kEvin p. keAting

The Distinguished Precipice

-1-

On the afternoon of his seventeenth birthday, Patrick Hanlon was summoned to the principal's office where an assembly of priests, eleven in all, faded men in high backed chairs, waited in the steely winter light, their eyes fixed to the branches of the elms and maples clattering against the windowpanes, their arthritic fingers reaching automatically for the books of matches piled high in ashtrays stationed at every corner of the room like bowls of holy water at the entranceways to the school chapel. It had been a gloomy winter, gloomier than usual even for that the gloomiest of cities, Cleveland, and like the weary ghosts who inhabited the crumbling warehouses and clapboard shanties and stone churches hunkered down in high snowdrifts transmuted into sculptures of strange shape and contour--giant locusts and gnats and dead fish floating white and blue in the tundra--the priests endured with a stoicism they'd perfected over long decades the gusts and gales that came screaming off the icy lake.

Whether from advanced age or the bitter cold, or maybe because they simply hadn't bothered to wear their dentures to this meeting, their faces looked concave, like hollowed out like pumpkins left to rot on porch stoops. They lit their cigarettes and sipped their artificially sweetened coffee and spoke obliquely of their colleague, the twelfth member of their group, who for many months had been bedridden, stricken with the final stages of disease, his shriveled limbs cruelly mimicking the degeneration of his legendary mind. The doctors poked and prodded and made their grim proclamations: they didn't expect him to see the first rains of spring. Even the priests had given up hope and prayed to Saint Jude.

"Such suffering."

"We held vigil for him last night."

"If only God would take him home."

Their stoicism teetered dangerously close to perdition, and the priests felt an enormous sense of relief when Patrick Hanlon appeared at last, his head bowed, hands clasped together like some captive New World heathen brought before a tribunal of inquisitors. The boy stood in the center of the room and waited. The principal indicated the empty chair.

"Well? Go on. Take a seat."

Patrick lowered himself onto the chair, but slowly, as though it were covered in a carpet of nails. He crossed his legs, uncrossed them, squirmed, stared at the tips of his shoes. A nervous lad. This was as it should be. The natural order of things.

"I suppose you know why we called you here today?" asked the principal.

The boy shook his head.

"You did not pass your Theology exam and you are thus in danger of failing the class for the semester."

Though entirely capable of making stern pronouncements, the principal addressed Patrick in an oddly solicitous manner, his elocution flawless as ever, the greatest of orators, golden-mouthed, honey-tongued. It was frequently noted that the mothers of certain students sometimes wept at his sermons, swooned at his wild descriptions of how they would burn in the lake of fire for all eternity. He never failed to persuade.

"We know you're clever, very bright indeed, and we want you to succeed, want you to distinguish yourself in some way. But this situation demands a quick solution. So this is what we propose." The principal lifted his nose, waved his hand at the dust shimmering in the long shafts of silver light, and he let his words spill slowly into the room like the blue cigarette smoke that looped and coiled into helixes of meaning. "We'd like you to see a..." he shifted his eyes toward his colleagues "...a tutor who, after a sufficient amount of time, will..." again, a slight shift of his eyes "...test your ability to analyze and interpret the concepts of Augustine and Aquinas."

The other priests nodded and murmured their consent--"A most excellent idea, very sensible, quite expedient"--but it was well known that a number of them had grave reservations about this plan and had expressed their doubts prior to the meeting and wondered why the principal didn't just ask the boy to clear out his locker and leave the school once and for all. There were, perhaps, mitigating circumstances.

Patrick wasn't a troublemaker in the normal sense of the word, never came to class drunk like so many of his classmates. Seventeen, everyone will surely agree, is a difficult age and some of the boys, the more reckless and daring among them, met behind the gym before the first bell rang and gulped vodka straight from the bottle, wincing like small children forced to swallow bitter and gelatinous medicine. He never used drugs, though he once tried marijuana at a school dance only to find that it had no effect on him other than to give him an inexplicable urge to eat an entire bowl of stale pretzels one at a time with machine-like precision while the other kids looked on and laughed as they would at one of the feces-flinging macaques on Monkey Island at the zoo. He never smirked at his teachers in a way that suggested he was somehow superior to them though in truth many of the priests suffered from low morale and felt trapped in the intellectual purgatory of a high school classroom, doomed to repeat the same insipid lesson plans over and over again with no discernible effect on their listless students.

