He blurred his then and his now—in a fantastic drunken distortion—with the thinness and thinness of now and before, respectively; wisps of Burke with Jane infiltrated him without her, the way dry oars still taste of salt. And it made Burke trace Jane’s silhouette in his bedsheets with his lips, wondering if his sadness and loneliness was of any import to the grander human comedy, like the swooning soul of Joyce’s Gabriel, lost amidst a universe of snow—because, in small, unnoticeable ways, must not the sea taste of oars?

Growth