by Brian Post
From a little after dusk until the late night time blackness like an ink pot that had spilled all over the earth Quentin sat in what the Harvard people called his dormitory room but what he felt was more like a prison with its plain furnishings and bar-covered windows because sometimes when college students like himself became saturated with the continued absurdity of the literature they were forced to read the windows would be opened and they would jump from the second or third story rooms and plunge to the ground below and the light that he read by was nothing more than a simple candle casting an eerie luminescence and creating the shadows that were his only companions. The novel (and it is called a novel only because some scholarly types thought it should be called so and they also thought it was this author's greatest work but it is hardly worthy of being called a novel--more like rubbish) was a leather-bound volume that was worn and faded like a handrail on old stairs that had been touched many times by many people and forgotten immediately after the encounter and the pages were becoming yellowed with age but they were still intact because even the moths and termites and other insects would not dare to feast on the matter. Quentin struggled with the mystery of why anyone would read this unless like himself they had been assigned to read it and while he rolled this thought over and over in his mind he wished he could bury this book just like he wished he could finally bury the thoughts about the old, dead south that had occupied his consciousness for the longest amount of time.