The Line

The Curator is pleased to admit you for a thirteenth viewing.

You will come in out of the cold into a great ancestral house given over to a succession that never ends, all wax and old varnish and stopped clocks and the long line of portraits breathing in the dark, where every soul who feared dying with no one to carry the name is taken up at last, continued and kept. There is a place waiting for you on the wall, a frame turned to the light with your name cut into the brass, and the line of the house drawn close around you, and a pedigree that has learned by heart the one empty frame you could not bear. One reminder, with our compliments: the way out is real, and this time it asks whether you can walk away the last of yourself, take no place and leave no name in the line, and go out the outer door into the cold street to an ending that is wholly your own.