Liars and Saints

There were many things about Elizabeth Ferguson that the people of Bayview disliked. They thought her tall, too thin, too aloof. Her neck was too long and her breasts were too big. The men, who could have lived with the size of her breasts, found her unwilling to flirt and labeled her cold. The women were jealous of how well her clothes hung on her, and that she managed to look elegant in outfits that would have made them look like the bag ladies of late autumn. She said little in town unless spoken to, in which case she had the gall to be civil and clever. They distrusted her because her husband and parents were dead and because she called herself Elizabeth instead of Lisa or Betsy or Liz. In a town where the sole taxi driver delivered pints at breakfast to a dozen people, a town where alcohol was the cornerstone of all civic and social endeavor, they did not like that she could drink so much at the bar without becoming sloppy or degenerate. They found it alarming when, in the market ...

All night the rain fell on Arlington Park. The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flowering in the arid starlit sky. They came over the English countryside, sunk in its muddled sleep. They came over the low, populous hills where scatterings of lights throbbed in the darkness. At midnight they reached the city, valiantly glittering in its shallow provincial basin. Unseen, they grew like a second city overhead, thickening, expanding, throwing up their savage monuments, their monstrous, unpeopled palaces of cloud. In Arlington Park, people were sleeping. Here and there the houses showed an orange square of light. Cars crept along the deserted roads. A cat leapt from a wall, pouring itself down into the shadows. Silently the clouds filled the sky. The wind picked up. It faintly stirred the branches of the trees, and in the dark, empty park swings moved back and forth a little. A handful of dried leaves shuffled on th...