into something more tangible; they were splinters that could actually be pulled from the heart and placed on a table, regarded.

Didn’t they realize that love was slow, shy, baffled half the time by pride? The

long time that she had traded one face for another. Or

Sometimes she worried that her love for Edgar was too strong, a covetous earthly love, a love against God, a love to reclaim lost things. But what love wasn’t that? What love wasn’t a reward to counter an old wrong? Anyway, it wasn’t something she could control. How

At such hours there was a democracy of loneliness; one felt the smog of it to be equitably distributed. Lucy

In the car, Edgar felt something like panic. The air itself was turning to cement. He didn't understand that this imprisonment was an illusion, a phantasm of grief. He truly believed that life might be over, that all stories would unfold in the already-lived, the sole place in which his grandmother was not dead. But as he looked out the window, he saw how the landscape moved by so fast that it blurred. Trees and billboards slapped past his consciousness with the clicking intensity of a roulette wheel. Edgar felt a desire for something else. Perhaps there were other arrangements a person could make with time.

Death would think itself real without an official protest from the dead person’s greatest ally.