Excerpt:
For months the condolences flooded in and she let the big cubical
house go to pieces while she collected them. His works had been
published everywhere and so the cards were postmarked Helsinki, Rio de
Janeiro, Hong Kong, St. Petersburg, Dublin, the whole gamut. At first
she wanted to burn the lot but the fireplace was black with cinders from
Christmas when he'd sat blindly by the fire. Then she was uncomfortable
lighting up a blaze by herself--did he put the kindling on top of the
newspaper or the newspaper on top of the kindling? And finally she
didn't want to burn the cards but only to put them away in two boxes
from the local IGA printed "Broccoli, California." In the basement,
stacking the boxes, she saw there were signs the plumbing had not
bravely withstood the winter. When she tried to make baked macaroni it
burned. She ran out of windex and didn't bring herself to get more so
the windows and mirrors picked up grime. The telephone rang and she
didn't answer it. She counted the number of times she didn't answer the
telephone every day and said it over and over to herself, a mantra for
sweeping by. She gave another thought to those mirrors. "In such a
situation some people cover their mirrors with sheets," somebody told
her. Like rattling of tin the word rang through, "Situation," and she
neither covered her mirrors nor looked into them but from an angle spied
the mirrors, one in every room, sentries keeping watch in case
something--something inimical-- should happen. But nothing happened.
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