his house and he have aged together with a crackling of paint and a crinkle of skin he drives a nail and folds his hands to keep his world from shaking...

A SWIFT, chill wind rattled at Preacher Stahl's windows, scattering dry leaves across the aggregation of tattered porches and rooftops below. Radiators, turned on for the first time that Fall, belched and clanked throughout the sprawling, peeling conglomerate known as The Faith Haven School for Young Christian Men to the handful of souls which it sustained and sheltered against the elements and the outside world.

once she knew of them, her death was sealed in a small copper box pinned to the edge of twilight where the skulls clunked forever reminding, it was hemmed in the seam of a golden robe — the cloak of some nameless child moving always moving closer to them...