Rays of sun catch the dust clouding the air and become beams of golden fog. The small room is armpit warm and reeks of mildewed cardboard. Skad sits on the floor with his legs stretched out. He's stopped kneeling because the inflammation and pain grew intolerable. He sifts through boxes containing the last remnants of a time that no longer exists.

He's lost in albums of old photographs. Faded black and white images reveal relatives he's only ever known from these heavy stock pages. Everyone is a generation or more before his time. More than once, his mother sat with him and went through them all pointing out who each person was. But the memories are gone, so he examines faces and guesses which side of the family each book belongs to.

Every person he sees is dead and so completely forgotten that once he and Ed go, no one will even remember these pictures exist. When the last of the Skaddings have joined the people in these photos, the albums will be nothing but trash. The camera has carved up slices of their souls and preserved them on slides, but one day soon someone — Lil' Carol perhaps — will haul them out of the house and send them off to the dump.

It's inevitable.

We are particles of dust caught in the act of remembering we're nothing but dust, he thinks.

Downstairs, the phone rings. Skad slams the album he's holding shut and drops it back in the box. Sweat burns his eyes, and he wipes it away with a sleeve grown wet from the repetition of the act.

The carton grinds dirt into the wood floor when he slides it out of the way. The flaps of the nextone peel back to reveal a stack of old wall calendars. They're freebies from banks and other institutions hoping to incubate warm feelings with banal pictures of trite scenes. Pages have been clipped out and they no longer hold together. The months fan-out between the covers dogeared and yellowed. His mother salvaged the kitschy art to decorate the walls. Skad threw the framed prints out but for some reason hadn't been able to part with these.

He flips to a random page. The fourth of July, 1970, has the redundant notation: "BBQ" in blue ballpoint. Skipping ahead to September, he learns Ed had a doctor's appointment on the third and school started back on the eighth. The twenty-first of November is circled and is inscribed with: "Bon fȇte, Bobby. Je t'aime!"

He sorts the calendars chronologically and stacks them next to the box. Somewhere along the way, the phone gives up on ringing. For the time being.

At the bottom of the box, is more family photos. These are of a recent vintage and are piled in a scattered heap. Black and whites are mixed with bleached out colors. The images document his mother's life before she married a brutish mill worker who planted babies in her belly and Shanghaied her to this backwoods hellhole.

He holds one up. "You see this, cat," he says to his little friend. "This was taken at grandmere's down in Manchester." The house is a gray blur in the background. The family is congregated around a massive black convertible with Skad's grandfather behind the wheel. A pipe is gripped in his wide smile and a black Lincoln beard covers his chin. "The three brats in the back seat are Uncle Jacque, Jean-Pierre, and Henri. Jacque and Henri died in Korea. Jean-Pierre ran off with a divorce twice his own age. Quite the scandal. He was disowned and last heard was living in Argentina. Lucky him. Along the side with my grandmother are my aunts. Thérèse childbirth. Gabrielle cancer." He pronounces their deaths in a flat voice. Then points to the teenage girl standing on the running-board, wearing a dress so white it seems to glow. The apparent purity of it suggests the picture may have been taken after her confirmation. "That's my mother. Even then you could tell she was going to be a looker."

Skad draws the photo close to his eyes and runs a finger down the length of the girl's image. In that dress with her blonde hair cascading out behind her, it stirs something in him, a connection, a resemblance. But it hovers out of grasp.

Words escape from his tight throat in a thin trickle. "She was a beautiful woman." He puts it back in the pile with the others and moves on, searching deeper into the heap of relics.

When at last, he has the battered old cigar box in his hands, he smiles. This is what he's been looking for. It's nothing fancy, pressed cardboard instead of cedar, a bit of twine held it shut instead of a brass clasp. The brand is about the cheapest smoke available in the day. When it opens the stink of the stogies it once held wafts into the air, an evil genie with a sordid past. Inside is dad's .45 revolver. A handful of bullets spills out and rolls about the floor.

"Hey, cat. What do you know? It's here like Ed said."

Skad holds the gun up to the cold white light coming through the window. The black barrel gleams as though recently polished but the actual condition can't be made out. Beyond the shaft of light from outside, all is blackness and shadows in the room.

His legs are numb and stiff and it's a struggle to get on his feet. Night has crept in. The house on the hill has every bulb burning and is blinding against the darkness.

Where has the time gone? It was the middle of the afternoon a moment ago. Had he slept the day away? Slipped into unconsciousness without knowing it, encouraged by the heat? He's been so tired, it would be good if he had. But he has no sense of having rested.

The boxes at his feet are only revealed by the distant glow catching their edges. He glances at the piles of junk and the neat stack of calendars. Nothing else is apparent.

"Cat? Where are you? Minou? Minou?"

Except, Skad would never let filthy vermin in his house. And yet he was sure the stupid cat had been with him.

Framed in the window, the house gleams with modernity. He aims the pistol. The hammer falls on an empty chamber. A metallic click echoes in the empty room.