Tufts and whole feathers, the stainless steel knives, the rain caught hold of the edges of everything in eyeshot and held on to it as if it were afraid of centrifugal force, the movement of the planet itself. By that time, our calendars had filled up so quickly we forgot what they were good for. The sunlight poured in afterward through windows we had left open so as to be able to catch a glimpse of whoever marched up the driveway intending to warn us of the machinations of the town council or wag their fingers in our faces due to something our children had done, or were suspected of doing. It was enough to cause the flesh on the back of the hands to turn an unusual yellow and make the library books on the end table seem suddenly fascinating, the trips downriver in search of those who had made the trip previous and were now missing, the charts and the arguments for the spreading of wealth like the invaluable contents of a newly-smashed barrel of molasses. I made it half way up the side of the river bank before gravity and the fear of falling were too much for me and I would probably be there still but for the assistance, the bravery and the surprising physical strength, of the boy who lived up the street. His formulas were immaculate and should properly have led to a scholarship and a life of, if not leisure exactly, then moderate exertion, but he died on the road that led out of town and you can see the makeshift memorial there to this day with its dull gray ribbons and its plank boards nailed together to form a haggard-looking cross. Time has made it crooked. Which is the proper configuration, if you think about it, but you’re not supposed to think about it. Our sentences run from three months to a dozen years and we serve them as if they had never actually been handed down at all, as if we simply woke up one morning and realized it was to be, in each and every respect, the same sort of morning as the one that had preceded it, and when the time came for the shadows to blacken and obscure the corners of the porch, to spill in through crevices and cracks in the plaster, we refused to treat this as something ominous or even particularly meaningful. It was something we studied as we might study the contours of the twilight or the David of Michelangelo (in photographs of course) – as something to put your eyes on for a moment before you decided to put them on something else, maybe a soiled length of rope.