Excerpts in Limbo, Vol. 3

Tom steps out of the bar, his face suddenly swathed in the yellow-ochre light of the streetlamp. Yellow-ochre is the color of this country, he thinks. Terracotta. The heat makes the world fuzzy. His brain, bathed in a loose veil of red wine and whatever the Italian football players got him to drink, seems to clunk along behind him like a dumb animal. “Catch up, you idiot,” he says half out loud. “Put your hand in your pocket and find your keys,” he says. His feet shuffle along the brick sidewalk. “Make yourself a list if you need to,” he says, again out loud, to the streetlamps, to the slice of barely-visible moon. “You are going home alone.” And then, almost as an afterthought, almost unspoken: “And you aren’t as drunk as you’re acting.”