The silence was complete. Not a bird chirped. Even the chickens had settled to roost. The air hung heavy with unreleased rain, charged with static electricity. It smelled metallic outside. Here and there the house was streaked with a murky blue where the stucco had run from the previous rains—a bruised, wet blue turning to gray at the edges, painted with the same brush as the sky. Where the stucco held, the white was a glaring, garish, almost neon white. Inside, there was no noise. Upstairs, a man lay stretched out on his bed, his head propped up by a pillow. He held a book in both hands, though he wasn’t reading. The book was open, pages down, upon his chest. From time to time, he would force his eyes open and wade through a paragraph, but it was an effort. Downstairs, another man sat quietly at his desk. Beside him was a bottle of whiskey, from which he would occasionally sip. He was trying to write with no greater success than the man above trying to read. He’d write a word, then stop, staring with increasingly blurred vision at the clouds outside the open door.