By most accounts Patrick was docile, timid, pathetic even. He arrived at school early each morning and sat alone in a far corner of the cafeteria where he sipped hot chocolate (the Jesuits forbade the sale of coffee) and stared at the green cinderblock walls and traced the patterns on the cover of his geometry textbook with a lazy finger. When he slunk down the halls between classes the other students, the sons of doctors and lawyers and investment bankers, snorted with contempt and jeered at the clothes he wore, incredible bellbottom pants from the Goodwill and paisley ties unearthed in cardboard boxes at garage sales. No matter how hard he tried Patrick always looked disheveled, his shirts stained with whatever food he had for lunch, ketchup, mustard, a smattering of pizza sauce, and because his family could barely scrape together enough money and financial assistance to pay the staggering tuition fees, he was compelled to take a job as a janitorial assistant at a nursing home. This at least put a little money in his pockets, but rather than spend the cash on desperately needed school supplies, he resorted to rummaging through the garbage bins after class, looking for pencils worn down to chewed stubs and tearing out blank pages from used notebooks.

But these things were of little consequence to the Jesuits who had taken vows of poverty and so understood the many hardships Patrick faced. If they pitied him it wasn't because of the missing buttons on his winter coat or the dangling threads on the cuffs of his shirts but because of an incident that occurred during his sophomore year. Initially his parents wanted to remove him from school altogether, admit him to a psychiatric ward where a team of doctors that specialized in emotional disorders could pump him full of mood altering drugs--they had so many miraculous cures these days--but the Jesuits frowned on this idea, not simply because they had a healthy skepticism of modern medicine but because they had a moral obligation to help boys who were experiencing a "spiritual crisis."

"We don't abandon our students," the principal assured them.

Since Patrick's parents had no medical insurance and because they couldn't afford the kind of professional care he required, they turned their son over to the Jesuits who considered themselves experts in curing a benightmared soul.

The incident in question took place during biology class on a rainy day in March. The instructor, Father Flannigan, should have been quicker to respond, but he was an elderly fellow whose eyesight and hearing and lucidity had been in steep decline for several months. That the poor fellow looked ridiculous as well probably didn't help matters. Unlike his colleagues who were frail and stooped with age, Father Flannigan was an eating machine and a great guzzler of sherries and wines and Belgian ales, and his hamburger and beer bloated body waddled into the biology lab that day as if of its own accord, like a great boulder rolling down a winding slope. The boys laughed openly at him, said a man didn't reside within that mass of flesh, only an overactive gene that was about to burn out like an old fuse, a giant star exhausting the last of its hydrogen. In profile he looked like an ancient ziggurat, something that didn't need to be bathed and powdered and dressed each morning so much as scaled and excavated. The Jesuits had hired a woman for just that purpose. They prayed for her every day.

"Now then," said Father Flannigan, clearing his throat and absently probing his ear with a finger encrusted with waffle batter, "we will be doing dissection." He hummed, whistled, quoted with a chuckle, "Faith is a fine invention when gentlemen can see, but microscopes are prudent in an emergency."

A good natured man, Father Flannigan, the parishioners adored him, but a high school classroom isn't a place where one is likely to find much compassion for the elderly and infirm, and as he moved to the front of the lab, huffing with the effort of it, the boys made vulgar and obnoxious noises, pretending to fart and wheeze and vomit, some of them groaning as though with constipation. They even threw wadded up tissues at him, hoping he might open his mouth to devour them as a bat blindly devours insects in the night. He seemed suddenly distracted by their antics, frowned.

"Now then. What was it we were doing? Before you make your first incision, you must... First you must. Gentleman. Your animal. Anesthetize it. Remember. Always remember. They are created creatures..."

Maybe in his confusion he thought he was laboring before the church altar, struggling to recall the priestly arts of transubstantiation, and after reciting the necessary formula--"Introibo ad altare Dei"--he raised each frog by his forefinger and thumb and distributed them like consecrated wafers to his pupils.

Patrick was first in line. He accepted his frog in an almost reverential manner, and suddenly a great and disturbing calm fell over him as though some ultimate truth had entered the room through a crack in the window and now led him by the hand back to his station where he sat perfectly upright on his stool and muttered things under his breath, strange words without sense or meaning. The other boys watched how his lips moved, how his eyes rolled. The more daring among them inched closer and prodded him with a ruler.

"Hey, man. What the hell. You flippin' out, or what? You on something? Whatever you got, let me have some of it."

