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have edges anymore? And did it matter if it didn’t? A loud pop came, then another, breaking the silence inside Sebastion. No, came the answer to his questions, both of them. The world didn’t have edges. And edges didn’t matter. Be damned if we can’t get used to any ol’ thing. Fade Away Divine. Still tryin’ Purple Lion. Just make it stop. Pleaseohpleaseohplease just make it stop. Both bodies, his and the enormous one that contained him, felt the jolt. It tore through them, and they teetered backward—
    (Just make it stop)
    —Backward over the brink.
     
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    In the bathroom, sitting in its cold puddle of stray tub water, the glass tumbler existed undisturbed. But the two cubes of ice within shifted inexplicably, as ice cubes will do for some reason. They collided together, with a set of small clinks, then eased further down inside the glass. They settled on an angle, points pushing against the base of the glass, points pushing against one another. The tiny measure of heat generated by their movement caused them each to begin melting into the other and they became one chunk of ice with two arms.
     
     
    II. The Default Color for Pain
     
     
    A crow used to visit Sebastion by his bedroom window, used to perch on a bare tree branch where the boy could see it as he lay in bed, under his blue bedspread. Black and shiny, it would cock its head this way and that, and it would stay there for a while, as Sebastion looked on. When he was younger, he would speak to it, “ CawCAWCawCAW—C—A—W—Caw .” But as he grew older, he just lay in silence and watched it. Inevitably, as he became tired and as his eyes sagged with the day’s fatigue, the crow would flutter away, suddenly and without warning, leaving a dark branch to bob slightly against a backdrop of night. He named that bird, called it Oliver.
     
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    The year that Sebastion came into the world was a terrible, hideous and difficult one for his parents when tragedy after tragedy seemed to occur. They had been married for only a year: Sadie Nadine, his mom, and Oliver Warren, his dad. Amid a flapping storm of controversy which he called unsubstantiated, Oliver was let go from a major financial firm and with the papers for the house already signed, income became the holiest of grails in the Redfield home. With money on his mind, his first reaction to Sadie’s impending motherhood was one of apprehension, disgust even. He had not planned for this.
    That same year, Samuel McArthur, Sadie’s dad, finally lost his battle with the bottle. His wife, Beatrice, had found Pop Sammy in the barn of their pig farm north of Edan, in a bale of hay. He had collapsed, had fallen from the loft and smashed a bottle of scotch across his forehead. But it wasn’t the fall that killed him, though it had surely helped. No, he had been drinking since the early part of the sixties and his liver was a black dead spot next to his stomach. The poison had stretched to his furthest extremities. And though he had gone to see the doctor on numerous occasions and had been diagnosed properly, he refused hospitalization. His stubbornness left him a pale, yellowed corpse with chaff pasted to his drawn face by the same sticky alcohol that would have been on his last breath.
    Beatrice had stumbled across her husband while their breakfast of ham and eggs sizzled in a fry pan on the stove top. Bereft, grief-stricken and lost, she downed a handful of iron pills later that morning from a bottle over the bathroom sink and chased that with thirty or so pills of Doxepan—a more powerful ancestor of Prozac. She was dead in an hour. A boy who delivered groceries to the McArthur farm discovered them, her in an open bathrobe laying half-nude near the toilet in a puddle of vomit, and he out in a pile of hay in the barn as the pigs snuffled and scuttled about. The news found its way to the tan telephone with gray buttons on the kitchen wall of the Redfield house in Vaughan. This was the