not noticed and her brother’s bed. A boy crouched in his room, praying to the sound of voices rising from the register softly wishing that the creature with the long claws would come and take them all away. A teacher waiting in the parking lot of the school for his student, the smell of her body still on his sweater, a duffle bag to hide the surprise, the parking lot wet from recent rain, the blacktop’s contours filled with miniature lakes, the spreading rainbow of oil on the face of the water, the teacher’s hands damp, the smell still rising to his nose, but he’s cried all he can and all that is left is the Lord’s Work. An empty blue car on the side of the road. The party, the men with drinks, sloshing and spilling, calling names, the smell of burning somewhere, names holler listen rolling across the ground all the girls they think falling into themselves who wouldn’t want this falling into themselves. The department store, closed, the windows reflecting the passing people, the display racks standing still but empty, though somewhere in the endless dark of now unused inner offices, boxes of receipts, decades of transactions, await another life. A man waiting in his office resisting the urge to call the hospital for the seventh time in an hour to check on her condition, when the sound of steps comes down the hall and he sets the receiver on its rest and pretends to work. A bonfire on a distant hill, orange light in the black night, hanging insubstantial in the void. A bonfire in a distant field, the gleaming grills of pickup trucks in a semi-circle, windows open so all could hear the sick system. Garth Brooks and Jodeci. En Vogue and Anthrax. Judas Priest and Onyx. Snow and Alan Jackson. A bonfire dying down to a charred blot in the starless night, pale bodies passed out in the beds of the pickup trucks, young men and young women, and in the total blank, a voice. The woman’s shaved head in the sun, feeling the sun, the warm rays, heavy rain as the boat bobbed, she removed her hat and her husband smiled at her and removing their life vests, they dove into the cool brown water of the man-made lake and swam around to the far side of the boat, in the shade of the bending trees in the inlet and found one another. A woman walking in the woods, listening for crying that she thought she heard. The muddy shore, brown and green, the brown water cooling in the shade. The buzz and whir of the trees. The clicking trees, the clacking trees. The silence of crumbling branches and leaves. The jawing of the woods, without beginning and without end and someone walking. A bend in the street and the sun-baked sidewalk with confetti of shadow, a leopard, and just at the bend a person walking away, disappearing around the curve, behind a tree and the street is empty. A secret post office box, a secret credit card, an evening hoping the cell phone does not ring. An evening worrying that the payment on the television set might not make it in time. That the payment on the SUV might not make it in time. A car driving past the house for the fourth time in an hour. A woman killing a colony of ants with a pot of boiling water and all the years’ leaves in dunes in the corner of the porch. The sun playing on the surface of the broken glass of the smashed bottle of beer thrown onto the patio in retaliation for a remark about a sister. The sun speaking along the edge of the glass and along the edge of the lite beer. Swill gilded with evening rays. The backyard garden, up mossy steps, in a stroke of sunlight, a distant parental voice, directionless, powerless to the draw of this moment, the distant dogs with the bloody stumps of their excised tails wailing to the distant turn of the neighborhood. A latex werewolf mask, a tent, the night and a knife, the brothers having fought, run and yelled, hollered and beaten walls, crying over insignificance, and one darting in the pale light of the security lamp in the backyard while the other whispered to his friends. The feeling of dirt and dust against dry skin and the rubbing of raw wood against the flesh of calves after having seen them on one another, calling out names and foulness, the pages of the illustrated Bible torn and wet, the tongue of summer heavy on everything. A drive home. A kiss. Divining a body in the dark. Fingers unhooking. Prodding terse and enveloping. Listening under a streetlight. On a swing set in the dark behind the church. Watching the outline of black trees as the warm breath of summer slips down thighs. A pasture cut by a stream, and on the other side, the green rise of a mound, a burial place perhaps and beyond even that, a marsh, webbed with water, fallen logs for lolling arms and the two outstretched, looking up through green light into the dark canopy of black leaves. Two shapes moving through the yard at night. Two shapes in the shade behind the empty department store. Two bodies roving one another. A howl loose and ranging. A howl lifted to the heavens. A howl harrowing the cul de sacs and courts. A window, half open, the voice singing the passing cars’ songs. Something left on the doorstep. A bed with sheet thrown back. The gutter on a street. The glass in the gutter on a street. The blades of grass rising through the garbage in the gutter on a street. Aglitter with God’s own last light. A voice saying, “She’s not doing well.” A voice saying, “Were you going?” Blood running into an eye and children swarming the basketball court screaming for the ball. Hook shots awry. The ivy-laced fence around the cemetery. The family no longer