Patrick didn't respond, didn't seem to notice them at all. He stared at the rain drumming against the glass, but he saw something more than the rain, something that the other boys were too frightened to guess at or to name, and rather than smother his frog with a chloroform-soaked cotton ball, Patrick reached into his backpack and grabbed his compass, the one he used in Geometry class to draw concentric circles and to make arcs along a plane like a cabinetmaker's son, and using the sharp point that glimmered dully under the fluorescent lights he stabbed the back and legs and the soft, pliant skull of his thrashing frog, never flinching at the sharp pop of the spleen and the long, sad wheeze of the evacuating rectum. From the sound alone he could identify each organ.

"Liver! Pituitary gland! Lung! Ovary!"

The other students recoiled from the viscous, milky fluid that meandered across the surface of his desk and dripped to the floor. They waited for Father Flannigan to take charge, to do something, but the old man was oblivious to everything except the rain hurtling from the sky. Later, when the other priests questioned him about the incident, Father Flannigan tugged at the loose skin around his throat and cried, "Idlers! Those boys are idlers, every last one of them!" Shortly after giving his testimony he was removed from his teaching post and sent to live out his final years at the rectory.

But it was Patrick who concerned them the most. After decapitating his frog he ran around the lab and raised the sharp point of his compass high above his head and stabbed the frogs one by one, methodically gouging out eyeballs and genitals and tearing off legs. If the custodian hadn't come along and tackled him to the ground Patrick might have turned the compass on his classmates or even on himself, self-mutilation wasn't beyond the realm of possibility, and as he writhed on the floor with the dying frogs squirming all around and his mirthless laughter ringing through the hallways and out into the terrible March downpour, the other boys formed a circle and gave him a spirited ovation.

-2-

"We're all very confident that you'll succeed in your mission," said the principal who looked a little flustered now, maybe because the office was beginning to fill with the noxious gasses seeping silently from his colleagues.

The other priests dabbed their foreheads with handkerchiefs stiff from frequent use and continued to puff away on cigarettes that over the course of the meeting had become flimsy sticks of ash dangling from their lips. They leaned forward in their chairs and watched the boy's eyes and smiled at him with their gaping jack-o-lantern mouths, but Patrick refused even to blink for fear they might take it as a sign of his insolence and pelt him with stones. He stood up and meekly murmured, "Thank you for giving me this opportunity." As the men resumed their pointless banter he backed slowly toward the door but at the last possible moment, just before leaving the room, he shot a hand toward an ashtray with the agility of a magician performing a card trick and slipped a pack of matches into his pocket.

He had time to kill, thirty minutes, so he ambled along the blustery streets and narrow alleyways of the old neighborhood, pausing for a moment outside the creaking iron gates of the public park to observe the homeless men who'd gathered there for the night. A few of them, already reeling with drunkenness, rummaged through the garbage bins, looking for discarded food, cold cups of coffee, newspapers to stuff into their ratty coats for insulation. Patrick smiled with anticipation.

At the appointed hour he went to the rectory at 1545 Dickinson where he knocked three times before the housekeeper Ms. Hightower finally answered. She was a tall woman with broad shoulders and a complexion as gray as the sky, a face unaccustomed to sunshine and fresh air, an indoor face, with eyes small and dark and almost feral that glimpsed from behind heavy curtains and through peepholes and regarded students with equal measures of contempt and suspicion. She reminded Patrick of those sepia tone photographs from his history textbook of nineteenth century washerwomen with heavy lips pulled down in muscular frowns, their sleeves rolled up past their elbows to proudly display well developed triceps. The other boys had a game. From the safety of the classroom windows they watched Mrs. Hightower as she marched in a steady line through the lacerating winds to the rectory, her heels going clippity-clop along the cobblestones like the shoes on an old packhorse. Snickering with delight, they invented ever more lurid tales about her: she served as concubine to several of the priests, pleasuring them late at night with a gloved hand, sometimes working up a sweat as she "prepared for the second coming." The boys clutched their sides with laughter at that one. Others claimed she was actually a madam who on the weekends procured women of all types for the priests--short, fat, lean, shaved, bristly, bushy--and, should the bishop drop by for a surprise visit, several nubile boys of Asian descent. For it was well known that the bishop had his fetishes.

Now Ms. Hightower thrust her nose at Patrick and scowled. "Hanlon?" Her voice lashed out at him like a rusty bicycle chain and whenever she coughed, particles of rust and grit floated through the air. Without waiting for his reply she waved him inside.

