Letters had their time and place, they influenced, but they were not action, after all. He was up early Sunday, shoveled the snow from his steps, and then set himself to finish the sanding and shellacking of a piece of wood that he chose to call a figurehead, actually a section of hand-carved molding that must have graced half of some late-nineteenth-century doorway. It was something over three feet long, and had two floral designs among its sweeping scrolls, no human face, and it was strangely incomplete looking, but he still called it his figurehead, and when he had bought it from the puzzled junk dealer for fifty cents, he had imagined it beige or brown or whatever color the real wood was. He had thought at once that Annabelle would like it, perhaps as a lamp base, perhaps simply lying on the long table in the living room, purposeless and beautiful. He worked briskly but without haste, and he was putting on the first coat of shellac when he heard the shift of a car’s gears.
What do You think about This Sweet Sickness (2012)?
