Fast Lanes (20 page)

The morning before the service most of the family had been in Coalton, seeing to what is done at a death. I had been alone in the house with the coffin churning what air there was to breathe. I had dressed in best clothes as though for a serious, bleak suitor. The room was just lighted with sunrise, window shades pulled halfway, their cracked sepia lit from behind. One locust began to shrill as I took a first step across the floor; somehow one had gotten into the room. The piercing, fast vibration was very loud in the still morning: suddenly I felt myself smaller, cramped as I bent over Warwick inside his white tent of netting, his whole body afloat below me on the narrow bed, his white shape in the loose bandages seeming to glow in dusk light while beyond the row of open windows hundreds of locusts sang a ferocious pattering. I could scarcely see the parlor anymore. My vision went black for a moment, not black but dark green, like the color of the dusk those July weeks years before.

I wish to thank my editor at Vintage, LuAnn Walther, for suggesting the addition of three previously uncollected stories to this edition of
Fast Lanes
. “Counting,” written in appreciation of the Japanese poet Akutagawa, was first published as a limited edition letterpress book by Annabel Lee’s Vehicle Editions. “Callie” is a memory saved from disappearance, a real-life counterpart to Audrey’s entirely invented voice in “Alma.” That story, first published in
Esquire
, was written as I began work on a novel called
Shelter
. Two of the characters, Lenny and Alma, are sisters, and “Alma” was my first inkling of who they were before they arrived (in the company of numerous other characters) at the isolated rural setting of the novel. As
Shelter
progressed, “Alma” was taken apart, arranged differently throughout a particular section of the book, changed into third person. Numerous readers have asked me to preserve it in its original first-person form.

ALSO BY
J
AYNE
P
HILLIPS
 

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