Even the smallest bones in his hands and feet were lit with pain. He had to brace himself against his mother to make it to the bed. Stars rushed his head, burning stars glittered his backbone. The ground seemed to drop from him and rise up again suddenly. He couldn’t get his bearings. He wobbled in his walk.

His mother had smoked his room with sweetgrass and lined his blankets with sage. She wanted to sit beside him, to tend to him, but even her watchful eyes were heavy on him, painful. He wanted to be alone. He told her to leave him. She left a jar of bitter juniper-berry-and-black-moss tea steaming by his bedside. Fever thrummed his temples and he woke to find his hair damp. He could taste the salt crust on his dry lips. His spine swelled in the sagging bed and he had to rock himself to turn over. Sleep would not come, only wakeful glimpses of dreams. He took gulps of the tea his mother had left him and found it thick and cold. His belly trembled. A dark fog pressed on his chest and he struggled to breathe. The backs of his ears were hot and he felt something breathing behind him. He braced his arms to the bed and pushed up with all his strength to stand.

The room seemed to be closing in on him. He needed to open the window. He pressed his fingertips beneath the wood-frame window casing. No budge. He pushed hard and heard the crack of old paint. And then he felt the thin mercury window shattering, his palms tender with slivered glass. Cold startled him awake. His mother called to him and he told her he had only broken a glass, he was OK. He stepped around the shards to pull a cigarette from his shirt. The room held an odd glowing light. He pulled smoke deep into his broken chest and saw his blood in the saw bands of glass that glittered the floor. In his blood he saw a crimson salamander. He pressed his good eye with his thumb and looked again. His blood had hit the floor in the shape of a salamander. He could see Louise’s great-grandmother, the lick of the salamander brief in the August grass, the sudden red tail humming.

Death was close. Death came to warn him with glimpses of events he couldn’t understand. He wanted to shut out the things he was seeing. He dragged the blankets from his bed to the living room. He wanted to sleep on the dirt floor, wanted to smell the sleeping dust, hear the dull sound of his heartbeat against the earth, not see what death had come to show him.