Michael Bedard

“Words were few and failing between them as though the silence that sat with them had laid its old lips on theirs and sucked them dry of speech. For where could one begin? With the weather? But here there was no weather. These few sad rooms were the old man's world. His horizons were all walls.”

“But there was so much that one had to pretend not to see the incredible clutter that threatened to overtake the entire flat save for those few narrow paths that the old man moved on; the acrid odor of dirt and neglect that pervaded the place and worked its way into your pores so that you carried it with you after you had left; his odd ways,born of living so long in an absence of mirrors.”