The Lost General
...dark-orange smell of vegetable soup. Susie only knew how to make two things, vegetable soup and devilled eggs. Staple foods, she called them. Upstairs Carolina could hear the television faintly laughing—another one of those sitcoms Terry liked to watch. Without looking, she knew the scene: he was leaning lazily against the chair, directly in front of a rerun of Seinfeld or Friends, the dim room washed in the blue emanating from the screen. He never really reacted to the shows, never joined in with the laugh track, but he could stay hypnotized up there for hours. Still, whenever Susie went to call him to eat, Carolina would immediately hear the click-gasp of the television shutting off, and his steady footsteps following her sister’s down the three wooden flights. Clunk clunk clunk. Terry had been eating with them a lot more lately, and Susie had started opening bottles of wine that had lay in dusty cellar history only a few months before. Carolina always declined the offers of Chardonnay or Merlot, but the two of them had finished off a few dozen bottles in the last four months. The thin, graceful stems of the wineglasses always seemed out of place next to the plates of macaroni or bowls of soup. They curved up tall and pale, question marks in the middle of an already convoluted sentence. The wind had sett...