They peeled away in a swirl of dirt, honking and extending their middle fingers. Total country silence as the dust settled and the heat resumed. Joan and her friend realigned their eye patches, walked a mile or so back to the hard road, and, because there was nothing else to do, stuck their thumbs out.

The dogs could work in tandem when the situation called for it. From the flagstones, Pilgrim lifted his nose and sniffed Spock sniffing him. High in the oak tree the feral cat watched them. Tandem required teamwork and stealth, one of which Spock was good at and the other of which he was definitely not. He circled Pilgrim now, a white blob in the dusk, his stick dropped somewhere and forgotten.

He’d always thought about it later, what he wanted to tell Kyle that time everyone was talking about cars—that he himself liked Chamois as a girl’s name.

The thing he never could get over was that Kyle ended up keeping cats. Two of them that he always made like he was torturing in his free time, Sinker and Pet Sematary, but they hadn’t gotten the memo and continued to climb up onto his lap and onto the back of his chair, meow in his face for food, et cetera.

Cats can swim. They don’t necessarily want to, but they can. Kyle could swim too, but when push came to shove, he didn’t.

People will surprise you. Like this dead woman, who didn’t seem all that dead in that she was poking him in the shoulder with something.

Joan knew for a fact that human beings were sturdier than they looked. She had watched her mother struggling, sinking and waxy, the aperture of her world growing smaller and smaller until she was staring at her family through a pinhole. Then the pinhole closed and there was nothing but the grip of her long graceful hands. Inhalations and exhalations, long sighing moans that seemed to be words, or parts of words.