Status Updates From Suttree

Inside there is nothing. No bones, no dust. How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it. -- C.M.

By now the mother had come from the porch. She was dressed in black and closed upon them soundless as a plague, her bitter twisted face looming, axemark for a mouth and eyes crazed with hatred. She tried to speak but only a half strangled scream came out. The girl was thrown aside and this demented harridan was at him clawing, kicking, gurgling with rage. -- C.M.

They watched from the porch, gathered there like a sitting for some old sepia tintype, the mother's hand on the seated patriarch's shoulder. Watched him coming up the walk with his empty hands and burnt looking eyes. Suttree's abandoned wife. -- C.M.

He was a black of a contemplative nature and he was just slightly drunk and he stood leaning there against the abutment of the viaduct and took a sip from a halfpint bottle and slipped it back into his hip pocket and wiped his mouth and watched this spectacle of frenzied mayhem with a troubled gaze. -- C.M.