Mano worked her way up the river, the water gurgling as it pushed against the rocks along its floor. Some of the fish were still floating, hung up on the twisted curl of protruding roots. The new-growth peachleaf willows were bright-yellow bare against the gray maze of cottonwood bark, nearly glowing in the hazed moonlight. Mano collected fallen branches, some as thick as her fist, others more delicate. She found a dead kingfisher next to a half-eaten trout, a few black feathers from crows or vultures. She swore to learn the difference. She collected a variety of river pebbles the size of large grapes. She dug in her purse for her pocketknife and the fishing line she'd swiped from Rick's truck.

The construction site was located about a mile west of town, not far from a heavily used section of trail that followed the river and the road between two city parks. At night, in the dark, it was deserted, though Mano thought the way the moonlight glowed blue behind the clouds, the way it backlit the dark thatches of woody branches, made it more beautiful now. She was the lone human moving in the world, but she was not alone—the woods full of wary animals who knew how to stay both invisible and watchful. Mano used the fishing wire to hang the thicker branches by both ends, like trapeze bars, just above eye level. She had to climb the trees a bit, shimmy awkwardly, belly down, out onto the limbs, but she managed to get the placement she was looking for. She rolled a larger rock around for a stool and started hanging the corpses.

From one branch, she hung five dead trout, some by their tails, some by their gills. The moonlight reflected off the fish scales, lit the wet of the fish skin into a brilliant shine. She rushed together a series of fishing line macramé that she draped around tree trunks and limbs, filled with river-polished rocks. From another branch, Mano hung a single trout with crow feathers attached so that they radiated in all directions like night-black rays, and next to that, the dead kingfisher, strung up by each of its wings so that it looked bat-like in the shadows, nearly vampiric.

The dead animals and rocks hung at eye level, lifted so that the men could no longer look down on them. Impossible now for people to miss the horror of what they'd done. Mano lay down on the damp earth of the riverbank, tracked the moon's trajectory across the night sky, observed the shifting light against the terrible beauty of her sculpture. She squinted into the darkness, hoping she'd see the comet clearly, tail and all, but saw nothing. She felt achingly, utterly, alone.