By Adam Ehrlich Sachs, from his debut collection of short stories, Inherited Disorders, which was published last month by Regan Arts.

Although the plaster casts of Pompeii’s dead, buried alive in the ash of Mount Vesuvius, have furnished archaeologists with a wealth of knowledge about the lives of Roman citizens, one particular pair of corpses, caught in the narrow underground passageway of the so-called House of the Cryptoporticus and identified by scientific consensus as a father and a son, has inspired only endless debate. Were the father and son trying to squeeze past each other, as some archaeologists believe?…