He felt it at the edges of his world, the persistent sorrow, stalking him like some raw-boned animal. But it was not sorrow over the death of his father, as he expected. In fact, he didn’t think about his dead father very much. It wasn’t that he had not loved his father. Soot knew that he loved his father and, sometimes, he missed him. But, hour by hour it seemed, Soot’s memory gave up just a little bit of what it held of his father. It was as if the death of his father was too much for his mind to hold on to, and so it gave it up, little by little, in the hopes of saving itself.
