From Slaveroad, which will be published this month by Scribner.

Lucy Gantt Sheppard brings the glass teapot into a room too full of furniture to breathe. A woman not small, not large, not exactly shrunken, but clearly not the woman she once was. Old but as substantial as each piece of polished furniture, furniture whose every flat surface is loaded with knickknacks, photos in ornate frames, painted crockery, and vases. LGS, an old woman, crowded, competing for air with all the stuff she’s accumulated to surround herself: antiques, relics, African masks, a room full of last things belonging to…