The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

They'd put an awning up over the gravesite but the weather was all sideways and it did no good.

I just meant I'd seen things I'd as soon not of. I know it. There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I don't know . Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back.

Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

Each leaf he passed he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.

The lights of Knoxville quaked in a faint penumbra to the west as must the ruins of many an older city seen by herders in the hills, by barbaric tribesmen shuffling along the roads.

This night, thy soul may be required of thee.

His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel. He

The frailty of everything revealed at last.

Mire, mire! called the man. He was fishing about in his pockets and soon he was juggling four small wooden balls in front of Glanton's horse. The horse snorted and lifted its head and Glanton leaned over the saddle and spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Aint that the drizzlin shits, he said.

Normal people live distracted, rarely fully present. Weird people silence the distractions and remain fully in the moment.

Time went on grey, uncloured, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape unrolled beside her.