The Corduroy Mtn. Investigations Into The Tectonics Of The Tibetan Plateau Howard Good The chief inspector leans back in his chair and picks his teeth with a matchstick. The dead aren't missing much, he muses. My right arm hangs dead at my side. Perhaps I'm bleeding from somewhere as well. His men, spread out across the plateau, rap smartly on the doors of empty apartments. I only escape because they let me. But the moon is chipped, and even the star- strung ladder on which I might once have climbed wobbly toward it is gone. previous | next Added to The Corduroy Mtn. on December the thirtieth in the year two thousand and eight.