On the first day she slipped poison into her mother’s food and sat tenderly by the old woman’s bedside as she gasped and choked her way into peaceful death. She cried a little when it was over.

On the second day she caught her brother as he came walking along the bridge and slipped him over the edge. He fell silently, and the green waters below swallowed him whole.

On the third day she took her children for a walk in the woods and lost them. Seven teams worked for months combing the hills and brought them back again, identifiable only by the bracelets they wore, identical like they were. She cried and cried over their bones, wept like a dam spinning turbines.

She saved her husband for last, drawing out his death like an orgasm, edging closer and closer without ever quite slipping over. When he died he was blue as a berry, and the white flowering of her thumbprints stayed on his skin for days.

She counted them to herself as her own life spun down to its close, beginning again when she ended, names clicking through her fingers like rosary beads, structured like prayers.

Outside the rain is pouring down in sheets. Sylvia has had too much to drink and is taking it out on her nearest and dearest.

“I think you’ve had enough,” says Roger. Roger does everything icily – he’s an intellectual – but he’s at his absolutely frostiest now. The rest of the family is paralyzed.

“Oh?” Sylvia slams her hands flat on the table, and presses down until the joints pop. Her eyes aren’t tracking together, but she’s precise in her movements. “Let me tell you something, Roger. Let me tell you about having enough. Let me tell you, Roger –”

His eyes have gone empty as a salt desert and his knuckles are white around the bone handle of his steak knife. “Sylvia,” he says, warning, just as the lights go out. There’s a scream, high pitched and eerie. Lightning flashes into the room, pinning everyone against the walls.

When the lights come back up, Roger is alone in the room. The French windows are open and the rain has soaked his shirt. The pool at his feet is red, and spreading. “I,” he says, and “Sylvia,” and his voice is warm and human.

Outside the front door cars approach, bearing news and family, bastards all, demons, wild men and bloody, and aye their women. We gather, the clans, to celebrate, to eulogize, to curse and rage against the end of life, to remember, and, at last, to make peace. To forget. Our father is dead, but not buried, and so we have come to the ancient home, immemorial, incestuous, ingrown seat of plenty, to indulge in expensive liquor and cheap badinage.

The bell in the Catholic church rings, ten, twelve, fifteen times, warning of the storm approaching. Drama, drama. One of Terry’s wolfhounds comes padding from the direction of the library and I aim a kick at it, which through long practice it avoids.

“You’re in a foul mood,” says Terry, trailing behind it. “But don’t take it out on my dogs, poor brutes.”

“Damn your dogs, and damn you, too.”

His eyes are cool, but there are lines around his mouth that lengthen in anger. Oh, he’s a cool one, my brother, self-contained. I would beat him and drive him to passion but he is stronger than I am, four inches taller and forty pounds heavier. “How much have you had to drink?”

“Are you keeping score, now? Are you your brother’s keeper? This false piety –“

“Enough!” And for a moment his hands shake and I see the wild hatred hidden in the planes of his face and would dance if I could.