His skin didn’t age: it retained all its youthful elasticity, its spring, and never fell, though his bones and joints were wizened, his heart shrunken against its beating, his brain withdrawn from memory and feeling as from a long-despised drug.

She was as vital as a child—full of a surprising sensuality, surprised by it always, but still a child in passions and play. And yet the sun had scored her skin with deep, clustering lines and branches and stories. Every mountain pass and peak was written there, every deep dusk sail and cobbled walk recorded in cells, engraved, an album of her days, a composite of all the lives she’d lived around his silence and solitude. Continue reading…