Because it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark, Patrick smelled the place before he could actually see it. The rectory had a familiar odor, of pureed food and urine and the old wooden keys of an upright piano; it reminded him of the nursing home on West 95th Street where he was paid to mop floors and dispose of medical waste and, since there seemed to be no one else who could be bothered with such a menial task, sit with the elderly residents and keep them company, listening as they struggled to put the ruined battlefield of their memories in some kind of sensible order. Sometimes they complained about the bottle of chemicals he carried with him, recoiled from the skull and crossbones on the label, and when he twisted the cap off they trembled with fear. The stuff never disguised the stench of death and decay and it always stung his eyes like the formaldehyde used to preserve the fetal pigs bobbing up and down in those big glass jars lining the windowsills in the biology lab.

"You're late," snapped Ms. Hightower, leading him past a winding staircase and down a long corridor. "This way, this way. Now then, what is it you're supposed to study?"

"Theology."

"I know that. But which books? They did give you a reading list, didn't they?"

Patrick shook his head.

"Speak up, please."

"Saint Ambrose?"

She sighed. "Always the impossible dream of turning you boys into men of letters. Oh, the Jesuits do get strange ideas. In here." She pointed to the small library off the main hallway. "For now just go to the shelves and find a book that you think might interest you. I'll return in just a moment."

Patrick watched her vanish into the vast curling gloom of the house, waited for her footsteps to recede, then went to the bookshelf where he ran a finger along one shelf and saw on either side of the parted sea of dust in the quilted wood grain the faces of saints and sinners and the tormented screams of apostates. He selected a book at random, Gateway to Gehenna: An Appraisal of the Heterodox Theologies of the Egyptian Monks of Saint Pachomius, flipped through the pages, found the paper stiff and brittle, like bloodless autumn leaves; they almost seemed to crackle and hiss like kindling. Easily ignitable.

He scanned the lines from right to left, a little game he liked to play, tried to take in as much information as he could that way, tried to puzzle it out. From what he could tell, there once was a man named Thomas the Twin who, long ago, had the audacity to attribute to Jesus the following words: "Whoever has come to understand the world has found only a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world," words to be placed above the entrance of every county courthouse and state capitol in the country, but the author of the book was scandalized by its deep truths and so made the puerile argument that anyone who would dare to put such a blasphemous epithet into the mouth of the Savior should be condemned. But condemned to what? Patrick closed his eyes and dreamed of the appropriate punishment.

"For heaven's sake! Why are you just standing there?"

Ms. Hightower stomped back into the room, this time carrying a bowl of steaming chicken broth.

"Do you need a reading lamp? As you can see, Father likes it dark in here. You do know Father Flannigan, don't you?"

She approached a hospital bed in the far corner of the room, kicked a wheel with the toe of one shoe, checked the guardrails to make sure they were secure, and then placed the bowl on the dining tray. Beneath the thin blue sheets, staring up at the ceiling, clawing gently at the air with a trembling hand, there squirmed an emaciated old man whose translucent skin hung from his bones and who in the thinnest of voices rasped the words, "Oh god help me please oh please god help me help." She patted his head and smiled.

It all seemed real enough but Patrick instinctively shut his eyes against the vision, just as the Jesuits had taught him to do. Maybe the hallucination would pass. Still, he yearned to take a pencil from his shirt pocket and jab experimentally at the thing in the bed.

"At first it was inconvenient to move him up and down the stairs, he used to be such a heavyset man, so we decided to just keep him in here. We can lift him up to his room now that he's lost so much weight but I think he enjoys the library. He's like one of those antique volumes on the shelf. He used to be a renowned scholar, you know, could have taught at any Jesuit university in the country, but he preferred to teach you boys instead. I see you found one of his books he wrote. We'll take that as a sign."

She held a spoon to the man's lips, and he slurped loudly, his tongue laboring to lap up the broth.

"He wrote that book many years ago as a young seminarian. He was ahead of his time, almost prophetic. He warned us about the dangers of those lurid gospels. Gnosticism. More are being dug up in the desert sands even to this day, and the views they espouse threaten to influence young minds still grappling to discover the one true path to righteousness and salvation. God demands sacrifice, not the self-gratification of mystics."

Patrick nodded, pretending to listen.

"Take the book home with you if you'd like." She lifted the spoon again. "Yes, I think this arrangement should work out quite well, don't you?"

