Fiction
Excerpt
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Terrible to say, but there's a glamour in decay. All the sugars rising to the surface. Even the making of wine is a kind of controlled decomposition.
The last days have an atmosphere in which everything stands out, back-lit, finite. Photographers call it magic hour. As if death, closer now, closer every day, radiates a kind of pre-storm light.
And then that pre-storm light lasts for a spell after death--for the living. Basic things take on new definition, demand attention, but resist naming.
