Angels

by Denis Johnson

  It was Fredericks’s understanding that the prisoners had a story: that each night for months, at nine precisely, a light had burned in a window in the town, where the men on one cellblock’s upper tier could see it and wonder, and imagine, each one, that it shone for him alone. But that was just a story, something that people will tell themselves, something to pass the time it takes for the violence inside a man to wear him away, or to be consumed itself, depending on who is the candle and who is the light.