Stat

Write your poems, keep them in a desk drawer and be upset as a ghost in 70 years when they're published posthumously. Also, you're a sea captain. Captain of the Sea.

And so the slow burn set in, not during the broil of the furnace, but instead as night set and the moon washed black. A bread baked after the house cooled.

And with the arrival of the bright orb a brief period of happiness began, noticeable at first by the acute, pert stiffness of activity, and followed by the happy wilt: It would not last forever, but forever would be here for at least a short time.