Simon Matchcard haunts the upper stories of his family’s failing business, caring for his mentally ailing mother and refining a “special brand of loneliness… something so long and so wide that it ceases to be defined as merely loneliness.” His solitude and melancholia develop into hallucinations in which he inhabits a past constructed of his own memories and a desperate nostalgia for a time that never was, in which he imagines his mother as a vibrant young woman. Simon struggles to fabricate a fulfilling past for his mother to atone for being bullied by his overbearing brother into committing her to a rest home.