Sublime

The Coffee Room was so low that Gerald had to dip beneath a sequence of thick beams. “Why ‘Coffee Room’?” asked Phrynne, looking at the words on the door. “I saw a notice that coffee will only be served in the lounge.” “It’s the lucus a non lucendo principle.”

The vic’s home is your shot at getting a handle on this person you’re never going to meet. Even for their friends, people filter and spin, and then the friends filter all over again: they don’t want to speak ill of the dead, or they’re feeling maudlin about their poor lost pal, or they don’t want you to misunderstand that little quirk of his. But b

through the yearbook carefully from cover to cover looking for him. He isn’t in any group picture or on any list of names.

You are the person I share this house with, nothing more, nothing less. You mean no more to me than the shutters that hide what goes on in here, the floorboards I walk over or the doors we use to separate us.

A short distance away from the body, I saw his spirit sitting on the branch of a pine tree. He looked like a puff of smoke emerging from a chimney on a cloudy day. Where ya going? he asked. To find my parents. No point in that, he muttered. They’re all dead.