I found Benign on a foldout road map. It was only a few hours away, tucked off in northwest Louisiana. I bet the town was so small it barely merited the dot on the map. We should be there by evening, I figured.

Back in the car, Murphy and I cruised the Trans Am easy, sixty miles per hour on the dot. We weren’t about to risk getting pulled over, this being a sort-of-stolen car and all. Outside there was nothing but trees and billboards and the occasional Arby’s sprouting ugly out of the landscape, some abandoned wreck of a shop or half-hearted strip mall nearly overtaken by kudzu. I turned on the radio to a classical station that was half-buried in static. It seemed appropriate for the landscape—the best intentions of humanity being swallowed whole.

“Man, I hate classical music,” said Murphy. “It’s nothing but earhole torture.”

So I shut it off.

In the silence I kept thinking about our grandmother, who we were about to meet. I was a little nervous.

Mom had never told us much about her childhood. We knew she had grown up in a place she called “the Farm” in the backwoods of Benign, Louisiana, hunting and fishing and learning all kinds of survivalist shit from her hippie mother. We knew her father wasn’t around, that he had run off when she was little. We knew that she and our grandmother had some kind of falling out, a rift that was so bad they never spoke in person again. At least not that we knew of.

Every now and again Mom had tossed out a memory. Like this one time, sitting on our old front porch, Mom sipping a beer and me reading Yeats and Murphy off somewhere exploring, a hummingbird flew right up to our porch swing. Mom didn’t hardly move, that big toothy smile sliding across her face, nothing but joy, as the bright red thing flittered and darted around her. I’d never seen one up close like that before. It seemed to like Mom, circling her head and dashing away only to come right back. The bird hovered in front of her ear as if it were trying to tell her a secret. Then it was gone, so fast it seemed to have vanished. Mom fell back against the swing, laughing.

“We used to have them on the Farm,” she said, a little dreamily. “I loved them so much. My mother hung feeders on all the trees in the grove, and they’d flock to us.”

“How many?” I said.

“Dozens,” said Mom. “Hundreds even. They would fly around and bash into each other, trying so hard to get at that nectar. It was almost dangerous to walk out into the middle of them when they were all out there. You’d get smacked or pecked or swarmed every time. Hummingbird season was my favorite time of year.”

I used to love to think about that: My mom as a child, standing in the middle of a barrage of bright red flitting things, kind of like the way electrons whirled around atoms in the chemistry book Mom taught us from. I loved to think of them following her around, an impossible entourage of kinetic energy, bright as rose petals.