Journal Entry: Dead News
Because my first discovery was Pete (Peter) Phifer, it took me a long time to find the second. I was looking for names that matched the stories, but Peter has been the closest full phonetic match, so far. I am not looking full time, or even most of the time, and I had all but given up when I found Patience Muffet, whose last name, of course, was a perfect match. But after Patience I began to suspect that the only way to find them was to see their lives in some collapsed form, within the news of a life. The published pieces of a person, puzzled together, reveal things the unpublished and mundane details that are so universally shared cannot. I’ve become a connoisseur of yellow flaking paper and the smell of those parts of libraries few people explore. I’ve become an expert in dead news.
-Amatus
fabled obituaries 