Mercy

<p>In a neighborhood nondescript except for how often small houses are being torn down to make way for big houses a beautiful woman too young to be widowed waits for her husband to come home from prison. Arthur Baladino is getting out courtesy of a compassionate leave program the theory being that he's too feeble to shoot anybody else.</p><p>Next door to the Baladino home a little boy in a baseball uniform asks his father What happens when you die? It's a question the father will soon confront in a terrible and surprising way. Just down the street a young woman is trying to figure out how to re-start her life after her husband has lost his money hers and their home by day-trading in their basement. Elsewhere in the neighborhood several women and a couple of men-two of them accomplished arsonists who've sometimes been employed by Arthur Baladino-dream of what might have been if they'd been wiser more patient or luckier in a past long dead everywhere but in their imaginations.</p><p>On a landscape more often than not indifferent these people seek mercy if not in love than in the sometimes rickety temporary alternative connections they can find with their fellow seekers.</p>