It took the fewest of words to set him off, sometimes nothing more than the faintest trace of a smirk. He was also capable of making things up, conjuring up an affront out of thin air. That‘s what they would all realize afterward. He would seize on apparently meaningless cracks or gestures and plunge them deep in his heart, until they glowed radioactively, the nuclear fuel rods of his great fire.

But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.