There is a child on a bike and a man on a chair. And there is nothing. Children are taken from their rooms in the night. Babies snatched from behind unlocked doors. For a while there is a frenzy of wonder about where they might be and what happened to them. Then quiet. There was a girl who was a lifeguard at a pond. She was seen in the morning and then she was gone. Several years later a hunter found the scrap of her bathing suit in the woods. Their bones fill up the earth. Build up an infrastructure like rebar. I feel I am walking upon them, each one a stab in my hip. I run past a house with a box car in the yard. A man unlocks it and enters. He might store my own body there. It would be both the most and not the most obvious place for my body to be stored. He has a shepherd and hostas. He will not kill us. The dog across the street rolls over and over in the damp grass.

He knew how to meditate. He could lose himself to his mind. The years of learning by prayer served him well in the bar. I could no more ask him why he had become a priest than he could tell me he had become a priest because. I couldn’t ask him anything. I made him a character. I wrote that he had been forced out of the priesthood for believing in occult and pagan practices. The truth, I do not know. Maybe he stole from the plate. Maybe he insulted someone. The notebook he wrote in was leather bound. He used a pencil and not a pen. He wore glasses. Was prematurely gray. His mother was a widow. His sisters had big hips. At one time he had believed in God and perhaps still did. I was moving away. I was getting as far away as I could stand to go. I would never see him again. And he would die. I knew nothing about him. I knew everything.

The tree beside the window was blooming but scentless. I sat on the star-covered spread. Smoked clandestinely. I lit candles, though they were verboten. The fireplace was flanked by tile. Lustrous. It would have been a sitting room when the house was new. I could do nothing there and he lived on the other side of the door, breathing, offering me quarters. Here is the key to the washing machine. Clean the toilet. Sleep beside me. I drove away from there, through the hillside neighborhood up to the house where the young man lived, back near that shitty little airport. I burnt a hole in the cassette case with my cigarette. Listening. Every moment fell into every moment. I held my own. I kept up. I did not crumple.

All day, I wait for the betrayal. A person is not who he says he is. A man waits, unmoving, on the bench next to me. I see his knees and his feet. We must wait. Here together, we must wait. I learn that he plays the ukulele. Someone asks him about his music and he responds. More questions. His parrot has died. I offer sympathy. The children run across the field and they measure my head and my arm and my foot with their measuring tape. They hit the ball. They walk backward to the tree. They run forward to race. They eat cupcakes and pasta salad. The kids eat cookies. They eat strawberries. They eat candy from the piñata. The kids play games and they run. The kids do not sleep. They will not sleep. No. No. They run. They run. They run. They run to the apple tree with the bees busy. They say: I want to learn about dead sea stars. I want to learn about loons, too. I want, and I want, and I want. The sun hides behind clouds. It hides and does not show its face. The sun hides and we are lost in gray and blooms. The children have become quiet. We tilt our heads and pretend to listen for them. The little girl jumps off the bench again and again and again and says, bwwwwaah. She hugs other children and says goodbye. She does not want them to leave. No one wants to leave and they all want to leave. Good bye, good bye, and the cars pull away from the gravel drive and the girl sits in her world with her presents. And there is no end to the want and it is beautiful. And there is so much silence that soon we will need to speak to each other.

The wind knocked petals from the trees and it looked like snow. It was cold enough for snow. But it was petals. Gently. Let’s not talk about the weather. Not talk about it anymore. The blue is up above the clouds. On a plane, you would see it up there—blue and the sun in the distance. The sun might even shine through your window. We slept with the rain tinkling against the window. Hello, hello. Lo. Lo. The ferns have pushed out of their fiddleheads. Everything pushing up and out. The birds fly low in the rain. They fly low across the road and we nearly hit them with our cars. Sometimes they walk. The weight of water too much for their hollow bones. They are trying to keep their chicks safe and warm and fed. In school they have eggs in a heated box. Soon the chicks will peck their way out of the shells. The children will see them come through. Touch them. Gently.

The next town on the map was Ashtabula. She kept thinking of Bob Dylan and expected wildflowers by the side of the road. Instead there were train tracks and abandoned buildings. The restaurant they ate in served them iceberg lettuce. They were tracing the map. Michigan. Minnesota. South Dakota. Across. Across the mountains. And then there it was. The desert. It was like you could find Jesus out there in the desert. If he was anywhere, he was there. A spider’s tracks in the sand. Creatures out at night and then hiding in the heat of the day. The mule teams went out onto the salt flats. And then at night, a sidewinder outside the restaurant and a man in a cowboy hat whisked it out of the way of his date. They must have all been staying there. Where else would they be?

The bed she once shared with her sister was pushed against the wall. We were told we were lucky to see her sister’s pearl gray wedding gown laid out on the bed cover. She would never marry, would never want to. There were two desks in the room. One desk was formal and heavy, A piece of furniture. The other was a small semi-circle mounted to the wall by her father. A plank of painted wood. A simple chair and inkwell. Her sister painted a mural on the side wall. Calla lilies against a black background. Two windows looking out onto the street flanked where she sat for 14 to 16 hours a day writing. She taught herself to work ambidextrously so that she could sustain her pace. Her thumb, she said, was useless, numb from gripping the pen. She would not die there.

The light over the marsh was hesitant, resisting the day. Cereal bloated and pushed against the sides of the bowl. Later, rain would fall, pulsing onto rolled hay. We would feel there was something wrong. A deja vu of movement, pressed into the eye. We would take our dishes out of the cupboard and put them right into the dishwasher to save time. We wouldn’t know why we were crying.

At 4AM the birds outsound everything. Their songs are desperate, me, me, me, me. You, you, you, you. As the sky lightens, a V of geese sweeps over, heading north. His eyes try to make sense of them. Everything is new. The greenness blurs the edges of space. Boundaries are lost and found again. There is a black pocket in the forest where he must not go. A man there pushes through the undergrowth in search of grapevine.

The man across from me made art out of solder. His hands never touched the table, sticky with spills, before the seisiún. And your outrage and your pride. It was about those, too. When we put the dog down. When we euthanized the dog. When we killed the dog. The second after he stopped breathing. The second he stopped breathing. I said, “I want him back. Bring him back to me. My friend. My friend.” All of my ugliness and my shame. That does not exist here.