I am cleaning my office. This sucks.  Right now, I am taking a break. Yet, I do find all sorts of fun stuff when I “organize” my life. I found this torn out page from a New Yorker. The date is December 25, 2006-January 1, 2007. Otherwise, all I have is the last page of a story that clearly moved me, in particular the ending (good job, mystery author) and I remember these lines filled a carved spot inside me at the time:

Existence in the here and now only made me realize how much attraction the past exerts.

Anyone who can figure out who wrote this story and the title of the story, is welcome to a package of books from my office-cleaning moment. Here’s the last paragraph in full (which doesn’t contain that resonating sentence but is a very nice last graph):

I could see from the house of my mind the  alley, from the alley the street leading to the edge of town, its farthest boundary the lucid silence of the dead. Between the graves my path, and along that path her back door, her face, her timeless bed, and the lost architecture of her bones. I turned over and made myself comfortable in the wild crush of burdock. A bee or two hummed in the drowsy air. The swarm had left the rubble, and their new home stretched far beneath the earth. The bees were busy in the graveyard right now, filling the skulls with white combs and coffins with sweet black honey.