For all his scrubbing the grime and soot still streaks down his chest, staining his waistband where his body dips inside it. Only his face and palms got clean. He can see this from the window in the barn loft. He’s hungry too. He bends and rubs his innocent, clean hands in the dirt again, smears gray on the knees of his rodeo pants, up his thighs. He has calluses already.

Enter the hens. They peck around him. They’re an audience, like us, but they’re in the show too. Their coop door hangs open. No one thought of the hens last night, their safety from foxes, dogs. The Kid notes it, so we note it.

But someone remembered the horses at least. We can all agree there’s a big difference between horses and hens. The Kid hears the horses shifting under his feet in their stalls as he sits in the loft watching himself at the door to the coop. This is tremendous fun.

He is addled. He knows it. There’s something terrible and wonderful about addled, a requirement of growing up. A red dog chases the flock below. The red dog.

They scatter around his other self, the Kid, down in the yard, hens squawking, flapping and pretending they can fly. They divide around him, too tall and too slim even for a cowboy, as creek water will divide around a rock. The Kid is the rock. All else is the water. This is knowing he is alive now. He is an actor now. He will fill in. His body.

A cat waits behind a chicken with black-blue wings. The cat keeps low, is big-pawed, believes he’s a sabertooth.

There’s a truck parked at the main gate, really an old telephone pole on a black forged hinge. The gate is down. Over the gate is an archway of welded pipes, tall enough for deliveries by truck—feed, pallets—and for moving cattle in or out. A brand hangs down from the middle: V4. If the boy were to float above the gate on wings, he’d sit on a pipe, examining the couple sleeping in the truck. Saul is in the bed, slapping at bugs without waking. Ella is in the front passenger seat. The window is cracked for air. She’s restless. Feels the boy hovering over the hood.

He flies to the tree on the hill where Dan is sleeping unsoundly by the mare who’s still awake, of course, blinking in her sling. The ranch is quiet except for the cattle lowing, moving up and down in the fields. The scene is vast and serene. Yes, the little town, below, over there.

A roof is nothing. A boy is something. He flies back to himself in the barn loft. He rests his wings.