The Distinguished Precipice

From the March 2011 edition Berg Gasse 19 Magazine

On the afternoon of his eighteenth birthday, Tom Wentworth is summoned to the principal’s office where there awaits a quorum of priests, eleven in all, faded men in high backed chairs whose arthritic fingers fumble with the books of matches piled high in ashtrays stationed at every corner of the room like bowls of holy water at the entranceway to the school chapel. The office is a precise space--tidy, carefully curated, scrupulously scrubbed and polished--and the priests sit hunched and pensive in the tapering shafts of prismatic light like stone icons, their eyes fixed not on the door but on the branches of the ancient elms and sycamores that scratch at the windowpanes like shunned souls contending with one another to claw their way into Paradise.

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