Alfred Fluke might have been good-looking in past years. He was slender and tall and his thistle-brown hair was still full, but the veins stood out wormy on his temples and the skin beneath his milky blue eyes flattened against his bones, forming grey, crescent-shaped concavities rimmed with orbs of hanging flesh, such that Stait was reminded of the faces of dead people he’d seen in the war.

“I’m going to kill you,” he told him.

When Moths Burn, coming December, 2019