He never talked much at dinner, just kept his head down and toyed with his food, pushing his peas back and forth like beads on an abacus. About ten years older than most of the others, he dressed in slacks and a short-sleeved shirt from Sears. His was not the look of the literati. More so the man who trimmed the shrubbery in the gardens, where the gifted and the endowed took their walks while waiting for inspiration to settle upon them like a golden feather. 

Many of them paired off soon after their arrival, and these dyads floated and joined with other shifting molecules of conversation and activity. He stayed detached, observing, not acting. Locating a bench some distance from his cabin, he spent hours there, unopened notebook under his leg, smoking cigarettes and staring up at the skies of upstate New York. It was beautiful, but a new kind of beauty. Pastoral, nothing like the view from the Santa Monica Pier. He wrote How many species of bloom/varieties of flowers? Then shut the notebook again. How much beauty can one person take, when they’ve watched a waking nightmare for so long? 

He’d brought two cartons of cigarettes and two quarts of bourbon in his suitcase, and wondered how long they would last. He didn’t want to drink in front of the others. They were amateurs, most fresh from MFA programs, and he’d attended one boozy soiree the second weekend, drinking ginger ale while they gibbered in a nearly foreign language. It was best for him to keep to his cabin and write one story this month, about a man balancing on one foot at the end of the world, wondering what to make of all this grace. 

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