“Dear Mai,” I write, “All is forgiven stay there.”

Nine birds sweep down from the sky and light on the pine tree you planted last fall. The scrawny boughs crack and dip in the snow. 

To them he was simply “the old man” and they had no other name for him: he was so ancient that they had forgotten what he had once been called and knew nothing of his origins; there was some debate even as to whether he truly belonged to the tribe. Yet when they took me out to meet him, they showed him to me with pride: he was theirs now and was something to exhibit to visitors; he cost virtually nothing to keep in food and shelter and could easily be carried with them once the waterhole dried up and they had to move on. Besides, he looked after their locusts.

Has he come to say goodbye? I begin to wonder how he will say it as I ring the downstairs buzzer to let him in and throw the rod of the police lock, listening to his footsteps drag him up the stairs—unclear, indefinite thumps, muffled by a sliding sound as his shoes lag a little behind his forward momentum. Each step is followed by almost a second of silence before the sound of the next.

When people asked what he did, Donald Long’s standard riposte was, “I’m a mechanic of the dream.” Meaning, he was a projectionist.

Where darkness is on the rocks of the Morula Mountains, the stars twinkle in the frosty night like stars. Cold winds come from the east and thin snow skitters along over the frozen surface of the old snow. Some pines stand and whir in the gusts. 

One night, David had a dream that was nothing more than a book title:

The Cosmological Imperative

Upon awakening, he was not sure if his dream had included a visual image of a book bearing

He started out at a nice easy 120 strides per minute, his heart rapidly increasing its beat to accommodate the extra strain on his body, his pulse more or less normal, and his breathing deep, rhythmic, and unlabored. On his right was the canal, on his left the river, and everywhere else trees. Or at least it appeared that way. In reality, the trees were only on his left, between the path and the river.

At 29 years of age, completely satisfied with the gentle Fall outside, with vast stretches of contentment ahead of me in an unbroken melloyello greenery, I took my head in my hands and I considered 

My daughter was born the day the Long War began. In the quiet times during labor, I listened to the explosions, wondering as I drifted into five minutes’ sleep whether the bombing had precipitated the contractions, or whether she was so remarkable a child that her entrance into the world should cause a war, a rearrangement of planets not entirely her own.

I have short hair and under my strong brows, two honest Indian-bead eyes. My face is subtle, fretful, and quick. But my flesh is weak and my spirit uncertain and by now the legend written across my smile must evidently be “Tread on me.” The awful part of it is, I noticed even before he asked me how to get to thirty-fourth street that he was definitely not a type you go out with.