Ann Tashi Slater

He is walking now. Nights, he reads from the 17th-century pilgrim poet Basho, a volume given to him by his father that he salvaged from the wreckage of the house. He’d held on to his father for as long as he could but then was alone, clinging to a sodden beam. He fell from time to time into a narcotic sleep but mostly just gazed up through the roof at the robin’s egg blue of the spring sky, studied the steady peregrination of the stars and planets through the long night...