Age of Loss by Richard Spilman

You have come to a time when everything is loss— your parents dead, your friends dying or gone south. You have come to a time when you have money and nothing you care to do with it, though you take cruises, spoil the grandkids, redecorate the house, which, schooled in irony, echoes as if abandoned. At the end of a day in which you cannot remember whether you took the car in or got your teeth cleaned, you sit before the TV and watch people discover who murdered a woman trapped in a locked room. You ready yourself for bed like the homeless preparing to launch themselves into a cold wind. You turn on the porch light to ward off the terrors every night brings, and there in the pale glow discover a web spread from firethorn to birch. You go out in your robe, your plaid pajamas, and sit…