He pulled himself away from the riddle that was left of the living room. Walking further into the house, as if awake before he had intended and faced with the discomfort of grogginess, he looked for a place that hadn’t been completely dismantled. Passed the shallow dining room with its unending pattern of antique-rose, flowered wallpaper that shown in the dim light, which forced its way in under the drawn shades of the curtainless windows, without the large oak table and chairs (six of them that nearly touched the walls whenever anyone got up), looked regrettable. Passed the long, narrow hallway that seemed too great a distance to walk to get to the two small bedrooms whose neat vacancy would have betrayed the fact that children ever entered there were it not for the leavings of a toy part, broken crayon, barrette, or ribbon scattered across the floor. Into the kitchen where everything except for the stove and breakfast table, with its mismatched chairs, had been hauled away.                                  

            Lincoln dragged one of the chairs from across the room and sat down at the table. There, out of stark silence, he noticed the late autumn light of mid-day afternoon appearing in the window, amazed by its poetry: a haunting refraction glowing against the brittle discoloration of life. A calm beauty that could never fully be admired. Not even by the most romantic fool. For he knew a weltering destruction dwelt beneath such elegance—a rotting vigor that precedes every perilous change, when life exerts its last faint glimmer before succumbing to deadly winter. Lincoln felt the severity of that turmoil coil around his spine and threaten to cut-off any feeling.