Dog: We had bought The Art of Raising a Puppy by the Monks of Skeate, and it sat like an ironic reminder on the lower shelf of the coffee table, its cover half chewed off with a puppy’s zeal.

Sock: Her husband had left for the weekend.† In the bedroom he left behind a tossed off pair of jeans and a single sock trailing across the floor, like a lost soldier in a war zone. She walked into the room and thought that this must be what psychologists talked about when they talked about the remnants of the recently deceased that drove the living to suicidal despair. It was the kind of detritus of life that makes one feel that another human being was just there, just breathing, just making a mess. The neatnicks would not get the same level of sympathy when they died, she thought, startled, wondering if she should pick up he clothes or leave them.

Books: Sometimes, particularly around the summers when his nephews would drop in for a weekend or a week, he would start to worry that his apartment had become a collection of his lifetime of failures.† To be sure, there were chic vases and tomes of Proust and Faulkner on his bookshelves, which he thought were just the thing to make young boys harbor a secret respect for their elders.† But then there were the books he’d bought when he turned 40 and would wake up, middle of the night, terrified of his own middling existence.† There were his divorce books, his spiritual meditation books, his books on aging, on hair-loss and tooth-whitening, and one recent addition called “The Perfect Resting Place: How to Select a Nursing Home Before Your Loved Ones Have To”.† He had picked each of them in earnest, and read them, for the most part, with some interest.† But as he waited for the doorbell to ring with two twenty-something boys on the other side of the door, everything in his apartment seemed a terrifically misguided attempt at a kind of self-assuring comfort that one could only pity in its aftermath.† He sat in his chair and fretted.

Bike: She’d insisted that we take his bike, spray-paint it white, and lock it up on the corner of Main street and Damascus. We did not have the heart to tell her that that was something one did for a loved one killed while riding a bike. We took the bike out back, and the walked it quietly to the center of town and chained it to a lamppost.† When we came back the following morning we found a crushed coke can and a gum-wrapper in the basket that he had neatly affixed to the handlebars.

Rooms: There were times when the silence was so grating, so overwhelmingly present, that it would seem to swallow all hope, like a chill that sneaks up on the crocuses in April.† But there were also times when her solitude was soft and pliable.† It enveloped her wholly in its murmur – the radiator hiss, cars in the street, the neighbors taking the trashcans to the curb – and she let herself explore it, walking from one room to another, wondering at first if this was a mistake – if the chill would return as suddenly as it left – and growing gradually more comfortable, letting an inner monologue fill the empty spaces in her mind.