Rex buttons his piece of charcoal into his pocket. “In a time,” he says, “when disease, war, and famine haunted practically every hour, when so many died before their time, their bodies swallowed by the sea or earth, or simply lost over the horizon, never to return, their fates unknown…” He gazes across the frozen fields to the low, dark buildings of Camp Five. “Imagine how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. To believe that it was possible.”

Out on the ice of the Yalu far below, the wind drives the snow in long, eddying swirls. Rex sinks deeper into his collar. “It’s not so much the contents of the song. It’s that the song was still being sung.”

Singular and plural, noun stems and verb cases: Rex’s enthusiasm for ancient Greek carries them through the worst hours. One February night, after dark, huddled around the fire in the kitchen shed, Rex uses his piece of charcoal to scratch two lines of Homer onto a board and passes it over.

τὸν δὲ θεοὶ μὲν τεῦξαν, ἐπεκλώσαντο δ᾽ ὄλεθρον ἀνθρώποις, ἵνα ᾖσι καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀοιδή

Through gaps in the shed walls, stars hang above the mountains. Zeno feels the cold at his back, the light pressure of Rex’s frame against his own: they are hardly more than skeletons.

θεοὶ is the gods, nominative plural.

ἐπεκλώσαντο means they spun, aorist indicative.

ἀνθρώποις is for men, dative plural.

Zeno breathes, the fire sputters, the walls of the shed fall away, and in a crease of his mind, unreachable by the guards, hunger, or pain, the meaning of the verse ascends through the centuries.

“That’s what the gods do,” he says, “they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”

Rex looks at the Greek on the board, at Zeno, back at the Greek. He shakes his head. “Well, that’s just brilliant. Absolutely bloody brilliant.”

LAKEPORT, IDAHO

2014

Seymour

Eleven-year-old Seymour is walking home from the library on the last Monday of August when he spies something brown on the shoulder of Cross Road just before the turn onto Arcady Lane. Twice before he has found roadkilled raccoons here. Once a smashed coyote.

It’s a wing. The severed wing of a great grey owl, with downy coverts and brown-and-white primary flight feathers. A piece of clavicle still clings to the joint, a few sinews trailing out.

A Honda roars past. He scans the road, searches the weeds along the shoulder for the rest of the bird. In the ditch he finds an empty can that says Übermonster Energy Brew. Nothing else.