gathered, the woman alone straightening the silk flowers she left, looking at her name on the other half of the marker. The realtor walking through the empty house, noting to the young couple that there is no legal requirement to disclose if the previous occupant died of AIDS or if the house is haunted, and though she prepared the real estate purchase contract, the couple were unwilling to sign and she went home angry, though she could not show it to the young couple, and sat in her living room, checking the message on her cell phone and calmed herself by thinking about her mission trip to Africa. A hill and the two sitting, turning to leaves as the breeze speaks their names. A young man’s car in pieces across the highway and the state trooper dreading the call to the fiancée. A passing train, never ending. A man who brings his boys to watch it rattle along, listening to old soul songs as the boys pick things up off the ground. A boy talking to a girl, her hands signing, his eyes wishing he could read. The young man’s jeans riding low over bony hips, reaching across to where the older man sat, face flushed and a passing train rattled the windows. A dentist dragging a millstone through the town, window rolled down, pointing his finger at God like a pistol, laughing too hard to speak the warning to the world in his heart. A minister walking into a field. A father farting for his son’s amusement. The three girls waiting by the window, hoping their father does not come home. Sprawled in a bathtub, gray water cooling, too disinterested to even touch himself, a man remembers with wonder the first time he rubbed himself raw on the bathroom floor of his grandmother’s house while she cooked meatloaf and green beans and smoked unfiltered cigarettes, the kitchen windows open to let an autumn breeze in. Weeds growing up high. Grass growing faster than the property manager can handle and the tenant with the dog is standing on the balcony again screaming at the children below and the dog bays and howls and the children laugh and continue to throw gravel, though the rocks arc shy of their target. A glass case with trusses and braces. Metal rods to straighten the back. Bedpans and bottles with tubing. Walls of bottles. Elixirs, tinctures, pills, tablets, philters. A rack with sun-bleached comics. The Gods all dead. A gash across Hercules’ eye. Pages grow more brittle each year. A curving counter with a jar for beef sticks and loafing men spilled over the edge, gazing into the surface of their coffee or into the amber remnants of their syrup. Spitting griddle. Chili dogs, chuck wagons, brown burgers spitting on metal plate. A dusty window lets in gray light. Horehound candy, Beech-Nut gum. A long cluttered counter of tin cars in faded boxes waiting for children that have long since grown. Sisters hide here and wait until it is time to go home. A cash register rings and worn bicentennial quarters pass over palms. A boy gone missing. A mother yelling down an empty street. A child hidden in a clothing rack, aware of the switching to come, but unable to help herself. Children range through the department store and caw for candy. A hand in a room in a column of light. At the end of a conveyor in the far back corner of a toy warehouse, young men waiting for the day to start, the electronic tone that tells them to pile the dream houses on the dusty belt. A man offering a book and a look at others of worth, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, adjusting his glasses, rubbing the back of his neck, peering down at the young face, smiling and feeling in his pockets. Calcium carbonate, limestone, marble, all of the shells of all of the living things crawling along. A sister that is unwell, shriveling in her room as the family prays, as the preacher calls on the family, bends by her bedside, says words as best he can, as the father wakes, washes himself, works all day, and drives home, seeing her blinds closed, knowing the light makes her feel worse, he goes in to see his little girl, praying, smelling the dinner ready downstairs and sits on the side of her bed and listens to the noise of the bypass. A father who wanted silence so much that he went so far as to plan on puncturing his ear drums with knitting needles, but not until after he consulted with a physician under the pretense of researching a novel in which a father wanted silence so bad that he punctures his eardrums with coat hangers. A child choking in her crib while a young parent dozes. Two students in a dark hall, whispering. A girl and her brother, listening in the dark for the sound of a monster moving through their house. On the curb, the broken body of a girl hit by a car as the neighborhood children pool silently. A dog on the bottom of the doctor’s in-ground pool. A mother and father silent in the dark bedroom, counting the cars passing, watching their high beams skitter across the walls just like their children used to do, the children that felt like they were still right there, right upstairs asleep in their beds, bunk beds, empty for decades. The principal who still lived at home with his elderly parents, allowing them to cook and clean for him, his wife having left him some years before for reasons that his parents were never entirely clear on, though they were certain that she was a tramp. The woman washing her grown son’s clothes. The principal who called the staff in to watch the videotape of the students that he kept in his desk and making lewd comments while some averted their eyes, some walked out, some watched, certain