Peddlers found her loathsome, wrote home in codes they had fashioned themselves for the purpose, hoping to forgo the embarrassment of public ridicule, of conspiracies multiplying like locusts. Her shirt opened up down the back with the merest accidental brush of the hand or even a forceful exhalation like that which occurs when your airwaves fill up with mucus. She stated on record that her name had changed from the time when we knew her, but we thought this an almost unforgiveable transgression and went about making our feelings known by spelling them out with letters clipped out of magazines and arranged on yellow sheets of paper big as a window, the stars clumping together overhead as if they had only recently discovered our presence and wished to observe us before anyone else got the chance. Visions become so common in circumstances that might seem at first extraordinary because the air is thin or the sirens have been wailing for twenty minutes, but really they are a record of the human mind from the time of its inception to just before its annihilation, and when we heard that the twilight was more than just a meteorological phenomenon, our hands began to shake and any empathy that had, to that point, accumulated, was run through like water in a sieve. Or the syrup one finds in a can of pears. Which is to suggest more slowly than you might have at first anticipated. I bought her a ring that looked brilliant under artificial light but lost most of its luster early, in the pre-dawn hours when the sun isn’t so much ascending as hovering in place like an insult and she told me the bark on the trees had been speaking to her again but she knew better than to take what it said seriously because she had gotten in trouble like that so many times before. Our reactions slow over the years until they can’t really be called reactions at all and their replacement is something like the instincts placed naturally into butterflies which make them veer about from one place to another from birth (or, at least, their emergence from the cocoon) without ever really lighting on anything for more than a second or two, this being, apparently, the most successful way to keep them from getting consumed by whatever is immune to their toxins.        

To hear us tell the tale afterward, you’d think we had left something crucial behind in those cages. A certain good-natured nihilism. A circular structure in the middle of the chest. With holes on either end of it to allow blood in and sound waves and the scent of persimmon because the fruit was popular then. A means of driving away demons that were otherwise poorly defined or understood. They had nose rings that glowed sometimes in the glare of the flashlight but the only other hint we had of their presence was a fiddle played the old fashioned way. With a bow and resin. With open tuning and little regard for the niceties of melody. We blasted our way into the side of the mountain and there found the relics that would suggest we weren’t the first, or even the second, to attempt to settle between the river which was gold in color and the other river which had no color whatsoever, only the faintest hint of having been in its channel for eons. You couldn’t trust these insights though because everyone had them. They were as common as tennis shoes. The alternative, which one could easily enough stumble upon published in the back pages of the trade magazines or on the airwaves where it was disguised as mindless banter, turned out to be fraudulent, something cooked up by miners of all people, who had been tossed out of the ground for demanding stricter safety measures, or a place, an establishment, to call their own where the women who worked there talked about their beauty secrets as if they were discussing the battle of the Somme or the best place to cast your line to pull in walleye. I never understood the reactions, which ran the gamut from full on horror to bemused horror to something that had no name but you could tell what it was because we had all experienced it at one time or another. We had all run our hands under ice cold water at a time when warm water would have sufficed. We had all suspected a loved one of attempting to murder another loved one through nefarious means like poison. And we had been mistaken, but the suspicion was enough to remind us that appearances, what remains on the surface after everything underneath has been dispelled, cleaned out and annihilated, were of little value in themselves but that didn’t mean you could ignore them completely. You had to take their measure the way we paid attention to the shape of the leaves that fell from the trees in order to identify those trees, in order to know which ones to cut down because they were likely to succumb to disease or insects and which to water in anticipation of the coming drought.