He imagines Albert Camus weeping into a bowl of Cheerios. He imagines the Algerian flag noosed around his neck. Yellow light cuts through a cracked window, dust motes, the whole bit. Somewhere nearby, a ridiculously slow waltz is playing on a phonograph, with a pop that repeats with every rotation. A bottle of rancid wine sits on the mantel; from the ashtrays cinders bloom like mushrooms. There is a corpse in every house in this town, some talking, others silent.
He doesn’t know much about Camus, of course. Just the play he was assigned to read in college. And a book, later, where a whole town died, or might as well have died, and something about Jean-Paul Sartre and how much they loved and hated one another. Spare him the details of the road to Paris, the crash, how absurd it was to die with the new year just begun. It is simply too much, too much to bear.
Robert L. Penick’s work has appeared in over 100 different literary journals, including The Hudson Review, North American Review, and The California Quarterly. He lives in Louisville, KY, USA, with his free-range box turtle, Sheldon, and he edits Ristau, a tiny literary annual.