Photograph by Aaron Fraser McKenzie.

For something like five years now the man who was what amounts to this woman’s first love has been dead, and she’s only finding out now. To alert her, there was no shiver along some ethereal web of life connecting everyone, as there maybe should have been, or as this woman at least hoped there would be when something like this happens. Her heart didn’t even murmur in sympathy the moment her onetime heartthrob’s own heart quit its throbbing. This woman’s sister had to tell her, mention it—his passing—in passing.

“There’s something with you,” says this woman’s boyfriend that night.

“Jonathan Brandis is dead,” she admits. “He hung himself.”

“Hanged,” her boyfriend whispers, then fits his hand back between this woman’s thighs, his hot, wet face back into the crotch of her neck.

The day ...