I close the door. I watch as he walks back to his ship. His helmet gleams in the dry light, and I try to pretend that he is you. But he is not you. He does not have the same distant gaze. When he walks, he does not look as though he might drift off, never to return. His steps release so little dirt from the ground.

And so, I made a mental note, that Friday after speaking with my dear friend, not to let go of the case, exactly, but to perhaps loosen the grip of my mind upon it. I said to myself, ‘Bartolomeo Díaz, you must balance yourself.’ I did not want to end up like my father, after all, with an estranged wife and child (I am speaking figuratively here, of course, as I do not have either) and six bullets to the chest. How little I knew then, of what I would gain and lose…

[Their love] was full of darkness, it was of a species of parasite that lives within all of us, but that can only feed on certain flesh, flesh that has been injured, infected, gangrened into something that does not look—and is not—altogether human. A parasite that waits, buried deep somewhere in our bodies, for the moment when we become closer to monsters and farther from the men that we are.

By morning in the gray spectral light of a brief and obscure winter sun the fields lay dead-white and touched with a phosphorous glow as if producing illumination of themselves, and the snow was still wisping down thickly, veiling the trees beyond the creek and the mountain itself, falling softly, and softly, faintly sounding in the immense white silence.

Dawn. Fields smoking where the mist shoaled, trees white as bone. The gray shrubbery hard-looking as metal in the morning wetness.

I knew that my mother was real, in a sense: but was she real like the coolness of the air, or like the way that, in its temperature, it made me feel new sensations?