August 20th, 1910. The worst heat in living memory, the kind that flattens a city and slows the blood.
An artist named James Clarence Withencroft spends the morning drawing a man in the dock, caught at the instant sentence is passed on him. Then he walks out into the glare, wanders without direction, and finds himself in a stonemason's yard, where the man from his drawing sits carving a headstone. Neither has ever laid eyes on the other. The name cut into the stone is Withencroft's own, and so is the date.
They agree the safest thing is to sit together until midnight passes.
W.F. Harvey wrote this in 1910, six pages that have refused to loosen their grip in the century since
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