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rather typical of the neighbourhood. The façade was mostly clapboard painted white with brick facing along the bottom. A few flowering shrubs had been planted beneath the living-room window. The house was perched at the top of a slight incline and the lawn rolled gently down to street level. A blue Hyundai was parked in the driveway. The house was dark. The walkway and front steps were littered with carnations and roses and a large wreath — about five feet across — had been laid in the middle of the grass. After more than a week these memorial tokens were beginning to show their age, and the air smelled of decay.
    I approached the front door, stepping among the rotting flowers, to read the notes that people had left. A few of these had been rendered illegible by recent rainfall, but others were preserved in plastic. “To my best friend, killed tragically, rest in peace,” I read, with no clue to which of the Siddiquis it referred. Other notes conveyed similar sentiments, some addressed to the whole family, some to individual members.
    After reading the notes, I waited for someone to come along and demand what I was doing here. There didn't seem to be any reason to stay, but I put off my departure more than once. As the minutes went by I felt a sense of liberation, as if I had established a right to be on the property. To kill time, I gathered some of the fresher flowers into a small bouquet and propped it against the railing. I peered through the window of the front door, but in the gathering dark could not make out any detail. Across the street the boys were still throwing the football back and forth, but their numbers had dwindled and the dog was gone. Otherwise the street and sidewalks were empty.
    I crossed the lawn to the side of the house and followed a concrete path around to the back. There was a fence, but the gate opened when I tried it, revealing an intricately landscaped and spacious back yard filled with bushes, beds of plants and varieties of dwarf evergreens. A portion of the yard had been levelled and laid with brick to make a patio, where they kept the outdoor furniture and a portable barbecue. The fence was about seven feet high and closed in the yard on all sides.
    All was quiet except for the distant drone of television voices and the occasional rumble of a car passing in the street. I sat in one of the plastic lawn chairs. The sky dimmed and grew dark as I watched, and everywhere shadows deepened and objects lost their definition. In a short time stars became visible overhead. I heard voices from somewhere beyond the fence, a man and a woman talking. The conversation was desultory, filled with pauses. I could not make out any of the words, and yet from the tone I could tell it was not an argument or even a discussion of some topic in particular. It was as if each spoke simply to hear the voice of the other and be comforted by it. One let drop a comment, and after a moment the other picked it up. I imagined a married couple seated beneath the light of a lamp,the wife knitting, the husband reading a book, beside them an open window. Perhaps the television was on with the sound turned down.
    After a while the voices of the man and woman faded into silence. Somewhere close by a dog barked. This suburban back yard was such a great distance from northern India, I wondered how often Dr. Siddiqui had come outside and, looking up at the stars as I was doing now, wondered about the path that had brought him here and all the other paths he could have followed. It seemed inconceivable that I could inhabit this space at this moment. But the Siddiquis had died and I was sitting in a lawn chair in their back yard. It could not possibly mean anything. And yet I felt that somehow it did.

Catechism
    by Sue Carter Flinn
    By her calculations, Lily committed one of the biggest sins ever on record. A sin, she estimated, that was only one baby step away from nailing Jesus to the cross. Lily killed a