The black cat is making a habit of sharing in his lunch. The little bastard has grown bold, and if it still had any fear of Skad, the tuna fish sandwich wipes it away. It leaps onto the table and stares with its bright green eyes at the man and the meal.

The image of Angeline coats Skad's eyes like cataracts, and when he notices the cat waiting for a handout, he isn't sure how long it's been there.

It's impossible that Angeline appeared to him last night. The dead stay dead. Even in his paintings, the living-dead were metaphors— reflections of those still breathing but not truly living. Death marks the end. It's the terminus. Life has to be fought for and clung to because there is nothing else.

Except, he'd seen her.

If anyone had the right to haunt him it was Angeline.

They'd made so many plans together. She was going to come and join him once he got set up in the city. He'd go first and get a place near campus, then come back for her so she wouldn't have to scrabble for an existence in squalid, little Lake Sauvage. All that awaited her here was a brief stint as a waitress or a hairdresser before becoming a wife and mother. It was pointless to grow up with dreams in this place.

Her parents found out about their ideas and demanded they get married first. Old fashioned bumpkins clinging to a morality they didn't even comprehend. But he'd agreed. He actually wanted to go through with it. Imagine that. If he was going to spend his life with anyone it was Angeline. They were to get married over the holidays and then go off together.

Lots of plans and they all began with him going to her house for a goodbye dinner. Her parents had insisted. Angie had favored him with her mischievous little smile that always got her everything she wanted and asked him to humor them. He'd wanted to spend the last night with only the stars, the lake and Angeline for company. In a world filled with no one but the two of them, he could let himself go and tell her all the things he wanted to.

But he told her he'd be at her house for six.

He spent the afternoon packing up the beat up Volvo he'd bought off of Dwight Carmody. He didn't have much worth bringing or even keeping, but he filled the trunk with his books and clothes, his sketch pads and paints. The late August sun danced on the rippling water and a wind blew through the trees dragging autumn in behind it. Almost on a whim, Skad got in the car and drove away. He didn't speak to anyone from his old life until a year later, when he called home and told his mom about the patronage he'd received.

His mom didn't tell him how anyone was doing. He hadn't asked. Not about his family and not about Angeline.

"It was Ed who told me what happened to her," he says to the cat. "Did I ever tell you the story of when he came to visit me? I'd just gotten that wonderful place on Waltham Street It had these tall windows that let in the sun and I'd worked all morning. It tired me out in that good way work sometimes does, where your bones almost feel weighed down by satisfaction. Then Ed had to ring the bell and ruin my whole mood."

Skad gives the cat some of his sandwich, it's eating more of it than he is.

"Ed marches in all scowls calling me a son-of a-bitch. Can you believe it? My younger brother calling me that? When he finally gets past insulting me and ranting about me disappearing, he gets to the point. Tells me she's dead. At first I think mom, who else would get him so riled up. But he eventually spits out Angie died."

His lips draw tight around a cigarette. The lighter shakes when he lights it.

"'Because of you, she's dead,' Ed says." Skad adds a lilt to his voice, mimicking and mocking. "'You abandoned her. Didn't even have the decency to call, but then there's never been anything decent about you.' He went on to tell me how early that summer Angie had gotten drunk and taken some pills. She went out in the middle of the lake and drowned. 'She committed suicide because you couldn't be bothered to pick up the phone.'

"I says to him, 'Are you sure it was suicide? She was never a strong swimmer.'

"Oh, Ed got mad at that. He pushed me up against the wall. In my own house, mind you. He does this in my own house. I was so shocked by his sudden backbone I didn't slug him like I ought to."

Skad breaks off coughing. He's inhaled from the burning filter and it's scorched his throat. The cat retreats to the far edge of the table until his fit is over.

"Turns out they'd been talking. A lot it seems. Made me wonder if it was only talk. If you know what I mean. Maybe Angie tried to soothe her sorrows in the arms of the lesser brother. But no. She never would have with Ed, even if he could have gotten it up. Anyway, she'd mentioned to him not seeing the point in living on more than one occasion. She didn't feel she had anything to live for anymore."

He pushes the plate with his lunch toward the cat and takes out another cigarette but doesn't light it. He runs it through his fingers in a motion mirroring the counting of prayer beads.

"Confronting and raving at me isn't enough for Ed. He wants to show me some godforsaken movie he's made. He actually lugged a stupid 8mm projector with him on the bus all the way to Boston. Thing's black like wrought iron and the size of a birdcage. I put one like it in Parasite Lost No. 8. He says, 'Angie asked me to make it for you. I didn't realize it was her way of talking to you one last time.'

"There was no way in hell I was going to watch such a thing. Sit in the dark and listen to my dead ex tell me what a shit I am. That might be the maudlin thing Ed would do but not me. I tell him to clear out and stop bothering me. And you know what he says? 'What's the matter with you? Look at all these ugly things.' Can you believe he had the gall to call my paintings ugly? Hardly surprising from a man who wouldn't know art if it bit him on the ass.

"He goes on saying, 'They're as ugly as you are. You're filled with ugliness.' His voice all shrill. 'You know why you're obsessed with death? Because you are death.'"

Skad brushes the loose tobacco of his pants leg and tosses the paper into the bushes.

"Oh, Fine words. Big words. Ed was so high and mighty, but let me tell you something." He points at the cat and it rears back but doesn't flee. "Mr. Perfect came to me on my son's funeral and hit me up for money. Pah, first he tells me how sorry he is and he's there for me. Trying to soften me up before launching into the real reason he came. Turns out that company of his, the one he's so proud of, isn't doing too hot. You know they make all sorts of terrible things to anesthetize the population. Gizmos and gadgets that kills people's souls but makes him a profit. Not much of one, as it turns out."

He barks out a laugh at his joke. Ed had tried to explain to him the new nefarious device he was working on, but Skad didn't listen. It's going to be huge. It'll totally turn things around for us and change the entertainment industry as we know it. I'm not asking for a loan but an investment. You'll make earn a fortune from it. I just need a bit of seed money to get a working prototype. The lasers it uses costs a mint. Come on, help me out this one time.

"He looked up at me with this pathetic, simpering face of his, and I said to him, 'I could give you the money but I'm not going to. I love you too much.' I really told him that. Ha! Yeah, I said it. Just to fuck with him, you understand. Then I said, 'If I bail you out now you'll never toughen up.'

"You should have seen his face flush. I thought he was going to belt me right there in front of the casket. But not Ed. He only stormed out. Even after all these years, he still hasn't learned to be a man."

The plate liked clean, the little, black cat jumps off the table and disappears for the rest of the day.