"Arrangement, Mrs. Hightower?"

"The Jesuits didn't explain things to you. How typical." She sighed. "We're well aware of your experience at the nursing home... and in lieu of taking another exam you are to read to Father Flannigan for one hour every day after class until the end... of the semester. That is the arrangement." She wiped the old man's lips with a napkin and dropped the spoon on the tray. "You may as well pull up a chair, Hanlon. Make yourself comfortable. And please make sure to enunciate your words. Father is hard of hearing. Aren't you, Father?"

Something seemed to stir within the library, the shades of forgotten holy men gathering around the bed to gaze down at the pitiable old soul who rasped and gurgled and wheezed and whose unceasing aria of despair echoed throughout the hollow rooms of the house and poisoned them with sickness.

"Please oh god help me god please oh god help me help me please oh god please help god help me please oh."

-3-

By the time Patrick left the rectory it was almost dark and he gave some thought to going home but first he had plans. First he stopped at the market on the corner of West 25th Street where he took a minute to marvel at the stylized depictions of violence in his favorite comic books--men screaming through the streets, their clothes ablaze, their faces melting like candle wax, while behind them, prodding them with swords and spears and blazing torches, there descended a horde of laughing goblins, amphibious in appearance, with giant webbed feet that allowed them to bound across landscapes of profound desolation. Patrick turned the page and let his eye wander toward the other magazines, but only for an instant.

Unlike most of his classmates who burst through the door with cigarette smoke and whinnying laughter drifting in behind them, Patrick did not possess enough temerity to pull one of the dirty magazines down from the top shelf and ogle the pictures of naked women sprawled across plush carpets. The boys ran their fingers over the glossy pages with the devotion of revered clergymen memorizing verses from the Book of Revelation. They used words like snatch and pie and box, spoke them loud and clear, repeating them over and over as though they were an incantation, oblivious to the little old ladies from the neighborhood who shuffled up and down the narrow aisles, loading their squeaking carts with jars of pickled herring. "The Jesuits will hear about this, so help me," the crones hissed, but these threats only made the boys laugh louder. Yes, they may have been brave when it came to exploits with little at stake, but Patrick had other qualities. Everyone sensed this about him. Before leaving the office that afternoon the principal had warned that he "hovered on the edge of a distinguished precipice" though he never explained what he meant by this, another one of his cryptic pronouncements perhaps.

He put the comic book back on the rack because the shop owner was watching him closely, ready to reach a hand beneath the counter with the agility of a gunslinger. Stocky and middle-aged with a few black spirals of hair on top of his otherwise shiny crown and a perpetual five o'clock shadow cast across his cheeks and in the deep crevasses of flesh below his jaw, the owner stood guard near the door and examined each of his customers one by one, able to calculate the odds of trouble with clairvoyant accuracy. Twice in the past month the store had been robbed, and during the last incident the owner managed to shoot the thief, a teenager from the projects, wounding him in the shoulder. He surely would have finished the job, stuffed the barrel of the gun into the kid's mouth and pulled the trigger, had the boy not begged for mercy as he writhed outside on the sidewalk surrounded by the shattered window that sparkled brilliantly under the yellow streetlights. "The police are of no use to me," the owner later told reporters. "I am not a man of the book. I am a man of the gun." The whole city applauded him as a hero.

Patrick, not wishing to test the man's patience, brought a bottle of lighter fluid to the counter and put his money down near the register. The shop owner coughed, scratched his belly slowly back and forth and squinted as though trying to run a comb through the dense tangle of hair beneath his shirt.

"Do you need a bag?"

"Yes, please."

The man grunted. "Will that be all?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good evening then."

Back outside Patrick strutted along the icy sidewalks. He felt good, confident, and when he reached the park he waved his arms and shooed away the pigeons gathered on the edge of the empty fountain. Further on, a half dozen shivering bums curled up on wooden benches and pressed their ruined faces into the bundles of rags they used to cushion their heads. Patrick crept forward, stealthy as one of the sewer rats that emerged at night to hunt for any remnants the bums may have left behind, and sat down beside one man whose malodorous tentacles of piss and madness made him gag. He breathed deeply and after a minute got used to it.

