The things they had already accomplished were noteworthy and each successive accomplishment was met with a further boost of high octane fuel sending them further into the upper reaches of an unsustainable orbit.

The nurse started to walk briskly toward the vehicle and she came upon a ghoulish sight: Sadie, splayed against the side of the road, a black puddle of blood flowing like a corona around her head, reflected in the moonlight.

They were written in her menstrual blood and each word seemed to move and drip, in the midst of an act of violent conjugation.

Swept up in the indomitable rush of youth, he did genuinely feel for a season entirely invincible.

His amorous adventures, such as they were, were comically misdirected; the result perhaps only of transference as a result of Amy’s extended absence.

Ultimately, it has been suggested that they each chose to deal with it in the way they had been raised for generations to handle any disagreements: they unanimously called for—without once uttering the exact words out loud—an extended time-out, a long, cold and unencumbered silence; something like a blanket of snow, Richard imagines, quietly aggregated in whispers, comprised mostly of white noise and dampening all extraneous sound.

There were big moments, surely, but the occasions he tended to savor were not big, no matter how defining they had once seemed—his high school prom, his college graduation—even his marriage, when it came, would somehow seem larger before it occurred, as if, in anticipation, it would become unexpectedly diminished and when he attempted, months or years later, to recall these so-called big events with any clarity, the only thing he could truly remember was the fragile sensation of much smaller moments, each recovered like delicate earthenware.

Instead of the usual book of photographs—page after page of Europe’s stately, decomposing monuments—Larry’s book of memories was filled with esoteric candy bar wrappers and condiment packages, each one taped with cellophane to a page and accompanied by a note in his unwavering handwriting, detailing where it was acquired and when it was eaten, as if he was a field scientist gathering and labeling exotic species.

When the house did emit a settling sound, each noise, it seems, made its way into the dramaturgy of her dreamscape; every groan became the daring soliloquy of her latest acquisition: a scuffed-up end-table acting out the tragic role of Hamlet or King Lear or the neighbors, the generations who had trekked this shabby piece of solid oak, legs and drawers, all over the state.

Next was Marlon, a beautiful man by all reports, a good old boy from Kentucky, suave talker and southern gentlemen, possessed of wide shoulders and real charisma whose eyes and hands, it seemed, knew no sense of propriety.