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realized it was a trophy:
    THE LUCRETIAN CUP IS HEREBY PRESENTED
    TO DOUGLAS HARMON, WITH GREAT ESTEEM
    AND ADMIRATION FOR HIS OUTSTANDING ESSAY ON
    THE NATURE OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS.
    T HE C LASSICAL S OCIETY OF THE
    U NIVERSITY OF P ENNSYLVANIA, J UNE 1930
    It was a proper prize, not one of those cheap-looking knickknacks my classmates would get for winning a softball championship. I ran my fingers over the sphinx, over her paws and her wings and her face, proud and remote. She made me want to strive for something, to earn something beautiful I could hold on to for the rest of my life.
    I put the trophy back on the table and turned down the bedclothes, peeled off my dirty socks, and slid between the snowy covers. The pillow was cool on my cheek. I understood now why the smell of laundry soap was so comforting: Things couldn’t be too hopeless if somebody was still bothering to wash the sheets.
    *   *   *
    I slept, and when I woke up I stretched like a cat. The house was still. I went into the living room and knelt beside the sofa. “Mrs. Harmon?” I don’t know why I kept calling her name. As soon as I touched her hand I knew she was dead.
    I’d never seen a dead person before—well, you know what I mean. A funny feeling went through the fingers I’d touched her with and spread up my arm and all through the rest of me, and even though I was kneeling by the sofa the floor seemed to fall away beneath my feet.
    I shook myself and stood up. The white cat was curled up on his cushioned stool by the fireplace as if nothing had changed. He lifted his head and looked at me, then closed his eyes and rubbed the side of his face against his paw—as if to say, So what?
    No more Fancy Feast for you, that’s what. I went back to the sofa and tugged the afghan up to Mrs. Harmon’s chin, as if I could warm her up. Again I caught sight of the knitting basket, and I took a couple of balls and a set of wooden needles and slipped them into my rucksack. “Thanks, Mrs. Harmon,” I whispered.
    Then I wandered through the rooms of the tidy little house, looking at old pictures and fingering all her handiwork—the doilies along the center of the dining-room table; the pearl-buttoned cardigan draped over the back of a chair, as if it were resting on somebody’s shoulders; the embroidered proverb, A MERRY HEART DOETH GOOD LIKE A MEDICINE , above the light switch in her bedroom—without really seeing any of it. I went back into the Spare Oom and got into bed, only because I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t leave her like that, but I didn’t know who to call, and even if I did I wouldn’t have known how to explain my being here. Someone was bound to think I’d done something wrong.
    I decided to go back to sleep and pretend for a while like none of it had happened. I didn’t know what else to do.
    No cake—no knitting lesson—and no one left to trust me.
    *   *   *
    There was a noise in another part of the house, and that’s what woke me the second time. It must have been early evening. I sat still in the bed, straining my ears, and in a few seconds I heard it again. There was somebody here—somebody still living.
    I opened the door and it drifted down the hallway, the sourness of a meal that should have only been tasted once. I smelled blood too, but it wasn’t quite the odor I knew. Maybe a dead person’s blood doesn’t smell or taste the same.
    There was a figure framed in the darkened hallway, kneeling over the sofa. It was the old man I’d spotted from the bus. I could see his missing ear. His head was burrowed deep into Mrs. Harmon’s belly—there were shreds of her blouse on the carpet—and her arm fell across his back, stiff as a plank, as he plunged into her nose-first. Mrs. Harmon’s head was gone, but there were thick locks of silver hair across the arm of the sofa.
    I