Excerpt: A Night So Clear

"I found myself giving in to the urge to look at the photographs. Flipping through them, one after another, I was taken aback by how many of them had been taken by Verity. She really had been a prolific paparazzo in her youth. There were photographs of objects; my old brown Ford Bronco, the Welcome to Wisten Hills sign and the corresponding Thank You For Visiting one, those little chubby pops in a camping cooler, a John Deere tractor, a single shaft of wheat held in the palm of a hand, a television with a fuzzy image of a far-away place, a blue mug filled to the brim with coffee on a yellow table, a month’s work of newspapers stacked to show their front-page headlines, a broken pane of glass, a snowman melting in the sun, a pair of green high-tops battered by the teeth of a dog, and a rock shaped like a heart. There were also pictures of people; Marion in the fall parade on the leading float, our high school principle, the man who lived on Berry Street, a boy whose name I cannot remember, Mrs. Ipsky’s niece, a gas station attendant, a policeman, a diner waitress, and a fuzzy blur of unrecognizable limbs.
I toyed, for a few moments I confess, with burning some of the images. I have heard that fire and burning objects is particularly cathartic. However, I doubt it somewhat, because it was told to me by my father more than a few years past as his justification as to why smoking was healthy.

'Daniel,' my father told me, 'Danny-boy, don’t ever knock my habit. There’s all these doctors out there rumbling about how bad it is; how they want to ban me from smoking in restaurants and buildings. Well, I’ll tell you, those doctors don’t know shit. My smokes are better for my health than any of their meds. There’s something… something…oh what’s the word I’m looking for? Like relieving stress…'

'Cathartic?' I had replied.

'Yeah, sure cathartic! You know your teachers down at that school don’t give you enough credit for being smart. There’s something cathartic about smoking, son. I mean just think about it… All those Vikings and Romans and shit, they burned things when they were sad and then they felt better. Well me, I light up a smoke and it burns, and I feel better. I don’t need any of those wacky shrink pills as long as I have my smokes.' "