The Last Paragraph of Denis Johnson's Angels

The Last Paragraph of Denis Johnson's Angels

It was Frederick's understanding that that prisoners had a story: that each night for months, at nine precisely, a light had burned in a window on the town, where the men on one cell block's upper tier could see it and wonder, and imagine, each one, that it shone for him alone. But that was just a story, something that people tell themselves, something to pass the time it takes for the violence inside a man to wear him away, or to be consumed itself, depending on who is the candle and who is the light.