His face is beautiful despite the smudgy blue shadows under his eyes. He’s tired, of course. What a night! The creature in its cocoon, at its metamorphosis, is never at rest. He sets his hat on hay gray from winter. He must clean his pants, but the dirt, too, is wonderful. It matches the smudges on his skin. All is wonderful, his handsome jaw, his icy eyes in penetrating squints, the bits of straw strewn attractively through his tousled hair.

He crawls to the north window above the cow pit. There is movement in the pit, metamorphosis there too. The woman has rejoined the living as the cock crows.

She’s climbing across calves and a stiff gray foal, a human shape made of muck shifting through muck. She has a plan. She is dragging bodies to the bodies. She is building a set of steps with corpses. This is a good idea, the Kid grants it, but he still isn’t impressed. Anyone would’ve come up with it if they woke up in that kind of grave. And here she’s climbing the steps, steady as she can. She reaches the lip. She’s out. She lies on the turf at the lip of the pit, a wet, stinking, drowned skunk. She stares up into the walnut. Her eyes shift to the window of the loft. The Kid makes himself scarce.

She crawls toward the barn. A horse head hangs out a stall. It nickers at her, nibbles. A loving scene of love when she reaches it, then the head disappears into shadow. She zips her pants. She is Eve rising from the clay this time around, Genesis revised. Her left eye is awful to see. Her lips are swollen. She is hideous, red, chapped, caked with fetid pit rot.