A man leaves his house on a busy street in a crowded city. It is mid-afternoon and he has plans to meet his brother at the entrance to a nearby park. Sunny, unhurried day and the leaves chattering in the trees. A chill. Before setting out, he tied his boots, buttoned his jacket and tucked a phone into his pocket. His days have a rhythm to guard against forgetting. He is running a little late, but not so late that he feels the need to text his brother. It’s nice enough. Who wouldn’t welcome an idle moment in the open air, waiting on a sibling’s imminent arrival? He feels a certain looseness to his step as he recounts his routine — close the window before the rain comes, check stove check coffee maker grab keys — and onward.

In the years since he was called to the morgue to identify his colleagues, he has rotated around the sun with a protracted inertia, not incapacitated by their memory so much as encumbered to distraction by the pale details of the scene. It happened to have been his fortieth birthday. He was close to two of the dead, but the others he knew only in passing.

His family expected little of him and were not surprised when he failed to return their correspondences, when he dropped off the map, folded in upon himself, took his leave. He was not saddened by the deaths we all endure. He had, even by the time the others drew their last breaths, sewn the loss into the fabric of his own life, and had merged his own into the edge of the frame.

This released him to settle into other concerns, including the tending of tomato plants in pots on the balcony — they get sun most of the day there and the squirrels find it hard to scale the brickwork to snatch the ripening green globes off their branches.