From here he had an unobstructed view of the school's gothic bell tower jutting into the cast iron winter twilight. Despite the stinging blasts of wind, he enjoyed sitting quietly and gazing at things without having to measure their value. The Jesuits, of course, put a value on everything. They used words like assessment and evaluation and analysis. The universe, they believed, must be measured--physically, psychologically, spiritually, morally. So believed Father Flannigan, a man who for the better part of his life had dedicated himself to the examination of life under a microscope though he'd once written a book defending Catholic orthodoxy against the myriad blasphemies of religious mystics. At what point in his life, Patrick wondered, did he walk away from dialectics to pursue pure science? Maybe he experienced some kind of epiphany when he realized that God could be more readily grasped by using microscopes instead of memorizing the catechism. After all, wasn't it possible that a young man with one set of ideas can as he grows older become a different person with an entirely new set of ideas? But Patrick also understood that the universe was essentially static and that everybody in it was headed toward one ineluctable destiny. Some people sensed this and never changed. Like Patrick. His fate was carved on stone tablets. Long ago he'd come to the conclusion that some people were Creators and others Destroyers, like the Ancient of Days who once thundered, "I will smite your whole territory with frogs, which will come up and go into your house and into your bedroom and into your bed and into the houses of your servants and into your ovens and into your kneading bowls," and Patrick, like his god, was that uniquely American thing--a sociopath, a monster capable of unimaginable and senseless destruction.

A police cruiser rolled by, and he knew he couldn't say for very long without arousing suspicion. As quietly as possible he began to tear pages from Father Flannigan's book and placed them one by one underneath the homeless man. Then he removed the bottle of lighter fluid from the paper bag, tore off the cellophane wrapper along the perforated edge, flicked open the red cap with his thumb and squeezed the sides of the bottle, sending a perfect parabola of fluid arcing across the darkness, dousing the man as he slept. Patrick took in the sour chemical smell, then searched his pockets for the book of matches that he'd swiped from the principal's office earlier that afternoon.

The man lifted his head. "What's that?"

Patrick smiled, put the bottle of lighter fluid in the man's hand.

"What's this here?" He tried to drink from it. "What you up to anyhow?"

"It's alright. Go back to sleep."

"Tastes funny."

"Sleep. Rest."

"A nice gentleman like you. Maybe you can spare a dollar."

"Mmmm."

"A nice gentleman."

Patrick lifted the matchbook cover, waited for the wind to die down, five seconds, ten second, twenty, he would be patient, thirty, all the while the man continued pawing at him but was utterly incapable of lifting his body, his torso pinned to the bench with a bellyful of whiskey, then everything was suddenly still, the wind vanished as though sealed up tight in a bottle. The clouds parted. Moonlight flooded the park. Patrick struck a match and held the weak flame to the newspapers, to the loose threads dangling from the man's cuffs, to the pages of Father Flannigan's book, the book no one ever read or would ever read again. Sparks soared heavenward, flames licked the sky, a burnt offering. The man screamed, begged for mercy. Grease sizzled in his hair. He rolled off the bench onto the packed snow where he hissed like a smoldering log.

Near the corner a bus screeched to a stop. Patrick ran to catch it. The driver stared straight ahead, mesmerized by the lines in the road, oblivious to the conflagration in the park. After handing him the fare Patrick took a seat near the back of the bus and closed his eyes. Outside, the wind picked back up. It sounded strange and shrill like the cries of a being not quite terrestrial in its origin, a thing dreamed up late at night but never imagined during the day.

Almost instantly he was bored and wished he'd saved at least a few of the pages because, as the principal was fond of saying, even the worst books had something useful to teach. But worse than boredom, he dreaded the moment when he would arrive home only to find his parents asleep on the couch, their bottles of vodka and vermouth resting peacefully beside each other on the floor. On the coffee table he would find the half eaten cake and he would smell the celebratory fragrance of blown out candles still lingering in the room. He would kiss his mother and father, wish them sweet dreams as he always did, and then retreat to his room, the sanctum sanctorum where night after night he sat at a small desk by the window overlooking the busy street and hatched his plans for the next day's ordeal.

© Kevin P. Keating
Kevin's essays and fiction have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Avatar Review, The Stickman Review, Underground Voices, Smokebox, Fringe, Perigee, Megaera, Double Dare Press, Identity Theory, Plum Ruby Review, Fiction Warehouse, Fifth Street Review, Juked, The Oklahoma Review, Slow Trains, Numb Magazine, Tattoo Highway, Exquisite Corpse, Thunder Sandwich, and many others. Much of his work may be seen at kevinpkeating.blogspot.com. He currently teach English at Baldwin-Wallace College in Cleveland, Ohio.
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