Moans ring in another festival of Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Generalissimo Falha places a fasces of nettles bound in twine at the edge of the La Tour postcard from Musée Toulouse-Lautrec that he’d pocketed as a youth. The icon has seen better Octobers. Its moldering edges have long retreated from the white borders he recalls thumbing on his first campaign. “I have never noticed…how much you resemble the Anthropophagous.”

“Spare me, brother. End this by November.” Fires burn across the distant ridge where the moon rises, almost blotted out by smoke.

“Have them send in a boy.”