or 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 they will be late, they will have to come another time, they are sorry they forgot, the wild grass growing up between stones, in cracks in the pavement, the ivy crumbling mortar, the bricks now loose, the steps a hazard, a warning in passing, the house quiet alone, the television reception for shit, the telephone uncharged for days, the wild grass and wild flowers between the wallpaper pieces, the walls in blooms of green and red and blue and gold, the walls damp and falling, the ceiling buckling, the ivy around the bed, the sky a band of impossible colors, the sound of someone calling out, downstairs, a memory, remember, all of this and the ceiling and the walls nothing but the soft rise and fall of the hills, listen, and they listen and the speaking across the pastures and the full night full of everything. Racks of licorice whips and horehound lollipops. Trusses and decongestant. Tittering motes continually seeking purchase on the surface of products. Tubes of cream and bottles of oils lingered, yellowed and dried out. Fire measles, milk sickness, scrivener’s palsy, chilblains, stink damp, quinsy, lumbago, scrumpox, decrepitude. The days passed in this way, the parade of disease and decay, wrinkled humans not long for this world begging to be saved through some salve, but there is neither time nor death, only laughter and variations on light on the surface of things. The women groan in beds, bed sheets flayed. Legs drawn up. Living Waters. Still Waters. Autumn Waters. Pleasant Waters. They sigh and take visitors and call names out to strangers in the hall. And soon, they will be twenty-one, lazing in summer air, lingering in fields, eyes closed. Long legs dipping down into still pond water. A break from working at the telephone company or at the drugstore. Pond water colder than anything against long toes. Soon itchy grass scrapes thighs and goose-fleshed arms. Soon: flat clouds passing above, something inside rumbling like devils caught in a box, and then they will be off elsewhere, younger and younger, holding mother’s hand as they watch a house burn, or as they watch a parade end, the marching band’s thump fading just beyond the courthouse. And then the music is gone and then a spark of darkness that grows closer, because that was always the first thing anyway.