Brilliant Story by Matthew Derby on Guernica

Here's a paragraph of the story "January in December" by Matthew Derby, found at
http://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/742/january_in_december/ :


"Fancer set the rocket launcher down on a mound of hard snow and rose slowly, the street lamps illuminating his lower half in dishwater light. He had failed to put into motion even this, his last attempt to push something back out into the world instead of taking it, once again, in. If he had been a better man, a more reasonable man, hardened by life instead of merely weakened by it—if he had been a man who planned out a day instead of mincing his way through, bitching out the hours one by one until they disappeared up the steel column of night, he might have made something of the moment, put his signature on it. He might have set a special, public fire. But this other man beat him to it. He felt a clean tremor of recognition then—clean because it was like the wispy white center of an ice cube—at what the man across the street had done, what he had failed to do himself. The man had cut a hole in the history of the world, and fallen in, and Fancer was standing at the freshly cut edge, peering down."