Staring at the form for an hour, it seemed (had it been an hour already? her mind had wandered so), and still no decision. She lifted her pen and it wavered over the space for her signature; it did not make mark. She set the pen down again and her hand, free of indecision, cradled her forehead and covered her eyes.

It was yesterday…

… the cherry tree was loaded with fruit, was tall as the sun, and her mother had lifted her so she might sit on a low limb, within reach of the clusters, her flight contained in those arms and in that smile; cherry juice stained her blouse without shame; perfect mother perfect day

“I don’t see it…!”

“Shh. Just wait.”

The trail they were walking had opened onto a field, out from under heavy-scented pine boughs that dimmed the daylight and hushed the world, from depths to shallows like a river flows into a lake. The change had been so sudden that for a moment the sun had blinded them and, while their eyes were turned down, she saw it. He hadn’t.

She was taller, and years had trained her eyes to look for hidden things. He was four, with much still hidden from him and waiting to be found. She leaned down behind him until her cheek rested against his head, her lips brushing his ear. She nestled her arm against his shoulder, and pointed so that his sight might follow her finger.

‎"… and if you lead one, or another, through those pathways to your heart – turning this way and that as they do, confusing as they are, ending sometimes in blind alleys and brief frustrations – will he (or she) find generous rooms, warm with art and soft with cushions, and a table laden for a feast?

“You are the one to guide them: you hold the light. You must meet them on the public avenue with your invitation, you step forward maybe shy maybe hesitant to meet them, ‘Welcome friend! Welcome in…’, and perhaps in your extended hand there is a place to rest and be comforted, or passage to a country they have never seen, or generosity unbidden, to make that strange walk worth taking.

As he wrapped his fingers round the haft and tightened their grasp, his forearm muscle’s strands united, bound themselves to bone and were, by that movement, married to intention. His fingers felt the weight, and the fiber of the arm responded, hand to wrist to elbow, the arc of his strength raising the sledge again.

The same arm curled around his woman’s waist as they moved together. The same arm caught up his infant daughter, held her warm against his chest. The same arm opened a door; the same arm closed it.

‎"I’m still awake," she sighed.

She stretched so her right foot, at a diagonal and off the bed, reached for the door, while her right arm clutched her pillow tightly to her head. All week long, whispers and pictures reminding her she was not “enough” had been sifting down on her like gray snow, burying her in breathless drifts:

… that man’s leer took her skin and discarded her life; … that magazine’s style soiled her clothes, they could never come clean; … those friends said… those friends and their serial disappointments … media’s mirror “what you’re not… what you’re not…”

With the moon still under the Atlantic, there were stars, and neighboring houses whose lone lights flickered between the trees, to light the way. The world was more shadow than path, and the shadows were filled with cricket sounds and other, more furtive, nighttime feet. He squinted from the warmth of the doorway, but could make out nothing. “Better…” he thought, and took the small flash that hung beside the door, to make his way across the field.

“… but I do begin my sentences mid-thought…” she thought; and thinking about thought was to look in a mirror that reflected another mirror. She was a tunnel of faces that began at her glance, peered around the corner of the glass at another, inner face, and after that a smaller other, and another and other and other. She raised an eyebrow and a million eyebrows rose: “… that might be a tunnel into my soul - but shouldn’t I see a light at the end…”

He guessed, when he had fully wakened, and the dream’s scenery had begun to melt into the familiar features of his bedroom, that while she had been a major figure in the story, still it was a story, and it was only his.

The impulse was to tell it, of course, as though it had been shared: there are stories where two lay their heads to sleep in separate houses, on separate pillows, but dream as though the pillow were only one, connected by an ethereal thread of sameness or desire. There are stories as well, where two lay their bodies in a single bed, heads on a single pillow, but their spirits are so scattered to opposing winds that, even searching, even calling, they could not hear a whisper of one another. Story or fact.

As I stood under the shower’s spray this evening, allowing the warm water to wash away the day’s dust and travel, I found that as the dirt left me, so did peace and security.

I looked at my hands, and as I passed them along my arms, I suddenly felt an urgency, emergency, imagined I was rushing to remove an invisible poison – radioactive decay – that had collected on my skin and sifted through my clothing, as I sat cowering inside my home, whose chinks and gaps would never be airtight, whose doors and windows were designed to breathe as a human breathes, to move air in and around me so that I might have fresh oxygen to light my blood and to quicken my pulse.

That’s why I sang these songs: the art of writing down my name might call up hers or, reaching the true cause of me (a reason? a meaning?), might find a home, or build one that is why I sang

In evening when light fades you feel it, or in the night where nothing shines but stars that gleam from the far end of the thinnest thread: those strands that catch the corner of your eye and rouse your sounds, widen your smile so song is woven on the melody of her curve, harmony in the curl and moisture of her lips; that is where I sang; and where our voices met we settled in, the sunlight came so every seed we planted surged and opened leaves in sweet upswelling fountain-spilling flowers, fruit, future as though I sang them into life