She zigzagged and tripped. The red dog drank at the creek and she passed him and he passed her. They’d cut messages to the future in the logs. Rest in Peace if a bird had cracked its noggin into the single window, buried by creek or stumps with a cross and a name given after death.

GINNY LOVES DAN.

She was no longer hungry. A waste. Always food at the Old Swede’s.

She’d fucked Shaw in the back room once. He’d slipped out the back window when Dan came home early calling What’s for dinner, and for this, she admitted now, she deserved horse theft. She’d sucked his cock. He’d laughed at Dan and pretended not to. For this, she deserved more than horse theft. She was nothing, now, without the cob. She’d laughed with Shaw only because people laugh when people laugh. Only the oldest and wisest don’t laugh at those times. Or the blind.

She stopped short at the edge of the clearing. She could not step into it yet. The porch roof—she knew—was tar paper, while the main pitches were tin pounded flat, a rusty color. She sat by a tree with the red dog beside her. She listened for cabin sounds and thought about sin, a new topic. She could smell the cob but could not look. The blind have an advantage there. The red dog was more brown than red. She didn’t love the red dog. She loved the cob. The old, square roof nails—she knew, why look when you know?—were an army marching up, tacking overlapping seams of the tin, up and across, up and across, like fire on a hill. There were other things: only pretty birds got a burial, blue jays or little yellow birds, red. Why? And why would the old trapper have bothered with sills? The red dog had an unpleasant odor. Sills are rampant in our new age, but back then, the old man had to haul the window all the way in, sacrifice a mule’s back for this bit of translucent prettiment. Why? The roof nails, when she looked, would be rising out of the roof seams, the result of swollen wood drying and squeezing, of neglect and all-natural processes, rates of expansion vs. contraction of wood, tin, and iron. Starvation of the body is a thing of the past. Starvation of the soul is another matter. She’d fucked him in his barn. She’d fucked him on the rug with blue tassels. She’d fucked him laughing at the world, this trick she was playing on it. There was something missing inside her. For this, a person needs a transplant of some kind, a new soul. Horse theft, she now saw, was only the beginning of the procedure.