He went back out to the pile of ashes, now all white and less hot. He stoked them yet higher and went back inside to complete the last leg of his conjuring. His grandfather had returned while he had been outside and asked why he had not touched the food his aunts had left. Horace complained of not being hungry and went into his neat room and lay down in the darkness, knowing he would not fall asleep. He set his alarm clock for fifteen minutes to twelve. Then, suddenly appearing in the doorway, his grandfather asked: What you been burning, boy? Smells like you been burning tires or something. He told his grandfather: Just some old planks that kept getting in my way when I cut grass. His grandfather stood silently for a while, peering into the black, silhouetted by the light from the kitchen. Rather than ask, as Horace was sure he would, if he was feeling sick, the old man turned and went back into the kitchen. Horace heard the sounds of his grandfather washing his one dish: the waterpipes clunking; the water splashing; a plate being set in the dish rack to dry; the refrigerator door opening and closing. He heard the light go out—for his eyes were closed—and the sound of the metal chain chinking like a pendulum against the hollow light bulb; then he and the house were locked in one dark velvet quiet. He listened to his grandfather shuffle out to the porch where he sat in his rocking chair and rocked, the planks of the wooden porch beneath groaning in a slow rhythm. Had the doctor not made his grandfather give up chewing tobacco, he knew he would have heard the splat of juice, flawlessly aimed, hit the azalea bush.

Crickets and frogs and cicadas chirped the beating of a thousand tiny hearts. A turtledove cooed in the woods in the distance, and he did not think of birds and soaring and freedom as he had earlier, but of his humanity, his flesh, his blood, his soon-to-be-gone, soon-to-be-changed life. He considered the deep quiet called death and how different it was from this blue solitude, here, now, on his bed surrounded by thinly made sound and soft black.