“You are a fucking idiot, aren’t you? You know how much I hate spiders?”

I grew you in my mind, blooming flourishes onto your perfect template.

Otherwise they could have been just about anybody.

Can you see images of flames? Of a fiery horizon burning scarlet against a star-scattered void?

Everyone cried, I am sure, except for the boy, who stared, transfixed, into the box

My mother hummed in the kitchen, the smell of liver wafting from the stove.