Quick Brown Fox 2012

padded downstairs, settling in the dull brown armchair next to the bookcase with the photo albums. She pulled one into her lap.

Snapshots of San Francisco filled her cold Alaskan night with windy streets and flowers and real people moving through their real lives. She stopped at a picture of her and Mark at a bar years ago. Easy camaraderie, she thought. He looked normal. Certainly not an alarmist then—dressed like a regular person, not yet having donned his customary camo fatigues and heavy boots. Cynicism had not yet become his defining feature.

She flushed, moved to anger at the sight of this imposter.

She blamed him. She blamed herself. Foolish youth. His eccentricities were tolerable when they met—endearing, even. He wooed her with beautiful promises of a life apart, the two of them. The idea was nice: a house in the woods and the breathtaking Alaskan wilderness to fill her inner emptiness. Natural beauty, he crooned, without the distractions and crime and the troubles of city life.

Away. Don’t you want that? He would ask her these things, planting kisses on the freckle on her right ear, whispering sweet snowy nothings, pulling her into his icy web.

She stared at these antiquated, colorful versions of herself.

Once she wore dresses and purchased cranberry heels. She dated men and fell for them, hard, when they promised her things. She ignored the seeds of character flaws: an occasional coldness, a distance. She chose not to notice when they took her for granted and built fortresses to keep themselves from the world.

She slammed the photo album shut and startled Bess, who had long ago crawled into her lap and rested her great scruffy dog head on Lilah’s arm. The clock read 3:42. She had spent three hours reviewing a catalog of her poor life decisions. She walked up the polished wood stairs and into their Spartan bedroom where her husband slept with a pistol under his pillow.

Mark was on the roof early, when the sky was still purple and the air was still cold enough for Bess’s paws to freeze to the porch. He had designed the house for utility, but Lilah had insisted upon the porch. He had whisked her away from civilization, and she wanted to rock, with a mug of tea and a Bernese mountain dog 27