Nicholaus Patnaude

“This is my one last call and lullaby for this eternity. All of my medicine.”

“And maybe one winter it will get too cold and I’ll forget about the summers we once shared. My family portrait mightfold in too, producing the same horrific effect as Jeremy’s: that I, all along, had another sibling who eclipsed and became me—a prosperous sibling, an imposturous sibling, who outgrew a sense of time and place in which the three of us were everything to one another. Then only my blood in the sea could unfold and lead me back out of the origami.”

“Once upon a time Karen saw somebody nobody else could see. She thought to ask an old man: who were you? Once upon a time I thought to dream of medicine. Now I dream of medicine by the sea.”

“The world was alive, the sky descending; our times were lullabies and sad goodbyes.”