A VALLEY FOR DOROTHYThe days were long for the toil filling them, but the nights, oh, the nights: an eternity growing up each dusk and stretching long and long until the dawn sun scalded the mountains of the east like a great malefic fire to cleanse the world of all the sorrow it carried within its endless miles and eternal hours; though of course the sun, great deceiver that it was, gave no such mercy. For the nights always returned to hound Henry Barber, who hadn’t slept a good sleep in forty years and more. They stretched the same wicked length and depth, laden with all of the pain he’d known in his days, and pain he’d known much of.
And so it was that another eternal night had set upon Henry Barber: he put his hands on the air to examine them by the young lunar light. All of the old s
