Stepping out of his car, Oscar stands, listless and cat-like, delight in his easy swagger. And dark, too, even in the waning daylight: the sun setting low, imbuing the now-collapsing horizon with warm colors such as the vermillions and the violets, making room for twilight’s encroachment. Washed with such colors, slanting prettily across his polished footwear: when he tip-taps across the driveway’s immaculately smooth asphalt, his heels catches the gloaming. It appears as though he’s on fire, he might be infernal.

Long languid fingers slide along the hood of his car, only to momentarily pause: outside his periphery, his neighbor is watering the manicured hedges that separates their respective properties.

He takes this chance to initiate conversation: it is normal, after all, and Oscar is exactly that to the naked eye—normal. Raising his chin a slight modicum, enough to mystify where his gaze settles upon: is it the sunset gutted and bleeding across the skies, or is it the fleeting vision of his wife before she sharply closes the curtains?

“Lovely sight, ain’t she?” He smiles. It is almost, but not quite, instinct now. “The golden hour never fails to deliver.”

He does not lie, and yet here he is in a perpetual state of doing so—wearing the skin of an obsequious, obedient husband in the American backdrop of southern humdrum.

Such a Hell would not exist if it weren’t lovely once. Why would anyone birth paradise without redemption, plagued by madness and pestilence?