that what they were doing was wrong, but unable to resist and it wasn’t until he was called by the paper that he began to regret some of what he’d done. The wooden bones of a whale floating above the children. The woman reading letters left for her, unsigned. A man on the couch, hiding his erection from his wife. The smell of wet and warmth. A car repossessed in the night. Second Notice. Final Notice. Creditors calling places of work. The elderly man who cannot hear, mowing silently in the morning. The children watching the house burn from the back of the truck. Son and daughters who will never marry. Houses rented for lifetimes. Aunts taking young nephews out for dinner at the chicken place and then letting them buy a plastic toy from the dollar store. A trip to the mall with her grandmother, eyes lazing over racks of clothing, mind wandering, the old woman asking, “Do you like it? Do you? Honey?” Dead birds, dying light, cracked pavement, peeling paint, neon lights flickering, pulses of red blue green, traffic piling up, a woman crossing the street, slumping along, dirty clothes, wet clothes, listening to the men as she passes, back bending under backpack, arm swinging, the men stopping to watch her, eyes intent as though she cannot see them, and then they break into a cluck, loudly laughing and looking again, eyes squinting in joy, jaws swaying, cracked pavement, the stream through town, the overpass, the train tracks, the break in the wire fence where she wriggles through and remembers words that were buzzing her, clutter clouds, she darts through into darkening trees, following the curve of the stream. A child screaming during the service, much to his father’s disgust. A dog without an eye, under the covers, licking her hand while she sleeps. A dog swimming gaily in the grass. An arm shorter than expected. A cat watching the dark for something to move. The puddle of cat on the floor, somehow always in the narrowing parallelogram of light. A piano clang. Everything gone, everything hidden, the children innocent eyed as their father screams. In bed during the daylight. An animal’s head. Black eyes. Black globes. The entire universe in a swirl of glass black and glinting. Women in jeans and in denim skirts, heads covered, hair long and crimped, hair short around sutures. Women with children that sit silent and stare. Women with children that will not sit still. That will not be quiet. That will not shut up. That are bound for a switching if they don’t behave. If they don’t get right. If they don’t listen. Hear me? Children that tear the pages out of books, put the tires of plastic cars in their mouths, shit themselves long after they should have stopped. Children that blood coils swelling air choked with graves. A stucco house on a hill, bent trees bending in, dark rooms, cloudy spring afternoons, a box of puppies and a dentist cutting their tails off while in the back garden his boy begs a neighbor to take off his clothes. A woman reading stanzas by a window, not noticing the fading day, the fading words, fallen asleep. A woman finding a birthmark in the shape of a crab on her date’s neck, underneath the heaps of permed hair. The man telling his granddaughter about the tunnels under his house where the slaves used to hide. A man cursing his deaf wife and the blacks that have ruined his name. The doctor reaching into the closet to find the baggy he stashed. The girl in the octagonal room reading Anne Shirley to life. A boy asleep in a cold basement, listening to the steps upstairs though he is alone. The dog watching the man moving naked through the dark house. The sound of thunder across the pasture. The bed unslept in. A world, another whole world, other earths, other stars, the father telling the children, there are other places worse than this, other places better, the sighing sun reaching out its last arms across the ocean of sky and drawing us home. The boy on the jungle gym telling everyone that his cousin let him suck her titties and that she touched his thing. It was the best wedding he’d ever been to. Across a yellow field, a man in thick glasses slipping into the woods with a boy while bells peal. A young man sitting on the blue bridge, pitching his empties down into the water, trying not to care that the girl with his baby is waiting for him to call. The boy parading down the street alone. The sight of sun. The wind moving through trees, branches, low arms, sing song, singing, listen, a voice, listen, the wind speaking through the trees. The bottom of the sea, risen, populated by worn bones and shells. Painted boys whooping. A saxophone rented upon retirement. A mother calling her children’s names at an empty window in an assisted living facility and the visitors passing by pretending not to hear. A town in the center of a pasture, a stream and a lake, old houses with peeling paper, old houses with names rattling plaster, wet streets, wild grass and wild flowers erupt from brick and cement, metal rusted red, archipelagos of sound, children in yards and streets scattered about, teens darting from shadow to shadow, singing in voices of light, young men and women driving to work, holding hot drinks between pressed slack thighs, work days trundling, sighing sounds as clicking clocks call to distant hours, retirement parties scheduled for Wednesday mornings, cooling coffee with milky rings, smiles, talk, back to work, the cleaned-out desk, the drive home, a moment to try and remember what happened, the restful moment on a back porch and children calling to say