Dept. of Vivid Description
From this week’s New Yorker fiction:
He walked up the flag steps, through the unlocked door, and into a broad hall. It was an echoing house of frighteningly tall rooms that smelled of emptiness and mouse droppings. The place hadn’t been painted in many decades, though the last occupants had left it relatively clean. The lightless kitchen, something added a hundred years after the place was built, contained a gassy-smelling stove and a badly chipped sink. Upstairs, four vast rooms opened off a wide hall, and a door led up to an attic crossed with naked cypress beams. Above that perched a glassed-in belvedere, unbearably hot, where he could look out over long flat plots of woods that had once been cotton fields. He imagined pickers dragging their bags slowly across the steaming landscape and understood whose labor had built the house. The roof was iron, and it looked to be sound, though storm-dented and running with rust.
– Tim Gautreaux, Idols
