You know you can’t buy, you can’t rent, you can’t be dead here.
Lazy summer afternoon in the living room of an Edwardian house in Flatbush, just past the southern tip of “Prospect-Lefferts Gardens,” on the corner of Bedford and Lenox. The house is surrounded by scaffolding and construction.
The Abellard sisters lounge in the living room. They go away and come back to this configuration, always. The television stays on in the background: latest local news on a 15-minute loop, weather on the 2’s.
Any silence is not silence. There is always the air conditioner’s modest scream, the running script of the news, the inane dialogue of soap opera, a shady confessional, ongoing construction, what is happening on the street, some small creature between the walls breathing.