- Edward Morris Where Have You Been All My Life? Edward Morris The sailor awoke before dawn. Something was wrong. Like he’d wound up on the wrong side of the city, on a map no cabbie could read. His work had been interrupted. Here lay the Winter of Nepenthe. Across the room, a single gas lamp burned low, sticking out of the wall above the battered chestnut vanity like a beckoning finger. Simple things. Almost familiar. Gray walls, wood floor. A men’s rooming-house, Spartan, nearly bare, with a piece of dirty white muslin draped across the dresser. Atop the muslin was a washbasin full of dirty, soapy water; beside it, a shaving-mug and brush, and a little pearl-handled French razor and strop. This is how it begins. Anew, now, but always the same. He rubbed the long, twisting scar etched across his stubbly scalp, unsure where the thought was coming from. In the dark. In a one-night cheap hotel and restless, or under a bridge, or even a cozy doorway in the middle of that great, roaring dark, full of coal smoke and the clopping of hooves on cobblestones and the fog.
