There’s a bloodless patch upon her cheek. See it there. It’s a blight upon the rose. When she tans, it glows coal white. She is not above telling the meddlesome that it is the kiss of her first love. Her cheek was abraded in the dirt-bottomed bay of the basement of her dead father’s house on the day when she first decided to do away with herself. She ground her cheek into the gravel as a kitten curls its head to its master’s leg. When the bandage finally came off, the attending nurse got a mascara pencil and circled the scar. “Let this be a lesson to you,” she told Sylvia, flashing a compact. Sylvia scrubbed the marbletop with the same earnestness that she had formerly applied to her poems. Her brain-children come as whole as babes lately, wriggling and bewailing.

She blinked. She crossed and recrossed the room. She saw an etching deep in the finish of the marble, abstract, drawn with smoke. But, squinting, the design of a swastika came clear.

The swastika, she knows from the scholarship of German calligrapher Rudolf Koch, a favorite with her father, who also doted on Darwin and Bee Bazaar Magazine, was originally extracted from the emblem of the sun wheel. This symbol was prevalent in ancient Babylon. The sun, as a deity, was considered both maleficent and benevolent. According to mood. Like the effulgent /tenebrous Rorschach of a poem.

As though, Sylvia cannot help thinking to herself, there were not already enough tragic history and encoded iconography to endure in her house. Or enough good and evil omens present, accounted for, and on nonspeaking terms. Or as though Ted, by his absence, hadn’t already invited the Devil in.

She placed Abdiel’s gift in the center of the table, covering over its winged scar.

The shingled cross under ice enkindled the suggestion of smoke. At first it was only that. A sort of pervading innuendo, blandly demonic. She has never smoked cigarettes and she never would. Her diabetic bee master father smoked heavily. Otto Plath was a broad-shouldered man with thinning hair and pink pouches beneath his eyes. Professionally, he was an ornithologist and an entomologist, and he held a fellowship at Boston U, but it was bees alone, which he thought of as the manifestation of electrodes, and the key to the very mystery of existence, that were his singular passion. He ignored the swelling and blackening of his right foot in order to have a lark of Darwinian roulette with himself. Groggy with dope, he managed to both quote and misconstrue Goethe, whose Sorrows of Young Werther sparked a suicide craze among romantic young men in the eighteenth century. The doctors apologetically intimated their intent to amputate. Otto raised up a few inches in the bed.