Overture


When I was a boy, I loved to draw. It irritated my mom, who would ask in a dread voice why I was wasting paper. We lived on Dunsinane Drive, named for Macbeth’s gloomy Scottish castle by a home builder obsessed with Shakespeare. My dad had done okay in business until the Koreans undersold him. Then there wasn’t money for clothes or meat meals or the dentist. I still habitually probe with my tongue the spaces where teeth are missing. Maybe no one grows up unscarred. Cows, slow-moving, banal animals Hindus venerate as sacred, plod through streets of blackened ruins.